by Nazri Noor
The hairs at my nape pricked up. Carver was coming? Wow. I’d never seen him on a mission before. I had pretty limited experience with his abilities, having seen him disintegrate solid objects into motes of worthless dust. Gotta admit, it both excited and terrified me to wonder whether he could do that to people. I stuck my hands into my coat pockets and shuddered.
Gil folded up the documents, slipping them back into the envelope and under his jacket. “We’ll have to find some way to take Sterling with us, too. We need all the help we can get.”
Sterling folded his hands behind his head. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world. Dibs on the magic users. Their blood is tastier.” He blew out a puff of smoke, then gave me a slow, meaningful wink. I shuddered again.
We raised the shutters on Mama Rosa’s restaurant, unwinding the chains holding the glass door together after turning keys in the three different padlocks she used to secure the place. Tedious, yes, but it kept her restaurant safe, and our domicile even safer. Besides, in an emergency, Carver could easily wave his hand and unlock all of them in a single go. The restaurant was empty by then, about four or so in the morning, which meant she’d already gone home, but unsurprisingly, Carver was perched at one of the tables, chin resting in his clasped hands, eyebrows set expectantly.
“Well?”
Gil handed him the dossier, briefing him on what we’d discussed.
“Excellent. Good work taking initiative on planning, Gilberto.”
Gil shrugged, but I could tell he was hiding a smile. Carver had that effect on people. You wanted to show him you were good at your work, and you wanted to hear him say it, too.
“I agree,” Carver continued. “This is a four-man job, and we’ll definitely need Sterling on board. I also agree that we’ll want an entity’s intervention to smooth the creases in this project.” He rubbed his chin, stroking his beard. “We could shroud the place in darkness.”
“So a moon god?” I suggested. “Some kind of night demon?”
“Better to take the sun away entirely,” Sterling said.
I laughed. No one else did. “Is – is that even possible?”
Carver smiled tightly and spread his hands. “Welcome to the arcane underground, Dustin, where anything is possible.” He made a small cough. “Even fireballs.”
“Please don’t start.”
“A sun god it is, then,” Gil said. “We could try Apollo, maybe.”
“Or,” Sterling said, “and here’s an idea. Or we could not. Remember what happened the last time? Do you think I can just keep regrowing myself?”
“I mean, theoretically, you can,” I said. I’d seen the results before. I’d watched as a beam of sunlight burned half his face and a good part of his hands right off his body. I met him again just days after, and he was perfectly healthy and smooth, as if nothing had happened.
“You stay out of this,” Sterling growled. He folded his arms, shook his head, and stamped his foot. “No Apollo.”
“Well, if you feel so strongly about it. What about Ra?” I said, trying to be helpful, as if I had any idea where to find these gods’ tethers to begin with.
“A good suggestion,” Carver said, nodding slowly. “But considering the recency of Resheph’s death, I’m inclined to say that the Egyptian pantheon at large might not be so friendly towards humanity at the moment. I suggest someone more neutral. Amaterasu, from the Japanese pantheon. Her mother Izanami is a goddess of the underworld. I suspect she’ll be more amenable to dealing with the undead.”
Sterling held his hands up. “Oh, I’m out. No offense, Carver, I don’t care if Amate-what’s-it has an ‘I heart vampires’ tattoo on her face. I’m never going on a sun god communion ever again.”
“That is – acceptable.”
“Plus the sun’s coming up in a few. I should be in bed.” He sauntered off towards the kitchen, the faint hum and crackle of our domicile’s portal indicating that he’d left the restaurant and our reality. I fidgeted with my backpack’s straps, my feet itching to follow. It had been a long, long-ass day, and I couldn’t wait to just lie down and sleep everything off.
“So it’s settled,” Carver said, rising from the table. “We commune with Amaterasu.”
“Okay, sounds good. When do we go?”
Carver blinked at me, watching me with an expression that told me I was an idiot for even asking. “Why, now, Dustin. We go now.”
I groaned.
“Like Sterling said, the sun’s coming up soon.” Gil shrugged. “What better time to commune with a sun goddess than the dawn?”
“I know, but.” I cut off the rest of my thoughts. It was unfair. Everything I knew of werewolves told me that they were basically tireless, and Carver being a lich meant he was tireless as well as practically immortal. Somehow I knew that blurting out “I’m only human, let me sleep, you monsters” wasn’t an acceptable excuse.
“Let’s just get this over with,” I grumbled.
“Make yourself a coffee to perk yourself up, Dustin. There’s a good boy.” Carver patted the seat next to him, inviting Gil to sit down. “Actually, make that three coffees. It’s a fine morning, and I haven’t had anything to drink in weeks.”
Not for the first time I questioned the true value of agreeing to an apprenticeship under Carver’s watchful eye, and not for the first time I questioned the value of telling him that I’d once worked as a barista.
“Make mine a latte,” Carver said, with a grin that dared me to talk back and complain. I set down my backpack and dragged myself behind the counter. I guess it didn’t matter whether I worked for Carver or the Lorica, though it also struck me that maybe, just maybe, this was what normal people did on the regular. The everyday grind, powering through work with a little grit. My grind just happened to involve magic, and the undead, and a boss who I was almost sure liked to see me suffer. But at least this one hadn’t sacrificed me on an altar to a dark god. At least not yet.
An hour, a second latte, and two mochas for Carver later, he finally decided it was close enough to daybreak to seek out Amaterasu’s tether. What that was, exactly, I hadn’t been told. An entity tethered itself to our world through something physical, a kind of anchor that bridged its realm to ours and allowed mortals to communicate with them. It was like the brass knocker on a mansion’s front door, like a doorbell, only it came in many different forms. Sometimes it was just a symbol painted inconspicuously on a wall full of graffiti. Hecate’s was a dead pigeon in the back alley of a pharmacy, and Dionysus’s must have been his entire bar, the Amphora.
I headed for the barred front door of the restaurant, but Carver clucked his tongue. We weren’t heading out? Huh. Maybe he had another portal somewhere in the kitchen. I paused then, wondering whether I’d driven myself insane since I’d just thought that exact sentence. Ooh. Or maybe he had a whole room full of portals hidden somewhere in his temple.
“Come closer,” he said, beckoning with one finger. Gil was already standing abreast of him, in the little space on the restaurant’s linoleum floor that wasn’t occupied by its busted-down tables. I stepped closer.
“Closer.”
I frowned and watched his hands carefully. “You aren’t going to take my blood again, are you? Use your own damn blood this time.”
Carver chuckled. In a flash his hand darted out to tug on my sleeve. I yelped, shocked at his strength, and caught myself before I stumbled. The three of us were now just inches apart.
I stared at our shoes, uncomfortable with the proximity. “Now what?”
Carver smiled. Too late I noticed the ball of liquid flame he dropped from his open hand. I yelped again, my reflexes taking over as I attempted to dance away from the fire now roaring about our feet, but Gil snatched at me, grasping me firmly by the wrist. The flames licked higher, burning brighter, consuming our bodies and all vision of the restaurant as Carver’s laughter filled my ears –
And then we were somewhere else. Gil let go of my hand and I stepped away from the two of them.
I rubbed my wrist and threw Carver a reproachful glance.
“You need to start warning me when you do all this crazy shit.”
“And you need to stop being so jittery about every last little thing,” Carver said, his voice lined with mirth. “If Gil hadn’t held on to your arm, you might have missed your very first proper teleportation.”
Which, now that I thought about it, didn’t feel as gross or disorienting as I’d expected. It was nothing like moving through the Dark Room, and not similar to the descriptions some of the Wings gave me back when I worked at the Lorica. One said it felt like her limbs were wrenched apart and popped out of their sockets, then forcibly reassembled at her destination. Another said it felt like being flayed alive, in a way that was painless, but still deeply disturbing, his body fraying into its components each time he traveled.
But with Carver, all it felt like was a momentary, balmy breeze, the flames hardly burning above anything warmer than the heat of a radiator. That fleeting warmth was even more noticeable because of the chill of the morning, a dewy, damp coolness, not at all dissimilar to how it felt at the arboretum. Which made sense, since, as it turned out, we had ended up in someone’s garden.
“Where are we?”
“Ah, yes. Amaterasu likes to keep her tether here. We’re in the garden of one Mrs. Yoshida, in a residential suburb in, I’d say, northeastern Valero. A lovely woman, I’m told, who has no idea that a sun goddess has deemed her backyard worthy of hosting a portal into another realm. I suppose Amaterasu likes to keep it in the family, as it were.”
I looked around at the stone lamps, at the carpet of smooth, perfect stones, a bamboo water fountain sloshing and clunking with soothing regularity among the foliage.
“And where is that portal, exactly?”
“Shush,” Carver said. “Keep it down. Just wait.”
A stabbing pain took over me, radiating from my wrist. I bit my tongue, careful not to show either Gil or Carver that anything was amiss. I watched in the gloom of predawn as one segment of the flower on Dionysus’s brand faded from black into nothingness. Two petals remained.
The dawn of a new day, and the countdown continued. Just wait, Carver said. I stared at the horizon, wondering how many sunrises I had left, and waited.
Chapter 11
I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for until I saw it. The sun broke through the darkness, sloughing off the black of early morning with the orange and pink of a new day. But I knew we weren’t just there to watch the sunrise. It rose slowly, a fierce ball of flame riding through the sky, and I shielded my eyes as I dared to watch it go, wondering whether it would crash to earth, or send a flare, some spectacular way of opening the gateway to the goddess’s plane.
It was simpler, it turned out, but no less spectacular. A ray of sun pierced the clouds, solitary and bright, reaching through the skies over Valero to strike the spray of water splashing from the bamboo fountain in Mrs. Yoshida’s garden.
A kaleidoscope of light burst as the sunbeam met the drops of water, fragments of rainbow scattering across the garden, then rejoining into a perfect circle on the ground. Carver beckoned us to step into the scintillating disc of color, already running one of his rings across his fingers. He dripped the requisite bead of blood into the circle’s center.
“What about the offering?”
He only smiled and shook his head. Gil looked warily from Carver, to me, then down at the circle, and we stepped in at about the same time. The world burst into fractals of colored light, so much brightness that it felt as if we’d entered the heart of a perfectly cut diamond.
I blinked, clearing the afterimage out of my eyes, and realized that I wasn’t far off. All around us the domicile looked very much like the inside of a giant lantern, its walls like great, mirrored sheets of glass reaching up to a bright blue sky. Wisps of cloud rolled far above us, each a perfect, slender rendition of something out of poetry and art.
But there was no sun. No, the light came from within, from the woman with the alabaster skin, with hair like black silk, and regalia more grandiose than anything I’d ever seen in my life. She sat there, majestic, on a palanquin in the center of this massive lamp, shrouded in the world’s most elaborate garment, half kimono, half battle armor.
“Visitors, so early in the morning?” She held a hand over her mouth as she spoke, feigning a yawn. Amaterasu’s voice was melodic, sweet, and kind. And fair enough to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I’d met enough entities to suspect her true nature.
“But isn’t it always early for you, dear goddess?” Carver smirked. I noted a familiarity in the air between them. “There is a sun in every time zone.”
“Indeed,” Amaterasu said, lifting something from the folds of her robe. It was a smart phone, with a charm dangling from a red thread on its end, a tiny cartoon cat. “Nearly six in the morning in California? Ah. That explains your presence.”
“Bright and early. It is good to see you again. These are my apprentices,” Carver said, gesturing to us. “Gilberto Ramirez, and Dustin Graves.”
Amaterasu’s nod was nearly imperceptible. I made a low bow. Gil followed with a suitably polite gesture of his own.
“There is a fourth,” Amaterasu said. “Or there was. I smell the taint of the undead on you.”
She could detect Sterling even when he wasn’t around? I nudged Gil. “It’s his body spray. I keep telling him to change it.”
Carver rolled his eyes.
“You know, he doesn’t even need it,” Gil whispered. “Vampires don’t sweat. I’m extra hairy, like, everywhere, and if I miss just one shower it’s wet dog city. It’s so unfair.”
No sweating, and no body odor for all eternity? Suddenly the little perks of undeath were looking very appealing. Very briefly I considered the possibility of letting Sterling turn me after all, just in case this whole find-the-Codex thing didn’t work and I needed to worm my way out of the Dionysus problem. But Carver threw us a withering glare. Gil stopped talking at once, and I coughed softly into my fist.
The corner of Amaterasu’s mouth quirked in amusement. “Your two proteges are – interesting, in and of themselves. One is tainted by the moon curse. The other is tainted by something greater. Something worse. It’s very bold of you to have brought them here. Uninvited. Without telling me.”
“I thought you might find them interesting,” Carver said. “There’s something to learn from everyone, after all. Someone told me that once.”
Amaterasu smiled, but only briefly, the turn in her lip vanishing as quickly as it appeared. “Yet I also notice that you’ve come without an offering. You are really testing my patience with these breaches of etiquette.”
Carver sighed. “I’ve grown accustomed to your unique way of doing things. The radiant Amaterasu demands an offering when you enter her domicile, not before. Isn’t that how you like things to work?”
She smiled again, more broadly this time. “How sweet of you to remember.” The smile vanished. “An eye. Give me one of your eyes.”
I froze. Was she serious?
“Only an eye this time?” Carver chuckled. “And here I thought you would ask for my heart.”
What the hell was going on? I’d never seen this side of Carver. Then again I’d never seen him interact with anyone outside of our little circle of unfriends at the Meathook. I watched the two of them with interest, my mind recording everything, eagerly taking notes.
But the flirtation had ceased, at least for the moment. Carver reached up to his face, his fingers digging into the socket of his eye. I squirmed as I watched him pluck the entire eyeball out of his skull, and I waited for the accompanying gush of blood – but it didn’t come. The eye swiveled around in his hand, as if it had a life of its own, and its gaze came to rest on me. I can’t tell you how I know, but I swear it winked at me.
He stepped forward, hand outstretched, presenting the eyeball to the sun goddess. Her expression remained unchanged, but I could tell that her cheeks were r
osier.
“Then this is mine to keep?”
“The gift matches the receiver. I know you’ll make full use of it, even though you can already quite literally see everything under the sun.” Carver chuckled again. “And I can always make another.”
Make another. I knew that like Thea, Carver was an accomplished enchanter in his own right, crafting the ensorcelled jewelry he constantly wore on his fingers. It wasn’t a stretch to assume that he also created that thing that he plucked out of his eye socket. Was that how he located me, how he always knew where to send Sterling and Gil before I joined their little crew?
Amaterasu grinned openly, letting the eye roll about in the palm of her hand before pocketing it somewhere in the folds of her immense garment. “Ask, and you may receive.”
“You know of the nature of – some of my colleagues. We have a preference for moving in darkness, but there’s something we must do that necessitates working in the daytime. I request you gift us with some method of temporarily blotting out the sun.”
Amaterasu laughed. “Truly? You ask me to hide my countenance from the world?”
“Yes,” Carver said, a smirk on his lips. “I’d say around two in the afternoon, in Valero. The Gridiron, specifically. Pacific Standard Time.”
The goddess laughed even harder. “Do you realize how ridiculous this sounds? I’ve retreated from the world before, when my brother frightened me so much that I hid myself in a cave.” She lifted her chin, her spine straightening. The light pouring from her skin shone even brighter. “I will never be made to dim my radiance again.”
“Please,” I blurted. “Hear us out.”
Was I talking out of turn? Sure, but maybe this required a stronger hand. Carver was banking on his prior relationship with the entity, on this play of flirtation and gentle mockery. We needed an alternate approach, good cop, bad cop. Ultimately, I just didn’t want to die, and I knew that finding the Codex was the key to saving my hide. And fine, yes, saving the potential dozens or hundreds of other innocents that the Viridian Dawn could hypothetically harm with its insane magi-terrorist attacks.