S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 13
July 14, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twelve, Pt. 2
Still curled up on the floor, Jill gagged on a sob. She spat it out. “I can’t live like this…”
“Jill, what happened?” Zoe repeated.
“What do you think?”
Zoe stepped into the room, approaching slowly. “I’m here, okay?”
“How do people do it?”
Zoe knelt a couple feet from her sister. She reached out but didn’t quite touch. “Do what?”
“How do people wake up and this is the world we live in? How do people look around for more than five minutes and not want all of this to go away?”
She took Jill’s arm, stroking her sister’s shoulder with her thumb. “I don’t know.”
Not far away, a circle of salt surrounded a splat of tarry black. Seals and sigils bound it up, a gob of shapeless gross. Zoe wondered, if she’d bound and sealed the pack of cloves she’d thrown down the garbage disposal, would it have become viscous, vantablack ejecta, too?
“I keep having this dream…” Jill had stopped sobbing and now just sounded tired. “And I keep thinking back, remembering. Jonathan didn’t really kill himself, you know.”
Zoe froze. “What?”
“It’s the world. All the pressure and the pain people put you through not even on purpose but just because nobody cares, or just because they can. We know magic, Zo’…we should be able to save someone.”
“You couldn’t have done anything.”
“I know,” and the tiredness turned to anger. “I know that. Nobody could have. Nobody should have had to. The world should have been a better place and better people should’ve lived in it. But instead people just kept piling on rocks until the rocks fucking crushed him.”
(what kind of psycho piles rocks on)
(today’s in-class activity)
Zoe didn’t know what to say. Maybe there wasn’t anything.
“I don’t want to be here, anymore,” Jill whispered. “Here needs to be different or I need to be somewhere else, but I can’t…I just can’t.”
“Yeah, well. Too bad.”
“Zo’, please, could you not?”
“I’m being serious. ‘Here’ needs you. I—I need you.”
Jill turned to look at Zoe, half her face revealed, pale and sick, wisps of frayed black hair stuck to a sheened forehead. “No, you don’t.”
“I don’t have anyone else.”
“You have Sung-ho.”
Zoe snorted. “As a mentor. As a friend. But we’re family. I’ve known you my whole life.”
Jill rolled over, repositioning. Buttressed on one arm, she faced Zoe but didn’t make eye contact. “You’re three years older so technically just my whole life.”
Zoe reached over and put her hand on Jill’s arm again. “See? You feel better already.”
“I don’t. I just…the first time I used, I didn’t even want to. They—well, I didn’t want to. But I did. And now it eats up my thoughts like I don’t even know what. Everything feels so sharp and hard. Just reading about the world, sometimes just knowing about it, it cuts me up, and this junk, this stupid fucking poison, it puts me back together again. I can’t escape it because it is an escape. And I can’t keep living in a place where I need an escape and my escape is killing me.”
“So we’ll change it.”
“What?” Jill’s gaze flicked up to Zoe’s.
“We change the escape or we change the world, either way. But I can’t lose you. I won’t.”
Jill pursed quivering lips and wiped at a glisten of more tears glassing her bloodshot. “I don’t know what to do.”
Zoe stood up. A wash of splayed books cluttered the floor where Jill had pushed over the two bookshelves. She picked a few of them up and piled them neatly. “You can start researching again. I know it helps.”
“Zo’…”
“It’s a risk, but what isn’t?”
“You’re sure?” Jill asked, shifting on the floor.
Zoe picked up a heavy, leather-wrapped grimoire. Staring at it, she nodded. “Yeah. I’m sure. Now,” she turned around, an almost-real smile painted on her face, “care to give me a hand here? Something really trashed this room.”
Turn Back
...coming soon...
Table of Contents
July 13, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Twelve, Pt. 1
Sung-ho swept Seo-yeon off to the master bedroom and Jill slept on the guest bed. Still tipsy and jittery with pre-run adrenaline, Zoe stayed awake, nursing a final scotch and half of a clove. Wandering toward Sung-ho’s den in hopes that old music and worn-cozy chairs might help her sleep, she heard the sound system already alive beyond the inch-open door, the Black Diamond Heavies bidin’ their time. A sigh whispered out in Omar’s voice. Zoe sipped her drink and took a deep, lung-filling breath. She’d wanted to say something to Omar but hadn’t. This seemed like the ‘now or never’ moment, the point at which the thing either happened or didn’t.
Switching her rocks glass to the same hand as her cigarette, Zoe knocked hard enough to push the door in farther. “Omar?”
“Hm?”
“You okay in there?”
“Uh, yeah, yeah.”
She stepped into the den to find Omar in Sung-ho’s chair. Sitting across from him, she set her drink on the edge of the desk. “I thought you didn’t like the blues.”
“I don’t like anything on infinite repeat.”
“Up late thinking?” she hazarded.
He nodded, gazing at his glass.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Mostly that I don’t really know how to defuse a bomb.”
“You have double degrees, one in computer science and the other in electrical engineering. You applied to MIT for graduate school but didn’t get in. You didn’t have a back-up plan for whatever reason and you’ve been doing IT and odd jobs since you graduated.”
“How do you know all that?” he asked.
“Me and Sung-ho talked to a friend of ours. Someone high up. We hashed out a deal so we can guarantee you Class-E clearance, probably Delta. They followed SOP, a deep background check, stuff like that…”
“You could’ve just asked.”
“I could’ve. The people actually making the decisions don’t know you from Adam.”
Omar leaned back, massaging his face, his eyes bloodshot. “How big is all of this, anyway?”
“Not that big but big enough.” She held out her half-a-clove. “There a matchbook over there?”
Omar massaged his face for a few more seconds before sitting forward with a groan. “Yeah.”
“If you do get Delta, which…if we pull this off, I think you will, you’ll have to think about whether or not you really want into all of this.” She took a beaten old matchbook he offered and snapped off a stick from inside. “Because if you’re as good at all this shit as I told everyone you were—and you are good—you’ll have to make a choice between civilian life and formal training pretty quickly.”
“How quick?”
She took a drag, the initial flavor stale from when she put it out the first time. “Six to nine months after you go through the initial swearing-in.”
“Did you tell ‘em I could start on Monday?” Omar grinned.
Zoe didn’t return the smile. “Really think about this, Omar. Being Delta in and of itself isn’t so demanding…but if you go through with training, probably you’ll get Charlie, and after that there’s no way back out again.”
“Back out of what?”
“All of this. The monsters and the magic, this whole world—”
“I’m already in it.” Omar sat forward, smile gone. “I’m already in the world with the monsters and the magic whether I like it or not. Proved that at the ski lodge.”
“This is different.”
“How? At least people like you know what’s coming.”
Zoe laughed.
Omar frowned, brow wrinkling. “So that’s a joke?”
Still chuckling, she shook her head. “No, it’s not. Except it is. Do you really think I know what’s coming?”
“I…” he sat back, slouching. “I don’t know. More than anyone else, I guess.”
She puffed, flicked the filter of the clove even though little ash had accumulated yet. “This life…it’s a maze of glass. Once you’re sure that magic exists, you can’t be sure of anything else ever. When is a car crash just a car crash, after all? And when is it the result of an accretion of hexes and curses, probability fields micro-adjusted until one of them became inevitable? Because once mundanity sets in, the end result looks the same. So we’re all locked in this little world together where reality itself is uncertain, where we can’t really tell the difference between the walls and the floor and the ceiling, where we can’t see a dead end straight ahead of us unless the light hits it just right. Sometimes people get cancer and sometimes cancer is incurably vicious, but the right magic can give someone incurable cancer. It’s a lot of work and really not worth it, but they could. Knowing that means that I always have to wonder. Realistically, I’ll rarely ever know. So I just keep my hands out and try not to get too far from the walls, in case I lose them, and I pray I never need to sprint because when something really chases you in the maze, if you really have to run, sooner or later you’ll hit a dead end, another pane of glass you couldn’t see because the light didn’t hit it the right way…and by the time you realize you’ve crashed face-first through a dead-end of slivered glass, the shards of your fuck-up will already have shred the skin from your bones.”
Omar picked up a drink she hadn’t noticed, rum and coke it looked like, and sipped. “Wow. You worked on that for a long time, huh?”
Zoe let herself chuckle. “I did, yeah. I went over it in my head about a thousand times.”
“Why?”
She watched smoke writhe around her cigarette. Her jaw tightened. Relaxed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess…nobody ever warned me.”
“I’ve been with you for a month and a half,” Omar said. “My job? It’s gone. And you keep telling me that you guys are somehow gonna set it up so all the evidence for these attacks points to your perp, but last I checked…I’m a person of interest, right?”
Zoe answered by not answering.
“This world existed the whole time I did and I never knew it was there until…until it came for me. Since then, you’ve been the only person watching out. And I appreciate that, but if you tell me there’s a chance I could get the skills I need to defend myself from all of this, maybe to defend someone else? If you tell me I can get paid for it? Why would I not?”
“Because once you sign onto this, you can’t get out again.”
“There is no ‘out,’” Omar said. He swirled his drink in its glass and finished the last of it. Zoe noticed the music had changed but she didn’t recognize the song. Omar chewed his thoughts for a few seconds. Sighed. “I think maybe since you grew up in this weird secret society shit, you think the secret society shit is the thing that matters. But the thing that matters is that, sooner or later, someone gets killed by a monster, and probably they never saw that coming. Someone’s gotta be there, right? Does it matter what ‘team’ gets credit?”
Zoe went for her clove but it had died again. “Goddammit.”
Omar set down his drink and tossed the matchbook back to her side of the table. “Here.”
“Thanks…”
“That make sense to you, though?”
She took a long drag. “Yeah. Probably more than most.”
Turn Back
...coming soon...
Table of Contents
July 8, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eleven, Pt. 4
Salem wasn’t a night-life town. It had its bars and late-night establishments, its last-call drunks and after-party nocturnes, but in the main, few lurkers inhabited the pre-dawn hours. Even at its wildest, Salem wasn’t New York or even Boston—and it sure as hell wasn’t New Orleans. Driving back to her rental just before midnight, Zoe saw few pedestrians and fewer vehicles.
Until.
Five minutes out from the rental, a shade-windowed sedan passed her on the street. As she traveled west, it traveled east. A semi-opaque shield hid the front license plate. As it drove by, Zoe lost her breath. A sixth sense surge pulsed through her. Scenarios flashed through her mind in rapid-fire images, a dozen bad endings overlapping each other at the speed of chemistry. Sucking air through a choked throat, she forced her gaze up the rearview and caught the last two digits on the rear plate.
Seeing no one else on the road, she spun the wheel and pulled the emergency brake. The car spun, arcing around. Rubber shrilled. Momentum swung her sweat-coarse, jaw-length hair in front of her face. Brushing it away, she disengaged the e-brake and finished the U-turn to follow the other vehicle.
The last digit on the plate had read ‘0’ and something about that didn’t settle with her. Something she’d once known about Massachusetts plates that she didn’t know anymore.
At a busy intersection and a red light, she stopped behind a truck behind her quarry. The other sedan went straight and Zoe switched lanes to accelerate up alongside the truck. Squinting through her windshield, she managed to note two more alphanumerics from the plates. When the other vehicle made a sudden, un-signaled left turn, Zoe gave up her pursuit.
On one of the several burner phones she’d acquired for the run, she noted down what she’d gotten from the license plate.
Twenty minutes later, pulled over on another shoulder of another street several miles from her newest rental, Zoe rested her forehead against the steering wheel. She wanted to call Sung-ho. Nobody else in her life had ever been Sung-ho. This made sense, intellectually; it broke her, emotionally.
She took a deep breath and straightened up. She could’ve cried but she hadn’t.
She wanted to call Sung-ho but Sung-ho no longer received calls. The dead rarely did.
Still, deep in the shadowed corridors of her airtight neural compound, a name and number existed that she still recalled by rote. And if any situation needed her to set aside her own bullshit and make the call, this was it.
It took her five minutes to dial.
Turn Back
...Coming Soon...
Table of Contents
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eleven, Pt. 3
Just before 11:00 PM, the group convened at a place called La Femme Rouge.
La Femme Rouge had started as a seaside hotel, twenty-four rooms and two suites, with a small eatery, a bar, a guests’ lounge, and a cigar lounge on the first floor. But time did what time always did and La Femme Rouge evolved into something different. Under local, Quebecois mafia ownership, La Femme Rouge served as a bar with minimal menu, the guests’ lounge and most of the cigar lounge transformed into a VIP area where the well-off lost their hours staring at sinuously swaying and occasionally writhing dancers. The fourteen rooms on the second floor provided ultra-low-rent living spaces for in-need performers, doubling as a brothel or street pharmacy when required. The mob kept its offices on top. The last police raid targeting La Femme Rouge had happened sixteen years earlier and another showed no signs of popping up.
It was a place busy enough to drown them out, scant enough to keep watch of; loud enough to mutter secrets and not so loud that the intended hearer wouldn’t hear them.
They sat at a table in the rear, near the bathrooms and the door to the stairs leading up. Sung-ho said something about how the Quebecois high-ups met at that very table to discuss their business, but Zoe found it hard to believe. If the mob kept its offices thirty feet overhead, why meet in the bar? Sung-ho shrugged the question off and ordered something the bartender couldn’t concoct. When the scruff-faced, lumberjack-handsome bartender furrowed his brow and pursed his lips, Sung-ho asked for a double bourbon on the rocks, instead.
The three of them waited, bourbon-rocks, Old Fashioned, rum-and-coke, until Jill ducked in ten minutes later. Wearing a hoodie under a winter longcoat, Jill maneuvered the crowd well enough but seemed to have forgotten the general dress code of the blend-in. Exchanging a look, Zoe and Sung-ho shared a quiet chuckle. Omar questioned with his eyes but not his mouth and so he still didn’t have an answer when Jill sat down.
“He wants them to see,” Jill said, answering a question Zoe had asked her three hours earlier after the day’s second clandestine meeting, “because he thinks he can save them.”
“Save them?” Zoe echoed.
“Like what you did with him,” Jill nodded at Omar.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Omar leaned forward. “Can he do that?”
“No—well, not really—which is why we never figured out his plan.”
“His plan?”
“There’s no real sigil for diving,” Jill pulled down her hood and glanced un-subtly over her shoulder. “What Zoe did to you, ‘diving’ into your mind, there’s not even some low-tech, pre-Latin, cave-paint scribble for it. ‘Diving’ wasn’t something a non-psychic person could do until a hundred or so years ago. But psychic arcana still existed…as did warding spells.”
“He’s trying to ape the mechanic that lets us stabilize and reinforce a person’s sixth sense,” Zoe said.
“What did you mean when you said ‘not really?’ I mean, is this something he can actually pull off?” Omar fidgeted, stirring his drink idly with its slender red straw.
Zoe glanced between Jill and Sung-ho. Sung-ho glanced at Jill. Jill glanced at Sung-ho.
A beat passed, the bar’s din filling the quiet.
“I…don’t know,” Jill admitted, sharing a nod with Sung-ho. “Historically, this has been attempted before, and with at least some small degree of success. Also historically, the method was discarded for its inefficiency. So, at best, it might work on some people, but probably…it won’t.”
“And this other…what did you call it—matrix?” Omar swallowed a throatful of drink, coughed. “What’s that for?”
“We were able to disrupt that one,” Zoe said. “So it’s much weaker than before. And still amateurish.”
“But what is it?”
“It’s a series of summoning spells, conjuring, and portalcraft,” Jill kept an even tone, unpanicked despite the implications of her explanation. “He might’ve been trying to create a Breach but he’s not good enough. Instead, he’s trying to simultaneously summon a half-dozen aberrations at different points across the city. He’ll be opening a couple portals for any interplanar fugitives or multi-dimensional hobos to hop through, too.”
“And there’ll be bombs,” Zoe said.
“Bombs?” Omar’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit, that’s how he’s gonna get a crowd…”
“He wants witnesses,” Zoe confirmed.
Jill reached into her longcoat and withdrew a novel-sized case. “This is the one we found. We don’t think any of the others will be much more complicated.” She pushed the case toward Omar. “If you’ll have a look.”
Omar blinked. “Me? Uh…why?”
Zoe set her drink down over-loudly. “Jill will stay in the city proper to disrupt the Summoner’s spells. Sung-ho and I will attack the Summoner’s place. Since you build computers and know software…”
“That’s a big fuckin’ jump to bombs.”
“Right now I just want you to look at the photos and diagrams in the box,” Jill intervened. “And tell me if they make sense to you. Zoe’s paired photos with her notes so it shouldn’t be hard to defray them.”
“You mean ‘defuse?’”
“See, you’re great at this already.”
Sighing, Omar swiped the case close to his chest and popped it open. Pulling out two rubber-banded stacks of photos and sketches, he started examining. He put the rubber-bands around his glass and frowned as he flicked through the images. “Huh.”
“Is that a good ‘huh?’” Jill asked.
“I…I can read the diagrams. Zoe’s sketches make sense. I know what a lot of these parts do, too. Just…” he licked his lips, took a deep breath. “Even with Zoe’s step-by-step, I don’t know if I…if I can actually do this.”
“Zoe?” Jill ventured.
“Me and Sung-ho are the only people here with combat training.”
Jill opened her mouth.
“And experience,” Zoe added, closing Jill’s mouth. “We have to take the slaughterhouse.”
“If Omar can’t do it, you’re the only one who can.”
“We have to handle the Summoner,” Sung-ho set his drink down empty. “If the crazy guy escapes, he’ll do another crazy thing in another two or three months. We know where he is and what he’s doing now, so now’s the best time to take him out.”
Jill frowned.
Omar put the photos and papers back in the case, un-banded. He picked up his drink, took a sip, and stared at it. “I’ll keep looking them over. If there’s anything you can do to help me out, like ooky-spooky whatever, that’d be nice.”
“So that’s the plan, then. I’ll go over the details of these schematics with you until you’ve got them memorized and I’ll throw some spellcraft on you before I leave for the slaughterhouse. And if you run into something that scares you, just leave it.”
“Leave it?” Omar echoed.
“Leave it.” Zoe answered, iron-voiced. “Which leaves us with just one more major issue…”
“I’m covered,” Jill confirmed, still frowning, not really looking at anyone around her.
“Okay. So. Jill and Omar take care of the spell matrix and the bombs, me and Sung-ho make the main assault. Forty-eight hours from now we’ll be wrapped.”
“He thinks he can wake people up,” Jill said, unprovoked. “He thinks he can get them to see that magic is real.”
“Well, too bad for him that it doesn’t work that way, then,” Zoe replied.
“Why would he know that?” Jill asked.
“He wouldn’t.”
“He’s doing all of this because he thinks he can.”
“Jill, this isn’t because of Malleus.”
“It’s not Malleus. It’s Malleus and the Belgian’s council and even the White Ravens.”
Zoe rolled her eyes. “Oh my god, so it’s everyone? And, what, the Winters—”
“He wouldn’t do this if he knew it wouldn’t work,” Jill steamed, voice unwisely loud. “So why doesn’t he know!?”
“Who’s supposed to teach him? Are your people out there looking for—”
“At least we’re studying it! At least we’re learning.”
“Oh, cool. Did your ‘learning’ stop this motherfucker from trying to freeze me in place and shoot me to death?”
“Briars!” Sung-ho shouted.
The table turned to him. The bartender did, too, if only briefly. The nearest other table, seven feet away, pretended not to hear.
Jill sat down again.
“Tomorrow we all might die,” Sung-ho observed. “Probably we won’t, but we might. And since we might—even if it’s only a one or two percent chance—maybe we ought to act like it. Now, I don’t even want a cigar anymore, and since Jill’s disguise is bad beyond words, I vote we spend the rest of the night back at my pad, sharing good memories instead of bad blood.”
For a couple seconds, everyone’s attention hung on Sung-ho.
Then Omar laughed. “Sorry, sorry. It was just…”
“Yeah,” Zoe agreed. “That was pretty corny.”
“Still,” Jill said. “I think, considering everything…I second that.”
Turn Back
Keep Reading
Table of Contents
July 7, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eleven, Pt. 2
What did people do all day? What did people do with their hands?
Zoe itched like fever. The initial physical symptoms had seemed bad enough. Going from seven per day down to three per day had seemed bad enough. Going from three to zero? It felt impossible. Even in the first week of August, fourteen days after the First Confessional, somewhere between six and nine days before the Proclamation, it felt threadworn, unrealistic, tenuous as a single molecular chain encountering hostile forces. The nic fits and heightened frustration lingered on even after the last queasy symptoms of physical withdrawal died out.
And, increasingly, the boredom.
The ritual consumed between seven and nine hours of the day. The meditation, food prep, cooking, and eating took up another four hours. On a good night, Zoe managed to sleep for six hours. Added all together, she still ended up with at least five hours of…
What? What did people do?
She paced. A small TV played a re-run of a re-run of a re-run, the screen occasionally fritzing and snowing as a natural but inexplicable response to prolonged exposure to magic. She turned the volume up but couldn’t care about what any of the characters said or did. She paced. In the kitchen, she finished leftover dinner—more salad, now wilted.
She flicked the butt of her cigarette.
Wait.
She flicked— Wait.
She stared at the slim black clove between her fingers. She felt something brewing in her head. Her mind blanked, her zen the calm before an apocalyptic storm. Her Zippo felt heavier in her pocket. Had she even put it in her pocket that morning? And where had the clove come from?
She dropped the smokestick to the tile and stomped it dead. When she picked up her shoe, nothing remained. She paced.
Upstairs, Jill screamed.
Zoe froze. Jill screamed again. Something heavy crashed against the floor of her room.
Zoe ran. Every light in the house flickered and buzzed, flashing shadows on the walls. Whispers pressed up from the floorboards, too many overlapping phrases for any of them to make sense and all sharing a single voice. Zoe hammered the stairs up to the lounge, the left turn toward the bathroom and the darkness outside of it—she rushed forward passed two other doors before reaching Jill’s.
Jill shrieked and cried. Another heavy something slammed against the hardwood.
“Jill!?” Zoe shouted. She’d sprinted too fast and couldn’t slow down before crashing. Rebounding, she grabbed the doorknob. “Jill!?”
Jill drove out a series of wails, each sharp cry a whip through the air.
Zoe twisted the knob and put her shoulder into the door. No magic held it fast—it blew open and she staggered into the room, body twisting and unbalanced from the momentum. She threw herself back mostly out of instinct. No threat greeted her immediately and still she leapt back toward the entry threshold.
Jill curled on the floor, fetal, surrounded by overturned furniture.
In the center of the bedroom, painted symbols and Kosher salt formed a seal. Zoe felt a layer of wards crackling dome-like up from the seal’s perimeter. In the center of it all, a small bag of heroin, a spoon, a butane lighter, and a rubber hose waited.
(never-y-story)
Jill’s screams stopped, reduced to sobs. She shook, rattling her bones against the hardwood.
“What…happened?” Zoe asked.
Turn Back
...coming soon...
Table of Contents
July 6, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Eleven, Pt. 1
Jill sat, legs folded, in the center of a circle of blessed, Kosher salt poured around a flat-enough, less-filthy patch of alleyway asphalt. Eyes closed, her lips moved around silent syllables. At the mouth of the alley, Zoe leaned a shoulder against a brick wall, gazing her nightsight into the sodium-lit dimness. Almost a third of the buildings bristling along the shore and harbor waited on death row, foreclosed or condemned—and so the lights and buzzing glows bringing haven to the darkness there were interrupted by deep notches of shadow. Still, for safety and secrecy’s sakes, they’d set up the ritual between two still-operable businesses, both warehouses, and waited until just after midnight to begin.
It wasn’t a complex plan. They’d used invocations and drugs to strengthen Jill’s already-trained sixth sense. Jill had induced herself into a semi-conscious vision-state and plugged herself into a divination spell supported by an amply-notated map of Oceanrest provided by Sung-ho. Just over an hour had passed since, Zoe standing guard, waiting.
Sung-ho and Omar had already gone home.
Zoe had smoked two cloves so far. Six more still waited in the slim case inside her jacket.
A faint shiver rolled through Zoe’s sixth sense and she stepped back from the alley mouth. Crouching low, she sank into shadows, hand on her sidearm grip, maneuvering around a reeking green dumpster. A cop car whispered rubber along the street beyond. It rolled through pauseless. Trying not to re-notice the stink around her, Zoe watched the dark until taillights blinked for brakes and the police vanished into distance. Standing, she spat. It didn’t help.
She returned to the alley mouth, just six blissful feet away from her hiding spot. Jill’s eyes snapped open. “You were right.”
“Well, shit.” Zoe removed her case of smokes and clicked it open. A clove filter fit between her lips. “What did you find?”
“A matrix of spells, like you predicted. They’re all pretty frail but there’s a lot of them, some obviously redundant…”
Zoe lit the clove with a flare of Zippo and disappeared the case and lighter in a dash of hands. Puffed. “What do you think he’s trying to do?”
Jill stood up, brushing grime from her hip-hugging jeans. She ran a hand through a sheen of royal purple hair. Shrugged. “I don’t know. The magic’s too subtle to get that clear of a reading like this…” she gestured to their set-up. “If you drove me around town I could pick out specific sites and maybe get an idea of what it’s all for, but from out here all I can say is that it’s big.”
“We can take a circuit around the city after we get some sleep.”
“This ‘Summoner’ guy, you said he deals mostly with constructs and summoned entities?”
“So far.”
“Zo’…I’m one of the best in the world when it comes to banishings and exorcisms. Cleansings and seals, too.”
“Yeah, well,” Zoe peered back toward the road. In the not-too-distant distance, the Atlantic lapped the coast. “It’s not something I would’ve brought you into if things hadn’t gotten…out of hand.”
“I know. It’s not something I would’ve agreed to if you hadn’t sounded…”
“What?”
“Scared.”
Zoe took a drag, flicked ash. “I’m not scared.”
“It’s me.” Jill put a gentle hand on Zoe’s shoulder. “You can lose the armor for just one second.”
Zoe pursed her lips and tried not to focus too much on her sister in her periphery. “We shouldn’t even be seen together.”
“Things aren’t that crazy between Malleus and W-A.”
“You’re right, they’re not. Not usually. But somehow I think that when one of Malleus’ best agents meets with one of W-A’s best scientists, yeah, that one might get a reaction. Maybe even an overreaction.”
“Zo’—”
Zoe shrugged Jill’s hand away from her. “We covered for you, right? But there was still blowback. And I get it, after everything we’ve been through, I understand why you left. Why you had to. But it changed everything. You know this is a risk, helping me. You know it’s a risk just being here.”
Jill sank back, nodding. “I know.”
“The decisions we made…they were the right ones, but they had consequences.”
“I couldn’t stay at Malleus.”
“No shit.”
“What are you trying to prove, here?” Jill asked.
“I—I’m not trying to prove anything.” Zoe lost steam. She went to take a puff of her clove but the cherry had died. She flicked the burnout to the ground and sighed. “It just…” (every story) “It just sucks, doesn’t it? Don’t you feel so alone, now?”
“We have our payphone chats.”
“And now everyone at Malleus thinks—or knows, they know I’m compromised.”
“Everyone’s compromised,” Jill said.
“Not everyone is this compromised.”
Silence brooded between them.
“I’ll admit it sucks,” Jill cracked the quiet. “Honestly, none of my colleagues trust me, either. Maybe two of them. And dating is impossible, but it’s always been impossible, right? There aren’t enough eligible men in our world and none of them are any better than the FiDi douchebags outside of our world. I have two friends, I’ve been single for two years, and, yeah, I only talk to my sister twice a month during covert payphone conversations. Life’s rough. So what?”
Zoe chuckled despite herself. “FiDi douchebags?”
“I thought we needed some levity.”
“Sorry. I haven’t had much to do since Sung-ho and Omar left, so I’ve just been…”
“Stewing?”
“Thinking,” Zoe corrected.
“Stewing?” Jill repeated.
“I guess so.”
“Well…for the next few days, at least, we can creep around Oceanrest together.” Jill joined Zoe at the alley mouth, shoulder to shoulder. “So it’s not all bad. I should get back home, though…I can meet you at twelve-thirty tomorrow if you want to drive through the city and see what we can figure out.”
Zoe examined the clove’s dead cherry. “That sounds like the best next step.”
“I’ll give you a ride back north. Sung-ho’s place isn’t too far out of my way.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t worry about it. As long as no other secret agents see us.”
“It’s not a joke if it could happen.”
Jill shrugged, pulling her car keys from her purse. “Says who?”
Turn Back
...coming soon...
Table of Contents
July 1, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Ten, Pt. 3
The morning after the attack, they arrayed their notes.
Zoe’s:
adrift / a / drift / a / rift
doesn’t this world feel flat to you?
it is (every story)
the eyes are not there — yet —
peel back the lids, hold the head steady, we’ll show them
(the same ending)
rift / Breach / rip / tear / Veil / I’ve heard the whispers / eater of the
Pandora’s box forever
Sung-ho’s [marked where translated]:
[from Hangeul] waiting around the city
digital triggering fuses someone shouting “fire” in crowded
[in English] abattoir-terroirs here is a fallow
(story)
you’ll smell it first you smell it first you smelled it ffff
a torch handing down in the long-term
[from Hangeul] legacy is struggle
[in English] when you smell it pause.
…and Omar’s:
the plan is a higher power than the mind that made it.
Beyond the single sentence written in Omar’s notepad, they found several sketches. All the drawings captured the same subject, a wide flat building surrounded by fields and perimetered in fence. Ink-scratch scribbled margin-to-margin with detail. A close-up on a section of fencing revealed chipped paint and rust, chains and a padlock.
At one o’clock, in the kitchen, they splayed out the notes and Omar’s illustrations on the dining table and started pinning possible leads to a corkboard. The table bristled with print-outs. Lingering dreamer-vision flashes eddied around the periphery of Zoe’s thoughts.
She’d told Sung-ho last night that she believed the Summoner wanted to create a Breach. They weren’t sure if he even could. Creating a legitimate Breach in reality required very powerful, very violent, and very vulgar magic. So a ‘Breach’ scenario seemed unlikely. But then what was the Summoner doing?
Regardless of their enemy’s grand scheme, Zoe felt certain about one detail in particular.
The Summoner wanted a lot of people to witness a lot of supernatural phenomena very quickly.
But why?
Sung-ho stared at Omar’s sketches. Throughout the morning, he’d flitted between his various tasks and research and Omar’s sketches. Zoe watched him stare. Pursing his lips, Sung-ho stuffed his hands in his pockets.
“You know the place?” Zoe asked.
“I think so. Have to ask Seo-yeon.”
“Why?”
“Long story. Or not long, but boring.”
“I’ll wait ‘till it gets exciting then,” Zoe replied.
Just after two o’clock, Seo-yeon stopped home, delivering food from her restaurant. Before she’d even set the take-out bags on the counter, Sung-ho had called out, “Yeobo?” and the two had engaged in a short, muttering conversation in Korean. Zoe understood some of it, mentions of ‘buying meat,’ ‘years ago,’ ‘closed.’ Like most students, she found native speakers more or less unintelligible.
At the end of their conversation, Sung-ho and Seo-yeon stared at each other, glass-gazed.
Sung-ho cleared his throat. “I know where that building is.”
“It’s an old slaughterhouse,” Seo-yeon continued. “It belonged to the Ashers when we first moved here.”
But the Ashers were all dead. Every single Asher in the whole bloodline.
“It closed down seven or eight years ago. Never reopened.”
Zoe peered over at Omar, who had moved slowly-languidly throughout the day and spoken very little. Dazedly, he peered back. Since awakening from his vision, he’d engaged in only four or five lines of dialog, all of it basic silence-killing chit-chat. In the bottomless pools of his eyes, veins of new trauma pulsed. Maybe he’d seen or done something in the visions that disturbed him or maybe he’d become someone or something he couldn’t shake off again—a person’s first dreamer-visions trended toward rockiness. Luckily, dreamer-vision memories seldom survived very long, aberrant to the environment of a living human consciousness.
“He’s there,” Omar confirmed.
“His hobo’s hideaway,” Sung-ho said.
Seo-yeon straightened up and took a deep breath. “You’ll have to excuse me.”
Before she could leave, Sung-ho grabbed Seo-yeon, spun her into his body, and gave her a single prolonged kiss stretched across too many seconds not to become awkward. Zoe shifted her weight against a column framing the threshold between eat-in kitchen and formal dining room. She waited. Once the elongate embrace reached the point that even Omar started staring, Sung-ho released his wife.
“Uh…excuse me,” Seo-yeon repeated afterward, much more quietly.
After she left, Sung-ho turned back to Zoe. “Trap?”
“Seems like,” Zoe replied.
“How?” Omar asked, voice toneless with shellshock. “We learned it all from the visions.”
“Nobody knows how dreamer works,” Zoe said, the words feeling somehow too-too-familiar spilling off of her tongue. “Or what, exactly, it does to us. Or if it has agenda. Why does it show us what it shows us? Why does it take us where it does? Why give us these visions, these phrases, this building?”
“We asked for it,” Omar answered.
“The Summoner’s there,” Zoe put a finger on one of the sketches. “A place with probably a dozen mass-graves full of animal carcasses, enough scrap and junk and leftover tools to build a score of Constructs. Are we supposed to attack it? Do we think it’s undefended?”
Omar opened his mouth. Closed it.
“There is someone who knows a lot about this sort of thing,” Sung-ho walked over to the kitchen island and started unpacking the food. “If we’re willing to cross enemy lines.”
“Enemy lines?” Omar asked.
“It’s an idiom,” Sung-ho answered. “Zo’?”
Zoe frowned at the collection of their notes, the growing pile of research, the sketches so easily given location. She brushed a hand through her honey-brown hair, ruffling. “I’ll make the call. Where’s the nearest payphone?”
###############
The payphone closest to Sung-ho’s house required a fifteen minute drive out of the proper suburbs and into the more densely crowded pseudo-suburbia immediately surrounding the city proper. Zoe parked a few blocks away, giving her a ten minute walk. The walk required thirty minutes of recon, a series of perspectives and views offered by cafe windows and a brand new Barnes&Noble recently-opened, followed by a series of double-backs, her eyes roving the sidewalks and roadways constantly as she moved.
But by five o’clock, she’d shouldered her way into the glass booth and plucked the handset from the receiver. She’d pushed the coins into the battered slot and dialed the smudged digits. She held the handset to her ear and twined the steel cord between her fingers with her other hand.
In the southeastern distance, a choir of sirens crescendo’d their warbles. An unknown number of unknown emergency vehicles rushed toward an unknown destination—somewhere distantly southeast of the payphone.
Near the docks and the harbor, perhaps.
Zoe bent over, searching for a southeastern sightline. But whatever had happened, it had happened too far away to see. Even the short two- and three-story buildings clustered around the inner ring pseudo-suburbs of Oceanrest blocked enough of the horizon to prevent any kind of visual assessment. Sirens wailed, rushing for the harbor. Zoe twisted the payphone cord between her fingers. A trill pitched over the line.
“Hello?” Jill asked.
“It’s me.”
“Is something happening?”
Jill had defected from Malleus to Winters-Armitage not long ago. The Board had sought some kind of punishment, some hex or major curse laid on Jill to dissuade further defection. Cooler heads prevailed, in no small part due to the interventions of Sung-ho Park and Leonid Singh. It cost the very last dregs of the Briar name, the leftover scraps of a dying dynasty. Whatever damage their father had done, Jill did the rest.
“Sort of…nothing to do with you, don’t worry.”
“What is it?”
Still craned over to peer at the sky through the glass, Zoe watched a news helicopter chop the air southeastward. “I’m not sure. Well. I can tell you more in person. There might be something big happening.”
“Where are you calling from?” Jill asked.
“Somewhere very close to you.”
“Oh my god…are you here?”
“Yes. I caught a case and it got…complicated. It’ll take too long to get a specialist from our team up here to look at this and we don’t have that kind of time.”
“What’s going on?”
“I can’t cover it on the phone. You remember where we all met the night before your extraction? We’ll be there.”
“Who is ‘we?’” Jill pressed.
“Nobody you can’t trust.”
A pause.
“I’ll be there tonight,” Jill said.
“Thanks. I—I love you.”
“I love you, too, Zo’. So much.”
Zoe put the handset back on the hook and stepped out of the booth. Even with invocation-enhanced hearing, the sirens barely registered with her anymore. Muffled miles away, their wails came to her as whispers. They’d rushed in the direction of the harbor, that semi-abandoned and utterly downtrod swath of industrial and once-industrial bleakness. She considered walking the not-quite-three miles to the scene to check it out, but instead decided to return to the newest rental car and drive it back to Sung-ho’s.
On the radio, a local news reporter spoke with simultaneous urgency and calm, enunciated flatness. A homemade bomb had just exploded in an abandoned factory on the edges of the harbor and old industrial district. The explosion set part of the condemned structure ablaze and the fire department responded as quickly as possible. Firefolk had already pulled a couple indigents from the structure, but the building had since become dangerously unstable.
Zoe’s sixth sense hummed. She felt strangely out-of-body. Harnessed properly, she could make use of this sensation—but the sensation itself made it difficult to harness anything at all. Her consciousness sat behind her and inside her at the same time and beyond her control. Staring off to the southeast, Zoe felt a strange, subsonic pressure build against her eardrums.
She blinked. Back in her body, she turned the keys in the ignition.
Somehow, she knew, the bombing linked back to the Summoner. But how?
And, again, always, why?
Turn Back
...coming soon...
Table of Contents
June 30, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Ten, Pt. 2
Time dilated in the ritual’s second phase. On a vegetarian diet without any booze or nicotine and limited to only two cups of coffee per day, Zoe felt the hours expand like some Big Bang fallout. The minutes unraveled at the fringes of the observable, every second somehow several seconds long. Itchy and prickly and nauseous, nauseous especially during those first few nic-fit shouting-match days, Zoe felt suspended, adrift on some temporal derivative as x approached infinity.
She’d only thrown up twice. That put her ahead of Jill on the scoreboard, at least.
The ritual work expanded, too. Zoe’s five hour days extended to seven hour days. The labor increased. The combination of more effort burned across longer hours left her queasy and frail. She needed a cigarette. If she had a cigarette, she introduced chaos into the spell. So far, she’d only thrown up twice. So far, she’d had zero cigarettes.
The ritual’s second phase also required more teamwork. The practitioners—Jill and Zoe—performed their morning meditations together, facing the dawn, and ate both breakfast and dinner as a group. In this case, a pair. A week into the second phase, their commingling withdrawals and frustrations had already revealed themselves in armor and claw, fights snarled over issues as stupid as undercooked pasta. Why?
Because Jill needed a fix and Zoe needed a cigarette and the dark, gravelly-voiced thing whispering in the walls needed them to need those things.
“You will never be free of this.”
(never)
(never never never)
During the Gateway between the First Confessional and the second phase, Zoe had taken the car into town for supplies. On the drive back, she’d stopped at a gas station to refill the tank. She’d walked inside almost without thinking and ordered a pack of Djarum almost without thinking. She’d paid for the gas and started driving back. Window open, filter between her lips, she’d barely stopped the lighter before she puffed. She’d snapped the Zippo shut and tossed the smoke. The rest of the pack had followed. And she’d only thrown up twice.
(never)
On the ninth day of the second phase, the ritual heading slowly-but-surely toward the second Gateway, called The Proclamation, Zoe stalked smoke-less upstairs to fetch Jill for lunch. Approaching Jill’s door, she felt an increase in the magic crackling in the air—a sixth sense sensation bristling against the skin of her ear-drums—and hesitated. “Jill?”
“Hold on!”
Zoe frowned, no longer nauseous from not smoking but plagued by the dual diseases of post-quitting lethargy and the withering leprosy of her patience. She grabbed Jill’s doorknob, twisted, and pulled. A mystic force held it fast. “Are you kidding me?”
“One sec!”
Zoe yanked on the door again. The spell fastening it to the threshold weakened, magic not an especially strong force. It opened on the third tug, flinging Zoe back with sheer inertia. Zoe caught herself and stomped into Jill’s room. “What are you thinking?”
Jill froze mid-movement. Several illusions glowed in the air, illustrations glimmering and hovering like sci-fi holograms. Five books also floated, untethered from gravity by more magic. Another dozen books and grimoires strew the floor, half-circling a lap-table overpiled with notebooks. Jill shoved a pile of dusty, thick-spined tomes under her bed. “I was…researching.”
“How many spells are you flinging around here?”
“They’re tiny. Nobody’s here who can fuck them up just by seeing them.”
“This spell is already infested with what sounds like every dark and self-loathing impulse you’ve ever had—why would you take even the smallest risk of destabilizing what little stability we have?” Zoe barreled over every interruption Jill made, giving no quarter for more than a single syllable. “What if that thing wins?”
“I’m sorry. I was just…I found something in Sung-ho’s collection and I think I’m onto a proof, a new way to reinforce—”
“You’re risking this entire ritual for some fucking academia?”
The illuso-grams fritzed and died. The books fell broken-backed to the floor. “I’m sorry,” Jill said, “I’m sorry, I just…”
“You ‘want to know,’ right?” Zoe didn’t bother to fight the sarcasm thickening her tone.
“There’s nothing else to do here!” Jill shouted.
“And how do you think I feel!?” Zoe shouted back.
“Fuck!” Jill kicked her bedframe to little effect.
Zoe wrangled control over her volume. “Shit. Goddammit. Why were you doing this?”
“It…” Jill stopped shouting, turned away, and took a deep breath. “It helps me organize things.”
“Could you try just pinning things to the walls? Draw it out by hand, tape it up?”
“I’m not the best artist.”
“And I’m not a substance use counselor,” Zoe threw up her hands, “but here we are.”
Jill opened her mouth to yell. Her nostrils flared, her eyes widened. She paused. Backed down. “I’m…okay. I’ll try pinning things up.”
“Like band posters.” Jill shook her head, arms folding.
“Sure.”
“Look, I’m sorry I barged in and I’m sorry for…I don’t know, for yelling, I guess. But we have to be really careful with how and when we use magic in this house. We can’t risk anything. I mean anything. Okay?”
“I said yeah.”
“You said ‘sure.’ With attitude.”
“Jesus. I’m trying to find something to do.”
Zoe pinched the bridge of her nose. “I know. Me, too.”
Jill sat sharply on the edge of the mattress. “How are we going to make it through this? It’s, what, two more weeks until the Proclamation? And then—”
“We’ll make it because we have to. We just have to be careful.”
Jill pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. Her elbows met her thighs.
“Look, whatever,” Zoe said. “We’re too deep to turn back now. You said so yourself. So…so let’s have lunch, okay?”
“Yeah. Lunch. Sounds good.”
“I’ll go set the table or…something.” Zoe stepped backward out of the room. She hesitated, wanting to say something else but not sure what it was. Turning away, she followed the long hallway past another bedroom (two bunkbeds), the lounge with attached bathroom, and downstairs. At the first floor landing, before heading into the kitchen, a shot of pure cold rolled over her. She braced herself, waiting. Nothing else happened. She shivered, the temperature nosedived to the dirt.
“Hey, you,” a friendly voice called out from the kitchen. “Take a load off.”
Zoe crossed the threshold. Afternoon sunlight shafted in from the windows. The eat-in kitchen was exactly the way she’d left it.
Except.
Except for a pack of cloves on the eat-in table.
The temperature returned to normal, the sensation more sixth-sense than purely material anyway.
Zoe picked up the pack and crushed it in her hand. She turned on the garbage disposal and fed the pack to the shrieking teeth of it. The blades jammed and jittered through the box and she pulled it back out again. The disposal roared, an angry ocean in her ear. Breathless for a reason she couldn’t name, she yanked out the bent and busted cigarettes and began throwing them into the disposal’s whirring maw. Tobacco and spice flew everywhere. Zoe threw the half-tattered pack in the trash. She stood in front of the trash can, panting, for several seconds.
This was a bad sign.
the story might read differently if
The garbage disposal clicked off.
“Zo’?” Jill asked.
“Sorry. I, uh. I found some rotten food.”
“Already?” Jill watched her like an inspector.
“Yeah,” Zoe cleared her throat, turning to face her sister. “Yeah. Anyway. Lunch. What do you feel like?”
Turn Back
Keep Reading
Table of Contents
June 29, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Ten, Pt. 1
—but Omar jerked awake, flinging Zoe’s arms aside.
He rolled over and spewed a hiccup of vomit; ejecta like toast popping out of a toaster. A single hurk flexed through him and it was over. He panted two ragged breaths and threw himself over onto his other side, grabbing for pen and pad.
Catching her own breath, Zoe asked, “Are you okay?”
“Shhh, shhh, shhh,” Omar hushed, scribbling notes.
Zoe sat on the floor, weight buttressed up on one arm. She caught her breath, waiting.
Movement and multi-lingual conversation filtered down from upstairs. Footsteps ran the foyer and muffled into distance. More tracked toward the back porch. Zoe’s breathing steadied. Omar scribbled and scrawled. He tore a page loose and threw it aside, already onto the next.
“The man behind the curtain is magic,” Omar whispered. “The man behind the curtain is magic…”
Sung-ho descended the stairs. “He okay?”
“I think so…”
Sung-ho regarded Omar’s rapid auto-writing coolly. “Hyun-jung is fetching my shooting practice targets from the attic. We’ll need weed and whiskey at least.”
“The Hunter S. cover up?”
Sung-ho gave a single, curt bob of the head.
Zoe grinned. “It’s fun to have fun. It’s better to have a convenient excuse for gunfire.”
Sung-ho replied with a smirk of his own.
Omar stopped writing. He stared at the page in front of him.
“Omar?” Zoe asked.
“Where…where am I?” Omar sank back on his knees, genuflective. “Who—what?”
“Tell me about your mother,” Zoe said.
“What?” Omar echoed. “Who?”
“Your mom, Omar. Tell me about your mom.”
“What about her?”
“What was your favorite Christmas present?” Sung-ho prompted.
Omar laughed. “It’s so lame.”
“Tell us,” Zoe said.
“It’s just…” Omar licked his lips, chuckled. Shook his head. “When I was a kid, my mom got me a Sega Saturn and a copy of this game called Panzer Dragoon Saga. I must’ve played that shit twenty or thirty times—and it wasn’t a short game.”
Sung-ho and Zoe exchanged a glance. “Uh…how long was it?” Zoe asked.
“Four disks?” Omar estimated. “I think. Four. And you know the worst part? I scratched the last disk before I finished my first play-through. I scratched it just exactly right so I couldn’t watch the last cinematic. So I went into the game like twenty times, beat the last boss twenty times, and saw the beginning of the final cinematic twenty times. And then the system would restart. I’d be watching this villager chilling in a pottery shop and this huge shadow would pass over him—my dragon—and before the camera cut to…whatever came next, I dunno…I guess I always assumed the next shot would be me like flying the dragon to…wherever. I think I was rescuing some alien chick? And…”
Zoe and Sung-ho stared, eyebrows raised.
“Well, that’s embarrassing,” Omar muttered.
“At least you’re out of the vision state,” Zoe offered.
“Oh, cool, yeah, I just didn’t know that embarrassing the hell out of somebody was a good magical defense system, I guess.”
Sung-ho coughed gruffly. “Zoe. Weed and whiskey, very quickly.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Omar, you rest,” Sung-ho said. “It looks like your first dreamer vision was… intense.”
Omar nodded, rubbing sweat away from his nose and eyes.
###############
Outside, floodlights blaring down on target practice caricatures and broad green lawn and the dim, farthest reaches of the adjacent property, Zoe and Sung-ho sat in Adirondack chairs with their discharged sidearms cooling on a table between them. They drank Macallan, four fingers, one rock each. Their joint stood in the ashtray like a grave marker.
No sirens had ever arrived.
Sung-ho had lived in Oceanrest, barring assignment transit, for twenty-six years. Most of the neighbors had already hated him, met him, and forgiven him. He had the easy humor and glinting grin of an easily likable man. More importantly: once somebody participated in the fun, themselves, they tended to make allowances for it. Maybe nobody had called the police or maybe the police just hadn’t come. Either way.
“He attacked my house,” Sung-ho said, breaking a seconds-long silence.
“He did,” Zoe agreed.
“He knows where we live.”
“He does.”
Sung-ho refilled his drink. He took a sip, settled the glass on the broad arm of the Adirondack, and peered out to where the floodlights revealed shot-up caricatures. “We move as soon as we find him.”
Puffing back the cherry on her clove, Zoe snapped her Zippo shut and replaced it with her Scotch.
(every story — in the long run — ends the)
(you’ll never be free of this)
(never)
She stood, flicking ash. “What is he trying to do?”
Sung-ho shifted in his seat, shrugging. “Pull curtain, every story.” He paused, face wrinkling quizzically.
A steel Mickey Mouse caricature plugged with a dozen thumb-sized holes tipped a hat at the edge of the light. Zoe stared beyond. “He wants people to see it. Whatever he’s doing, he wants witnesses.” She puffed. “Why witnesses? When so few people can bear witness to begin with, why?”
Night wind breezed softly, answerless.
Turn Back
Keep Reading
Table of Contents
June 23, 2020
A Maze of Glass, Chapter Nine, Pt. 3
Seo-yeon shouted something in Korean. Sung-ho shouted something in Korean.
Hyun-jung shouted, “There’s two motherfuckers!”
And Zoe un-froze.
Omar shuddered on the basement floor; Zoe sprinted the stairs up to the crash of combat. She banged through the door and into the stretch of foyer connecting dining room to kitchen. Someone screamed in the kitchen, something clattered to the tiles. Zoe spun into the room sidearm-first, thumb on the safety and index finger on the trigger guard.
Seo-yeon swung a broad iron pan at a shimmering shadow in front of her. The thing moved swiftly, climbing the wall and swooping down, and Seo-yeon yelped and backpedaled, swinging wild. The shadow gained mass, clawed grooves in the cast iron as it arc’d close. Sung-ho tossed a flashlight to Hyun-jung—who wore just-back-from-a-show goth-punk merch as an outfit entire—and grabbed another from under the sink for himself. A second shadow-assassin dove at him. Sung-ho rolled to the side; the shade became solid just in time to rake claws over the tiles Sung-ho had occupied seconds earlier.
Hyun-jung muttered a combat-drowned sentence and threw a hand to the sky. Her flashlight sizzled, blowing, and a bright orb spun out of its melting mass. The orb blinked and erupted, shredding every shadow in the room into brightness.
The twin shades howled, forced to take material form as all darkness died.
Zoe hadn’t known that Hyun-jung was a born witch. The realization froze her for a second.
She’d only met a couple born-paranormatives in her entire life. Or…well, more than she’d thought…
A snarling monster swiped at her, claws ripping fabric from her knife-resistant jacket. She leapt back from her epiphany hesitation and thumbed off the safety on her sidearm. The inky-blurry darkness lunged toward her. She opened fire.
In her periphery, Sung-ho sprinted away from an attacking assassin. He stumbled as it struck him, tossing his own flashlight toward Hyun-jung. Sung-ho groaned, limping and listing, putting the kitchen island between himself and his physics-defying assailant.
More leather and armor ripped from her jacket as the shadow slammed into her. Gushes of faint light geysered from exit wounds, darkness fighting to scab them shut again. It groaned and lowed, its shoulder catching her waist, one multi-jointed arm kinking around her to scratch and slice. She thrashed in its vice-grip and kicked at the body below her waist.
She pressed the gunbarrel against the back of the thing and emptied the rest of the mag.
It plowed into the mood-lit foyer howling. It reared, half-halted, and she flew from its shoulder and thunked full-body against the door. Something broke in the doorframe, something ached in her back. She landed on her side and rolled. The monster roared, bleeding light. She reached for her spare mag…
Her eyes widened. She’d forgotten to grab her spare mag.
She scrambled. The monster wail-whimpered and listed to one side, its blurry silhouette melting with light. It lashed out with a gooey arm but barely glanced her. The blow flipped her onto her back but little else. She kicked and threw herself into the air, landing on her feet. Their grapple had dragged them into the foyer, away from the shouts and bright flashes glaring the kitchen. Zoe broadened her stance. Pointed her empty gun at the monster.
The monster de-materialized, sacrificing its light-eaten limb to join with the foyer dimness. It swam the darkness through the mail slot and fled. Its half-gone arm stayed behind, slowly disintegrating.
Zoe rushed back to the kitchen in time to see the battle ending there, as well.
Somehow, they’d used the flashlight-orb cantrip to adhere a bulb-bright mote of magic to the monster’s flesh. As it sizzled and boiled against the shadow’s skin, the shade searched for darker refuge. But no refuge existed. Zoe blockaded its only hope. It staggered her way and she knocked it back. Rainbow prisms and shafts and beams of color and the lack thereof ate the monster away like some kind of cancer in stop-motion fast forward. It wailed and shrieked, its whole existence devoured in seconds.
Zoe rushed back down to the basement.
Omar shuddered on his sleeping bag. His muscles twitched and shivered, his face crawled with tics and sputter. He hissed. His fingers kinked at the knuckles; his eyes bulged and rove beneath their lids.
Zoe ran for him.
His spine arched, his sternum lifting skywards. “Eats — the — veil!” Omar shouted.
Dropping her pistol somewhere, she fell to her knees at his side.
“Tear-rip, pull curtain, behold, every story!”
Zoe’s heart skipped a beat.
Omar collapsed back to the cushioned bedroll, shuddering, grinding his teeth. Zoe grabbed his face, his temples under her fingers.
She started whispering. She lost syllabic rhythm for a second, so much exertion catching up to her, and heaved a throat-tearing gasp to catch up again. She imagined the needletip of an adrenaline syringe. She almost reached <> but—
Turn Back
Keep Reading
Table of Contents
