The closer they moved to the back counter, the more Aspen could hear faint music gently seeping from a gramophone beside the cash register. The music was off tune. Not bad enough to notice if she actually tried, but in the back of her mind, almost subconsciously, it set her on edge, a primal instinct that told her to run, run, run.
“Customers, customers…Haven’t had those for a while. Almost as if they were frightened off…”
The soft voice wafted from the back. A shadow formed in a doorway a moment before a man pushed through the string of beads. A sudden wave of fear hit Aspen, even though she could detect nothing immediately threatening about the man in front of her.
He was shorter than she was, his skin deeply bronzed, black hair slicked back in sharp waves. When he placed his hands on the counter they curled in towards his wrists, looking like claws. The black fabric of his suit was completely devoid of any lint or stray hairs, as if he’d meticulously picked off each and every piece. A necklace clacked around his neck as he leaned over the counter. More teeth.
“Ah…Isak,” he said in a soft eastern European accent, “my favorite customer.”
“Don’t you mean favorite snack?”
The man inclined his head, seeming to concede the point, yet not looking like he was sorry at all.
“You decipher my words like a master linguist. And who is your beautiful friend?”
Aspen’s breath caught. Her heart sped up. Beautiful? Did he think she was beautiful? No one had ever called her that. But the way the man’s eyes—flecked with gold and full of the promise of any deepest desire fulfilled—gazed at her, spoke to his belief in what he’d said. Beautiful…She was beautiful. Did Isak think she was beautiful—
“Stop it, Car,” Isak said. His strong hand gently squeezed Aspen’s shoulder. Her world blurred, the haze in her mind clearing. Suddenly the man’s easy smile seemed more predatory than friendly. He was looking at her face intently, lapping up her expression as if it were a puddle of blood leaking from an open wound.
“We’re not here for mind games,” Isak went on. His hand lingered on Aspen a moment longer. When he removed it, she felt cold.
“My apologies. My manners have been lacking lately.” The demon gave an elaborate bow, contorting his body in a way no human could have to fit in the cramped space behind the counter. “My name is Carsisiphus, demon of the fourth circle and owner of this fine establishment. You may call me Car.”
He made a motion as though he wished to take Aspen’s hand. She didn’t give it.
“We need information,” Isak said.
“You need many things, but that is the most pressing. Yes…yes…I can see it fresh and clear in your mind’s eye.” His lips curled into a smile that almost touched his ears, revealing raw-flesh colored gums. “Information like what you seek…information so…ancient, comes at a steep cost. But for one of my best customers, I suppose I could part with it for a price nominal its going rate. Same as last time, Isak?”
Aspen’s stomach dropped. “You don’t mean…his soul?”
Car frowned, wrinkling his already cracked face. “My dear, you’re quite fresh to this game, aren’t you? If the boy had previously given me his soul, do you think I’d want it again? No, no, no, let God and Satan have their eternal tug of war. I want something more immediate, more tangible.”
He leaned across the table, once again baring his teeth in a horrible smile. “I deal in dreams, girl, memories and the like, the more intense and horrible the more succulent. Such depth of emotions is quite foreign to me, you see. But when I have but a small taste it’s…intoxicating.”
“Just one, Car,” Isak said, rolling up his sleeve. “No more.”
Car slowly withdrew across the counter and turned his attention to Isak who had almost gotten his sleeve up past his shoulder, up near his heart. Even more tattoos wrapped their way around there, reaching from the line of his ribs up toward his face, strangling his neck. They appeared deeply imprinted, as though they’d been gouged there.
“Wait, you’re giving him a memory?” Aspen said, taken aback.
“Just one,” Isak emphasized. “I’ve got plenty.”
“Will it be a sweet one this time?” Car said, licking his lips. “You know how I just love those.”
“The sweetest,” Isak promised.
“Oh, the parents,” Car said. “You do so love those memories, but they are the tastiest. I won’t forget this, my boy, I may even throw in a bonus—”
“Wait—you can’t.” Aspen pushed in front of Isak. She lowered her voice to him. “What are you doing, Isak?”
“Getting what we came here for,” he said gruffly, not looking at her. “Just let me handle this. I know what I’m doing.”
Aspen could only stare at him, aghast. “They’re your parents. You can’t give those memories away! If you have to use a…I don’t know, use a less potent one!”
“Car won’t take them and he’s the best information dealer in this city. We can’t go anywhere else.” He smiled, almost sadly. “I’ve got lots, Aspen, really—”
“And each one is precious!”
The corners of her eyes were stinging now. Xavier might have been a substitute father to Isak, but he must have had real family at some point. Must have been loved and cared for. “If I had any more memories of my parents, I’d guard them with my life,” she said fiercely.
But now Isak seemed determined not to listen. He shouldered his way in front of her and held out his bare arm. Car leaned forward, his mouth widening. Isak shifted his body away from Aspen just as there was a squelch of teeth hitting flesh. Isak shuddered. His face went white, then gray. It was almost like she was watching the memory he was giving Car being drained out of him, leeching into his arm and away.
Aspen stood frozen with indecision. Car needed potent memory? A painful memory? She had that, but was it something she could bear to part with? She could give him a taste, just enough that it took the edge off the pain of remembering it, but not so much that she forgot. It was better than knowing somebody else had given up something precious to them and she had stood by and done nothing.
Isak had slumped down the side of the counter, as if Car was leeching past his memory and had now started sucking his life force. He let out a groan.
Aspen couldn’t take it anymore.
She threw off the left side of her jacket, rolling up her sleeve before shoving Isak aside. There was a sound like suction disengaging. Isak stumbled away from the counter, bleary-eyed. The color began to return to his face.
“Aspen…? Wh-What are you doing?”
Aspen thrust her arm in front of Car. The demon, his lips engorged with feeding, didn’t hesitate. His eyes bulged, his jaws unhinging and teeth elongating into rows and rows of needle-sharp points.
Then he clamped down on Aspen’s forearm.
The Discovery
There was surprisingly little pain. She felt separate from her body as she sank back into herself, letting the darkness take over.
She saw a man and a woman standing in a bright, colorful garden. It was summertime. The sun scorched the earth. The flowers were blooming. Beyond the white fence over her shoulder, Aspen could see a glittering lake. A single, secluded road rounded gently through hills of green.
This wasn’t her memory. The people in front of her weren’t her Mom and Dad. They must have been Isak’s. She must have picked up the last bit of the memory Isak had been giving Car and now she was getting to watch them as they slowly ran out of her mind. Even now the figures were disappearing. The entire scene leaked away like running watercolors. Then it began reforming into another.
“I’m warning you. Back off.”
This was the Isak she remembered as a child. His tattoos were not as vivid as they were in the present. He couldn’t have been more than a year older than when she’d first met him in the alleyway, but there were multiple cuts and nicks covering his skin. His expression was fierce and deadly as he stood his ground in the corner of an aba
ndoned room, blocking the way of the two men.
“Isak!” Eve tugged on the hem of his shirt as she struggled to stay standing. Her ankle was swollen. Sprained, maybe. “Isak, I’ll just go with them. You don’t have to—”
“Listen to her, kid,” one of the men said. He took a step closer. “Just let the girlie come with us and that’ll be that. Nobody gets hurt. ‘Specially you.”
Isak ground his jaw. He stepped more in front of Eve.
“Ah, don’t be like that, kid.” The second guy almost sounded sad. “Ya really gonna do this?”
“Start running, Eve,” Isak said. He pushed her away before bringing up his hands and slamming them against the ground. The magic Aspen was used to seeing from him flared to life beneath his feet.
But there was something wrong. This magic was weak and unfocused. It curled from the ground into his hand, but instead of solidifying into a dangerous force it merely sputtered and died.
The men laughed. Isak was still staring at it when the first fist collided with his jaw. He sprawled to the ground. Blood poured from his lip.
“Stupid—little—brat—” one of the men said. Aspen could see now that they weren’t men at all, but trolls. Their gray skin was covered with bits of branches growing up and down their arms. Wide jaws like bricks expanded from bulbous skulls with tiny, malicious eyes deeply set in their sockets.
“That was supposed to be our sacrifice this month,” the other troll said, giving Isak another kick that made him whimper and try to cover his head. “Pretty little thing like that? Would have made Jarjur very happy, that would have.”
The first troll bent over and grabbed the top of Isak’s head, lifting him up so that he was dangling in front of them by his hair.
“You’re much uglier,” the first troll said. “But maybe Jarjur will be happy with you.”
“Yeah!” the second one agreed gleefully. “He’s a kid, right? Maybe Jarjur will like this one.” He licked his lips. “Maybe I’ll like this one—”
Something struck the first troll, causing him to squeal and drop Isak. Aspen’s vision was overtaken by bright sputtering flashes of light as multiple spells careened toward them. There was a pair of pained squeals, then nothing.
Isak picked himself up and nearly fell again. The two trolls lay motionless at his feet.
“They’re merely stunned,” a cold voice said.
Aspen’s heart stopped as Xavier stepped into view. He looked much the same as she remembered him. Cruel eyes calculating, mouth held in an almost permanent sneer. “I had to stun them so they wouldn’t hurt you.”
Isak took another look at the troll’s blank, horrified final expressions. Their bodies held an unnatural stillness.
“Merely stunned,” Xavier repeated. “To protect you. They were evil creatures, who would have done terrible, terrible things to you and your friends. I had to step in.”
Isak slowly nodded.
“But you weren’t going to let that happen, were you, Isak? You were prepared to die for your friend. You, a product of this broken world. But perhaps a useful one...”
Isak finally found his voice. “How do you know my name?”
“I’ve been watching you for some time.”
“Pervert!” Isak spat.
Xavier chuckled. “Just an interested party, I assure you. I am a Mage, Isak, one who wants to offer you a very unique proposition—”
“Prove it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Prove you’re a Mage. Anybody ‘round here can say they’re whatever they want to be. Those guys,” he resisted looking at the trolls as he nudged his head their direction, “they said they just wanted to give us some food.”
Though Aspen wasn’t in her body, she felt the tension rise as Xavier slowly raised his hand. “You’d like me to prove it?”
Suddenly the entire room erupted in light and sound. Magic coiled up the walls. Fire sprang from beneath the brick and wood, consuming the trolls in an instant and blasting Isak back with the sheer power and heat. Shadows rose up from the cracks in the floor and danced, their dark mouths twisted into snarling sneers. A few slithered toward Isak as he cowered in the corner.
“I am a Mage, boy!” Xavier thundered. “And you’d do best to respect my power.”
“Okay!” Isak yelled, trying to shield himself from the closest shadows. “I’m sorry, you’re a Mage! I get it, I’m sorry!”
Xavier waved his hand and the magic vanished. He stepped up to the cringing Isak. He looked down at him with a mixture of disgust and what might have been approval.
“What I offer is something many would die to accept. Come with me and you will wield power like mine. You will wield that pain you feel. Come with me and you will taste power and find it sweet nectar. You will never know fear again. You will be there to protect the weak of the world. You will remold it into a better place.”
Despite everything she knew about Xavier, Aspen found herself silently willing Isak to take his hand. The tear-stained, broken boy lying in a huddled ball before her needed him. He had needed Xavier, for better or for worse.
Isak reached up—
Aspen’s vision snapped back to reality. The present day Isak lay across her on the floor of Car’s shop. She could feel the heavy press of another body beside her, latched onto her arm, heaving up and down like it was pumping something from her. With every pump it felt like something else left her. The sensation was not unpleasant.
“Enough!” Isak wheezed. Seconds must have passed since she’d shoved him aside. He had just managed to stumble up. He tried making his way toward her. “Car, I said…”
Aspen’s eyelids closed and she let her mind fall back into the blackness. Now her selected memory welled to the front of her mind.
She was seven again, and scared. Terrified. Her skin burned. Her throat was raw. Her home burned into ashes around her. She blinked to clear her vision and there they were. Her parents’ charred bodies, blackened into unrecognizable lumps of flesh.
Perhaps it was because it was a memory, or perhaps because she had replayed this particular one over so many times in her head that she felt nothing at seeing them like that anymore. She was like a director with a script, knowing everything that was about to happen before it did.
There were her parents’ bodies, in the same place they always were.
There was Xavier, stepping through the window
There he turned to launch magic back outside.
The memory was turning gray now. All of the colors were beginning to lose their luster, as though being drained away elsewhere. She could still make out most of the memory, but it was growing more difficult to see any defined shapes.
There was Xavier beating her up and leaving her to die.
That’s enough, a part of her mind told her. She needed to stop here. If she let Car keep feeding, let him take this part of her memory, she’d forget why she hated Xavier, forget why she wanted so desperately to be a Mage.
“Stop!” She shouted. “No more, Car! No more!”
She might as well have shouted into a void.
The memory continued to play. Aspen stared at her seven-year-old self, curled in the center of the burning floor. She had never seen the memory from this angle. By now she should have passed out. By now…
Someone else was clambering through the window. The grayness of the memory was such that it distorted everything. Aspen squinted, trying in vain to make the person clearer. Was it someone from outside? Was it Brune?
“I said enough!”
She was back in reality. Isak was pulling her body across the floor, putting himself between her and Car.
“I told you that was enough, Car!” Isak roared.
“Delicious…” Car murmured. Aspen could faintly hear the sound of him slurping up something just behind the counter. The part of him she could see was hunched over, covered in leathery, pockmarked skin.
“You are a delicacy to be savored, Aspen Rivest,” Car said. “I did not take much
, but still…so much pain. So much delicious…potency.”
“Aspen?” Isak hovered over her. He looked concerned and…terrified? Was that it? But why was he so terrified? For her?
“Aspen, can you hear—”
“Yeah, I can hear you.” She touched the side of her head. For a brief second there was the sensation of a gaping hole in her chest, like something had been dislodged before settling back in place. “You don’t have to yell, I’m right here.”
Isak heaved a sigh. Then he bellowed, making her jerk in place, “You idiot! If you’d wanted to kill yourself you should have let me do it earlier, not feed yourself to a demon!”
“As if you’re good enough to kill me,” Aspen managed. But he could, right now, if he’d wanted to. There was nothing stopping him, and her body felt woozy, like she was drifting pieces of land slowly finding each other again. And yet she felt safer here, held by him, than she had anywhere else in a long time.
There was a slight smile on Isak’s face now. “If I was good enough…right. Can you get up?”
“Yeah…I think I need air.”
“Please, use the back door to the alleyway,” Car said. He still remained stooped out of sight. “Just give me a moment to compose myself.”
Leaning on Isak’s shoulder, Aspen awkwardly limped through the curtains, past a cramped office, and out the back to a small alleyway running the length of the rear of the shops. The moment the warm air hit her face, she sighed. Her mind was clearer now. She took the chance to cycle through her memories, cataloguing those she still held.
Most about that day were still there. Her parents’ death. Xavier. But everything was a bit more muddled and grainy, lacking the usual color and clarity. There were also gaps missing. The second person in the fire wasn’t any clearer, and Aspen mulled over whether there had ever really been a second figure at all, or it was just an extra Car had implanted in her memory. Because how could she have seen them if she had never really seen them before? Other than that the rest of the memory appeared to be intact. But would she even remember if it wasn’t?
Mage's Apprentice (Mages of New York Book 1) Page 17
