Infidelity

Infidelity
by
Bobby Derie

They broke the kiss with a blush, and May turned away with a smile, hefting her suitcase. The taste of her lingered on his lips as he waved at the taxi as it pulled away. He waited until the bumper disappeared rounding the great oak tree, and quietly closed the door.

Dawnlight spilled into the breakfast nook as he spread out the paper and poured the tea. The steam rose and filled the air with the scent of ginger and citrus. Almost absentmindedly, he had set out two places, and smiled at the second cup as it cooled. Before him, the tiny black runes on the dead gray paper seemed determined not to give up their secrets. So he sat back and drank his tea, watching the steam rise from the second cup. The warp and weft reminded him of her, how she would hold the mug with both hands, eyes closed, and just bathe her face in it, as if trying to absorb all the essence of the tea at once through her skin.

Morning found him in the library; all interest in the now forgotten as he delved into the past. Some of the books were his, others from his father's and grandfather's collections, and two full bookshelves built into the walls had come preloaded with dusty, cracked leather-bound tomes from one of the previous occupants. The dust motes floated in the still sunlight as he rummaged among the shelf, tiny clouds of particles seeming to hang for a moment in outlines of a familiar shape before falling back again.

Night stole into the bedroom, where without a thought he had pulled down the covers on her side of the bed, and puffed out the candle flame. Through the window, the city light spilled in and gave strange shape to to the darkness and the thin curl of smoke. His lay awake, eyes settling into the darkness, colors muting into shades of black and blue-grey. Something about the sway of the trees and the smoke gave the illusion of ringlets of hair falling around an unseen head, tresses which did little to hide the shape of the breasts they spilled over. Sleep, when it came, found him wondering at the shape and heaviness of those unfamiliar teats.

She was there again the kitchen, as he instinctively poured the second cup. He could see her more clearly now, through the steam. Long straight hair, eyes that curled up at the corners, the ghost of a ghost of a smile on the shadow lips. He read the news aloud to her, eyes flicking through the articles at random, picking out words that became an impromptu poem. Again, by instinct, he became aware of the words, began to shape the narrative. There was a theme there, though he could not name it, and when he turned the last page the tea in both cups was cool.

The shade in the library was different, this morning; the light warmer, the dust settled as he came in. Yet there were three books he had taken down from the shelf and laid out the other day - and the shape, the curve of the spines as they lay there, was evocative of another, more familiar shape. Shaking his head, he fell into the researching, pen and pad at the ready to catalog, stopping every now and then when the subject matter was particularly interesting, or by an author he knew. Almost without being aware of it he felt her then, as the dust rose up around him in the golden sunlight. She seemed to be ignoring him, lazing idly in the bright patch on the floor like a cat. Not the same, he could see. The hair was curly, not straight, the hips too wide, the mouth too generous... With a dull thud, he clapped the book shut and set it back into its spot on the shelf.

He drank, before bed, and lounged long in his chair. The afternoon had been long hours of dread, and he avoided the bedroom, the library, the breakfast nook. The merits of an alcoholic slumber here, in the den, had its appeal...and yet, and yet. The brandy swirled in the glass. What if they found him here?

Midnight found him slipping between the sheets, but his heart beat too fast. The moon hid its face tonight, and the darkness had grown to cover most of the room. He waited, a slight feverish flush coming to his head and cheeks. Minutes slipped into hours, and still he lay awake, mind going back again and again to those shapes, those shades, those echoes of women, none of whom were May...

When the clock struck softly, and the wind was still, he saw her then. A thing of shadow, she walked towards him on long legs, the light giving just enough definition to her form - bony, taut, but the thinness that spoke of losing too much weight too quickly, the breasts unnatural mounds on a figure where you could count the ribs. A hand reached out to him, and the skin was not smooth or young, but webbed with the arches of veins and small, powerful muscles. He couldn't move, he realized, as she drew back the cover. At her mercy, the finger touched his shoulder - a caress like burning ice, there and then gone as she pulled it away. No pressure, no lasting pain, just the sensation. She touched him again, and his body tensed automatically, still not under his control, and withdrew. Again and again, fingers exploring him, the shape of him, the touches lasting longer each time, and each time he tensed less as he got used to the sensation. Before he knew it he shivered with a different kind of anticipation, he recognized the beat she was using, the direction her hands were traveling. Burning ice slipped down his pants and gripped his scrotum, and as he lay there panting, her smile was a wicked slash of midnight, a blackness darker than the night.

The dawnshade he called Miko. She waited for him, every day, to make her tea, and listened with wrapt attention as he read the paper to her, sometimes reading the news out loud, sometimes once more playing one of his little poetic games. Her smile chased back the shadows of the night, the odd aches and scratches that should not have been there, the cold ache between his legs. Sometimes, as he turned the pages, he felt the brush of a hand or arm against his own, a bright warmth like contact with a cat. He could see her much more clearly now, as the steam rose from the cup; he could make out the little bruises on her throat, where the chain had been wrapped. When the tea was cool, and the paper done, he would excuse himself and head to the library.

The bookwife sprawled outside her shelf, the stacks of old leather tremendously suggestive of her curves. He read to her too, while the light lasted, lying down to spoon around her while the sunlight lasted. Sometimes they slept that way, in the afternoons, and he woke to find his arm stiff and half asleep, and strands of hair too long to be his laying here or there. Once, they had spelled out in perfect cursive, the word "Ginger." So that is what he called her, during those daily trysts.

With night came the hag. She never rode him, never spoke nor cuddled. Somehow he felt she was always there, watching, as he prepared for bed, laying down the covers, lighting the candle and pinching it out, so the smoke trailed up to the ceiling. Waiting for the moment. She liked to let him wait, as much as he liked waiting. He had learned to like it.

One morning the door cracked, the hinges squeaked. Outside, a car engine was running. "Honey!" He could hear the smile. "I'm home!"

###

Thursday at the Soul Market

Thursday at the Soul Market
by
Bobby Derie

"You don't understand," the priest said, his voice dry and old, "Lucifer is an angel of the lord, once among the greatest of them, and under his command a third of the host of Heaven. He will fight to protect this world from these strange demons. He will lay waste those pretenders, these old gods from worlds beyond our reckoning. There will be battle, and their fabulous blood will rain from the sky, and their broken bodies cast into the abyss. All this he will do because he knows that this world...and everything in it...is his. He can do nothing else; it is his nature. Not to bow, not to scrape, never to bend knee or surrender or seek forgiveness, never to relinquish his position or property. He is the rock against which the old ones shall break themselves. The tragedy - the joke - the terror of it all is, he could be nothing else. It is how he was made. It is his purpose. Someone must be the devil, and in his charge is the world entire. Any lesser being could not do what must be done."
Then he fell silent for a time. A long time. Perhaps he dozed, but Mariah thought not. She dropped some change into his cup and stepped over the tired old man in his soiled vestments.

The soul market was held on Thursdays, in one of the old squares of the East Village. Buyers and sellers would set up their tables in the hour before dawn, if they had them, or lay out a blanket. A few of the upmarket brokers kept stalls on the north end, with steel shutters with seven locks they would close down at the end of the day, but they were few and select, and tended to deal in volume rather than cash-on-hand.

Mariah shivered as she watched the quiet activity. There were other people waiting, like her. A business woman in heels smoked, one hand over a too-obvious bulge in her midriff. A young man with a bass strapped to his back and ripped jeans. A big burly man like a linebacker gone to seed, sitting on a portable stool, a child's coffin on his lap. Two teenagers that at first glance looked like Hot Topic goths, but the details were wrong - their jewelry was real silver, patina'd with age, the jeans ripped from age, the ribs showing from hunger, bright scars beneath the elbow-length fishnet gloves.

One old man - he had a wooden stall, on a cart, which had been painted by hand. He set it up in a corner with all the patience and surety as if that space would still be waiting there a century from now. He was short, perhaps a couple inches over five feet, and his green hat was a shapeless mass that concealed his head except a fringe of curly grey hair; his brown leather jacket was carefully patched, and there were pipe stains on his suit pants, but his glasses were new, and his shoes shined.

"Excuse me...sir?"

"Just a moment miss," he said, as he unfolded the front of the stall like a magic box, revealing the counter and the green slate with the prices listed in white chalk. "There we are now. What can I help you with?"

"I...where are the demons?"

He smiled at her, not unkindly she thought, though he was missing both canines.

"Angels, miss. The d-word is a term of art, here, and not one you want to misuse. But you're wondering about the brokers." He waved a hand at the other shopkeeps, some of whom were talking to a gentleman in a suit, pointing to their cardsweeps. The old man frowned at the commotion. "Must be an issue with the wifi. This used to be a cash and carry business, you know." He flashed her that incomplete grin once again.

"As for the angels...there are a few, if you look about, but they're not the only ones on the market. They tend to come later in the day - something about the time change. No, most of us here are only human." He clicked his teeth as Mariah nodded. "Or, perhaps something less."

"Now then - I don't suppose you're a reporter?"

"N-no." She swallowed. "I came to...well, a friend told me..."

"Buying or selling?" He said calmly.

"Selling." She said too quickly.

"Well, let's chat." He said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. "And perhaps we can do business."

###

Summoner Shots

Summoner Shots
by
Bobby Derie

It was not much of a bar, but neither was it much of a place. Rusted tin let in every breeze and black fly, but the wooden frame of the cowshed was sound enough, and someone had carted out the valuable manure so long ago only a trace of the smell clung to the old walls. The Russian had laid a plank on a pair of oil drums, and that was the bar. Patrons wandered in, following the chemical smell of the distillery, and brought their own cups and glasses.

No credit was given, or asked for.

In such a place, entertainment is rarely complex. No fine tables marked with runes, no handsome glasses edged with gold, no rare vintages. For them, the gameboard was an old wooden square set out for checkers, the outer rim scratched with the most basic, muddled inscription imaginable - probably useless, but it was the form of the thing.

The sun hung low, and by ones and twos the customers drifted in. Some paid, others bartered; none drank for free. Some had camp stools, the others stood or sat on whatever crates were available. Even the board was set up on an oil drum, and the players stood in front of it.

Andolei had been winning too much, he knew, and he should move on, or else lose a match. A player who was too good upset the nature of the place; a player who could not be beat was boring to watch, and frustrating for those who lost. So the stakes would be raised again and again, until they broke.

So tonight Andolei stood on one side of the board, and three other players crowded the board. Four shots made a cross in the center of the board. Normally, in this setup, it would be a partners match. But Andolei had been winning too much. Three on one. The only chance they'd given him was a double-shot, a glass twice as tall as the others, to help the betting.

The bettors hushed, and as one the four reached down and raised their glasses, clanked them together, to spill a little in each. The others muttered their mystic toasts, but Andolei just raised his chin and slugged it down.

Clear fire hit the back of his mouth, and washed down his throat to sit in his stomach and burn like a pool of acid. Cold, clear, medicinal: vodka was a drink for those who could not stomach an honest cocktail, or could not afford it. The good stuff had some flavor to it, but this was closer to neutral spirit, raw and shapeless, probably brought over as aftershave and filtered out.

Andolei held it as long as he could, letting the others place out. Misty shapes covered the board, little columns of cloud in a square of fog. Three players, three columns, defined only by the hint of horn or claw.

Then Andolei opened his mouth, as if to whistle. A breeze blew down onto the board, and it cleared the fog away in a circle on his part of the board. Something heavier than air oozed from his lips, nearly invisible, but it gained color as it dripped, and by the time it hit the gameboard it was a small, swirling column like a miniature tornado, spinning clockwise.

As one, the three cloudy spirits moved forward as Andolei's vortex spun faster and faster, growing smaller and smaller. Misty claws slashed at the edges of it, but the other players were on edge; they had not seen this before, were not sure what Andolei was doing. But as it shrank, they grew closer, bolder, their forms gaining a little more definition - arms tipped with claws like a bear on the left arm, like a lobster or crab on the right. They tried to tear at the denser substance of Andolei's little vortex, tearing droplets from it.

Perhaps they thought they were winning.

Then, the spark. A column of blue flame shot up ten centimeters from the board as Andolei's spirit took light. It was a batlike-thing with vast thing wings of pale fire, and it moved with the speed of a fuse. In less time than it took to tell of it, those wings surrounded and engulfed the nearest cloudy spirit, which vanished with a pop like a firecrackers; it's player falling back with blistered lips.

The other two tried to run, but it was too late, and soon the board was cleared, the fiery spirit melting into the air as its substance was consumed.

Andolei collected the money, and did not look at the three men with blistered lips, but knew there was murder in their eyes. He had won too much, it was definitely time to go.

A woman waited for him outside. He face was unpainted, but there were strange geometrical scars etched into her skin, around the lips dipping down to her chin. An iron cup dangled from her waist, where it was tied by an iron chain. Andolei stared at her hard.

"I cannot accept a challenge." he said. "Not tonight."

"Not a challenge," she said, the accent was clipped and strange to his ears. "An invitation."

She held up her hand, revealing a small scroll wrapped around a small bottle.

"A contest of champions."

###

Jack Satan

Jack Satan
by
Bobby Derie

"Give it up, Jack. You can't save her this time."

Her eyes sought mine, but all I could see was the knife she was holding at her own throat. Faint luminescent veins shifted and twirled under her skin.

My hand twitched. My world was muffled by the bark of the gun. The side of her neck exploded; a red splash with rivers of glowing green. Those pale lips spat blood, eyes dark accusing islands afloat in glowing seas. I couldn't hear myself speak, but I felt the rumble in my throat so I knew I was talking. I hoped they could both hear and understand me.

"I'm not here to save anyone."

I looked around for witnesses. It was the kind of nice suburban kitchen after ten years of hard living. Little cuts in the counter, the odd dent or spackle of food on the wall, dirt built up in the hard-to-reach places, but basically clean. No roaches or ants. But there was a dog by the door. A mutt, but one with a lot of dachshund in it, low and slinky with short fur the color of dutch cocoa. Eyes like grapes in a skull you could fit in the palm of your hand.

I shot the dog too. Then I took off my jacket, closed the shades on all the windows, and dragged the bodies into the living room.

It was a rental property, and the managers knew enough not have carpet in here. Linoleum sealed under layers of wax, probably one for each set of tenants that had been in and out of here. Shoddy work too; there were flies and bits of food trapped there, little hard bits you could hardly see underfoot.

A spatula from the kitchen helped me draw the circle and the sigils. The knives were shit; cheap steel that wasn’t terribly sharp to begin with and really dull now. I picked out the best of the straight-edged ones and took the whetstone to it. From outside came the jingle of a passing ice cream truck, a warbling pathetic version of “Yankee Doodle Dandee” which somehow segued into something from Wagner.

It was the middle of a school day. Perfect time for bored, fat, lazy housewives to hook up with their Craigslist fuckbuddies or get stoned while watching the plasma televisions they bought on installment. But if anyone had heard the shots, nobody called the cops.

When the knife was sharp enough, I got her undressed—not an easy task when a body is dead weight—and took off the dog’s collar. I wasn’t sure what to do with the dog, so I improvised, curling it up by the side of the body. A couple minute’s rummaging turned up a pack of oat bran muffins and birthday candles, and for the first time in hours I smiled as I set them up at the five corners and flicked the little wicks to life.

“Ia! Lilitu, ach nem, ach sudanem, no me ra no te me se…” I began the old chant.

In the circle, the dried green slime glowed again, began floating upwards. I watched it curl in on itself, like a fetus, drawing its substance to itself. A dangling green cord dangled down to her belly button.

I didn’t know its name. It mewled, an animal sound, and lifted its great ponderous head, opening those vast dark eyes to stare at me. No, not at me—at the knife I held in my hand. It rippled and rolled, a monstrous green cloud coiled like an infant, lightning flashes beating like a slow heart inside its breast.

With the blade in my left hand, I cut the thin green line of smoke holding it to the body. It looked surprised. I jerked my thumb at the nearest wall.

“Get out.”

It stayed there for a minute, unsure. Then it must have made a decision, because it bunched itself up and shot straight outside, leaving nothing but a nasty green scorch mark I don’t think the renters would ever quite be able to cover with paint.

I turned back to the business at hand when there came a knocking.

Staccato raps started on the dining room table, then built up through the wooden studs in the wall. Complex patterns interweaving, long and loud and soft and short, until the crappy composite and particle board kitchen cabinets were shaking themselves to pieces. I could hear the chords build toward a single pitch…and in that moment, a piece of fire and light stepped in to the dingy apartment, a gossamer figure with a sword-shaped sliver at the end of one too-long arm that left ghostly light-trails. It reminded Jack of the time he’d tried to out-stare the sun.

“Why do you do this, Jack Satan?” It said. I noticed that the dainty feet hovered a couple inches above the ground, unwilling to tread the same earth as the rest of us. “Why do you hurt her?”

“I’m going to bring her back. I always bring her back. I love her.” I said.

“Your love is pain, Jack. How many times has it been? How many times have you hit her too hard? How many times has she not even been able to run away before you ply your filthy magics on her? Let her go, Jack. Let her go home.”

“You,” I leveled the knife at her. “Don’t get to talk to me about how I treat my fucking wife. I always take care of her. Always make it up to her.”

“Yes,” the burning creature said, wisps came off its skin as the heat in the room grew, burning away. I heard the air conditioning kick in. “Your gifts. Artifacts, powers, knowledge. Never enough to equal yours, of course. Oh, and larger breasts. Were those for her or for yourself?”

“She liked them.”

“I’m sure,” it said, and the sword grew brighter. A wave of hot, dry air hit me, like I was staring into an oven, but I didn’t turn away. “Yet every time…every time she runs away. Turns her gifts against you. Finds some one to try and protect her. A lover. A demon. An elemental. Will you keep at this until one day she succeeds?”

“That’s not going to happen.” I said. “This is just a game we play. She knows it makes me jealous. She knows what she does hurts me. The things she says. She just wants a reaction. She wants me to show her that I care.”

“You are a broken thing, Jack Satan. Let her go, and perhaps you too can heal.”

“Piss off, clip-wing.” I said. The insult hung in the air, and I tightened my grip on the knife, wishing I had my gun. But the fire dimmed and died, and blinking back the afterimages of its blazing sword I knew it had retreated with the grace intrinsic to its kind.

Calling Abba back took time. There was a lot of work to be done, even if her spirit hadn’t flown far. The jaw was a tricky bit, all those teeth going everywhere—she’d always had trouble with her teeth, they didn’t heal like tissue did. Maybe it was time for some dental implants. I played around with the old scars too—rougher work, before I’d really got my hand in at it. Soon enough, she’d be up and about again, and wouldn’t remember a thing. I’d just tell her she had one of her episodes, like the last time, and the time before that.

###

Ipsissimus

Ipsissimus
by
Bobby Derie

The magus woke from the crow of the black pullet and greeted the sun, with silent and spoken prayers, as he moved through the positions of his exercise, shifting consciousness to the waking dream. In the yard the cockerel dipped his head to peck at the scattered corn and grubs along with his harem, and the magus busied himself turning over eggs, divined a small future, then selected three and returned to the house. Out of long habit the steps were counted and the numerological significance considered against the forces of the moment—the position of the stars and planets, the day of the week, the hour. Each combination favored certain elements and operations, and set the schedule for the day.

He stepped over a line of salt which he had laid before the threshold, and entered a living library of the Art. A dozen editions of Lévi filled one shelf, propped up by a Tibetan kapala filled with dragon bone and amber, similar artifacts and amulets hanging from pegs and filled up odd corners of each room and hallway he passed through, topping neat piles of books that would not fit on shelves.

The kitchen, by contrast, was relatively bare. Alchemical operations were best carried out in the laboratory, and there were better sources of fire than the gas stove, sharper knives than those suited for cheese or fruit, and a much more impressive collection of herbs and spices in other rooms. The larder and pantry held but scant provisions, suitable for when the hours and days required he break a fast or pursue a particular diet for a week or a moon, and he cared not if he supped from chipped cups and cracked plates from spoons and forks where the silver finish had long worn off. The only remnant of the occult here was a book on cooking-magic, a gift from a scarlet woman who had known him in ignorance; silly crap, he had kept it as a memory of her innocence.

He cracked the eggs into a cold pan, and looked at the blood swirl in the yellow yolks. Forces would move against him, on different planes. Enemies from younger, less enlightened days, before he had left the scene and apprentices and groupies behind. The magus knew this, as he stared at the bloody yolks, and in the act of perception already he mouthed the words and made the signs of the counter-forces he aligned to disperse and direct their energies in better directions. Once, he knew, he would have crushed them, but he was wiser now, or at least more long-sighted. To blast and break them would but secure and enhance a reputation, to draw more acolytes, more followers again to pester and plague him. There had been enough trouble after he published the book…

The blood continued to swirl, and the white thickened and bubbled slightly in the cold pan. The magus frowned, murmuring again by instinct, invoking the names of a few secret angels and spirits. His will felt like a living thing within him, and the human body it was attached to a mere puppet, performing the necessary motions as he pushed his senses outwards, to grasp the shape of the thing whose omen was manifest before him.

The third eye opened, the magus-self looked on the shape of the future, as he had never done before. A cosmic chessboard laid out over the solar system, with dead gods clustered on thrones on the planets, attended by their courts of spirits, and in the blackness between and beyond more subtle and dangerous players. It was a living contest where powers and forces were played out and balanced against each other by knowledge and foresight, where a gambit might take a century to play out. There were many-winged angels and burning chariot wheels hanging there, and all eyes were on him. The magus felt the board shift, the many plans and intrigues of the spirit courts alter as a new element entered their equations.

The will burned within the magus, which seemed so distant a part of him. Knowledge filtered through, as though from sleep. That part of him which had acted, on foresight, making moves to counter moves against his self, had broached into their domain. Before he had been a caller and summoner of those spirits, a visitor in their courts—a tool, perhaps, or a board piece. Now they recognized him as a player, able to operate on their level. He felt part of himself accept.

The blood in the pan darkened and curled in on itself—a shadow-picture of a man, and growing from his back a thing, like flower and caterpillar and fungus, a great dark bubbling mass. He watched it strain and stretch into a thing like a tree, a butterfly, a cloud of bloody lines against the egg-whites, held in place by a few thing strands of plasma. The man knew himself then, as the soil in which the magus had grown.

The separation was sudden. The last strands broke, and for a moment the image was clear: two entities, distinct. Man, magus no longer. Then the image faded, the meaning lost; a mess of cold eggs and cold blood, which he washed down the sink.

The man walked through a house that now felt too large and too small, ill-fitting, cluttered. His steps went uncounted, his breaths and heartbeats moved at their own pace. The signs and sigils meant nothing now, simply scraggly lines etched in wood and painted on plaster. He reached down to flip through a book, but failed to find meaning in the words. This was magic? A bunch of lines and numbers? How long had he spent on this? Years and years, he knew. A decade or more. How long did it take to master a skill? He returned to the kitchen, the one room uncluttered by occult kitsch and bric-a-brac.

The book on the top shelf caught his eye, and he fetched it down, blew off the dust. It was a gaudy thing in paperback with bright covers, a grinning black face over a sorcerer’s stew of gumbo in which pale phallic sausages swam. He cracked the cover, and began to read.

###

The Ten Million Demons

The Ten Million Demons
by
Bobby Derie

So it was in the dusty road from Erebai to the dead empire, a scholar of small spells drew his circles with grains of rice. He had about him the village children, those free from other work or who could afford to tarry a little while, and he spoke to them of the ten million demons that dreamed the world of sins. Long he spoke in his low whisper, and it grew late in the afternoon, when the archmagus of Erebai was wont to take his walk along that dusty road. In that circuit was an antique necromancy of subtle power, each step timed with a certain prayer and a certain thought, and the rumble of that step was as a giant. For such was the potency of the archmagus of Erebai. Whether it was some caprice of wizardly rank or else he was too concerned with his droning chant, the archmagus did not deter his step as he neared the scholar of small spells, and his tread ruined his circles and banished the shapes that danced along them.

Now whether there was wroth in the heart of the scholar then, or some more mystic wisdom that accompanied the contemplation of his shattered circles, none now can say. Yet it was for the first time in memory that some months later, the scholar of small spells entered the Tourney of Sorcery.

Some took note of this, for while the collector of cantrips was not known for the particular potency of his enchantments, nor to have accomplished any great feat with which to build a legend, his measured tread had crossed the breadth of the world for two generations of necromancers, through the dusty tombs of sorcerer-queens and the forgotten libraries of minor hearth-gods, and he had set more than a few of boys' and girls' minds and hearts on the path to sin and sorcery.

The first three days were for apprentices and journeymen, demonstrations of skill. The archmage was exempt and chose to rest and prepare; but the scholar took his place with the least skilled, and offered freely his advice and criticism. So more passed their trials of the first three days than in any tourney before.

The second three days were for masters in their three ranks, and here there were a few duels, for those who had something to prove, but most were set some tasks by the judges worthy of their rank, and it was up to the contestants to impress those earnest greybeards by their conjurations. This year the archmagus of Erebai called for a spirit from the far outer gulfs, beyond the circle of light that girdles this world, and whose name none save he could utter with safety—and so awed the judges, that they passed him on the fourth day, and allowed him the additional time to study and prepare.

By this time the rumor had gone up of a feud between the archmagus and the scholar, so that immediately after Erebai had retired the collector of cantrips was called upon. The scholar of small spells stepped in to the rune circle with his worn robes and his shepherd’s crook staff, and in that dry and serious voice recalled an ancient spell familiar to all of those present, for it recalled an antique demon who of long standing had its lot to answer the calls of journeymen who wished to prove themselves to their masters, and there was not a witch or warlock there that had not called that self-same demon from its cozy hell. Yet that scholar did show his mastery in the precision of his chant and movement, the time and tones as perfect as human throat or mind could grasp, and he did it in the old way now forgotten and abridged, with all the embellishments lost and forgotten in a thousand crumbling schoolbooks, so that when at last the song reached its zenith the old demon came forth in all the glory and majesty that had been its in the days of yore, when it sat on basalt thrones and defiled virgins offered by bloody-handed sorcerers. Those who had thought themselves long familiar with the goat-hoofed thing marveled at its panoply of black glass and black gold set with smooth black gems, and the things that squirmed at its feet, and where its shadow fell. It looked each of the judges in the eye, and they felt once more that tiny wound in their souls which was the demon’s price to appear before their masters, a hurt that would never more be long forgotten.

So it was the scholar was admitted to the next round.

Now the archmagus of Erebai had heard of this summoning, and some rumors reached his ears from his familiars of the feud supposed between himself and the scholar of small spells, and on the night of the sixth day the archmagus called the scholar to his tent. They dined in silence and spoke little save of the other challengers, who had risen through the lists and who had fallen, and as the evening wore on the archmagus came to the point.

“I have heard,” he said. “That I did you hurt when I broke your circles, and you seek vengeance on me in the lists.”

“I am a teacher, as well as a scholar.” said the small spells. “I have but come here to give a lesson.”

“To me?”

“To any who would learn it.”

“Very well,” said the archmagus. “I have spoken with the judges, and they have agreed to pair us on the morrow. You have never been to the tourney before, but I know well my competitors. I would not have your lifeblood on my soul for so small an insult.”

The scholar nodded, and withdrew. It was only then that the archmagus of Erebai noticed the lesser wizard had tasted nothing of the repast, which sat untouched.

On the dawn of the seventh day, the archmagus found the scholar of small spells waiting for him before the runecircle, which would contain their thaumaturgies. A crowd had gathered even at that hour, for much had been rumored of their respective performances. On the side of the scholar were many of the apprentices and journeymen he had helped in the first three days, and not a few masters who had known him in earlier years, and those few of his own age that knew and respected him. The archmage’s side was lonely, save for the betmasters and his servants.

As if by common thought, the men entered the circle.

#

The little girl swept her legs up and down, setting the swing a-swinging.

“There was no beginning,” she said “but sometime long ago there were ten million demons, and they dreamed the world.”

A man sat on the swing next to her, holding a dripping side, making a red mud puddle of the dust beneath him.

“They were really more than that. Maybe ten million was as big a number as anybody could think of so that’s how many there were. And each and every one of them was their own little sin.”

She swung higher, catching the dying sun and golden clouds between the toes of her sneakers on the ascent, tucking them under to scrape the dust and gravel as she came down. The man wheezed a little, and gripped the chain holding his seat a little tighter.

“Can you name ten million sins? There was one for letting the fire go out, and one for watering down the beer, and another for leaving a lover unsatisfied. There was a demon for leaving out your piss for another to step or sit in, and a demon for burning a child, and a demon for spoiling a story, and so many more.”

The man had sunk in his swing, and the girl slowed her gyration to follow the blackbirds waiting above.

“You may think it very silly for there to be ten million demons for such things, when they existed before children and stories, piss or beer, or any of that, but they dreamed all that into being. You cannot have children without their sins, or they wouldn’t be children at all.”

She smiled at that, and hopped off to take his hand. The man fell into the dust and gravel, head lolling against the ground, and she took his head between her hands and turned it to the sky.

“Now what if I told you every now and again one of the ten million demons took on shape and form and a name? It’s true.” The blue eyes in her hand saw the moon, and hanging right beneath it, three stars that should not shine ‘til evening. “Not murder or lust or any other thing you might think of as a sin, but something specific and terrible all the same, a familiar evil clothed in flesh.”

He opened his mouth, but no breath came out, and she kissed him on the forehead with thin, dry lips. “But there must always be ten million demons.”

##

The duel lasted until the ninth day, and the scholar of small spells leaned hard upon his staff, and his robes were little more than rags, but the archmagus of Erebai stood exhausted in his lonely corner, propped up only by those few familiars that remained. They had taken their turns casting spells and countering them, and for all the skill and learning and power of Erebai, there was no dwoemer or incantation that the scholar of small spells could not turn aside with some ancient word or name, by spirits so common they were nigh-forgotten, and one by one the powers the archmagus had painfully gathered to himself were stripped from him. So he sapped his strength and weathered the small, flitting curses of the scholar of small spells. At first the archmagus had dismissed these thin shadows at once, but as the conflict grew and resources became few, so did he wait longer and longer between cleansing banishments, and now could scarce mumble a counterspell. Yet somewhere he found once more that inner strength that had seen him through the ranks of necromancers to the summit of that dark mountain of power, and cast them off once again.

The collector of cantrips awaited his next gambit.

At last, he held up his hand—not in arcane gesture, but in hail.

“Brother magician, I would beg your forgiveness for shattering your circles.” said the archmagus. “Never in this incarnation would I have imagined such borrowed strength as yours; I fight not against a man but all the kingdoms of dead hedge wizards, every spell thief and apprentice who has lived and died on this small planet for countless centuries. Whichever of us falls today, know only that I am sorry to have ever crossed you.”

Then the scholar of small spells shook his head, and his face was dark as a thundercloud, and there was sorrow and regret in his voice. “Such hubris is unbecoming. Have you never learned of the ten million demons?”

The archmagus of Erebai said he had heard of them as the most minor of spirits.

“Then you have forgotten much that every apprentice knows.”

So saying the scholar of small spirits turned and left the circle, so forfeiting the duel, and his step did not falter ‘til he rested once more on the dusty road between Erebai and the dead empire, leaving behind him the smallest of ignorant sins to ponder his words.

###

The Petty Mage

The Petty Mage
by
Bobby Derie

When the spells were muttered and chanted and done, the incense burned down to sticky brown lumps that no longer warded off the spirits of plague, the potions sipped and spat out again, the magician sat at the young soldier’s bed, and held her hand.

When the moon hid itself behind the clouds at night, the imps of disease took notice of a scent in the supernal wind and flew off, and the spirits bright and dark which had loomed over the sickbed turned and fled before a power greater than their own, the magician did not smile, but with steady voice and clear eyes looked at the newcomer and said with utter formality: “Hello, grandmother.”

A figure like the shadow of a queen in mourning gave a wordless nod.

“I have no bargains for you, nor charms to ward you off.” the magician said, caressing one of the soldier’s pale cheeks. “For I am poor in the ways of magic, though I paid dearly for what I know, and there is little enough left of me to buy or to sell.”

As she spoke the shadow took on definition, the darkness deepening in some places and lightening in others. The magician saw that this was no queen in funeral veil or shawl, though she held herself with all the silent dignity of the inevitable and the bereaved.

“I have heard that some know to charge you to fulfill your duties, to take her past the dangers that lie beyond this life, but I am not wise enough to give such an order, nor the authority to do so, nor would I ask of you any favors.” The magician laid her hand then on the soldier’s spear, which lay by her side. “Nor the favors of any who might have power or authority over you.”

Now the shadow spoke, and her voice was that of a woman speaking in the dark of night, clothed in shadows, as a grandam might speak to a child she rocked to sleep in the wee blue hours as the stars fell to the coming dawn.

“Granddaughter.” she spoke, and seemed to consider another word, but instead bent down over the magician instead and kissed her on the left eye. Then the shade reached out her hand, and the soldier opened her eyes and grasped it. With her one good eye, the magician watched the pale shadows descend into the waiting darkness. Stupid tears dripped down the right side of her face, as she looked at the cooling corpse on the bed.

There were funeral chants and small incantations to be said, to guide the shade and to guard it, herbs and spices to stave off the grave worm for some borrowed time, and a stone to be engraved with an image and a name, lest either be forgotten. These at least were in her power, and would do until the next time Grandmother came.

###

Storm Halo

Storm Halo
by
Bobby Derie

The stranger came and brought the storm with him into the saloon, and the feller at the piano stopped. Wisps of black cloud hung around his brow like smoke, a personal thundershower that cast him in an eternal pall and damp. Water ran off thin, stringy brown hair, in rivulets down the pale and bloated creases in his face with eyes that looked red from crying, dripped from pruned fingers and left a trail of wet sawdust behind him as he made a line for the bar. He could have been a sailor lost at the sea come back to satisfy another thirst. Mud stained boots with rusty spurs the sickly blue-black growths that speckled his flesh where some resilient fungus had taken hold.

Sully met the stranger across the bar, met his eye without looking away.

“Help you suh?”

“Whiskey.”

The stranger’s voice was a liquid, gurgling croak with a familiar drawl and bark, and every man in the bar knew him for a native of Georgia, and a man who had been used to giving orders. The particular shade of amber Sully poured in the glass could have been week-old horse piss left out in the sun, darker and redder than golden, but brighter than blood in oil. Wet coins clinked on the bar as the stranger reached for the drink.

The music didn’t resume play. Gamblers left their cards at the table. Two aging whores in sagging cotton skirts ushered a young girl with a painted face up the stairs, steps creaking. The stranger stood at the bar and sipped his shot, and the cloud seemed to rise a little from his brow and lighten, the fat greasy drops thinning out to a steady drizzle so he was soon standing in a spreading puddle. Behind Sully, the big mirror above the bar showed only the standing storm.

More money clinked down on the counter. Sully poured the same again. This shot disappeared down the stranger’s throat in a single horse piss-colored streak.

There was a click that echoed in the silence of the saloon. The room saw the stranger’s shoulders tense, the grey clouds thicken to black and begin to roil as it grew larger and more agitated around him. He turned his back on the bar to stare out at the room, and a sudden breeze seemed to blow. Cards blew off tables but nobody dared reach for them. The doors to the saloon began to swing freely.

One of the drunk cowpokes sat up in sudden sobriety, leveling his Colt Navy revolver. Somewhere far off came the sound of distant thunder, and that clap echoed in the bar as a brilliant spark leapt off from the agitated cloud. In the space between breaths it traced a lazy zig-zag path to the tip of the gun, which exploded in the cattlepunk’s hand. As if his scream was a signal, as one body the room reached for their weapons.

The storm broke in the room, a black maelstrom that kicked up dirt and sawdust into a blinding, stinging wind that whipped around and through the whole tap room, picking up empty bottles, cups, and loose articles to fling with the strength of a tempest. Some hunkered down against the wind, turned over tables for shelter against the pelting rain and debris. Others were less fortunate, exposed skin of face and hands shredded by broken glass, crawled toward the door as the wind rose to a hellish howl and the walls seemed to shake and moan. Sully came up from behind the bar with a shotgun, and received a blinding flash and crackle of thunder to herald his descent to hell for his trouble. The stranger stood at the center of chaos, and none in the room dared lift their heads to see the strange calm on his face. Lightning played out again and again in the room, until nothing moved or moaned.

The wind slacked by degrees, and the cloud thinned to a grey disc, circling widdershins above the stranger’s head, a steady driving rain pouring over the ruin of the saloon, washing bloody rivers from fallen bodies. He turned back to the bar, the mirror above it now spider-cracked, and reached for the bottle of whiskey to pour himself another shot.

There was the creak of a hinge. The stranger’s shoulders tensed. He turned around, still holding the bottle of whiskey. The woman framed in the saloon door had straw-colored hair beneath a dark wide-brimmed hat, and a heavy bone-handled pistol on her hips. Rainwater flowed like tears beneath dry eyes as the stranger assayed her.

“Silas Blackwater.” The name came out like a dry breath across the plains, full of honey-grain and the hint of buffalo shit.

“You ain’t got trouble with that name, miss. An’ you don’t want any neither.” He gurgled by reply, then added. “Don’t see no tin star.”

“Don’t see no need fer one, Mr. Blackwater. You recognize this here gun?”

She patted the handle of the pistol. Blackwater could see the wide bone grip, carved with a scene from heaven or hell, traceries and nails of blackened metal. There were six notches cut in that grip, exposing the pale grey-yellow of the inner bone.

“Durendal.”

“That’s right. You ready?”

Blackwater gave a phlegmy chuckle. “Are you?”

 The wind picked up. There was a boom and clap as of thunder that rattled windows, and a flash like a piece of glass caught the sun at high noon. Then the dull sodden thump of a body hitting the squelching mud of the saloon floor, and the tinkle of broken glass.

###

A Fearsome and Bloody Saint

A Fearsome and Bloody Saint

By Bobby Derie

Moxie’s sneaker kicked a child’s skull. The parched white bone clitter-clatted across the road before coming to rest at the base of a sign. Whitesbog, N.J. – 3 miles. Pins and needles played at the base of her brain, a hint of static reached her ears. Stomach growling, sun hidden by an endless expanse of gray cloud, Moxie shifted her backpack. She hated the ones with kids.

Moxie didn’t have anything like a plan yet. It could be anything that came out of the night to snatch those kids. Werewolf, maybe, or the Jersey Devil, if there was such a thing. The possibilities run through her head like the plots of a dozen z-grade horror movies, minus the tits and fake blood. She needed to get her bearings, snoop around, sleep with a cop or a reporter if that’s what it took to get the details. She couldn’t afford to go into this thing unprepared. Not again. Heading into a situation without knowing what was going on was how people died.

Still, the whole damn set up with the children stirred a dead memory. Something between bad luck and destiny has led her here, the black serendipity that saw Moxie stumble into most every patch of badness and horror in her life. She knew she’d cross path with this thing eventually—she just hoped it was before it got any worse. Like that thing in the basement in Newark, the nuckelavee.

She had half a mind to check out abandoned houses first, the ones the kids hung out at. Maybe stare at the graffiti, pick out the name of a local boogieman. So she walked, turning when it seemed right, the grass on the side of the road giving way to sidewalks, the sidewalks cracked and then fell away to reveal older stones, punctuated with grass.

The afternoon sun finally began to burn through the cloud cover when she felt or heard the rumble of an old black Cadillac DeVille coming up the road. Moxie kept walking as it crept toward her, watched it’s reflection on the glass windows of passing houses. The Indian girl driving it was carefully going five miles under the speed limit on the residential streets and stopped at ever sign and light, giving assiduous care to her turn signals. Moxie knew that style of driving; it’s the one where you couldn’t afford for the cops to pull you over for anything. The Caddy pulled up along side her, passenger side window rolling down to reveal a shock of bottle-blonde hair, and stopped right next to her. There was a chink as the back door unlocked.

Moxie gave the girl in the passenger seat a long look. A bottle of bleach had been sacrificed to remove all trace of color from the blonde mane on the head of a woman that could be either side of thirty. She radiated all the bubbly energy of a fifteen-year old; her eyes hidden by big plastic sunglasses and most of the rest of her was covered by a grey sweatpants/hoodie combination advertising some unknown sorority in pink letters—Moxie caught the hint of a neat line of razor marks around her eyes, where the shades were slipping.

“Moxie Hateman?” said the peroxide victim in the passenger seat.

“Not really, I just prefer girls.” The woman laughed.

“Justine. Get in the car sweetie. I sussed you out pretty good.”

The blonde stuck a henna-dyed hand out the window, nails painted alternating pink and black. Around the wrist hung a bracelet of wooden beads and a wooden inverted cross. It was old and Moxie knew she’d seen it before. A farm, up in Pennsylvania, lifetimes ago; an old man with the hex on him, praying.

Moxie clambered into the back seat.

The driver, the Indian girl, watched her. Moxie buckled herself in, and the Indian girl turned back to the road, the car lurching forward. Sitting next to her in the passenger seat is a bruiser, six feet a half if an inch, arms as big around as her thighs, buzzcut black hair shot through with grey; wearing about three white v-neck t-shirts and new bluejeans tucked into old Army boots. He flashed her a grin and a mock salute. A scar shaped like an inverted cross was burnt into the flesh right above his breastbone.

“That’s Davan, Mox.” Justine said, then turns to the driver. “And this is Priyanka.”

Priyanka, the driver, was Indian—nut brown skin, long straight dark hair, raven eyes just like Moxie herself. From the back seat, all she could make out was Priyanka’s slim leather jacket over loose-fitting pants and shirt of some light material in an exotic cut; that and a necklace of some kind of gold dagger dangling between her breasts.

Moxie felt the names and images sink into her. These people were like her, she could feel it, feel that black serendipity tie itself in knots in her stomach.

“How’d you know my name?”

“I felt the edge of your thoughts before you got in the car.” Priyana replied. “To be sure you were not an enemy. I am sorry for that intrusion, but Justine can feel your power, but she cannot see into your mind or heart.”

“Okay. Okay, yeah. Makes sense. Um, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but do you guys have anything to eat? I haven’t had a proper meal in a couple days.”

Davan pulled up a small cooler that had been resting at his feet, and opened it to reveal two sodas and a small trove of plastic baggies: six sandwiches, carrot sticks, raisins, apple slices just turning brown.

“Help yourself,” he said. “I always get a might peckish myself.”

“Yes, please eat. We spent some time driving around trying to find you, and now we are running out of daylight.” Priyanka added.

“You were looking for me?” Moxie said.

“Not ‘xactly.” Justine said. “We’ve been together for about eight months now, tracking something.” she licked her lips “Or maybe someone—that’s been moving down the East Coast, making signs in the forgotten places, painting old altars, awakening old evils and emboldening those that had kept quiet in their predations. It’s been three steps ahead all the time—and this is the next stop. I was trying to find the source of it when I happened across you. Like a candle floating on a sink full of water with the drain pulled out, little flame flickerin’ down the whirlpool.”

Moxie weighed her words. Had things been on the rise? She’d been busy in the Appalachians for months, and down through the Pine Barrens it had been one thing after another. She didn’t know about any of that, just like she didn’t know what was preying on the kids in this town.

“I think it is a fear elemental.” Priyanka said. “Sorry, you were thinking pretty loud.” Her accent was strange to Moxie’s ears, the cadence of the words unfamiliar, the accent on every syllable—definitely born in India, English as a second language.

“I tried to suss it out direct.” Justine said, holding up a New Jersey road map covered in pink highlighter. “I can’t draw a bead on it. Something makes my mind go slidewise when I try that head-on.”

“We been searching our memories.” Davan said. “Fear elementals are creatures of dark belief, nightmares given substance. They like young minds, fertile imaginations. Werefolk now, they tend to be messy, and the Old Folk from across the seas, they have their peculiar ways. This ain’t their style at all.”

“I remember,” Moxie said, in between bites of sandwich “the old fear spirits, in Ninevah, the Allu…”

“…Abhartach among the Irish and Qiqirn of the Iñupiat…” mumbled Davan, getting a thousand yard stare in his eyes.

“Careful now, y’all. This ain’t no time to get lost in the old memories.” Justine said.

“Indeed.” Priyanka said “There is too little we know of this thing to be sure we have encountered it before. All we have is the negative psychic nexus Justine has divined, where we believe it hides. We are going there now.”

“An abandoned house.” Moxie half-guessed, half-knew.

“Yes.”

Moxie felt the car slow down and finally stop, rocking back slightly. Priyanka shut off the engine.

“We walk from here. If there is anyone in the house, I don’t want to spook them. Time to bundle out and load up.”

Moxie felt the chunk as the trunk popped open, and the four climbed out of the DeVille. Moxie left her backpack behind on the floor. Davan got to the trunk first began handing things out: Justine and Priyanka both got a snub-nosed .38 and a gigantic metal flashlight that could double as a club; Davan took out an old, curiously wrought sledge hammer, then opened up an old duffle bag.

“Don’t know precisely what you’d prefer.” the big man said, drawing out a sawed off double-barrel shotgun and a massive, old and peculiar looking revolver with two barrels, one on top of the other. “But you can take your pick.”

Moxie held up a hand, palm out. The base of her skull tingled, like a thousand pins and needles, and she let the static flow down her spine, her arm. She felt as much as saw the glow on her fingertips, smelled ozone, heard the snap as they began to spark and sputter into five finger-length electric arcs like a handful of glory.

“I’ve got my own, thanks.”

Light reflected off Davan’s smile as he closed the trunk and picked up the sledge. “Suit yourself. One last thing.” He held the hammer out to her, head pointed at her heart. It could have been a hundred years old, with some old and warn engravings on the both the steel head and the striped wooden handle. Down near the base of the head, where the metal almost seemed to merge with the wood and a dozen years of rust or grime, she made out a tiny cross.

“This is the tool of Johann, who twice-preceded me. It is the hammer of idols and idolaters. Touch it, be known as a true friend, and it will never harm you.”

Moxie reached out one hand, and sparks leapt from her finger tips, tracing the old carvings on the wood and metal. It was cool to the touch, but something in it reminded her of her own bottled lightning.

A desolate For Sale sign swung over the dead brown grass of the lawn, the windows were unboarded and unshuttered. An old house, looted and abandoned by the younger relations. Perfect magnet for teens and tweens. Whatever was in there wouldn’t have even had to go hunting; the children would have come right to the front door, or wherever else they could bust in. A nagging image came to her mind of a mud-brick temple, and a bronze statue whose flaming belly held the charred bones of babies.

On a power line leading into the house perched a murder of crows, staring at the four humans.

Priyanka stared at the house. The Indian woman turned to address them all, and her eyes were black as the crows. “There are people in the house. I can taste their fear. They don’t think they’re alone, but I cannot see what they are afraid of. Justine, can you find it?”

The bubbly blonde took off her glasses. Five razor-thin scars made a raccoon-band across her face, past empty, gaping sockets, and across the bridge of her nose. As Moxie watched, the sockets lit from impossibly deep within. It was like seeing the light from a torch play on the walls of a cave, but not the torch itself.

“No. I can’t fix my Sight on it.”

Priyanka nodded.

“We must draw on our link together—to share thoughts and memories, bolster faith, combat illusion, and layer gifts. Davan, you are our hammer and shield; Moxie, you are our purifying flame; Justine and I will guide and protect you as best we can.”

Moxie frowned. “Yeah, okay. Just don’t go poking around in my brain while you’re there.”

“I never have, in any of our incarnations.”

Moxie blinked. For a moment, looking at Priyanka, Davan, and Justine’s ruined face, she saw they all had black crow eyes—and somehow, she knew she did too. Priyanka kept talking.

“I would like you and Davan to enter from the front; Justine and I will circle around the back. Be careful with your spark, but do not fear to use it if you must. Better that we should all burn and take this monster with us.”

Moxie nodded her assent, and the other two women took off to the left around the house. It was weird; she still knew where they were as they walked out of sight, just like she could tell the position of the sun by the heat on the back of her neck. Davan caught her eye with his.

“No telling what’s in there, so you stay behind me ‘til we get to the front door, secret fire or no.” Something edged into his voice, and when he spoke again she heard someone else speaking with him. “I am thy Shield, thy bulwark, martyr to thy cause; the waves shall pound against me and fail, your enemies shall break against me, their teeth and their nails, to fall back with bloody fingers and bloody mouths as old men.”

Hammer in hand, Davan strode forward, eyes straight ahead as he walked across the dead lawn toward the front door. Moxie matched him step for step, a few paces behind, sparks snapping from her fingertips as she called the fire to her, ready at hand.

The door was cheap, badly painted green some yesteryear, and the realtor’s lock box hung from the handle. Davan tried the handle, but it wouldn’t turn. From his pocket he took a curious brass key, inserted it into the lock, and tapped it gently with the head of the hammer a couple times; the key turned in the lock and the door swung free.

“Magic key?”

“Bump key. Daddy was a locksmith, sorta, taught me the trade.”

Moxie followed Davan into the house, looking for anything. The house wasn’t very dark yet, not with all the windows open and without curtains, but the afternoon sunlight cast long shadows.

The small central room there were in was empty, and led into what might have been a living room. Pale, unstained rectangles on the carpet gave the outline of bookshelves and chairs that hadn’t been moved for thirty years or more, but were now gone. Moxie gave full rein to her senses, looking for any clue, any scent or sound. All she heard was the buzzing crackle at her fingertips, the slight hint of ozone and old dust. Davan looked much the same: tense, alert, eyes and ears drawn to the shadows and the dark corners.

Something about the silence, the shadows, and the dust tickle Moxie’s memory. The whole mood of the thing is like a story she’d read a dozen times before, and was reliving—but the actual memory wouldn’t emerge.

“Hey. How do you…” Moxie started, stopped, kept going. “Remember stuff? From before.”

“Most of the time, I don’t. Not on purpose. Easy to get lost in old lives.”

“There’s something on the tip of my brain. Something about this I’ve seen before. Not me but…well, one of me, one of us.”

“Oh.” Davan motioned that he was going into the next room, the kitchen. Moxie followed. “Mostly, it’s hard to remember anything specific. It’s like…it’s like when you think back to your earliest memory. You’re three or four years old, just a child at your momma’s knee, that kind of thing. Then you think back before that, to what happened before that. That first death is bright and clear, and then you remember what happened before that. You keep going like that, takes a damn long time.”

Moxie followed, listening, thinking. She willed the crackling electric arcs on her left hand to disappear and started checking the cabinets, then stopped and blushed, feeling stupid. Davan didn’t seem to notice, though: he opened the unplugged refrigerator, as if expecting something hiding in there…or worse, trophies.

“For me, it’s like déjà vu. Sometimes I know things, but I don’t know where I know ’em from or how.” Moxie said. “But I go some place and it seems to me I’ve walked there before, can point out where a building or tree or stone stood.”

“You getting any of that now?”

“Yeah. Tip of my brain. An empty house or temple or something, full of broken statues.”

Somewhere in the back of the house, glass broke. An image flashed through their heads of a back room and Moxie and Davan turned as one and headed toward where they felt Priyanka and Justine, moving quick. The women were in the back room, glass from a broken window on the floor. Two teenage boys were laid out on the ground, sleeping, comatose or dead, Moxie had no way to tell, but Justine hovered over them, hands checking pulses, Priyanka covering her with her pistol.

“They are alive.” Priyanka said.

“Not much alive, by my measure.” Justine mumbled. “Weak pulses, sunken eyes, dry lips—they been here for couple days, dehydrated, walking long nightmare roads. We gots to get ‘em out of here right quick.”

“We can carry them out to the car. Davan, Moxie?”

“Not a damn thing, Priya. We didn’t get much of a search on when we heard y’all break in, though.” Davan replied.

“Let’s get to it then. Can you two get them to the car on your own?” Moxie asked. Priyanka nodded her affirmative, tucking her gun and flashlight in her belt and grabbing the first child by the shoulders, but is unable to do more than shift him. Moxie heard Davan sigh and handed his sledge hammer to Justine.

“Priya, darling, I love ya but you got the upper body strength of a girl that can’t throw a softball. Gimme that here. You and Justine keep a watch of the other one ‘til I get back; Moxie you keep searching—yell if you find anything.”

With that, Davan bent down and picked the boy clear off the ground, cradling him in his arms, and headed back toward the kitchen.

Moxie moved through the silent house with her hands in front of her, a Jacob’s ladder of electricity moving up her arms, the creep of familiarity slipping over her again. In what she guessed might have been the master bedroom; a croak came from the closet. Instinctively, she drew her right hand back into a jackal’s head, and the blue-white lightning arched along her wrist like a cobra ready to strike. With her boot, Moxie opened the closet door.

Sitting on a trap door in the floor of the closet was a lone crow. A window stood open in the closet, probably how the bird—and maybe the kids—got in. The beady-eyed black bird croaked again, then flapped up onto the windowsill and looked back at her. Moxie blinked and the black bird was gone. She dared a glance through the window: the murder of crows stared back at her from the trees outside the property line. As she watched, one flew up and landed on the nearest branch, turning around to regard her again.

Moxie looked down at the trap door. Somehow she knew. This is where they came in. A trap door in a place like this—how could they not go down into the dark? The fingers of her right hand curled into her palm, thumb held straight, and the electricty flowed into a fiery spike about a foot long, spitting sparks. With her left hand, Moxie pulled open the trap door.

The basement steps were old, narrow, steep and wooden. Moxie held the lightning-dagger out in front of her, lighting the way.

“Hello Mox.” A smoker’s rasp came out of the shadows. Right in front of her, right where she was looking he stepped out of the darkness and into the light of her spike.

Uncle Hank.

Déjà vu almost overwhelmed her. A face she’s seen in the mirror a thousand times, but it wasn’t her doing the looking, not her memories. They were Hank’s memories. Hank who should be dead.

Hank was as short as she was, but nowhere near as thin. He looked just as she’d last seen him, as he’d last seen himself before the Black Seal consumed him: three days unshaven, sleep deprived and half-starved, leather jacket and black gloves, Stetson drawn low over his brow, grey hair pulled back in a pony tail, black cowboy boots of some reptile leather older than snake or gator, a dozen inverted silver crosses hanging from his neck: silver, iron, copper, and gold chain, here and there studded with glass gems.

He was the one who had the spark before her. She’d felt him die, felt it pass into her, that night. Moxie had lived it herself, the final wrenching spike of iron driven into the chest, the final wound. His heart…she looked at his chest.

Uncle Hank pulled the jacket away to show her the hole, right through his wife beater, the gaping abyss in his chest. Moxie could see the fragments of bone. Some ember burned down there, in place of beating muscle, and out of the wound a trickle of black smoke worked its way out and toward the ceiling.

“It’s a hell of a sight, ain’t it? My dolorous stroke.” Hank says to her. “I tell you something else that’s a hell of a thing: when you go down at the last, like you’re supposed to, for the last time. Knowing you’ve done right what you’re supposed to, that the secret fire will be kindled in another heart. You make your peace.” His accent is just as it was, a bit of Texas, a bit of Oklahoma.

Hank let his jacket drop back, covering the hole. Moxie could see clearer now in the dark, saw how the thin smoke wreathed him, emanated from him, seeping out of every orifice and pore.

“I saw you, when you was seeing me die. Nobody ever told me about that, Mox. Might be nobody ever knew. I was glad it was you who got it.”

“You’re dead, Hank.” Moxie says. “I felt you die. This is a trick.”

“No trick, little girl.” Hank whispers. “No lies. I was dying then, you and me both felt it. My spark leapt into you. I can feel it crackle up and down your spine.”

Hank stepped forward, left hand raised, the last two fingers missing from an old encounter with a ghost rider out in Arkansas. His mutilated hand closed in on Moxie’s lightning spike, as if he wanted to feel the heat. Small sparks shot off the blade, landing on his hand, sucked up into him.

“Stay back, Hank” Moxie said, voice shaking a little. “I don’t know what you are, but don’t you take a damn step closer.”

“All our life we hunt monsters, or been hunted by them. We wade through blood and misery all our days so others won’t have to. I wrestled with the dark and burned it down to ashes, and as I lay there dying I knew I was going to hell.”

“Shut up uncle Hank.” Moxie gritted her teeth and poured current into the spike, willing it brighter to push the specter of him away, but he just seemed to drink it in.

“Don’t shush me little girl. I felt the tug of hell on my soul.” Hank said in a parental tone, his one good eye catching hers. “And so will you, I reckon. We do evil to do good—murder and thieve and every other little sin—and we don’t ask forgiveness, ‘cause we reckon we’re righteous folk. We call ourselves saints, but we’re sinners as black as some of them things we put down.”

Hank’s mauled hand almost closed on the bright construct, the tame lightning sucked into his flesh. Something like a sigh escaped his lips. Somewhere up above, Moxie heard the trap door shut. She backed against the stairs, and a bony grip caught her left wrist.

“They try to block it out, in the memories. They try to kill the stories, of those who fall. As I lay on my dying bed, something came and whispered those stories to me, of tainted blood and black saints”

Moxie felt the smoke thicken around her, smelt it, tasted it, eyes stinging—oil, cordite, brimstone, and a touch of the grave.

“I had no power left, it had all gone into you. I was promised, after the smokeless fire deserted me, I would become filled with another flame. To be something more, or maybe less, than a saint, if I could claim it. Because I was a grandchild of the fallen.”

Moxie hand shook as Hank’s grip closed on the spike, shrouding them both in darkness, and for the first time since she’d felt him die, the crackling power left her, leaving nothing but an emptiness in her skull.

“No!” Moxie screamed.

“And so are you.”

Moxie screamed. It seemed to go on for a long, long time. She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t even tell if she was still making a sound. Her gut ached, tense, diaphragm still trying to push air out, and her lungs burned. The smoke was all around her, in her, crawling in through her mouth, her nose, up her sinuses. Her eyes were screwed so tight it pained her, tears forced their way out and left trails on her cheeks. Ears pounded with the staccato beat of her heart. And still she tried to scream.

Something brought her out of herself. Moxie. She could hear Priyanka, in her head. Moxie could still feel the pain, the loneliness, the fear, but it was apart from her now. You need to open your eyes now.

And she did.

Flashlight beams burn down from the trap door overhead, and Moxie saw herself gripped by a skeletal fetus wreathed in black, oily smoke, clawed hands on her stomach. It shrank from the light, screaming. Holding the sledge two-handed before him, Davan clambered down the stairs toward her. Moxie shook, not in fear now, but in rage.

A corona of smokeless fire began to writhe around Moxie’s head, and sparking snakes of white lightning shot from her eyes and mouth toward the smoke-ghost. Justine had her glasses off and from her gouged-out eyes came an impossibly pure, supernaturally bright light. In an unseen corner, where she had not noticed it before, the beam outline a brown clay idol or censer—a squat toad-shape with pendulous breasts and a pregnant, bowl-like belly belching forth the oily, noxious black smoke. Next to it was the small, dried-out corpse of a little girl, a grey corpse in a pink snowjacket and jeans. Moxie remembered another child, another corpse, in a hall of broken statues.

The smoke ghost fled away from her storm halo, back toward its clay womb. Lightning seared its black bones, consumed its smoking body in mid-air until the last fragment, the child-like ebon skull managed to fall into the yawning clay pit/belly of the idol.

Davan raised his hammer, lambent with its own flame now, muscles and tendons standing out as he pushed himself past mere human limits. Justine held her flashlight steady, eyes burning from within. The hammer fell, crashing through domed bone and statuette alike, and there was an almighty crack of flame and thunder that broke the idol in two and shook the house. Up above, Moxie could hear the crows fly away.

The hammer had opened a black hole into the floor, and as he raised the head a cold, foul wind pushed through the room, sucking the pieces down into it. Then the air was still, and it was just a cracked and broken pit in the concrete floor.

“In the old cities,” Priyanka spoke “the Allu grew bloated in power, until they set themselves up as gods. Later they diminished, and became incarnate in man-made vessels, that would sequester and hide them. I thought their hiding places all shattered.”

Justine, shades back on, laid her hands on Moxie’s shoulders, whose storm halo had diminished to a bare glow. “It’s okay honey. It’s gonna be okay. It’s over now. We need to get them two boys back to their own folks now, and out of town ‘fore the police come round.”

“Yeah, okay.” Moxie sniffed.

“What did you see?”

Moxie could feel stupid, warm tears on her face, cutting through the soot left by the black smoke.

“My uncle, Hank. Sortof. He wasn’t really my uncle, but he used to sleep with my mom sometimes and—he’s dead now.”

“Hank Elvisson? I remember him. Fought the Black Seal at that power station in Atlanta. A fearsome and bloody saint.” Davan said.

“He—it—said we’re tainted. Fallen.”

“Lies to induce fear and self-doubt. To weaken you, and draw strength from your fears. It was very old, and has faced us before. I see, in your half-memories, you have fought it off many times, and it remembered you more clearly than you remembered it.”

Priyanka said, pulling a blue and black handkerchief out of a pocket. She wiped Moxie’s face, mother-like.

“The Black Saints are a myth, a dark rumor you have heard again and again throughout your incarnations. We lead unnatural lives, but we are still human. We are flawed and imperfect vessels for the memories and forces we carry. The fear elemental capitalized on that. That is all.”

Priyanka finished wiping Moxie’s face and stuffed the handkerchief back in her pocket. “Now we have to follow the darkness again.”