Sorcerer's Creed Books 1-3

by N. P. Martin

  Jasper stared at me for a long moment as he twirled the stake around with his fingers. Then he motioned with his head. “Follow me.”

  “Good lad,” I said smiling.

  10

  Jasper The Great

  Jasper brought me into the living room at the front of the apartment. The room was medium sized and stank of weed and incense. Thick black curtains provided extra protection from any daylight that might have penetrated the boards outside. The walls were painted a deep purple color that might as well have been black. Light came from the dozens of candles sat around the room, most of which were gathered around the large stone fireplace that still had a few logs inside smoldering away. Above the mantle, attached to the wall, was the skull of a large horned animal, a steer it looked like. Hanging from the horns were various small leather pouches and what appeared to be amulets of the kind you would expect to find in a shop like Peter Franklyn's, the leather pouches probably filled with herbs and whatever else that were supposed to have magickal properties but didn't. Same for the amulets. A quick magick detection spell told me that. Nothing more than costume jewelry, although I passed no remarks about it. If people wanted to kid themselves with that stuff, that was their business.

  I walked into the room and sat down on a busted leather couch, noticing that there was a magick circle drawn on the floor with red paint. A quick inspection of the symbols painted on the outside of the circle told me that enough of them were genuine to enable some magick to be generated with the right rituals and spells. It made me wonder about the kind of ritual magick being done by Jasper and his friends. In my experience, dabblers in magick only did so out of pure self-interest. They would try to use magick to increase their bank accounts, make someone fall in love with them or maybe even get revenge on someone who pissed them off. In their haste to get what they wanted, they often completely missed the dangers of what they were doing, and they would end up making deals with malevolent entities, or their spells would have disastrous side effects, often resulting in one or multiple deaths.

  “So tell me,” I said to Jasper as he retrieved a half empty bottle of whiskey from off the mantle, having just found two glasses in the room somewhere. “What’s your interest in ritual magick?”

  Jasper came and sat down on the opposite end of the couch, filling one of the dirty looking glasses with whiskey and handing it to me, which might as well have been a glass of warm piss as far as my face was concerned, though Jasper ignored my look of distaste as he filled his own glass and then put the bottle on the floor, which was in danger of being lost amongst the forest of bottles already there. “What do you know about magick?” he asked, looking over the rim of his glass at me with darkly hooded eyes.

  “Enough to know that it’s dangerous.” I stared at the glass in my hand for several seconds before drumming up the courage to drink from it, hoping the whiskey would sterilize whatever germs and bacteria were likely crawling all over it.

  “Only if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  "You sound confident." Too confident if you'd asked me. Magick likes nothing better than to knock people off their pedestals without them even knowing there was a rope around their necks the whole time.

  Jasper shrugged like some rock star with a vastly inflated opinion of himself. “Not everyone knows how to ride the lightning, you know what I’m saying. It takes a certain…talent.”

  Ride the lightening? Is he serious?

  “What kind of rituals do you do?” I asked him.

  He cocked his head to one side. “Private ones.”

  I nodded. “Sure. Private ones. Of course.”

  A frown appeared on his face as he slowly drank from his glass. "So why the hell are you here...what's your name again?"

  “Creed. August Creed.”

  “Who says Jennifer even needs your help anyway?”

  “Have you met her mother?”

  "Once, when she came here looking for Jenny. Jenny wasn't here, and her mother threatened to set her guard dog on me if I didn't tell them where she was." He shook his head. "Fucking crazy bitch."

  “Did you tell her where Jennifer was?”

  He raised his chin. “What do you think?”

  “How are you still alive then?”

  "You know what an Entrapment Spell is?" He waited a second for an answer and then shook his head as if it was too much to ask that I knew what he was talking about.

  If indeed Jasper didn't just run for his life when confronted by Angela Crow, frankly, I was surprised that he was able to pull off such a spell at all. He must have set the trap beforehand, then activated it later, which still would have taken a fair amount of power that for most Adepts would have taken years to master. It made me wonder if Jasper was doing deals with low-level demons or other entities in exchange for power. If he was, it was foolish of him and would almost certainly end in him dying or losing his soul. Or both. Most likely both. But I wasn't his keeper and as such was under no obligation to waste my breath trying to warn him of the dangers.

  “Does Jennifer play with magick also?” I asked.

  "What's it to you anyway, man?" he said, suddenly sitting forward, staring at me like he was trying to scare me with his awesome power.

  “Relax,” I said. “I’m just doing a job here. Angela Crow asked me to find her daughter and bring her back to her.”

  Jasper leaped off the couch and stood with his chest pushed out. "Well that isn't fucking happening, so you might as well leave right now."

  After placing my half empty glass on the floor, I held up both hands in a supplicating gesture. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Jasper.”

  "Oh yeah. We'll fucking see about that, then, won't we?" He took a step back and brought his arms around in a very dramatic way, holding his hands as if he was trying to conjure something from midair, at the same time beginning to mutter words that he could only have learned from a spell book, or if someone or something had taught him them.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him. “I wouldn’t do that, Jasper.”

  His face had taken on a darkly focused expression as his eyes bored into me, his spell, whatever it was, almost complete.

  Enough of this nonsense.

  Just as I felt the weakly powered magick begin to emanate from him, I held out my hand and used my own magick to block the spell he was trying to cast on me.

  "What?" he said, unable to understand why his Gandalf routine had no effect on me.

  “I’m blocking your spell, Jasper. You might as well stop now before you pop a blood vessel.”

  Jasper let out a cry of frustration and then came flying at me with his fists instead. Before his knuckles could bruise my face, however, I switched the focus of my magick and created a minor blast of energy that sent Jasper flying back a few feet before crash-landing on his ass. He got back up quickly but stayed where he was across the room, staring at me with a newfound level of wariness. "What the fuck?”

  “I told you to stop.”

  “Where’d you learn how to do that?” he asked, most of his hostility now replaced by the excitement of witnessing and feeling the effects of a power greater than his own.

  “In a place you probably wouldn’t have lasted a day in before you cracked under the pressure,” I said, thinking of the long hours my father used to force me to practice, and the mental and emotional torture that went along with it.

  “Can you teach me?”

  Jesus. Why are people so power hungry these days?

  I hardly knew what to say to him except, “No.”

  He was about to plead further when a girl’s voice interrupted him. “Who is this guy, Jasper?”

  It was Jennifer Crow, in the flesh finally. She was standing in the doorway wearing a black lace dress that seemed to suit her more than just about any dress I'd ever seen on anybody except my mother before she died. Jennifer Crow looked even more beautiful than she came across in the sketch I had of her. Even if she wasn't a vampire and didn't have that efferv
escent beauty that all vamps seem to have, she would still have been beautiful. It was then that I realized why I found myself so taken in by Jennifer Crow, even though I had never met her until then. She reminded me of my dead sister, Roisin. My sister had the same dark, lustrous hair, and the same bottomless eyes. Our mother's eyes.

  Before Jasper could spout off any bullshit about who or what he thought I was, I stood up and introduced myself to the girl. "Hey," I said, trying to come across like I was just there to offer my help. "My name is August Creed."

  Jennifer stared at me with suspicion. “Did my mother send you here?”

  “She asked me to find you, bring you back to her, but—” I held up a hand as I could see she was about to go hostile on me, and as she was a pure blooded vampire (and therefore possessed of frightening speed and strength amongst other things, even at her young age), I didn’t want her getting too upset by someone she probably saw as just an extension of her mother, the person she had run away from in the first place. “—I was hoping maybe we could resolve the situation to everyone’s satisfaction.”

  “Oh really,” she said. “And just how do you plan on doing that?”

  I stared over at her. "Well, I guess that all depends on you, Jennifer."

  11

  Babylon Calling

  Jennifer Crow stared over at me for long moments, quite composed I thought, for one so young…and for one being so rudely awakened from her slumber. She could have been forgiven for being a tad more tetchy about things, but for whatever reason she didn't seem to view me as a threat to her. I wasn't sure if that made the girl a good judge of character, or just plain arrogant, as many vampires tend to be in their dealings with humans. For the sake of peace, and also because I found myself trusting the girl, I chose to believe she saw that I was telling the truth. More than that, it was clear she wanted away from her mother and was desperate enough to hear out a complete stranger who had practically broken into her home (home away from home at least) and assaulted two of her housemates, one of which was her boyfriend.

  Just how bad was this girl's life? I wondered. What made her so reluctant to go back home? I hoped it was something other than just good ole teen angst. If it wasn't, and Jennifer was acting out for attention so she could piss off her mother, then there would be nothing for me to do except hand her over. I was pretty certain her situation was about more than that, though, as I wouldn't have felt the need to care otherwise, even though I didn't know why exactly I cared yet. I just knew that I did and that I was justified in doing so. Call it magick. Call it intuition. They're one in the same anyhow.

  “Jasper, would you leave us alone, please, babe?” Jennifer said to her boyfriend.

  “What?” Jasper exclaimed. “You think I’m going to leave you alone with this guy?” He rushed over and stood beside her like some sort of tattooed guardian, even though we both knew he couldn’t stop me from doing a single thing. “This fucking dude knows magick, baby. He’s dangerous.”

  "So am I," Jennifer said throwing me a look before turning to Jasper and kissing him lightly on the lips. "I'll be fine. Wait in my room." She looked at me again. "I'm sure this won't take long."

  I didn't respond to her comment. Instead, I sat back down on the couch and waited for her to finish reassuring her clueless boyfriend. I say clueless because he was dabbling in things he didn't understand, not even a little bit. If he did, he wouldn't have been doing what he was doing, which was making deals with spirits of the Underworld. Maybe not demons, as I doubt he had the skill or knowledge to conjure one, but most certainly with one of the many dark spirits that haunt the outskirts of the Underworld, souls who for whatever reason didn't quite make it into the Underworld itself and ended up lost and trapped in the fringes. Some of those spirits can be contacted if reached out to in the right way. My father, during my long training, used to make me (and my brother and sister) summon such dark spirits so that we could learn how to control them. I was twelve years old the first time I summoned one of those spirits. It was a terrifying experience and one which never got any easier the more times my father forced me to do it. Quite often, he would take over and command certain things from the spirit, things I wasn't allowed to hear. He even invented a spell to render me temporarily deaf, just to be sure. To this day, I still don't know what he demanded of the spirits. Neither do I care. The point is, Jasper was accepting power from a spirit whose only goal would be to bring him down in some unfortunate way, the endgame being death and the capture of his soul so the spirit could feed upon it (pickings in the dark fringes are meager). What Jasper was clearly enjoying now was a small taste of power that would turn sour soon enough and slowly melt his life away until there was nothing left.

  Jasper finally left the room after giving me a final look that said he would be somehow watching me, which I ignored, thinking he might just deserve what was coming to him for being so bloody stupid. When he was gone, Jennifer walked to the red brick fireplace and stood facing me, her dark eyes as steady as her mothers, though not as cold. Nowhere near. “I suppose you think I’m just some spoiled, rich bloodsucker who enjoys running away from home?” she said.

  "Maybe, in the beginning," I said, liking how direct she was. I was no fan of beating around bushes either. "When your mother first came to me, that's what I thought. But the longer your mother hung around, the more I understood why someone would want to get far away from her. Then I saw a sketch of you that came with a report. Something about you captured the attention of my…intuition, shall we say."

  She raised her thick eyebrows and smiled a little. “Your intuition? Okay. So what did your intuition tell you, August Creed?”

  “It’s hard to define these types of feelings. Maybe I just sympathize with anyone who has to endure the harsh reality of being controlled by a despot parent.”

  She shook her head emphatically. “Not controlled. Not anymore. And what would you know about it anyway?”

  “More than you think,” I said, my eyes firmly on hers for long seconds.

  Jennifer nodded. “So you get it.”

  “I do.”

  “Did you run away much?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of the hearth, more relaxed now, but still poised to spring if she had to.

  I snorted humorlessly. “I’m still running away." That came out more blunt and honest than I expected. For a while there, I thought I had convinced myself that what I was doing wasn't running from my past, but somehow traveling into the future (or stagnating in the present). Whatever the case, I just knew then that the truth was much simpler: I was still on the run.

  “I haven’t really ran away, you know,” she admitted, her demeanor becoming despondent. “I just needed space from my mother and her crazy fucking world. She knows that, but she enjoys the drama of trying to fetch me back home again.” She paused and stared at the floor for a second. “The truth is, there’s nowhere I could go where she wouldn’t find me eventually.”

  "So you keep moving. Don't let her catch up to you."

  Her dark eyes focused in on me. Her look was almost as devastating as her mother’s but in a much better way. Certainly not as withering. But powerfully captivating. "Is that what you did? Is that what you're doing?”

  I nodded slowly. “Maybe, yeah.”

  “And how is that working out for you?”

  I almost didn’t want to answer that. “The demons are never far away, no matter where you go.”

  “My point exactly.”

  I smiled. “For one so young, you seem…wise.”

  “I had to grow up pretty fast, believe me.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  She smiled then, warmly, as if she hadn't properly connected with anyone in a long time. Truth be told, it felt good to talk to someone who seemed to understand the way things were. I hadn't discussed my past with anyone but my uncle in the last six years. "So," she said. "What did my mother threaten to do to you if you didn't bring me back?"

  “It was pretty clear she would d
rink me dry if I failed.”

  She smirked and shook her head. “Crazy fucking bitch. Cross Countess Bathory with Alexis from Dynasty and that would go some way to describing my mother. She didn’t get the name The Crimson Crow for nothing.”

  I laughed. “The Crimson Crow. An apt name if there ever was one, I’d say.”

  “Man,” Jennifer said. “It’s not even fucking funny. I don’t think I can take centuries more of her craziness. Seriously.”

  "Are you serious?" I asked her. "If you are, I can arrange for you to disappear. Not even your mother would ever find you. No one would."

  She stood up slowly and stared at me hard for a moment. “You’re serious.”

  “You ever heard of Babylon?”

  “The ancient city? Yes. If my mother did nothing else for me, she at least got me a good education.”

  “And did that education extend as far as the arcane and the true nature of the universe?”

  “Not really,” she said, her brow furrowing as she probably wondered where I was going with this.

  “Babylon still exists, but in another dimension. I can arrange passage for you to go there. Your mother would never know.”

  Jennifer’s eyes widened now. “I can hear your heartbeat. You’re not lying.”

  “No.”

  “Holy shit.”

  "So are you interested?" It was a rhetorical question as she was pacing back and forth in front of me now, probably considering all the possibilities and ramifications of what I'd just offered her. You might also be wondering at this point, why I wasn't strolling around the great architecture of Babylon myself if I was so desperate to escape my past and the simple reason for that is because I wanted to see this world first before I hightailed it to another. Now that I had seen most of this world, maybe I would consider going with Jennifer to Babylon. I could think of worse people to travel there with.