The Circle

by Val St. Crowe

  He licked his lips. “I mean…”

  “It was,” I said. “Does it hurt?”

  “I just…” He got up and went to his refrigerator. He rummaged through until he came out with a can of beer. He opened it.

  “You can’t talk about it unless you drink?”

  “It wasn’t pleasant,” he said. “But I got through it.”

  “And your demon, it’s locked away by spells, invisible in its spirit form, undetectable, but with you always.”

  “No,” he said. “I mean, I think people used to keep the demons close, but now there’s a family vault, protected by spells. You didn’t know this?”

  I shook my head. “Enid and I had to learn everything second hand. So, you don’t have to be close to the demon?”

  “No.”

  “But I don’t even have a vault.”

  He took a drink of his beer. “Yeah, I didn’t think about that.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m not lacing. I’m not tying myself to a demon forever, making it so I’ll die if I detach. No way. I’ll find some other way to increase my power.”

  “Maybe you could lace to a demonborn,” he said.

  I turned to him sharply. “What? That’s possible?”

  “That’s why I got a beer, actually,” he said, throwing himself back on the couch. “Talking about lacing ceremonies always makes me think of the first one.”

  “The first one?”

  “It didn’t work,” he said. “I couldn’t do it. You know, my mother is, um, is dead.”

  “Oh, wow, I’m sorry.” I sat down on the couch next to him. “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, how could you? I don’t like to talk about it,” he said. “When I came out to my parents, I was ten. My mother was cool with it. Really supportive. She was on board. My father, on the other hand, he thought I was too young to be sure about anything. He accepts it all now, and he tries, but he’s uncomfortable about my sexuality.”

  “That sucks,” I said.

  “I mean, he loves me. He didn’t disown me or anything, or try to fix me. It could be worse.”

  “Sure, it could always be worse, but it doesn’t make things stop hurting now.”

  “True,” he said. “Anyway, my mother passed away right before I was supposed to be laced, and my father thought that the demonborn thing would be easier for me, because it’s, you know, more physical and straightforward. Apparently, you can lace to them by kissing, but that’s got to be given freely.”

  “Given freely?” I felt an uncomfortable niggle at my neck. “How else can you lace to a demonborn?”

  “You have sex with one,” he said.

  I pulled back, making a face. “That’s… that’s…”

  “They’re not like demons. They’re not spirit. They’re corporeal. They’re magical beings, but they’re like humans except for their wings. And if you, you know, have sex with one of them, you lace. It just happens.”

  “But they would never allow someone—”

  “No.”

  I got up off the couch.

  “I didn’t do it!” He spread his hands. “I couldn’t. I mean, they were all female. I guess it’s easier that way. Maybe you can’t force a guy, or maybe you can but no one wants to, I don’t know, but they were female and they were all unconscious, held in some kind of magical stasis. All I had to do was…”

  I backed away from him, backed up until my body collided with the wall.

  “Maybe I could be with a woman if she was into it, you know? I mean, if you close your eyes, it all feels…” He downed the rest of his beer. “But I couldn’t. I mean, I physically could not—”

  “Stop,” I said.

  It was quiet.

  I stalked across the room and opened his refrigerator. I took out a beer for myself and opened it. I took a drink and it was disgusting. I forced myself to swallow it.

  “I didn’t do it,” he said again, quietly.

  “I know,” I said.

  “Demonborn are trying to kill us all,” he said.

  “I know.” I drank more of the beer, choking down the bitter liquid. I didn’t like demonborn, but this was the same thing as that slug. Treating them this way, using them against their will, it wasn’t right. There were some things that you didn’t do because you didn’t want them to mark your own soul with their darkness. There were some lines you didn’t cross. “Demonborn killed my parents.”

  We were quiet again.

  “Well, I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “I would never lace that way.” I grimaced, though, as another thought went through me. Was it better with a demon? I had always thought of the demons as something other. They were spirit, and they weren’t like us. But the fact that demons and humans could mate, it meant that we weren’t so different. I had never wanted to demonlace because of what it would do to me, but now I found myself uncomfortable with the idea of imprisoning the demon.

  Enslaving the demon, forcing it to a witch’s will.

  Maybe it was all appalling.

  “I… have to go,” I said, setting down my half-drunk beer on the counter.

  “Hey, no,” he said, coming to me and taking both of my hands. “Come on, don’t be like that. You’re all weird with me. I didn’t do it.”

  “It’s not about you,” I said. “It’s bigger than you or me or…” I shook my head. “This whole place, this whole society, everything about it is rotten to the core.”

  He let my hands drop.

  “You’re a good guy, Lev,” I said. “And I know you can’t unlace without killing yourself, but that demon you have tied to you… I’m sure it doesn’t want to serve you and give you its magic, you know? Why do we have the right to impose our will on other beings like that?”

  “Hey, come on, demons used to be dangerous. They would possess people and wreak all kinds of havoc,” he said. “Now, they steer clear unless they’re summoned. We’ve made the world safer.”

  “Yeah, because we’re so much better than the demons.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I’m going to go to the library,” I said. “If there’s any way to get power without lacing, I’m going to find a way.”

  “There’s not, Suther, you know there’s not.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  I didn’t even know where to begin in the library. I looked up keywords on the computer system, and I found that there were books written about lacing, but I didn’t want to know more about lacing. I tried looking for power acquisition, and all that came up were a bunch of books about black magic. I didn’t want to do that either. There had to be some way to get power that didn’t involve killing or enslaving some other being.

  But I wasn’t sure if there was. It was basic physics after all. Energy could be neither created nor destroyed. It could only change form. If magic was bound to the rules of the universe, then magic had to come from somewhere. It didn’t simply float around in the ether, waiting to be harnessed. I had to power it somehow.

  I started thinking about alternative sources of electricity, though. Windmills and solar power and rushing water. Was there a way to harness that to make magic work? It was quite possible that no one had ever really explored that, considering demonlacing dated back to before the discovery of electricity. Could electricity power magic?

  I wondered.

  But I wasn’t likely to find a book about it. No, if I was going to figure this out, I would need to do my own experimentation, and I wasn’t sure how to even attempt that. It wasn’t as if I had a lot of extra time, between trying to solve my sister’s murder and doing my school work.

  I sat down at a table in the library, which was mostly empty. I guessed students at Hellespointe didn’t much go for reading books. Didn’t surprise me. Doing research was effort, and the occultist community seemed to be all about shortcuts.

  A book was sitting out on the table next to mine, and I realized it was last year’s yearbook. Curious, I picked it up and paged through.

 
; A picture of Enid caught me by surprise and I let the book fall onto the table, still open on the picture of her. I had picked the book up to see her, but looking at her, smiling at the camera, so full of life, it was painful.

  Enid was in a picture with Tess and Dr. Abbadon. He was in between the two girls, grinning, and they were both leaning in and smiling, posing for whoever took the picture. The caption said, Help with the semester project! L to R: Enid Astaroth, Dr. Abbadon, Tess Crowley.

  Wait a second. Tess and my sister had been partners on the semester project? Really?

  I looked at the copy block on the page, which was a spread all about the spring semester project for that year. It explained that Dr. Abbadon had been the professor of the course in the spring and that the project had been astral projection. All the other pictures were of partners, so it stood to reason that Enid and Tess had worked together.

  I wondered if Tess would be willing to talk to me. I didn’t know what to think of her. She seemed like your typical airhead, but she had seemed so sad at the party.

  Of course, she was the one involved with some jerk of a guy. She should dump him.

  A shadow fell over me, and I jumped.

  “I went to your room, but you weren’t there. The guy across the hall, that gay guy, what’s his name? Levi?” It was Phist. He adjusted the collar of his leather jacket, peering down at me.

  “Lev,” I said.

  “Yeah, he said you were at the library. He also seemed drunk. Getting an early start.” Phist sat down at the table next to me. “Anyway, I came here, looking for you.”

  “What do you want with me?” I said.

  “We’re doing a project together,” he said, giving me a lopsided smile. “Or did you forget?”

  “I’m just here looking for ways to kill you, that’s all.”

  “Well, how could I possibly interrupt that?” He was amused.

  I sighed heavily.

  He leaned in, propping his elbows on the table. “So, you’re going to kill me, huh?”

  “I thought we’d already established that.” I didn’t like it when he was close.

  “How are you going to do it?” His voice had dropped to a deep, rich whisper.

  I looked at his lips. I looked at his shoulders. “Haven’t decided yet.”

  “Is it going to be messy?” His lips parted. “Is there going to be a lot of blood?” He ran his tongue over his teeth. “Will it hurt?”

  “Yes,” I said, but my voice had somehow gotten very breathy. “That’s what you deserve, after all.”

  His face twitched. He pulled back. Now his voice was normal. “You’re not going to figure out how to kill me in the yearbook.”

  I slammed it closed. “I was just looking at—” I sniffed. “You know what? It’s none of your business.”

  “So, you want to take a break from planning murder in the first degree and look for potion ingredients?”

  “Potion for what?”

  He reached into his pocket and got out his phone. He pulled up something on the screen and showed it to me. It was a picture of a handwritten spell. There was a list of scrawled ingredients and a set of directions. “It’s for transmogrify.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Online,” he said.

  “You’re lying,” I said.

  “A friend,” he said. “I couldn’t take you along to meet up with him. He would have eaten you up and spit out your bones.”

  “Thanks for that visual.”

  He laughed. “So, you up for this? The prizes for the semester project, not sure if you know, but there’s usually cash involved. I could use it.”

  He really didn’t have money? I could hardly believe that.

  “If you don’t help, I’m not splitting the prize money with you.”

  I cocked my head. “And it’s like you’re actually just a guy in a class, not an evil killer who does human sacrifice.”

  “I don’t do human sacrifice.” He got up from the table. “I don’t do black magic if I can help it. It’s addictive, you know. The more you do it, the more you want to do it. That bastard with the elephant shark, he’s just a junkie. There are potion ingredients in the basement. You coming or not?”

  * * *

  “So, is there, like, any kind of organization down here?” I said, wrinkling up my nose. The basement was musty and dark, only lit by flickering overhead lights that looked like they’d been installed in 1927. It was full of shelves and the shelves were filled with jars of things. But everything was covered in layers of dust and spiderwebs, as if none of it had been touched in years.

  “What do you mean?” Phist was bending down, squinting at a row of jars on one of the shelves. They were all labeled, and the labels were old. Some were handwritten. Some looked as if they’d been done on a typewriter. None looked as if they’d been made in the past twenty years.

  “I mean, maybe the ingredients are stored in alphabetical order or something like that.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So, how do we find this stuff?”

  “We look,” he said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Listen, there’s a reason everyone else in the school is going to go for black magic on this project,” said Phist. “It’s not easy to do it our way. I thought we were on the same page with the potion.”

  “We are, we are.” I sighed. “Okay, look, divide up the list. Give me half of it, and we can split up, each search half the basement.”

  “But you’ll only be looking for half the ingredients,” he said.

  “Fine, right. Give me the whole list, and we each do half the basement.”

  He considered. “Okay. I guess that works. But I only have the list on my phone.”

  “Send me a copy. Text it to me. Email it to me. Whatever.”

  “I’d have to have your number to do that,” he said, smiling a too-wide smile.

  I glared at him and then rattled off my phone number at breakneck speed.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Now we can sext anytime.”

  “Gross, come on.”

  “You telling me you’re not interested in pictures of my dick? Because I don’t believe you.”

  “If I ever thought about your dick, it was just about cutting it off.”

  “Right, when you murder me,” he said. “Messily and bloodily.”

  My phone beeped, and I jumped.

  He laughed.

  He had texted me the picture of the spell. I pulled it up and scrutinized the ingredients.

  “It wouldn’t really be murder,” I said.

  “Um… I think it would.”

  “No, it would be revenge,” I said. “There’s a difference.”

  “I don’t think there’s a difference to the police.”

  “If we had magical police, I’d go to them. But we don’t. So if I want to find justice for Enid, find closure, then I have to do this myself.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Which side of the basement do you want?” I said.

  “Hey, Suther, it’s not going to matter.”

  “Well, no, but either side is fine with me, so just pick one. Or I can pick one.”

  “I mean, if you did get revenge,” he said. “There won’t be any closure. She’ll still be dead. When people are gone, you can never get them back.”

  “I’m not… that’s not what it’s about.” I gulped. “I’ll take this side, okay?” I gestured.

  He didn’t answer, so I turned my back on him and went off into the other side of the basement.

  I looked at various jars’ labels and tried to breathe evenly, so that my pulse would stop beating so wildly at my wrists and throat. What the hell was it about Phist? He wound me up.

  Time passed. I found a few ingredients.

  My stupid pulse continued to beat out of time.

  And then I squeezed down between two shelves to look at some jars back there. Nothing for the spell, but when I tried to come back out, I was stuck. “Fu
ck,” I said.

  I tried to wriggle my hips, but when I did that, it just shook the jars on the shelf, and I didn’t want to knock them over and break them. For all I knew, when some of these jars broke open, they’d release evil spirits that would possess us both or something.

  “Shit, damn, hell, bitchface,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” came Phist’s mild voice.

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s fine.”

  He appeared at the end of the shelves and looked me over. “Are you stuck?”

  “No,” I said.

  He laughed. “You’re stuck.”

  “I’m not. I’m coming out. It’s just my…” I moved my hips again.

  “Don’t. You’re going to knock something over.” He tapped his chin. “Maybe, um, bend your knees, so that your hips aren’t hitting the shelves. Your waist is, uh…” The bottom went out of his voice. “Smaller.”

  I guessed that made sense, but now we were both looking at my waist, at my torso, at my twelve-year-old figure. I felt heat crawling up my face, but I bent my knees, and now I wasn’t stuck. But I was going to have to duck walk back through there—

  Phist muttered a spell, and magic curled around my waist, pulling me past the shelves, sliding my feet against the floor.

  I collided with him, smack against his chest.

  “There,” he said quietly. “You’re out.”

  Back up, I told myself. Get away from him. But if I backed up, I’d get stuck again. He was blocking my way out, and we were touching. He was warm and firm and I looked up at him and he was gazing down at me from underneath his dark lashes and my pulse was racing now, going four times the speed of before.

  His gaze traveled over my body, and I felt it, like a searing touch, going down from my mouth to my neck to my chest and lower… lower…

  He turned abruptly, clearing his throat. “Uh, you have any luck finding ingredients?”

  “A little,” I said. “I put them over there.”

  “Yeah, great,” he said. “I put mine over there. You want to gather them up for us?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But, I mean, when are we going to make this potion?”

  “Later,” he growled, and he stalked out of the basement. He didn’t look at me, and he didn’t say goodbye.