Demon Zero

by Randall Pine

  “Okay,” Simon said, returning her smile. “Sounds good.” He pulled open the driver’s side door and almost caught himself in the shoulder with the corner of it. He jerked to the side, narrowly missing the edge, and then he blushed again. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Right, we got it, everyone will see everyone tomorrow,” Virgil said, shaking his head. He jumped into the passenger seat and twirled his finger. “Let’s do this. I’ve got a frozen burrito with my name on it at home.”

  Simon gave Abby a nod, then he got into the car, too, and with one last wave, they pulled away from the curb, drifted down the street, and disappeared around the corner.

  Abby watched them go. She smiled to herself as she shook her head and crossed back toward Mrs. Grunberg’s house. Simon really was very sweet, she decided. She tried not to make too many personal connections, as a general rule, but there was something about him she liked.

  Something she really, really liked.

  She hopped back up onto the sidewalk, stepped back into the lawn, picked up her necklace, and stuffed it into her pocket. She looked up and down the block, but didn’t see anyone looking her way. Satisfied that she was alone, she zipped up her jacket, pulled up her hood, and slunk into the shadows that stretched and dripped from the side of Mrs. Grunberg’s house.

  Chapter 18

  Virgil yawned and stretched and glared sourly toward the sun. “It’s so early,” he whined.

  “You know most people are, like, showered and dressed and already at work by now,” Simon pointed out.

  “Yeah. Well.” Virgil spat into the drainage ditch. “Those people aren’t me.”

  Simon offered Virgil a coffee, and Virgil eyed it suspiciously. “It’s coffee,” Simon said. “It’ll help.”

  “It’s bitter, and it’s terrible, and I don’t drink coffee, because I’m not a 50-year-old chain-smoking journalist,” Virgil shot back. But he reached out and took the cup anyway, and he took a sip. “Ugh,” he said, his face going sour. “Terrible.” He took another sip anyway.

  “It’ll grow on you,” Simon promised.

  They shuffled toward the tent beneath the bridge. Everything was as they had left it the night before. The tin can was still perched atop the old, partially-melted shopping cart.

  “So do we, like, knock?” Virgil asked.

  “How do you know on a tent?”

  Virgil shrugged. “I don’t know...you’re the smart one. I’m just here for the color commentary.”

  They crept up to the flap of the tent. Simon reached out, took the edge of the flap gingerly, and peeled it back. Inside, the tent was dark. “Hello?” he called into the space.

  There was no reply.

  “Maybe he’s dead,” Virgil suggested.

  “Why would you say that?” Simon asked, dropping the tent flap and straightening up. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “People die, dude,” Virgil said, giving Simon a shrug. “Circle of life.”

  “I know,” Simon glowered.

  Virgil shrank back, suddenly guilty. “Sorry,” he said quietly. “I’m not feeling so sharp today. I’ll drink more coffee.”

  “You do that.”

  Simon crouched down and pulled back the tent flap again. “Hello?” he called a second time, but there was still no response. He looked up at Virgil. “I guess we just…go in?”

  “We were invited,” Virgil pointed out. “Even under vampire rules, we would have a right to go inside.”

  “Good point.” Simon crawled forward, squinting into the tent. It was just so completely, utterly dark inside. “All right. Let’s go.”

  He took a step forward. His face slammed into a solid wall.

  “Ow!” he cried, falling back. He rubbed his nose, then stared incredulously at the tent. “What the…?”

  “Boy, you are really bad at going inside tents,” Virgil observed. He approached the flap and pulled back the canvas. He reached forward, and his hand made it about three inches past the flaps before it pushed up against a solid surface. “Or maybe the tent’s really bad at letting people in…”

  He moved his hand along the surface of the wall, and he couldn’t tell if it was invisible, or if it was solid black. Either way, though, it covered the entire opening to the tent, stretching from one end to the other, and from the ground all the way to the pitched ceiling. He pressed both hands against the wall and pushed. It didn’t give a centimeter. “Well, that’s weird,” Virgil decided.

  “I guess that’s how you knock on a tent,” Simon said. He hopped back up to his feet and closed his hand into a fist. He knocked gently on the wall. Even though he touched it only lightly, the sound of his knock reverberated loudly behind the wall, through the tent. It sounded as if someone inside was slamming a sledgehammer against stone walls. It was such a startling sound that Simon and Virgil both jumped back. They watched as a thin line of blue light appeared along the wall, splitting it horizontally in half. The light widened, reaching both upward and downward, becoming a wide bar of light. As it continued its outward growth, the center began to dissolve away, so that as they watched, the light seemed to wipe away the wall, from the center, and soon it disappeared completely, revealing the inside of the tent as they remembered it; the grand entryway with its stone floor and wood-beam walls, opening up into the expansive sitting room beyond.

  Llewyn the wizard stood in the center of the foyer, his arms resting on the handle of a massive axe. It was the size of a fully-grown man, with a double-sided blade that was about the size of two large hams tied together. The handle was as thick as a small tree trunk. The metal head was on the floor, with the handle sticking straight up, reaching up to Llewyn’s chest. His arms were crossed atop the end of the wood. “Welcome back,” he said.

  His blue eye was covered by a leather patch, which Simon and Virgil both found somehow comforting. The blue light that emanated from his empty socket wasn’t exactly the most pleasant sight.

  “Um…thanks,” Simon said lamely. He nudged Virgil.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Virgil added.

  The sorcerer grinned. He was fully aware of his effect on the young men, and he seemed to relish it. He lifted up the axe with a grunt, turning it over in his hands and giving it a practice swing. “Shall we begin?”

  Simon swallowed hard. “Are we…going to use that?” he asked, nodding at the axe.

  “I’m going to use it,” Llewyn corrected him, hefting the weapon. “You’re going to try not to be killed by it.”

  “Sounds like a blast,” Virgil muttered. He took another sip of coffee. “Pretty glad we came.”

  Llewyn beckoned them to follow him, then turned and headed deeper into the tent. The two young men stepped inside, closing the flaps behind them. The wall reformed, this time from the top and bottom of the opening, re-sealing itself until its two blue light lines met in the middle. The bars of light left behind a solid wall that looked like acrylic, or Saran wrap. They could see through it clearly, they could see the tent flaps on the other side, and the sliver of concrete drainage ditch that was visible between them. Simon shook his head in wonder. He supposed nothing should really surprise him, given the fact that they were in the home of a powerful wizard.

  Even so, a certain amount of un-reality, he decided, was always going to be a bit surprising.

  They followed Llewyn across the sitting room and back down the hallway at the other end. But this time, the sorcerer stopped halfway down the hall and went through one of the doors on his right. They followed him in, expecting to see another room, or chamber…but instead, they saw another long hallway, this one also lined with doors on both sides. The hall looked exactly like the one they had just come down.

  “Should we be leaving bread crumbs behind?” Virgil murmured under his breath.

  “I’ve seen horror movies that start like this,” Simon replied.

 
“I’ve seen horror movies that end like this,” Virgil countered.

  They gave each other a look. Then they continued on after the sorcerer.

  After three more doors, and three more hallways, they finally passed through into a room…although calling it a “room” wasn’t exactly right. It had a stone floor, and stone walls that reached up and curved overhead, meeting high above them in a cupola, like the ceiling of a cathedral. But the room was humongous and styled to look like the outdoors, with wide patches of mossy grass growing over the stones on the floor, and with great, old oak trees thrusting up from the ground and stretching toward the ceiling with their wide, leafy branches. Smaller bushes and shrubs dotted the landscape, too, and the stone walls took on a blueish color as they reached up toward the curved ceiling, giving the visual impression that they were outside, in an open field of trees on a pleasant, blue-sky day.

  “Do you think they sell this tent on Amazon? I am totally getting one,” Virgil decided.

  Llewyn strode out into a wide clearing, situated amidst a circle of trees. He gave the giant axe a few windmill swings, then he slung it into the trunk of one of the trees. The blade sank in halfway, and the trunk held the axe in place. Then he returned to the center of the clearing. He moved his hands over the spongy grass, and three tendrils sprang up from the moss, growing like flowers in time-lapse films. They curled and uncurled, growing taller and taller, and thicker, too, until they came up to Llewyn’s waist. Each one swelled with a blossom colored in a different shade of blue, each of the blossoms as large as a fist and closed up as tightly as one, too. They formed a sort of a living fence between the two young men and the wizard, waving lazily back and forth as if swaying in a breeze.

  Or as if they were being charmed like snakes.

  “Come,” the sorcerer beckoned, throwing off his coat and tossing it aside. A pair of scraggly branches dropped down from the canopy overhead and caught the coat in midair, then hauled it up so it disappeared in the greenery near the ceiling. Llewyn pushed up the sleeves of his white shirt and motioned them closer. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

  Chapter 19

  “Are we practicing to become gardeners?” Virgil asked, looking doubtfully down at the closed-up flowers.

  Llewyn grunted. “More than you know,” he said with a grin. “Yesterday, I showed you that you have magic. Today, you start learning how to use that magic. Eventually, you’ll build up enough strength and control to confront Asag.” When he said this, Simon detected a note of regret in his voice, and it occurred to him that in addition to being frustrated with the fact that he had to focus so much of his power on the sharp black thing in his chest to keep it from splitting open his heart, Llewyn might actually be disappointed that he didn’t have enough reserve power to face Asag himself.

  As if it were some kind of sport.

  If you’re strong enough, I guess it does become some kind of sport, Simon realized.

  He had an idea what Asag was capable of. It gave him chills to think about how strong Llewyn’s unbridled power must be, if he could think of a cage match with that immortal hell-spawn as a game.

  “Until you learn how to augment and manage your powers,” Llewyn continued, “you will practice different ways to contain them, and to put them to use.” He swept a hand over the blossoms. “We start that part of your training today.”

  “We’re going to power-blast the flowers?” Virgil asked.

  “No,” Llewyn said, shaking his head. “You’re done power-blasting for a while.”

  “But—”

  “No,” the wizard said again, this time with a heavy note of finality. “Not until you control it.” He set his mouth into a hard line and crossed his arm. “Your misfire was on the news last night. Channel 5.”

  Virgil gulped. He laughed nervously. “Well, at least it wasn’t CNN,” he said.

  “It might have been, for all I know,” Llewyn grunted. He shook his head ruefully. “I don’t have cable.”

  “We could check the intern—” Virgil started, but Simon silenced him with a look. Virgil nodded. “Right. Sorry. No power blasts.”

  Llewyn gestured down at the three writhing flowers. “These are curiocus plants. Every novitiate of the Seventh Order starts their journey with the curiocus. The selection is a ritual that began thousands of years ago, with the first mages of the Forgotten Lands. With the cultivation of your curioci, you take a step that leaves a footprint you cannot clear. Whether you see this through to mage level, or abandon your pursuit tomorrow, you will have unlocked something that will be both a strength and a curse to you. Knowledge is power, and knowledge of your own power is a heavy weight to bear. From this point, there is no turning back. This is your final opportunity to withdraw with your innocence intact. If you approach the curioci, your path is set. Do you have any questions?”

  Virgil raised his hand awkwardly. “What’s a ‘novitiate’?”

  The wizard sighed. “Any other questions?”

  Simon couldn’t deny a certain feeling of fear that was growing in the pit of his stomach. Just a few days ago, he had been a regular guy, living a regular life in a mostly-regular city, give or take all the supernatural happenings. But now the veil had been pulled back; he had met a wizard and an empath, he had discovered the powers of magic within himself, he had felt the darkness, and he had seen the literal face of evil.

  His view of Templar was beginning to widen; now it wasn’t just a city nestled against the Appalachians. Llewyn had enlightened him, and Asag had, too...and Abby: the town was also a battlefield of the supernatural war between the forces of Good and Evil. He and Virgil had stumbled willingly, if ignorantly, into that war, and they had chosen a side. It was the right side to be on, but that didn’t make the war any less frightening.

  But it was a war worth fighting.

  And he had already lost his sister in a secret battle in that war. He hadn’t known it then, but he was sure of it now. Laura was an innocent victim of the psychic struggle for Templar.

  He couldn’t do anything to save her then. But he could do something to avenge her now.

  And he couldn’t save his own sister, but maybe he could save someone else’s. He could help stem the flow of losses in this ongoing struggle.

  “We’re in,” he said.

  Llewyn looked at him, considering him carefully. Then he gave Simon a solemn nod. “Good,” he said. “Then let’s begin.”

  The two young men cautiously approached the flowers. When they were just a few feet away, the wizard held up his hands for them to stop. They did.

  “The fruit of the curiocus hasn’t yet formed,” he said, holding his hand over the flower in the middle. It snaked up closer toward his palm, almost as if it were sniffing his skin, like a dog would. “The fruit that is born from your curiocus will be your own curio, an artifact that is powerful and bound to you, that is useful to only you, and to no one else. It will be made expressly for you; the curiocus will bond with your past, and with your spirit.”

  “So it’s like choosing a wand in Harry Potter,” Virgil said.

  Llewyn shot him a look. His glowing eye burned so brightly that they could see the light through the thick leather of the eyepatch. “It is not like choosing a wand in Harry Potter,” he gruffed. “It is very, very different.”

  “It doesn’t sound very different.”

  Llewyn frowned and turned to Simon. “Is he always like this?” he asked.

  Simon nodded. “Pretty much always, yeah.”

  The wizard re-centered himself over the middle curiocus. “Watch,” he instructed. He closed his eye and placed both hands around the navy blue petals of the closed flower. The flower immediately expanded to fill the space between his palms. It swelled, filling from the inside like a balloon, pushing against his hands and expanding in all directions until the blossom was the size of a bocce ball. It broke free of its stem. Th
en the wizard was holding the bulbous blossom in his cupped hands. The petals fell away, one by one, until the entire flower had broken apart, revealing the thing it had grown inside: a flask, about the size of the wizard’s great fist, made from leather of some sort, or perhaps from some animal’s bladder. It looked ancient, well-worn, scraped and stained with age.

  “Your patronus is a flask?” Virgil asked, surprised.

  “You’re confusing your Harry Potter,” Simon said, rolling his eyes.

  “I haven’t seen those movies in a long time,” Virgil admitted.

  Llewyn ran his fingers over the old flask, touching it gently and with care. His eye softened with memory. “My great-grandfather had a flask like this,” he said, lost in some secret remembrance. “He was a mage from the Scottish Highlands. Always had it full of his homemade atholl brose. Do you know the atholl brose drink?”

  The two young men shook their heads.

  “No. Not many do these days.” The wizard smiled at the flask. “This is a powerful curio indeed.” He closed his other hand over it, mostly concealing it from sight. The flask shone with a bright white light, and then it was gone, disappearing into the ether.

  “Where did it go?” Simon asked. He reminded himself again that nothing the wizard did should surprise him.

  He hoped magic would always be amazing to him. He wondered if he would ever take it for granted.

  “I’ve placed it in my psychic castle,” Llewyn replied, grinning broadly, fully aware of the long series of questions this was sure to set off in his apprentices’ minds. “All in due time,” he said, preempting those questions. “First…let’s discover your curios.”

  “What if we choose the wrong one?” Simon asked doubtfully.

  But the wizard shook his head. “That’s not how it works. As I said, you don’t choose them; they choose you.”

  “Like Hogwarts wands,” Virgil whispered to Simon again.