Versus

by Nick Freo

  Versus

  An Alignment-Based Urban Fantasy

  Nick Freo

  Copyright © 2019 by Nick Freo

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  All persons, places, things, and events in this book are fictional.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  My city was under perpetual quarantine, plagued by every pestilence from addiction to idiocy. There was no glass dome or steel wall preventing us from leaving, but everyone here was circling the drain, resigned to living in the gutter. It was dirty and mean, and most days, I liked it that way. It was better to live in a city of people who had melded their minds with the cold, hard truth of misery and not the fake happy shit I saw in other places on TV.

  The insulated pizza bag hung by my side as I finished my last delivery for the night. The only light around this neighborhood came from the porch behind me and a security flood lamp a few doors down. The road was impossible to see until I was standing right at the edge of the asphalt. My car, a beat-up black hatchback, would have blended into the darkness if it weren’t for the aluminum alloy rims. In most places, a car that could barely be seen was a liability, but here, it was better to be camouflaged. If I’d driven a red or silver car, I would have returned to find a steel skeleton sitting on a couple cinder blocks.

  I unlocked the door. The moment I swung it open, a scent filled my nostrils that drove the crack of tension straight under my skin. Every instinct told me to prepare to fight, but as my eyes adjusted to the lights inside my car, I saw the man splayed out in the passenger seat. He had ragged black hair with flecks of white, his dark eyes wide open, and his hands cradled in front of a bleeding wound near his abdomen.

  I could come up with only two reasonable conclusions why a dead body was in my car: either this old man had snuck inside to escape from trouble, or somebody had ditched the body here to create trouble. Either way, he was a liability, and not the kind that my thirty dollar a month insurance package was going to cover. But morality is a stone-cold bitch, and I wasn’t going to leave a body in the dirty Detroit slush.

  I sat down in the driver’s seat, setting the insulated pizza bag on my lap. As I reached for my cell phone from the center console, the man’s hand shot forward. I tried to jerk backward, but his grip was tight. As color flooded back into his face, I recognized him.

  “Dad,” I stated. It had been a little over a year since I’d last seen him. It was usually a year between each visit from him, but every visit came a little later to the point that I knew one day he’d stop coming around. I thought it would be because he stopped caring, not stopped breathing.

  “Kyle,” he rasped. His hands flailed against each other. At first, he looked like he was scratching at his skin, but his fingers fastened around a gray ring on his left index finger. He struggled to pull it off.

  I could have sworn the ring was fighting against him, tightening around his finger. It wouldn’t have surprised me. My father used to break through my grudges by showing me magic tricks. It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I found out it was real magic. Most deadbeat dads hid new families from their sons. My deadbeat dad hid a whole supernatural world from me, and me from them.

  It would have been nice if that was the only truth he kept from me, but in my gut, I knew he kept secrets like baseball cards, waiting for something worthy to trade them for. And nothing I had was worth the trade.

  “I need to call an ambulance,” I said, sweeping my past life to the curb, so it could decompose like the rest of this city. I reached for my phone once more. He stopped me again, his hand half-heartedly bumping up against mine.

  “I’m…” He struggled to get the word out. “I’m…sorry.”

  Here was the truth nobody ever said out loud: apologies spoken on the brink of death were always another betrayal. How could I tell a dying man I’d held a grudge for years for being his secret? That he wouldn’t publicly claim me as his own? I couldn’t rage against his apology and demand to know if I was a secret because he was ashamed of having a non-magical son, because I was a mistake, or because he had some other family that he didn’t want me to intrude on—I couldn’t do any of that when he was dying. So I’d be damned if I let him die before I got my answers.

  As I grabbed my phone, he managed to remove the ring. He clutched the ring in two fingers, holding it up toward me. Despite my initial intentions, I opened my hand underneath his, and he dropped it onto my palm.

  “Put it…put it on,” my father said. To appease a dying man, I did as he asked. After the trouble getting the ring off my father’s finger, I thought it would have been equally hard to push onto my own, but it slid on, fitting perfectly behind my ring finger’s knuckle.

  My father mumbled something.

  “What?” I asked, bowing my head closer towards him.

  “The gray. Follow the gray…” he said, the words coming out in small exhales. After he breathed out the last word, his mouth remained open like the word was continuously spilling out, even without any sound accompanying it.

  I stared down at his slack face. After a moment, I placed my hand over his chest. It was warm, but there was no heartbeat. I looked at the black screen of my phone, but I didn’t reach for it again.

  I should have fallen apart or at least felt that crash of emotion at the fact that I was sitting beside my dead father. But this wasn’t new. I had sat alone in the hospital as my mother slowly faded away from cancer. I had sat alone in my aunt’s guest room after my mother’s death, with my aunt lying about how one day her house would feel like home. I had been furious, picking fights and being a general asshole, but I’d grown up, recognizing that I didn’t want to be a stereotype.

  My own heart was beating strong and steady. I could say it was because the emotional shock had numbed me, but I’d seen my father create fire in the palm of his hand. I’d seen him disappear in front of my eyes. I’d felt him touch my forehead and smooth out the scar that had been there for eight years. In comparison, dying was the most normal thing my father had done in a long, long time.

  I snapped the door shut behind me. The smell of blood was still strong, but at least the car’s interior lights were off, so we were hidden by the dark from the rest of the street again.

  I’d drive my father to the hospital. Everything would return to how it had been. Everything would be as normal as death.

  I gazed down at my hand. The ring was smooth, about half an inch wide. The way it reacted to being taken off my father’s hand and the way my father had told me to follow it—it had to be magical. The growing dull, apathetic daze of shock was replaced by a racing sensation in my veins. Every time my father had performed magic, I’d loved it, but it had also been a reminder of what I lacked. Now, I had a tiny piece of it. Now, I was a little more than I used to be.

  Someone’s knuckles rapped against the window, jolting me out of my
reverie. A thought struck me like an anvil—there was a dead body in the passenger seat of my car, and there was no possible way a policeman was going to accept an explanation involving magic. Hell, they likely wouldn’t accept any explanation involving pizza delivery, either.

  I turned slowly, a desperately plausible explanation for my father’s corpse forming on my lips. I expected to see the bright blue of a police uniform, but a gray trench coat stared back at me instead. A head lowered to peer into the car, bearing a face that reminded me of slate—smooth with jagged edges and colored eerily, unmistakably, inhumanly gray.

  Shit.

  Chapter 2

  The strange man knocked again.

  A random person knocking on your car window in Detroit was generally a bad sign that could easily lead to you being dragged out and getting your ass handed to you. A random person, who might not be entirely human, knocking on your car window while your father was dead beside you was a whole other issue.

  I lurched forward, bashing the door lock down. I slammed my foot on the brake, but as I reached for the keys, the gray-skinned man grabbed the door handle. The door swung open like it had never been locked.

  Definitely not an ordinary human.

  The man stared at me with pale, pewter gray irises. His eyes flickered to my father’s dead body, but when he looked back at me, his expression hadn’t changed.

  Either he couldn’t see my father’s dead body or my situation had been upgraded from “possibly going to prison for being near a dead body” to “possibly witnessing the work of a sociopathic serial killer.”

  “We need to talk,” the man said, his voice clipped, but not angry. The man had to be in his forties, possibly his fifties, considering his gray hair. As someone in my twenties, I figured I should be able to take him if I had to. I hoped.

  “I can explain,” I said, a lie and a sign of conceit like half the other things I’d said. He kept his eyes on me, observing me like I was an undiscovered specimen he was analyzing—wiry build, thick dark hair that could be an indication for youth, and slightly taller than average, which would lead to the conclusion that he wouldn’t be worth trying to murder—except he’s holding onto an insulated pizza bag like it’s his only weapon.

  Christ, I hoped he wasn’t a cannibal.

  “I should introduce myself.” The man gestured at my father. “I’m Morgan’s employer, Mr. Gray.”

  Follow the gray.

  I looked out the window, acting like I was fascinated by the utter darkness around me. I could start the car and speed away before this man—this Mr. Gray—was able to stop me. I’d still have a dead body in my car, but that felt like a problem I could deal with. I could feel in my bones that whatever this man wanted to talk about, it would lead to more complicated problems than bringing my dead father to the hospital.

  “Mr. Bishop,” Mr. Gray said. His tone bordered on urgency. “We have to go now.”

  “What about my father?” I asked.

  “I have a protocol for that.”

  “Do we need to go far?” I asked, my mind backtracking to all the possible places my father had traveled to. “My apartment is ten minutes from here, and I’d need a few things from there.”

  “No, we’re going to your father’s home.”

  I dug my thumbnail into the steering wheel. We didn’t need to go far, but we needed to go to my father’s home? That could only mean one thing.

  “My father lives here? In the city?” I asked. He stood up, his hand gripping onto the door like he was thinking of slamming it shut and abandoning me—the idiot who didn’t know his absentee father had lived in the same city as him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Are you prepared to leave?”

  I looked over at my father’s body. “Are you prepared to sit in the back?”

  “That will be unnecessary.” He leaned forward again, his hand grabbing my shoulder. I barely had time to think about how knobby his hand was before the ground lurched underneath me and my stomach dropped to my feet. I blinked rapidly several times, iridescent and opaque hues muddling my vision.

  The colors dissolved to the edges of my sight before fading away. When I recomposed myself, swallowing back the stomach acid that had crawled up my throat, I found myself standing in a room that looked like it belonged to some Silicon Valley billionaire with a penchant for fancy artifacts.

  The room had vaulted ceilings, and it was large enough that a military unit could train inside it. The wall on the left was made of brick, but the rest of the walls were white. There were massive windows built into the white walls, where I could see the lights of the city. The windows nearly touched the floor, but it was difficult to see where they stopped because there were tables in front of them filled with eclectic items that varied from tiny metal machines to aboriginal art.

  “What the fuck,” I said, turning to Mr. Gray, who stood a couple of inches behind me. If I were a smarter man, I would have been more cautious around him. The fact that he told me he was my father’s employer didn’t discount the idea that he was a cannibal, but magic always had the ability to trigger the dumbest version of myself.

  “You’re the new legal owner of this mansion,” he said. “By earthly and celestial right. I’m the executor of your father’s will in both realms.”

  “You’re his employer and the executor of his will,” I said. “In both realms.”

  “Correct.”

  “I own a mansion now.”

  “Correct.” He dipped his head in the slightest motion of a nod. “You also inherited his wealth, which has grown substantially in the last decade. He must have informed you of all of this.”

  “When?” I retorted. This whole thing was a circus, and I was the clown. “When would my father have informed me that I was going to inherit a house—a mansion—that I didn’t even know he owned? That I never visited or even knew existed in Michigan?”

  “He must have conversed with you,” Mr. Gray said. His hand flickered toward my own hand, pointing toward the gray ring. I stared down at it.

  “He barely said anything. He was too busy dying to explain much.”

  Mr. Gray shook his head. “Perhaps we should start with what you do know.”

  “That I should invest in a financial advisor?” I scrubbed my face with my hands. “And possibly a clean-up crew for my car.”

  “Your father was an Arbiter,” Mr. Gray said, ignoring my comments. “Do you know what that is?”

  “A financial advisor?”

  “He was a keeper of the peace between the sides of Heaven and Hell on Earth. Arbiters are a supernatural police, of sorts. He was appointed by the Celestial Court in order to resolve conflicts before they could lead to larger devastations or supernatural war. Arbiters are our legal system—the judge, the jury, and, when necessary, our executioner. Your father was the last Arbiter and, by all measures, the most powerful wizard in the world.”

  I choked back a laugh. “The most powerful wizard? Of the whole world?”

  “Correct,” he said. His forehead furrowed, and he seemed to have a genuine concern that he may have been talking to a moron. Excuse me for having missed my invitation to a magic school.

  “My biological father was the most powerful wizard in the world, but he couldn’t show up to see me more than once a year or do anything to help my mother.” I covered my mouth and let my head drop. “That is incredible. That is just fucking amazing.”

  “The office of Arbiter is passed on by bloodline or adoption,” Mr. Gray said, unperturbed by the fact that I was losing my mind. “And you, Kyle Bishop, are the only heir left.”

  I turned away from him, grabbing a small metal object that looked like an armadillo with flower petals bursting where its face should have been. When I reached towards the petals, they turned sharp as blades. I hadn’t wanted to deal with my father’s dead body, and somehow, it had become one of the least strange and least urgent events of the night.

  “As the Steward of the Celestial Court, I am serving as a
n administrator,” he continued. “As an administrator, I am imploring you to take on the mantle of the Arbiter. It’s not only your birthright, but it is also your obligation.”

  “I’m not a wizard,” I stated, facing Mr. Gray. “I don’t know any magic at all.”

  “There are ways to remedy that, and this responsibility is about more than you.”

  I set the metal object down. The petals returned to normal. “What about my father’s body? If somebody hasn’t found it yet, somebody will find it soon enough. I know you magic types are self-absorbed and batshit crazy, but that should have been a priority.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “I should extend my condolences and an apology now because we won’t be able to have a funeral or any type of normal proceedings concerning his death. It will have to remain confidential. Now, this is a matter of urgency: will you fulfill your role as Arbiter?”

  “This is insane.” I twisted the ring around my finger. It tugged roughly against my skin. “I told you. I’m not a wizard. I don’t know anything about your world.”

  “All you need to know is that without an Arbiter, the Celestial Court will dissolve, the balance between Heaven and Hell will collapse, and the Earth will become the final battlefield. If you won’t fulfill your role, I can delay Armageddon for a time, but it will be a futile attempt before Hell and Heaven turn this world into ash, dust, and bones.”

  “Why would you think I could do a better job than you from preventing Heaven and Hell from destroying the Earth? How—”

  “Your bloodline allows you—”