by Harry Nix
“What the hell is that?” Juno murmured. They were connected still, Juno able to sense his magic to some degree.
“Can you see that? Says pain and it’s full all the way,” Alex said.
“Looks like a tarot card to me. A scarred man holding an overflowing cup with gray liquid pouring out of it, but yeah, it's pain filled to the top,” Juno said.
“But how?”
Juno suddenly smacked her palm to her forehead and then shook her head.
“You were drawing magic to regrow your hand through the pain! I thought you would have needed a pain mage to show you that connection but I guess you figured it out all on your own,” she said.
Alex shook his head, reading the label again: pain. He hadn't noticed any gray sparks the night he’d regrown his hand. But then again, he hadn’t really noticed much except for the sheer agony of it, constantly gulping down bottles of whiskey to numb the pain.
“But I've opened Know Thyself plenty of times since then. Why wasn’t that there before?”
Juno made the familiar sign with their hand again and began pulling out imaginary handkerchiefs.
“Do I need to refer to the aforementioned butt and handkerchiefs? I mean, seriously, you’re getting upgrade points like you’re in a fricking videogame. No one does that! So you connected with the pain and now you have new mana to play with. You need to be really careful. Pain mana is quite powerful but it's an addiction.”
Alex was still pondering how exactly that had happened when his gaze trailed down to Juno's red bottom.
“Maybe it was because you were getting spanked by Nia,” he murmured.
Juno shrugged and ran her hands down his stomach, lightly tickling him.
“I know you want to sleep but you need to go to the lounge to convert some of the rings we bought.”
It was true. Alex felt like if he closed his eyes he’d be gone in an instant. Trying not to grumble he forced himself out of bed and quickly got dressed while Juno crept around gathering her scattered clothing.
He went to the lounge, finding a pile of ten rings sitting on the coffee table. They were all the same – protection rings, three charges.
Knowing it was safe to use the sex magic to edit them he followed his usual process, except using a dose of the red mana to do the job. As with each time he practiced, the amount required decreased. To his surprise he saw it was down to a quarter of the bar, which meant he managed to convert four rings by the time Juno got down to the lounge.
As Alex was doing so, he suddenly realized that the protection ring spells he'd been manipulating were all identical, as though they were made by the same mage, although oddly, there was no scent to them. When Juno had cast cleanse what felt like a lifetime ago, and drawn magic from artifacts he’d smelled roses from a wand and a ring had been sea and salt.
“No way, you did four already?” Juno asked, running her hands over the rings, casting Analyze on them.
“Is there some… mage factory or something that's mass-producing these?” Alex asked. “Because there’s no scent on them. Not like that wand that smelled of roses.”
“It’s the mark of a truly gifted enchanter to be anonymous and to be able to make wands and rings and bits of armor that are pure spell. Protection rings spells have been worked on for a long time by lots of mages so by now they’re pretty much all the same. It takes a really sloppy enchanter to imbue their scent into a protection ring, unless of course it was intentional,” Juno said.
Now the red mana was exhausted, normally Alex would use the blue. By now he was getting approximately two rings out of before he exhausted it and had to wait until it replenished.
His gaze strayed to the gray bar labeled pain. How strong was it exactly?
“I’m going to test using pain to edit,” he said.
“Okay,” said Juno and gently rested her hand on his shoulder to connect to this magic to observe what he was doing.
He cast Analyze on a ring, following his usual process and hoping he wasn’t about to do something incredibly stupid, fueled it with pain mana.
It felt different this time, the spellcasting faintly uncomfortable. There was an odd sensation, like a buzz running down his nerve endings, as though someone had translated the sound of nails on a chalkboard into a feeling.
The code quickly opened and Alex edited the three into a thirty before closing it up. It had only taken a tenth of the gray bar.
Juno had seen or felt some portion of it. She gave him a hesitant smile.
“So pain works, I guess?” she said.
Alex quickly cast the spell again and again. Five rings were remaining. Four he changed to thirty charges and then he was down to the last one. He still had a significant amount of pain mana remaining, plus the stock standard blue was full. Before he could lose his nerve he changed the three to one hundred.
The pain mana bar was consumed entirely and so was most of the blue bar. Alex felt it in his body, a lurch of pain as he came close to zero but he’d estimated well. The ring charged and he dropped it on the table, his mana starting to refill.
Juno patted him on the arm. “Crazy magic is how mages die, so remember that,” she said, but didn’t seem all that upset overall. She picked up the rings and jingled them in her hands.
“Okay, I’m going to get April from outside and go sell these. You get back to the bedroom for more naughty times with that werewolf, so at least you can charge up the red by the time we get back,” she said. Then she pinched his nipped through his t-shirt. Alex smacked her hand away.
“Hey I’m using that,” he said.
“Maybe the pain mana just got charged up. Worth a shot,” Juno said with a shrug before racing outside to get April, who was sitting underneath the lemon tree.
Alex still had his spellcasting window open. He was looking at the three different mana bars, his thoughts swirling.
Juno had told him there were all kinds of mana you could pull through the source magic. Fire, water, wind, earth, sex, pain, death, even nature itself. But it seemed a magic user who used that particular mana was required to connect to it first, in most cases.
He’d managed to skip the queue somehow and connected to pain directly without instruction.
Alex suddenly realized the perhaps he shouldn’t have just let Stephen the necromancer go, at least not without making a connection to death magic or demanding a spell from him.
Juno and April came whirling through the house, talking at high speed. Juno gave Alex a quick kiss before the two of them rushed out into Boris.
Alex went to the front door and watched them go. In the sunlight April’s pink hair was practically glowing as she sat in the passenger seat. She waved at him with a smile as they drove away.
There’s a connection to nature Alex thought.
13
Everyone was on edge as they pulled into the mall parking lot. Things had moved quickly after April and Juno had bought the burner phone.
At home under the protection of the ward, Alex had finally turned his phone on and received a message from the necromancers saying that they were ready to meet the moment he contacted them.
They’d chewed over this plan back and forth for a while now and today had finally decided to enact it.
First, they told Artemis to wear a red shirt so they could identify him. Then they sent the necromancers on a wild goose chase all over Baxter for the last hour to various locations so they wouldn’t have the chance to set up an ambush. They’d finally sent the mall address and told them to go to the food court, Artemis to meet Alex alone.
It was lunchtime on a busy workday and was guaranteed to be crowded, which Alex hoped would mean they wouldn’t try anything stupid.
“If I give you this signal it means get the hell out of there,” Juno said to Alex, pointing her finger at him.
“Do you want to make a code word too?” Alex said with a smile, trying to lighten the mood.
“Sure, it's get the hell out of there,” Juno said.
/> They left Boris and headed inside. It really was peak time. There were crowds everywhere, people carrying shopping bags and the occasional child running around.
Alex was rehearsing what he was going to say to Artemis but also knew he’d have to play it by ear. Because they were in public with so many witnesses he couldn't exactly shift into a werewolf if something went wrong.
The girls had reiterated the warnings about the Great Barrier and how if he did something magical in front of so many witnesses it would cause anyone magical nearby to turn on him. Juno had described in vivid detail how magic users had been forced to attack rogue mages who’d come up against the Great Barrier. The normals might attack too. Because Juno, Nia and April would be the closest three supernaturals, aside from Artemis, if things really went sideways they might find themselves compelled to attack Alex.
Alex was feeling jittery as he walked down the steps from the mezzanine level to the ground floor food court. He spotted a man sitting at a small table that was piled high with food containers. He was wearing a red shirt, his suit jacket hanging off the back of the flimsy food court chair.
He spotted Alex and nodded to him before returning to his meal.
“Damn, how did he beat us here?” Alex said.
“We can always abort,” Nia said, looking about the food court.
“We need to do this,” Alex said. They split up, the three girls going their separate ways to take up positions around the food court. Alex came over to the man who waved at him to sit down.
“You Artemis?” Alex said as he sat.
The man looked to be in his early forties. He had blue eyes and thick black hair and a small goatee. He’d also been stuffing his mouth with noodles as Alex came walked over. Finally he swallowed them and then gently shook his head.
“Unfortunately, he couldn't make it today. My name is Henry Markovic, from the Xavo enclave. Please, eat, you’re giving my grandmother a headache sitting there with no food in you.”
Henry pulled a spare plastic plate out of the pile and placed it in front of Alex, along with a plastic fork.
Alex had to admit the smell of the food was making him hungry. It was salty and greasy and fried and everything good in the world. When he didn't make a move Henry looked up at him again.
“None of this is poisoned, I promise… but of course if they were and what they say is true, you can just purify it, yes?”
Alex nodded and surreptitiously cast analyze on an open plastic container of Mongolian beef. It definitely wasn't poisoned and apart from excessively high levels of salt was perfectly edible.
Feeling somewhat off-balance, Alex picked up his small plastic plate and began serving himself from open containers, piling it up with noodles and Mongolian beef and fried rice and grabbing a few dumplings.
“Do you wonder what the world would be like without the Great Barrier? It hides many crimes, yes?” Henry said. He caught Alex with a mouthful of noodles. He quickly swallowed them and then nodded.
“I think a lot of mages get away with a lot of crimes, like attacking innocent people,” Alex said.
“It's not just mages. The vampires feast, fairies steal, mages take what they want. Do you think of all the little children who go missing each year and believe supernaturals are never involved?”
This conversation wasn’t going the way Alex expected. He’d been working himself up on the way here, rehearsing his lines and threats and now felt completely disarmed. The food, the man in front of him, it was like he was just out to lunch with a friend.
Alex chewed his food to give himself time to think.
“Doesn't the Great Barrier help keep supernaturals safe from the normals?” he finally said.
Henry raised his eyebrows before wiping his mouth with a napkin. He picked up a giant soda and sipped at it.
“Do you think werewolves with sharp claws really need protection? Or mages who can rip your body apart with the spell? Or vampires with their long lives and sharp teeth? It seems to me the Great Barrier is a great harm, especially to the normals.”
Alex glanced around the crowded food court. It was packed with families and plenty of young children with food smeared on their faces. There were prams everywhere.
He saw the three girls were watching him, perhaps a bit mystified as to why he was suddenly eating with the supposed enemy. Nia was standing against a pillar eating a falafel, Juno had an ice-cream and April was drinking a giant smoothie.
“Why'd you attack me in the cemetery?” Alex said, suddenly determined to get this meeting back on track.
Henry put his hands up and shook his head. “I do not know why you have been chosen to be attacked. Orders are orders. I do not agree, but I am not the boss. I can tell you this, however. To make it stop you must make it a terrible cost to dare to attack you.”
“It sounds like you’re telling me to kill some of your mages,” Alex said.
“As I said, they are not my mages. And yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you to do.”
Alex was a little taken aback. This meeting wasn't going anything like the way he'd imagined it. He imagined threats of violence and death, growling under his breath at some mage, but Henry sat easy unconcerned, as though we didn't have a care in the world.
“Why should I trust you?”
Henry broke into a smile. “I have a token of good faith – I'll give you a spell. It can resurrect small creatures from death – birds, mice, perhaps a small cat. Or one of those tiny yappy dogs, if that is your thing. Do you want it?”
He pushed one of the containers aside and put his hand palm up on the table.
Alex hesitated for a moment, but the lure of obtaining a new spell, some necromancy, was too much to resist.
He placed his hand on Henry's and then watched as the screen appeared above his head. It was dark, in tones of black but had pulsing red lines through it like veins. They were throbbing like a heartbeat. At the same time, Alex could sense his magic. It had that same heartbeat, like life itself, entwined with a deep and eternal nothing. Alex began copying, getting about five percent each time.
“Necromancy is life-and-death mixed together. Always the way it is. Cells grow, but others die to make way. Life-and-death are always together. This is why the greatest healer the world has ever known was a necromancer,” Henry said.
“What was her name? Alex asked, to be polite.
“Miriam Stonewell. I believe she is still alive… or at least not dead in the traditional sense.”
Alex had his spell screen open in front of him and Know Thyself running as per usual. Glancing over the three mana bars of blue, red and gray he suddenly realized he had a source in front of him who could connect to death.
“How do you draw death?” Alex asked.
It seemed an odd question to ask in the bright and sunny food court. Children were laughing and making noises and not too far away there was a fountain gently burbling to itself, sunlight shining in down through the clear glass ceiling.
“You kill something of course and pull magic through it as it draws its last breath. Or you bring something back from the dead and draw your magic through it, usually by touch. You must be careful for it is quite addictive and soon you can cease to care about the living if you spend too much time with dead,” Henry said.
Eventually Alex copied the entirety of the spell. It was titled minor necromancy. In the spell description it had what Henry had told him literally word for word: small creatures, birds, mice, a small cat, one of those yappy dogs, if that is your thing.
Alex glanced over the code. Some was readable to him but other bits were gibberish. He wouldn’t be able to know, of course, whether it was a trick or a trap that Henry had set for him, passing him a spell that would kill him, but that was something to be investigated later.
The spell copied, Alex removed his hand and the pair of them went back to eating. Out of the corner of his eye Alex saw Juno had finished her ice-cream and was scanning the room, on high alert.
&nbs
p; “Your wives are quite beautiful,” Henry said.
“Two of them are my wives, one is just a friend,” Alex said, not understanding why he bothered to explain.
“I have seen that look on a girl's face before. She is yours even if you do not yet agree.”
“I want Xavo to stop attacking me. Can you make that happen?” Alex asked.
Henry gently shook his head.
“I am not the boss. Currently, there is an argument in our enclave, a division that is being shouted in whispers. There is a crack that will soon form a break. I suggest you follow my advice. Unless the cost is great, they'll continue to come after you.”
“It appears we have nothing more to discuss,” Alex said, picking up a napkin to wipe his face.
Henry held up a finger. “I think there is perhaps one more thing. It is my understanding you've been researching your childhood, your adoption, yes?”
Alex managed to keep a straight face. How Henry knew these things he didn't know, but of course it seemed their enemies were always one step ahead of them.
Feeling as though Henry was an ally rather than enemy, Alex decided to tell him what they’d discovered at the central records office.
“Twenty-three years ago in April, I was adopted. I’d just turned two,” Alex said.
Henry took a large slurp of his soda and then gently burped into the back of his hand.
“An interesting thing twenty-three years ago around that time... Corvus lost an entire building, razed to the ground. Everyone within dead. I believe some vampires died too. Quite horribly, if you believe the rumors.”
Alex felt his heart, speeding up. Did Henry have some clue about his parents?
“Who did it?
“A werewolf and a witch. I do not know what happened to them. For that answer perhaps you could speak to the witches. They do keep good records. Or you could speak to the werewolves. They're not much for paper and pen, but they never forget.”
Alex saw that Henry was studying him, looking for a reaction.
