by Joe Ducie
“Pretty, yes?”
“Of course.”
“It would be forty years of marriage next month.” He sighed. “I remember this… but I do not remember my wife’s favorite color. These are nice, though. Pretty. I think she would have liked these.”
Ah, damn. Well to remember that I did not have a monopoly on the infinite sadness.
We talked for a few more minutes. A buzzing streetlamp overhead cast Mathias’s shadow against the redbrick wall behind him. It should have done the same for mine, but I’d long since forfeited my shadow… to gain lost and uncertain powers. I cast no shadow, not even on the brightest of days.
After returning to the shop, I locked the front door from the inside and flipped the sign over to ‘Closed.’ An almost invisible ripple of power shimmered across the storefront, like a pebble cast on still waters. The night was quiet, which was always a touch unnerving. The wards, subtle enchantments of Will designed to protect from intrusion, were small comfort, but comfort they were.
I took a deep breath, embracing that familiar smell of good old hardbacks. Musky vanilla, shaved grass and a hint of wood fiber—best aromas in the world. The soft chandelier light cast flickering shadows over the books spilling off the shelves and stacked ten feet high.
“Rose garden,” I said aloud across the empty shop. “Rose bush. Garden. Rose bed. Ah…”
The rough texture of the old books under my fingertips reminded me of afternoons spent in Granddaddy Hale’s library. My store was a poor imitation of that immense catalogue. Through Biography and into Horror, beyond Horror to Sci-Fi/Fantasy, and then to the hallowed, white shores of General Fiction. Here there be monsters. The shelves ended in a small alcove with a window seat overlooking the street, where Marcus and I earlier had been sipping wine and critiquing terrible prose.
I slumped down with a heavy sigh and straightened up my pages. When I looked up, a man sat across from me chewing on a worn pipe. Smoke drifted in sparse rings toward the ceiling.
“Good evening,” I said. “You know I can’t help you anymore, old friend.”
The English detective’s brow furrowed and he leaned forward, placing a hand that felt all too real on my shoulder. “My good man—the game is afoot.”
I closed my eyes, counted to ten, and thought of everything that shoulda, coulda, woulda been. Of Tal. When I opened them, the detective was gone.
But I could still smell the smoke from his pipe.
*~*~*~*
Some time near midnight, I awoke with a splitting headache and the dry, starchy taste of old scotch in the back of my throat. Whisky and wine—never a winning mix. I’d fallen asleep in the window bay, spilling a glass of red across the pages of my novel. Bothersome, but not as troubling as what woke me.
A silver orb of liquefied metal rippled in the space between the floor and the ceiling, pulsating gently. Short bolts of blue energy coursed along its surface, striking the dust from the piles of books and knocking a lidless bottle of scotch from the counter. A pool of amber liquid spread quickly across the floor. The orb was a construct of Will, of that I was sure, but not one I’d ever seen before.
A taste of copper clung to the air like blood on the tongue, or a mouthful of pennies. My wards were supposed to prevent this.
All the sound had been sucked from the shop. Standing up, I felt as if I were moving through tree sap, or trying to run underwater. The orb bulged, and a slit opened along its underside like a popped seam. A heavy, dark form wreathed in the silver light fell through the slit and landed with a thump against a stack of dollar paperbacks. It was a body.
And whoever it belonged to was laughing into the floorboards.
After all things said and done, I thought, for no reason, and could I smell... something that reminded me of Tal, of cherry blossoms in the winter.
“Declan!” Laughter again, but also a grimace. “Declan Hale, help me out here…”
The voice was eerily familiar. I stepped down and the strange arrival rolled over onto his back, perhaps sensing the same thing I did—that something was wrong. Terribly, terribly wrong.
“Don’t keep me waiting, pretty boy.”
He was ugly as sin, and I reacted with a harsh, startled breath. The man who had fallen out of the light, out of nowhere, lay in a widening pool of his own blood. Silver flames licked at his clothing, but they didn’t burn. His eyes were wild. There was no other word for it. Wild.
He was also my twin. I was looking down at myself.
“Stop staring, sweetheart,” Declan Hale said, and grinned one helluva bloody grin.
Drawn by the figure, I dropped to my knees. There was something clutched in his… in my hand. I reached for the object.
“Don’t touch me—you’ll create a paradox that’ll destroy the universe.”
I pulled back my arm. “Really?”
“No. Not really. But you touch yourself enough as it is.” The man who looked just like me, save for an ugly, red-raw scar crossing his face, laughed. “I just wanted… wanted to tell you something.” He frowned and motioned me close, using the hand that had been covering the hole in his belly. Blood flowed thick and fast from the wound.
I licked my lips. The world had slowed to a crawl. Sap hardened into amber, water into ice. “You’re me?”
“And you will be me.”
I stared at myself for a long moment, and then exhaled slowly. “How long before this happens?”
“You got just over a week. Grim forests in the dark, Dec.”
I couldn’t process that. “I can’t save you from that wound. All the Will in the world couldn’t… are you wearing my favorite grey waistcoat?”
“It looks better on me,” Declan said. “And we both know I don’t deserve saving. We’re dead, Dec.” His eyes were a little less wild. A little less… anything. He was not staring at me but through me. “Now listen. I am you. This is real. Call it time travel if it helps you sleep at night. It won’t, trust me, but it’ll keep you alive for… heh… for now.”
“What are you—?”
“Shut up and listen.” He was so pale. The pool of blood had spread under my knees. Broken quill! I was kneeling in my own blood without a scratch on me. “Train Ethan, love Clare, hug Sophie. Forgive the Historian. And trust Marcus, until he gives you a reason not to. And he will, oh my yes, he will.”
“Marcus? He’s earned my trust a thousand ti—”
“He’s turned Renegade, but of the good sort…” His voice trailed away and his gaze grew beyond distant, beyond nothing. His breathing fell shallow. The rush of vital fluid had slowed to a trickle.
“No such thing, chief,” I told him.
Declan lunged forward and snapped his hand around my neck, pulled himself up to shove his forehead against mine, and squished our noses together. A fierce, unholy heat was radiating from his ugly mug. I tried to look away and at anything but the living mirror. His grip was unbreakable.
“Don’t be such an arrogant fuck,” he growled. “And get a haircut. This ain’t no painted desert serenade.” He was mumbling, caught in that thousand-yard stare, a look I knew well. “Something else… something… Ah, yeah. Declan, remember, Tal always aimed for the heart.”
He laughed again and fell away. The back of his head hit the floor with a sickening thud which made no difference. I was dead.
CHAPTER THREE
From Grace
Emily brought me a turkey sandwich around noon the next day.
I was sitting in my alcove, working on the novel and retyping the unsalvageable pages ruined by last night’s accidents. I’d needed all of the early hours of the morning to dispose of and clean up after myself.
My body, I’d sent across the Void to the remains of Reach City, known these days as Nightmare’s Reach, after the penultimate battle of the Tome Wars had seen the metropolis destroyed. I’d stayed tethered to this world and buried my corpse as I’d buried young Jeff Brade—along the ragged edge of the page.
Even so, the floorboards wer
e stained with the blood of my… future good self? Of other me? The darkened spot would pass for a red wine spill.
“Good afternoon, Declan.”
I looked up. “Emily, you make that dress look good.” She wore a white summer dress with red straps that hugged her porcelain form. For the last few years, Emily had been my best and most loyal customer. More than that, at some stupid point we had become friends.
“Charmer. I thought you could try something a little different today. Turkey on toasted rye, with brie and cranberry sauce.” She handed me the sandwich bag, her fingertips brushing mine. “What have you got for me?”
I ran my finger around a stain on the coffee table, a half-moon of dried port, unless I missed my guess. “The one you’ve been waiting for. Van Booy’s latest.”
Emily gasped and spun on the spot to face the mountainous stacks of books leaning against the loaded shelves, curving towers just waiting for a slight breeze. The gleam in her eye said beware. “Where?”
“Caught between Romance and Thriller. All wrapped up in a pretty red bow.”
“Save me a bite of that sandwich.” She disappeared into the endless maze of words.
The crumpled white pages before me were awash with red ink and even redder wine. I removed a comma from the third paragraph on page five hundred and twelve, then thought about it, and put it back in. Was there a difference between “lifted” and “raised”? An important one. Tal would have understood.
“She’s a cute one, Declan,” Roper Hartley, the magical protagonist from John Richardson’s Emerald City series, said. “I’ve seen the way you look at each other. Don’t you think it’s time you got out of this dusty old shop and took a pretty girl on a date?”
I glanced up and then back down, shaking my head. Roper lounged on the leather sofa opposite me as if he had every right to be there, real and alive, and not some construct of Will or my own insanity pulled out of Richardson’s works. “Pacing’s a bit off in the middle here. Action, dialogue, action, and then exposition. Too wordy.”
“I mean, when we fought Astaroth in the Vanished Empire you didn’t balk at the idea of actual human companionship. What changed, Arbiter?”
I retrieved a fresh bottle of red from beneath the table. Add a splash of Jamaican rum and I was halfway to Sangria. Was it too early? It was wine o’clock somewhere. The alcohol would add some spice to the turkey and rye.
“The Emerald City needs you, Declan. Rumors of war in the Western Kingdoms have the goblin armies moving to claim Wildmen’s territory. Evelyn is lost. If we can’t find the Twilit Spear—”
“I’m a merchant now, Roper.” I’d managed to ignore him for all of thirty seconds. He wasn’t real. None of them were. They couldn’t be, not in this world—the real world. “I sell books. I will not live them anymore. You’ll have to fight the good fight on your own.”
“Not everything lost is lost forever, my friend. You are too defiant for this.”
There were a hundred books within two feet of me. A thousand more at arm’s reach. In the store alone, I had over three hundred thousand unique stories. All those words and all those infernal worlds. Forever wasn’t long enough.
“Please leave me be,” I said.
“Hah! Found it!” Emily called across the shop from the region due south of Sci-Fi.
Roper disappeared sideways into a beam of sunlight with a carefree shrug.
“I heard you mumbling to yourself,” she said, emerging from the stacks with her book in hand. “Stuck on a line?”
“Always. What’s another word for ‘affable’?”
“Friendly? Kind? Hmm… gracious?”
“I like gracious.” A quick scribble corrected the offending word. “You’re leaving again.”
Emily nodded. “Hong Kong for a night and a day. How did you know?”
“You always wear the navy blue heels before you fly away and leave me.”
“Do I?”
“Travel safe, Emily Grace.”
*~*~*~*
Later that day I was paid a visit from my unofficial apprentice and her boy toy. They found me, as was standard, in the alcove sipping scotch and searching for poetic inspiration.
“Don’t you two have class today?”
“Ethan wants to learn how to hide his Will from you.” Sophie Levy bit her lip and glared at her unofficial apprentice, who was about to become mine, no doubt. “I can’t sense his Will anymore, but I’m not as strong as you.”
Truth be told, I’d sensed Ethan coming from three streets over. Masking the burning power was more art than science, more finesse than strength. Sophie’s Will, her aura of supernatural strength, was hidden from me, even though my raw power outclassed hers by several orders of magnitude. Only a certain mindset could hide Will wholly and always.
“I don’t want to attract anything nasty, boss,” Ethan said. “Will you teach me?”
“Of course. We start as soon as you head across the plaza and fetch me a chicken kebab. Lettuce, onion, no tomato. Dash of hot sauce.”
Sophie rolled her eyes as Ethan laughed. When he realized I wasn’t joking, he saw himself out.
“He can be trusted, you know,” Sophie said into the silence. We weren’t often alone together. During our lessons, or whenever she had reason to visit, she usually made sure Marcus was about. “When I met him, he had no idea why he sometimes set things on fire with a stray thought. Forgotten and Unfound, as true as they come.”
“We’ve been burned before, ‘Phie. And by more than a stray thought.”
Sophie nodded and said without any hint of malice, “Yes. And whose fault was that?”
After Ethan returned and I spent a good five minutes berating him for getting barbeque instead of hot sauce on my kebab, we got down to serious business. I closed up shop early and cleared some space at the front counter, knocking aside a few dozen sturdy books.
Messing with the dark, infernal powers of creation demanded pomp and circumstance, so I dropped a tea light candle on the counter.
“Light it, sunshine,” I said to Ethan. Sophie looked on in mild amusement from the window alcove.
Ethan shrugged, whipped out his cigarette lighter, and ignited the candle’s wick.
I grinned. Kid had a sense of humor. “Smartass. Do it with your Will.”
“I’ve already got this down, Mr. Hale. Sophie taught me this basic stuff.”
“I want to see you do it from the start so I can gauge how far to push you today. Can you light this candle? How about peel this apple with a thought? We always start simple. Now, light the apple and peel the candle.” I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers against my lids. “And please, please don’t call it magic. This isn’t Hogwarts, and you’re not a boy wizard.”
“Okey dokey.” He waved his hand, and the candle flickered to life while an invisible lashing of sharp force gouged narrow furrows in the apple’s peel.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“You know how. With magic-like powers.”
“Don’t be dense. Talk me through your process. How did you make it happen? Your Will is the tool, a doorway in your mind that opens on the fuel powering the heart of the damn universe. How do you, Ethan Reilly, step through that door?”
Ethan was shaking his head before I’d finished speaking. “No, it’s not a door. Well, maybe it is for you.” He ran a hand through his unruly hair. “I see… Well, I see…”
“What?”
“Promise you won’t laugh?”
“No,” Sophie and I said together.
Ethan raised his palms toward the ceiling. “You ever play Super Mario Brothers? The video game? When I do magic—sorry, not magic—whenever I use my Will, I see myself bouncing up and punching one of those question mark boxes full of coins.” He snapped his fingers, and the candle flame turned a bright electric blue. “And it just works.”
“Wow. Okay.”
“Is that strange?”
I thought so, but then most everything was strange. “For n
o real formal education, you’re doing just fine. At the Academy in Ascension City, we’re taught from a very young age to think of stepping through a door into an ocean of raw Will. But whatever floats your boat.”
“Water, usually.”
“Ha. Ha.” I summoned the blue flame from the candle and made it dance around my palm. The fire expanded, feeding on the air, until I held a sphere of coursing energy about the size of a tennis ball. The heat was impressive, but under my Will, the skin on my hands remained cool and unscathed.
Ethan watched, entranced. He was years from accomplishing anything this intricate. Despite my age—I was only twenty-four—fighting on the front lines of the Tome Wars had forced me to learn on a staggeringly steep curve.
“So how do I properly hide the Will? How do I… shut the door?”
“When people think of our power, they think it’s a source to be tapped. But that’s not how it is with our Will, not ever. If you have the talent, the ability to access it and use it to effect, as we do, then it is always switched on. All the time. There is never a moment you’re not channeling the power through you, like the act of breathing—you’re constantly doing it. You’re lit up like a beacon for miles around, Reilly. We need to shut ‘er down.”
“How?”
“Up here.” I tapped his forehead. “For me, I just make sure that the door in my mind is closed, which takes a bit of practice, but with the door closed…” The sphere of rippling blue energy in my palm spluttered and died. “You’re about as Willful, or as useful, as a broken condom in a whorehouse.”
Ethan snorted.
“Oh, charming,” Sophie said.
“And what about Forget? Sophie tells me you use books to get across a void—”
I raised a hand for silence. “Not a void. The Void. A place, a level of existence that… sort of exists outside of the universe. I can’t explain it better than that. Its very nature defies explanation. There are multiple universes. not just worlds, but universes. The Void is the space between them, a dark, ugly space… full of not so friendly things. Our Will can be used to traverse it.”