by Nazri Noor
He shrugged. “Neither did I until she showed up one day saying that she was backing off from Lorica duty for a while. Said she needed to help her grandma at the shop.”
That’s right. Madam Chien was the diminutive yet headstrong proprietor of an apothecary out in Little China. A mage and martial artist herself, Madam Chien cared deeply for Prudence, and I knew that the feeling was mutual. If she needed time off to be with her grandma, then I wasn’t going to probe any further. That was between them, and probably Gil, I guess.
At the Boneyard, I showed Carver the black dots that Izanami’s touch had left in my skin.
“Think of them as bruises,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Dustin. She’s a death goddess. She didn’t need to touch you to kill you. A look would have sufficed.”
I shuddered.
“And she is correct. The world needs you alive, to settle this.” His expression went heavy, and he placed a hand on my arm. “I know this is a lot to bear, Dustin. But you must know that your friends are here to support you through this.”
I gaped for a moment. That sort of mushy talk wasn’t characteristic of Carver at all. So I only pressed my lips together, careful not to ruin the moment, and nodded.
“Now, as for this list. I’ve made a copy,” he said, gesturing to his eye. The thing had so many uses: scrying, telescopic vision, and apparently it worked like a digital camera, too? Note to self, I thought. If I ever lost an eye – knock on wood – I would have to hit Carver up for the recipe on making a magical bionic one for myself.
“My understanding, as is yours, is that it is meant to guide you through enchanting an artifact, one meant for sealing, for erecting a barrier against the Old Ones. This must be exciting for you.”
Something gleamed in his eyes then, and I caught it, too. I saw a flicker of the professor Carver always wanted to be. If there was one thing he enjoyed more than kicking my ego into the dirt, it was teaching, and knowing that the rest of us were learning from him.
“Rest for now,” he continued. “We will examine this in detail in the morning.”
And like a good boy I followed orders, retiring to my bedroom – where, for some reason, Asher was already waiting.
Chapter 15
“Fun night?” he said. He was peering at the stuff on my shelves when I caught him – not touching, mind you, because Asher’s polite like that.
I thought back to Izanami’s true face and grimaced. “Fun. Yeah. That’s one way to put it. What’s up?”
He shrugged. “Nothing huge. I just wanted to ask you something I didn’t get to back in Latham’s Cross. Your mom, Diana.” He pursed his lips, like he was hesitating, but quickly pressed on again. “I’m sure you miss her.” He gestured at one of the framed pictures on my shelves. “This is her, right?”
I nodded. “Yes, to both of those questions. I miss her a whole lot.”
“Right,” he said. “Right. I miss my mom, too. Explains why I just can’t let go of her, you know?” He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly.
“No,” I said. “I get that. It’s completely understandable.”
I hadn’t known until that moment that Asher still spoke to the shade of his mother. I saw it in action when I first met him. Well, I didn’t really see anything, per se – only Asher could see her. And he’d explained since then that it wasn’t actually her spirit. Mrs. Mayhew had moved on long ago. This was only a facsimile, a recording of her memories.
“Thanks,” he said. “I mean in a way it feels like I’m honoring her memories, but in others, it’s like I’m keeping her here. I know she’s gone, you know? But I don’t know if it’s helpful to hang on to her like this.”
I sat on the edge of my bed, patting it to get him to join me. “Something’s up,” I said. “Or you wouldn’t be talking like this.”
“It’s,” he started to say. The mattress dipped as he sat. “It’s nothing. Kind of embarrassing, honestly.”
I furrowed my eyebrows. “Listen. You’re basically a little brother to me. If you can’t tell me what the problem is, fine – that stings a little. But there’s always Sterling.”
“That’s just it,” Asher wailed, falling backwards onto my bed with a soft thump. He threw his hands over his face, massaging his temples. “This isn’t something I can talk about with my mom, and Sterling would just make fun of me for it. And Gil – well, he’s great and all, but he’s not close enough for me to ask about something like this. And – ”
Asher babbled on, saying a whole lot of something about nothing, his skin turning ruddier and ruddier as he went on. Was he blushing? Man. I knew what this was about. I thumped him lightly in the stomach with a fist.
“Shut up. I know what’s going on.”
His fingers parted, and he peeked out from between them with one guilty-looking eye. “You do?” he said meekly.
“Your crush on Romira.”
He sat bolt upright, his eyes huge. “How did you know?”
I chuckled, buffing my nails against my shirt as I took off my jacket. “Oh, you know. Cuz I’m so smart. And observant. And super handsome.”
He scratched the end of his nose. “Am I that obvious?”
“Little bit. You get all bashful around her, always blushing and shit. It’s cute.”
“Yeah? Well not cute enough, apparently. I guess she’s with Royce now.”
“I know, right? Interesting choice.” I pulled Asher in closer, slinging an arm over his shoulder, mussing his hair with my other hand. “Listen. Buddy. There’s plenty of fish in the sea. All we gotta do is expand your circle. You don’t know a lot of girls. That’s all it is. But there’s billions of them out there.”
“Billions,” he murmured into the sleeve of my shirt, clearly unconvinced.
“Actual billions. Come on. Snap out of it. It’s just a crush. It’ll pass.”
He wriggled his way out from under my arm, suddenly defiant. “Aww, like you would know. When is yours going to pass?”
I blinked at him. “Mine? My what?”
“Your crush on Igarashi.”
I didn’t need to look in a mirror to know that my face had gone bright red. “I – I don’t know what,” I tried to say, stammering.
Asher rolled his eyes. “Oh, get over it. Stop denying it. There’s something going on there, it’s so obvious. I was with you guys at the diner. Back when we had pecan pie, remember?”
I pressed my lips together and shook my head, suddenly the defiant one myself.
“Please,” Asher said, rising from the bed, folding his arms across his chest. “You can’t pull one over on me. I’m smart. And observant. And super handsome.”
“You take that back,” I said, brandishing a finger at him like a dagger. “Those are my words. No, you give them back. I don’t know where you’re getting your ideas from, but Herald and I are just – ”
“Tiger.”
“What?”
Asher flung his wrist out at my bed, where the tiger that I’d stolen from the carnival sat grumpily against one of my pillows.
“That tiger was clearly meant for him. It’s so obvious, and you’re just waiting for the next time you see him to give it over. But for now you’re sleeping with it like – like it’s a replacement Herald.”
“A fucking tiger?” I smacked myself on the forehead. “A replacement for Herald? What are you even talking about?”
“You should just go see him and give it over,” Asher said, an irritatingly smug smile forming on his lips. “Then again, might not make sense, because then, what would you have to snuggle with at night?”
“You’re such a child, Mayhew,” I said. My voice was getting louder, too. “Leave me and Mister Grumbles alone.”
Asher laughed out loud. “It has a name?”
I flicked a marble-sized ball of flame at his back as he scrambled for the doorway, fleeing from the sight of my massive, and surely very intimidating scowl. It missed, but I meant to do that. Annoying as that exchange had been, I wasn�
��t about to set Asher on fire. I made sure to make a loud, decisive “Harrumph” as I slammed my bedroom door shut.
With narrowed eyes I took off my backpack and let Vanitas out, daring him to say something. He floated over to his stone shelf wordlessly, but he was still laughing audibly in my mind.
“Traitor,” I grumbled.
“Liar,” he chuckled back.
Frowning, I brushed my teeth, sloughed off my clothes, and threw myself into bed, still irrationally annoyed over – what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. Whatever, man. I just needed sleep. That was all. It’d been a long day, and I was just tired. That was it.
I stretched over to my end table, clicking off the lamp. I mentally bid Vanitas good night, despite his small betrayal.
I reached for Mister Grumbles, then went to sleep.
Chapter 16
“Hmm. This is quite something. Hmm.”
Madam Chien held the Glovebox napkin up to a light, almost like she was examining a dollar bill to see if it was counterfeit. I peered over her shoulder, curious about what she was seeing, when she whipped around and gave me a hard stare.
“You say you got this from a death goddess?”
“Right,” I said, nodding. “Izanami. Pretty sure she’s their pantheon’s mother goddess, too.”
“Hmm.” Madam Chien rubbed her chin, her tiny, half-moon glasses glinting in the strange, soothing amber light of her apothecary. “I do not think that an entity of that much power would steer you wrong. I believe it is safe to say that this list is genuine, quite something that may be used in the interest of protecting our world from the Old Ones.” She held the napkin out for me, her lips pursing with distaste. “The true challenge, of course, is the difficulty of collecting these reagents.”
Sure, no small feat. After waking up that morning I’d spent a good chunk of the day exhausting the arcane underground’s avenues for rare and exotic ingredients. Carver didn’t have any of them in his laboratory, and even Sterling scratched his head, stumped, when I showed him the list. We’d thought of visiting the Black Market, over in Silk Road, but on Gil’s suggestion figured it’d be a good idea to check in with Madam Chien first, just in case she had any ideas.
The scent of incense filled my nostrils as I inhaled slowly, then let my shoulders sag with a burdened sigh. For all the jars and bottles and phials of rare, bizarre reagents Prudence’s grandmother kept in her shop, her stock clearly wasn’t going to help with our case very much.
Izanami’s recipe called, first of all, for a base item. Well and good, as all enchantments go. You need to anchor the magic to some object, someplace to keep it still and inert until the time you’ll need to use it. Anything could work, of course – a glass orb, a crystal, a dagger – but I figured I would use something that was already close to my heart.
I chose my mother’s amulet, the star-metal necklace she wore so often, and the same source of corruption that slowly brought her doom. Grisly, I suppose, but it felt appropriate. Wearing the thing was like being in constant mourning, feeling the cold of the metal and its single garnet jewel against my chest. It was all I truly had to remember her by, yet keeping it only kept the memory of her painful death alive. As keepsakes went, it was explicitly bittersweet.
The second and third ingredients we’d hoped to find at Madam Chien’s, but she’d patiently, almost angrily explained that those simply weren’t practical to source and to stock. I believed her.
“Grandma’s right,” Prudence offered. “I don’t even know how you would begin to extract, what was it again?” She took the napkin from me, reading incredulously. “Screams of anguish. What the fuck?”
Madam Chien rapped her soundly across the forearm. Prudence flinched and whined.
“Language,” her grandmother barked.
“I’m grown up now, Grandma,” she said, pouting. Prudence. Pouting! “And please don’t embarrass me in front of my friends.”
I had to hide my smile. It was kind of cute seeing Prudence all flustered like that. She was always so in control, so in charge of herself and her work, but I guess her hiatus meant that old habits and behaviors were steadily finding their way back to her.
Gil took the napkin from her, rubbing her arm briefly where Madam Chien had struck it. “And this – this is even worse,” he said. “The breath of the dying. This has to be some kind of sick joke.”
“Unlikely,” Madam Chien said, folding her arms, her cloud of white hair jiggling as she shook her head. “Izanami is powerful and learned in the ways of these things. If she says that this is required – ”
Her voice trailed off as her eyes returned to me, no longer as hard as before, but almost, I don’t know, sympathetic.
“You will need to gather these ingredients yourself, Dustin.” She took the napkin from Gil, handing it back to me again, then wrapping her hands around mine. “But you must be careful. The methods of collecting these substances? I am sure you can imagine that they are deeply profane. Forbidden. The Lorica must never find out.”
Sterling scoffed. “Pssh. Easy peasy. We’ll go find someone to beat up, then siphon their psychic vapors while they’re screaming.” He leaned closer to Madam Chien, tapping her on the shoulder. I wouldn’t have done that – I figured Sterling would be lucky to retrieve his arm and still have his entire hand up to the wrist. “Do you have some kind of enchanted phial we can use to collect that stuff? I’ll go find someone we can smash up. No problem.”
The slap came furiously quick, and I’m pretty sure everyone but Sterling and Madam Chien let out a tiny gasp. I cringed, my insides wriggling, my skin all but peeling off my body. I watched, and waited, but Sterling’s gaze only stayed glued to the floor.
“Do not joke about this, blood boy,” Madam Chien said coldly. “It is a serious matter. The collection of pain is not something simply done while it is inflicted. The quality of the pain matters. Some street thrashing cannot compare.” She dusted her hands off, folded her arms, then harrumphed. “Only the screams that come from someone in truly agonizing pain will do. Excruciating labor. Vivisection.” She exhaled slowly, in a single shuddering breath. “Torture.”
Prudence and Gil stood as still as statues, and I joined them in eyeing Sterling. He was rubbing at his cheek, the pallor of his skin slightly reddened by the slap. He looked crestfallen, for once, his shoulders drooped, his lips pursed in a small pout. Repentant, even. I’d never felt worse for him. He even seemed shorter.
Prudence cleared her throat. “I don’t know if that was necessary, Grandma.”
She looked at Prudence, then switched her laser glare to Sterling, who flinched. “If it was to impress the severity of the situation – to show that sealing the Old Ones out of our world is truly important, and no laughing matter – then I say that one slap wasn’t enough.”
“I’m sorry,” Sterling said softly, still rubbing his cheek. “I know. It’s nothing to joke about.” He looked to me next, his gaze somehow more resolute. “But what do we do, then?”
“We check the Black Market,” Gil said, the thick, tense air finally pushed out of the room now that all of us were back in the conversation. “See if anyone has anything in stock. Surely there’ll be at least one person there who deals in the really, really dark stuff.”
I wasn’t so sure about that, but it was exactly what we did. Well, after Sterling had a little talk with Madam Chien, that is. By the end of it she was patting him on the back of the hand, rubbing his cheek tenderly and making odd cooing noises.
One eyebrow raised, I elbowed him as we got out of the car and stepped into Silk Road. “What the hell was that all about then? With Prudence’s grandma.”
Sterling shrugged as he lit a cigarette. “Dunno. I just don’t like people being mad at me, I guess.”
Odd response, I thought, and one that I would have expected from Asher, and never from Sterling. I kept my smile to myself. Maybe Asher’s sweetness was rubbing off on him. Imagine that: Sterling, being sweet. I shuddered.
Yet headin
g all the way to Silk Road and combing practically the entirety of the Black Market turned out to be useless in the end. Madam Chien was right. Even a bazaar as diverse and – well, bizarre as the Black Market didn’t trade in things like the breath of the dying, or the screams of those in truest pain.
Sterling, Gil, and I got several uncomfortable looks each time we asked. There was no way to be subtle with it, too. One wizard reached under his desk for a gnarled wand, fixing us with warning stares and very pointedly telling us to leave. And so we did, empty-handed.
I ruffled my hair in frustration as we left the void of the Black Market and reentered Valero’s reality. One whole day spent on nothing. Meanwhile the Eldest were somewhere beyond our atmosphere, charging their fucked-up orbital laser, waiting for the right time to strike. We’d gotten jack shit done.
For what must have been the hundredth time that night, I sighed again.
“At least we have two ingredients,” Gil offered helpfully.
He was right. We had the amulet, and a lock of hair, freely given by a powerful being. It was anyone’s guess how Arachne could have possibly known, but she set me up in the best possible way all that time ago. She didn’t actually want the hair from Nyx, the goddess of the night.
In her own terrifying, precognitive way, Arachne must have known that I would need a lock of goddess hair sooner or later. I reached for it, somewhere in the depths of my backpack, sensing the warmth of the stars woven through Nyx’s hair under the pads of my fingers. Good. So it was still there, and in one piece.
But again: we still needed two incredibly rare, and incredibly incriminating ingredients. I was so distracted that I couldn’t remember what Sterling and Gil were talking about just then, and I just blurted it out.
“I’m not killing anyone,” I said. “Not for this. I’m not torturing anyone, either. This is fucked.” I pushed my hair back against my scalp, raking my fingernails across my skin in frustration. “No. We’re fucked.”
Gil’s huge, heavy hand clapped me on the shoulder. “Hey. We’ll find a way, okay? Despair doesn’t look good on you. Come on.”
