by Nazri Noor
I frowned. “Why bother? Who’s going to take it? Some deer? A coyote?”
He clutched his stomach miserably. “With some luck, maybe we’ll catch them in the act. Can you eat a coyote? I wouldn’t mind at this point. I’m starving.”
I folded my arms, then relented. “Fine. We should look. Maybe there’s something useful in there. Perhaps the servants packed some rations among my books.”
Pierce found new stores of energy at the thought of discovering something edible in my luggage, though I sincerely doubted it. We’d have to subsist on river water until we found something to eat. I followed him as he dropped to his knees and undid the clasp of the nearest trunk.
“Oh,” he said, his voice dull and uncertain.
“Hmm? What is it?”
He turned to me, a strange look on his face. “I don’t think you want to look at this right now.”
I scowled. “Well, that just makes me want to look even harder.” I brushed past him, groping in the dark to feel around in the trunk for something familiar: an embossed cover, the wrinkled edge of an old tome, the weathered leather strap of a magical scroll. But my fingers only met the satiny inner lining of an empty trunk. “No. This can’t be right.”
Pierce moved on to the next suitcase, then the next, opening them all in slow, ceremonial succession. “We should turn in, Quill. It’s dark. We can’t see anything, is all.”
“Ignis,” I growled, igniting a patch of fire in my hand, throwing its light over all the opened, upended luggage.
Empty. They were all empty.
15
“Libris,” I muttered, holding my hand out, using the command word to conjure and summon my books to me. Nothing. I tightened my fingers until my hand turned into a gnarled claw, then willed a book – any book – from the Repository to appear before me. “Libris. Libris.”
Nothing.
This was it, then. Asmodeus’s final cruelty. She’d taken everything from me and more. I slumped to the ground, what little fire and fight still in my belly gone completely out.
Pierce looked at the empty trunks, then at me, then down at the ground, still holding his stomach. “I can’t believe this. It’s over. What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my voice sounding so distant.
Dantaleon fluttered over, settling onto the grass next to Pierce. It was strange seeing him like that, quite literally lowering himself to our level, for once, instead of hovering in the air like he was so very clearly above us all. Maybe I had him wrong.
“This is why I always warned you to follow your mother’s orders, Quilliam,” Dantaleon said. His voice was so different this time, not chiding, not cruel, but almost sympathetic. “Prince Asmodeus can be generous, but what she makes she can also very easily break.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest, close enough to what I’d heard described as a fetal position, my eyes staring at nothing in the distance. “That hardly matters now, does it? She won. She made her point.”
Dantaleon sniffed. “Now, if only you’d listened all those times I lectured you, then you might have access to magic beyond the books in your Repository. Haven’t I always told you that it was high time to come up with your own signature magic, with spells you’ve crafted yourself?”
Ah, there it was. The old Dantaleon. The jerk I always knew he was. He wasn’t wrong, though, not exactly. The greatest witches and wizards of history had borrowed charms and cantrips from those who had come before them, but they truly rose to infamy by handcrafting their own sorceries. One learns by imitation, but an artist is not an artist until he creates his own magnum opus. And since we learned about the voices that sometimes surfaced when I called on my inherent gifts, we’d decided that it would be prudent for me not to rely so heavily on the Inscription.
But really, Dantaleon? Read the room. There was a time and a place for everything.
I raked at my hair, barely even thinking to cringe when some of it came off in my fingers. “You and Mother raised me to believe that Inscription was the true source of my power. I spent hours, days, years immersing myself in magical tomes, something you deliberately warned me against, just days ago, in fact. And now you’re telling me that I should have spent more time memorizing and studying my magic?”
He sniffed again. “I am saying that you should have used that time more prudently. What I am saying is no different from what I’ve been saying for years. Yes, Inscription built your power on your collection of books, but haven’t I always told you of the need to write your own spells, to create your own magic?”
“Neither the time nor the place for a nagging lecture,” I hissed at him. The two syllables of my favorite magic power word tickled the end of my tongue, begging to be launched from the tips of my fingers, but I very well couldn’t burn my mentor into a pile of cinders. I could certainly try, and certainly be roasted alive for the effort. Besides, we needed Dantaleon around, possibly as our only mode of transportation, for one thing. I kept my breathing even, trying to still myself.
Pierce gave a long, exhausted sigh. “So, what now? What’s the plan?”
I shook my head, swallowing the bitter lump in my throat, smoothing away the snarls in my hair and tucking it behind my ear. There was no sense breaking apart. Perhaps Asmodeus didn’t want me anymore, but I was still Quilliam J. Abernathy. I wasn’t defeated that easily.
“The plan is unchanged,” I told him. “We head to that building, do our best to sleep through the night, then we wake up with clearer heads and figure out our next step.”
Pierce and I picked ourselves up off the grass and trudged for the ruined building. Dantaleon followed, trailing behind us at waist level. If he really was still working for Mother, then he was doing a very fine job of looking convincingly distraught over all this. Out of somewhere in the darkness, Mr. Wrinkles came to weave in and out between my legs, doing that thing that cats do where they almost but not quite try to tangle your feet up and kill you. He mewled at me relentlessly.
“Your rodent appears to be hungry,” Dantaleon said.
“Tell me something I don’t know. And you’re far too intelligent to believe that Mr. Wrinkles is anything but a cat.”
“I go by what I perceive,” Dantaleon said, raising his proverbial nose. “I acknowledge that it belongs to the feline species, but all I see is a hairless rat.”
I gave up arguing with him. I’d hoped that Mr. Wrinkles would find something for himself out in the dark, maybe a field mouse or something, to stave off the hunger. It put my stomach in knots to hear him in distress. I picked him up and stroked him by the back, whispering small apologies. He didn’t quit his complaining, but the contact did get him purring a little. I couldn’t help his hunger, but if I could give him some comfort, then that was a start. First order of business, then, was to find some way to acquire cat food, perhaps a can of tuna, whether Pierce and I secured it through money, theft, or murder. Preferably not murder.
But as we stepped up to the threshold of the ruined building, something happened. Something awful. Pierce fell first, convulsing, shuddering, and gasping as he slapped at his bare arms and kicked at the earth. I dropped Mr. Wrinkles and ran over to help when it happened to me, too. My skin was crawling, not from an unseen fear, but from the dozens of hairy black spiders that had suddenly appeared there.
I screamed, falling to my knees as I scratched my arms, but the spiders weren’t dying, no matter how much I swatted at them. Worse, they were trailing from the ends of my hair. And even worse – I grabbed at my neck, my heart pounding with fear as I felt something tickling the back of my throat. Something hairy.
Then just as quickly as they came, the spiders vanished. I clawed at the grass, my eyes huge as I studied the ground for traces of them. Nothing. It was as if nothing had happened. My clothes were drenched with sweat, and Pierce was still twitching on the ground, his arms covered in reddish scratch marks left by his own fingernails. The spiders, they were gone.
But something was waiting at
the threshold to the building. It was a girl, possibly in her early twenties, her hair dark, her skin pale, her lips painted blood red. She kicked at Pierce with a booted foot. Pierce whimpered, then scurried several feet away into the grass, groping at his forearms, somehow even sweatier than when we’d first arrived from our expedition into Valero.
“That’s not what I expected at all,” she said. “Wait. There were two of you. Where was the other one?”
I froze in place, keeping myself flat against the grass as she glanced around. She smiled grimly when she found me lying perfectly still, then walked over casually, somehow confident that I wasn’t a threat. Within seconds she was squatting on her haunches, her kohl-rimmed eyes peering deeply into mine.
“That spell should have gotten you guys good. You should be clawing your skin into ribbons by now.” She waddled even closer, as if pressing her face up against mine would reveal some answers.
I threw up one hand, holding it between us the way I’d hold a loaded weapon. A tiny sphere of flame rotated in my palm, ready to launch into, and if necessary, through her face. She raised both her hands, a placating gesture.
“Whoa, there. No need to get violent.”
I croaked, which was when I realized that I was trying to say something. The fear, those bizarre hallucinations had made my mouth go dry. “Those things,” I said hoarsely. “Those images. What did you do to us?”
She scoffed, laughing her psychic assault off like it had been nothing. “Oh, that? Nothing permanent. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. I’m still confused, but mostly impressed. Any old victim would have pissed themselves at least a little. You two, though? I don’t smell any piss, and you don’t appear to have gone completely insane. Not yet, at least. Very impressive.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
She tilted her head, staring pointedly at me. And as she did, her eyes turned a strange, scintillant shade of purple, like the depths of an amethyst. A crystal. “Curious,” she breathed.
“What the hell are you?” I said, the flames in my hand guttering out.
“No,” she said. “The question is – what the hell are you?”
16
“A witch,” I said, studying her with one eyebrow raised, a hot cup of something warming my hands.
“Yes,” the girl said. “Don’t look so skeptical. You know we exist. Plus, you’re magical, too. Clearly. You’re whatever you are, and me?” She did a little pirouette, her sole scraping the dusty old cement of the building, before bringing her hands down across her body in a flourish. “Witch.”
Pierce elbowed me in the ribs, muttering close to my ear. “I know a couple of words that rhyme with ‘witch.’”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Not the time, Pierce. Our host is being very cordial – for now. Speaking of which, what was your name again?”
The girl shook her finger, a purple bonfire between her and us boys, between her and the rest of the world. “Uh-uh, pretty boy. No names. At least not yet.”
“Well, fine,” I said. “Though I admit, I’m confused about why you didn’t come out to attack us earlier in the day. Pretty sure we made quite the commotion.”
She shrugged. “I was out scavenging. So sue me.”
I brought my cup to my lips, slowly sipping on the rich sweetness to make sure it wasn’t too hot for me. It was cocoa, made from powdered mix, she said, which was a quaint concept. The last time I had cocoa, it was prepared by a witch as well. A bruja, incidentally, who made it the traditional Mexican way, out of huge tablets of chocolate that were melted and whipped into steaming milk.
Why so confident about drinking cocoa from a stranger, you ask? And from a witch, no less? Why, the same reason Pierce and I weren’t so easily taken by her odd brand of fear magic. Being a demon, or part demon, in my case, is not without its perks. It confers some amount of resistance to things that humans might consider less than comfortable, even toxic. Heat, for example, or poisons, and as we very recently demonstrated, fear. Oh, cowardly demons exist, for sure, but it takes a certain innate level of bravery to even stand within the presence of many of the demon princes. You think Asmodeus is frightening? Try the Prince of Wrath. Or the Prince of Pride. I’d only met Lucifer once, and that was more than enough for a lifetime.
The unnamed witch had grudgingly invited us into her home. The abandoned building, that is, which was far more comfortable on the inside than one would conclude by observing it from the outside. The floor was swept as neatly as it could be, the room done up with some clearly secondhand pieces of furniture, possibly rescued from a street corner or an alley. Pierce and I had each taken a stool. The sofa looked comfortable enough, if a little too dusty for my taste. A shelf pushed off into a corner had a stack of magazines and several books on display. All nonmagical, sadly, as I was quick to check. It was the very picture of someone’s idea of a living room. A little bit domestic, if not a little bittersweet, like someone’s idea of family.
“You live here alone, don’t you?” I asked.
She nodded, taking a quick swig of her own cocoa. “That’s right. Don’t get any ideas about mugging me, now. I was playing nice with you boys earlier.” She waggled her fingers and grinned. “I can play naughty, too.”
Pierce shuddered, but he seemed to feel better after taking a hearty slurp of his cocoa.
Mr. Wrinkles had curled up by the fire, his silvery coat turned an eerie purple by the flickering amethyst flames. The girl who would not be named had several tricks up her sleeve, it seemed. One of the most important lessons Dantaleon had ever told me was to always consciously assess what I might be up against, to let the enemy play their cards before I even considered showing my hand.
Speaking of Dantaleon, he was still playing dead, possibly his smartest move yet. If the girl tried anything on us, he could easily spiral up into the air and blast her away with a fireball. I’d hated her when she’d tried to get us to shit our pants with that spider hex. I didn’t think I hated her very much anymore, and my feelings had simmered down to good old-fashioned distrust. But then I watched her scrabble with what looked like her makeshift kitchen area, heard her open a can of something potentially edible, and perhaps I distrusted her a little less.
“Mrrow?”
Mr. Wrinkles had even fewer trust issues, or maybe he just liked it when people made an effort to feed him. The girl called him over, making the universal “pspsps” noise with her lips as she got on her knees and placed an open can of tuna on the floor, sliding a bowl of water next to it. Mr. Wrinkles, once as haughty and proud as his own master, shoved his face right in the can.
The witch stroked his head lightly, then, pleased with herself, smoothed her skirts down as she perched on the couch. I bit on the inside of my bottom lip, then relented.
“Thanks,” I said. “He’s been hungry.”
“I figured as much,” she said. “I don’t have much to offer you guys, but we’ll see about getting something in the two of you, too.”
Pierce practically leapt off his stool. “I’m actually starving, so maybe food? Now?”
She rolled her eyes, then thumbed over her shoulder. “Over on the counter. I set out a couple of cans and some spoons. Go get them.”
Pierce trotted over, vanishing into the darkness at the edge of the firelight. I heard glasses clinking, then the sound of him chugging water. I guess he was thirsty, too.
“So,” the witch said, crossing her legs, clasping her fingers across her knees. “The cat must be your familiar.”
I folded my arms and cocked an eyebrow. “Familiar? Why would you say that? Do I look like some kind of wizard to you?”
She shrugged. “I’m not dumb, you know. Someone nonmagical wouldn’t have resisted my hexes so reflexively. The two of you have at least a little bit of arcane training.”
From somewhere in the darkness, Pierce’s voice interjected. “He’s the wizard. I’m the warrior. Didn’t you see my muscles?”
�
�Pierce,” I hissed.
The witch laughed. “It’s really no big deal, you know. It’s not like I’m planning to murder you guys or anything. Hell, I’m inviting more trouble letting the two of you spend the night.”
I tightened my lips, feeling guilty about being so evasive. “I – that is, we thank you.”
She laughed again. “‘We thank you?’ Why so formal? You guys are weird.”
The outline of Pierce’s body reemerged from the darkness of the kitchen. He was making a strange noise somewhere between a snarl and a grunt. “Little help?” he said, half his lip still wrapped across the top of a sealed can. I slapped myself in the forehead.
“See what I mean?” The witch sighed, grabbing the slobbery can out of Pierce’s hand as she slipped into the kitchen.
Pierce disappeared, too, then made a decidedly wonderstruck noise at the sound of metal grating on metal. He came back to the fire, one hand holding what appeared to be a can of baked beans, the other excitedly clasping a plastic spoon.
“Did you know about this?” he said, practically collapsing onto his butt by the fire, folding his legs underneath him, then digging in. “Just like in the movies, where people eat stuff out of cans by the campfire under the stars.” He pointed at the purple bonfire, eyes huge, as if only just realizing it was there. “Just like in the movies!”
I rolled my eyes. Somewhere in the room, I sensed that the witch was rolling her eyes, too.
“You. Pretty boy, with the long hair. Come get yours.”
Grudgingly I picked myself up and trudged to the kitchen. Normally, I had servants to ply me with food, even spoon viands into my mouth if I didn’t feel like moving my limbs. This, of course, wasn’t normal for any of us. I groped about in the half darkness, finding the kitchen as my eyes adjusted. The witch shoved a can into my hands, the spoon already sticking out of it. She thumbed over her shoulder.