by Nazri Noor
She cleared her throat, and even from that distance Bastion knew to be on his best behavior as well. His posture went ramrod straight, and he leaned against the nearest wall in a quick attempt to look nonchalant, suddenly so interested in his fingernails. Thea cocked her head, her short, insanely stylish crop of hair staying put as she did, then quirked her lips in the direction of her office.
“About time, Dustin,” she said. “Come on. I need you in my office. Now.”
Chapter 4
Quiet. That was the first word that came to mind each time I went into Thea’s office. The other was immaculate. Kind of hard to avoid that association since the entire room – generally, even Thea’s clothing – would be stark white.
I hadn’t stepped into many executive offices around HQ, but I’d come to understand that they were allowed to decorate as they pleased, their spaces becoming reflections of their inner selves. Kind of gave new meaning to interior decorating considering how Thea’s office looked absolutely nothing like the corridors outside. There weren’t any fires in there either, just little suspended globes of what looked like sunlight. Also, everything smelled of sandalwood.
I drained my coffee as fast as I could, gulping it down in three mouthfuls, because when your boss asks you to take a seat on the white leather chair perched on the white throw rug right across from her fully translucent plexiglass desk, you do everything in your power to avoid spilling things. Coffee, blood, hell, any speck of color would be out of place there. Thea kept things so tidy and pristine that her workspace was essentially what an archangel’s office might look like.
That was the sort of presence and authority she commanded, too. She folded her hands together on her desk, watching me closely, and smiling, but for all the warmth in her lips, all I could see was a lioness. Her eyes studied me with the intense, almost uncomfortable keenness of a predator, and her coif of neat, closely-cropped blonde hair could serve as either a mane, or a halo. Throw all that into a stylish ivory pantsuit and a collection of enchanted opalescent jewelry and you’d have a decent picture of the woman I worked for, this creature that I at once admired and, I hoped, not-so-obviously feared.
“So,” she said. “Things are not great.”
I nodded. “Kind of an understatement.”
“Which is why we need to shore up our defenses, even on a personal level.” She placed her hands flat on the table, then leaned forward. “Time for you to learn about communing with the entities.”
“Entities?” The hair at my nape bristled. “You mean gods?”
She pursed her lips, her gaze thoughtful. “I suppose that works, but not all entities are gods. It’s a blanket name we use for all sorts of powerful beings that coexist with us.”
“Gotta admit, I didn’t even know they existed before last night.”
“In retrospect, I should have briefed you about them earlier. I just never thought it would come up so soon in your time with the Lorica. But consider it part of your training.” She steepled her hands together, resting her chin on the points of her fingers.
“Many of the creatures and deities you’ve read about in myth, even the monsters and demons and spirits, a lot of their stories persist for a reason. Some of them have always just been around. Others were manifested into being, because even the nonmagical, normal human mind has a funny way of being able to create things out of thin air if it believes strongly enough.”
“And they just exist?” I moved my hand in a circle. “Like, just around us.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. And speaking of speaking, it’s time you learned to communicate with them. Commune, even. The entities are useful for a lot of things, mainly gathering information, but sometimes one might like you enough to grant you a boon. A physical gift, maybe, or they might even lend you a bit of their power.”
My eyes widened. “I thought you said that sharpening our specialties or learning more magic were the only ways to make real progress.”
“Well, that, and making the right friends. Even if those friends are ancient demigods and cacodemons. As in real life, there are shortcuts for everything, and as in real life, sometimes it’s not what you know. It’s who you know.”
Her eyes flitted, and she rested her chin in her hand. “But there are caveats. I wonder if I should tell you.” She paused for thought, then cleared her throat. “Well, yes. All right. So you take the deities and supernatural creatures, and broadly, the Lorica classifies them all as entities. And they run the gamut from inconsequential – smaller, less significant spirits – to completely terrifying. We’re talking heads of pantheons here, archdemons, the great beasts: the All-Father, the Trimurti, Asmodeus, Leviathan, Tiamat. The very biggest kahunas. But theoretically, the most powerful beings of all surpass the entities. You don’t want to get mixed up in all that. There is a class of them that aren’t found in mythology. They’re stranger, stronger, more vicious, worse than the entities in every way.”
I hadn’t realized my mouth was hanging open, and I made sure to shut it. Just some time back I hadn’t even known that magic existed, and then this? I was starting to understand why Thea kept some of it from me. Learning everything about the Veil all at once would have completely fractured my mind.
“The Eldest,” Thea said, her voice a quiet mix of fear and reverence, “are older, greater than all the gods of the earth. And they have no concept, no understanding of humanity. The gods of myth, demons, all the rest, they’re clearly rooted in the human experience. Look at the Greek pantheon, especially. They live, they love, they fight, they die. The Eldest are nothing like that. They’re primal forces, fundamental to the universe, and their only instinct is to edge ever closer to domination, whether that power comes from breeding madness, or mayhem, or slaughter. The entities cannot possibly compare.”
I finally swallowed. “Right,” I said hoarsely. “Entities can be good or bad, but the Oldest – ”
“The Eldest,” Thea corrected. “Yes. They’re worse still. And best not to bring it up again. I only wanted you to be aware that they existed. Oh, but another thing. Unrelated.”
She leaned forward again, her head lowering towards her desk, like she had something conspiratorial to share. I mirrored her posture, bending in closer. “We probably don’t want you gallivanting out on your own for a little while. You found the Pruitt corpses and the god Resheph, after all. Whoever wanted them dead might find out about you.”
I twiddled my thumbs. “I like going out on my own.”
Thea frowned. “Not going to happen anymore. Not for a while, at least. Things are getting dangerous out there. Even the higher-ups are talking about this. No one is happy. Least of all the Pruitts, with those holes blown through their bodies.” Her features softened, as did her voice. “This is what I meant when we met, Dustin. Remember? Protecting people from their own greed, from power they don’t understand. It’s why you do what you do. And you’re so good at it.”
She was right. Hound or no, it didn’t make sense for me to work on my own anymore, which made me a little sad, frankly speaking. But sad was better than dead.
“I do question that sometimes, you know. I mean, I’m just a Hound.”
“Just a Hound,” Thea mimicked. She drew back, her face going hard. “Who told you that? Nonsense. You’re just as important to the Lorica as anyone.” She reached out, clasping my hand, the gold of her many rings cool against my skin, her opals glowing like little suns. “You’re valuable to us, Dustin. To me. You are special. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
I didn’t return her gaze, but I nodded.
“You’re like a son to me, kid.”
I didn’t know if Thea intended for me to notice, but her eyes swept past the monitor of her computer and landed on a couple of framed photographs on her desk. Pictures of her kids, a boy and a girl, but old ones that were obviously taken some time back. Nothing recent. I never asked about her children, or why she never had new pictures of them. Maybe that was why we understood each other.
She had lost part of her own family, the way I’d lost part of mine.
“Don’t forget why you’re here. We still need to find who did this to you.” Her eyes fell on my chest, staring there like she could see through my shirt. The scar over my heart itched just then. I reached for it and scratched. Thea knew everything that happened, anyway. No sense hiding that I still found it difficult to talk about my death.
“Someone mentioned the Black Hand,” I said, carefully.
Thea’s eyes narrowed. “Office gossip spreads fast, I see. Yes. We have reason to believe that this Black Hand is the same organization behind all of these recent incidents: Resheph’s murder, the Pruitts’, even yours.”
“It doesn’t make sense, though. If they had plans to spread some new kind of magical plague, why did they leave the book?”
“Perhaps the Black Hand got what they came for. I think this goes deeper. Resheph was only vulnerable because he stepped outside of his home dimension. That’s the only way a god gets killed, and the only reason a god would leave is for something extremely important – say, taking the Book of Plagues away so that no one would ever bother him with a summoning again. The Pruitts were just dabblers, fools playing at magic. Likely just casualties along the way.”
I squinted, trying to unravel the scenario. “So you’re saying that the Pruitts summoned Resheph, just to see if they could, and the Black Hand was already waiting to – to what, exactly? Were they after the Pruitts, or the god himself?”
“As I said, the Pruitts are inconsequential. Unfortunate that they died, to be sure, but they were collateral damage. You see, a god’s death comes with its own repercussions. It leaves a gap in our reality, and while the world rushes to fill that void, we see and feel the aftereffects. In Resheph’s case it could be as awful as an epidemic, or as minor as some restless rodents.”
A shuffling sound made its way across the wall just behind Thea’s head. She tutted and rolled her eyes.
“Restless rodents it is, then. It’ll be chaos for some time. Expect to find lots of overactive rats. Think of it as Resheph’s disappearance causing reverberations across his former dominion, his area of power. But more importantly: we need to remain vigilant. The Black Hand may strike again. But who knows when?”
The scratching noises continued, making it seem as if there were at least a dozen of those rats maneuvering between the walls. I shifted uncomfortably, wondering if the Lorica had its own way of dealing with vermin. But the scuffling stopped when someone knocked on Thea’s office.
“Come in,” Thea said.
I turned my head to follow the door when it swung open, and in stepped Odessa, one of the Lorica’s Scions. She favored a more esoteric kind of fashion, keeping to conservative dresses and long, black hair that framed her face with severe bangs, and looked for all the world like a living, breathing doll.
The Scions were the Lorica’s elders, high-ranking mages who were more learned or experienced than the rest of us, whether through skill or seniority. It was tough looking at Odessa and thinking the words elder or senior could ever apply considering she looked just shy of eighteen, which wasn’t to say anything of her mastery. There was just something off about her, in the depth of her voice, the deliberateness and confidence of her gestures. Her presence was laden with the kind of gravity that came from immense inner storehouses of power and knowledge.
If the water cooler talk was true, she was actually a little over a hundred years old, though how that translated to her appearance none ever dared to ask or even pry. It was the mage’s most coveted mystery, after all: the secret to eternal life, or at least, to longevity.
We all had our specialties, granted, but the surest way for a mage to continue growing in power was through studying the Lorica’s immense collection of scrolls and grimoires. According to Thea, that kind of learning and mastery could take years, even decades.
The more time a mage had to study, the more they absorbed into their occult arsenal, and the greater their power. A mage who could wield fire was one thing, but a mage who also knew how to fly, turn invisible, and summon demons on command? That was the stuff of nightmares. I couldn’t guess at all the things Odessa knew, all the mysteries that she had unraveled.
Odessa turned from Thea to me, nodding with the curtest of silent greetings. I took that as my cue to leave. I stood bolt upright, gave Thea a small wave, then almost found myself bowing to Odessa. She didn’t seem to notice, but Thea’s sharp intake of breath told me that she found the little unintentional jerk of my head amusing.
“I’ll be in touch, Dustin,” she said, keeping her face straight. “Get some sleep for now. You’ve got the rest of the day off.”
Keeping my face stock-still, I sucked in my cheeks, doing my honest best to hide how thrilled I was to have a chance to recover from the events of last night. I was self-conscious enough about disguising my glee without having Odessa in the room. The Scions just made me nervous. Maybe it was how nobody knew for sure what any of them could do, magically speaking. Something about her told me that she had power enough to wipe me off the face of the planet with just a crook of her pinky finger.
I shut the door quietly behind me and glanced at my phone. It was barely past ten. I stretched my arms out as I sauntered off, happy to get some time to myself at last. But not five feet down the corridor I felt my opal pendant warm up again.
Groaning, I glanced down, spotting the faint glow at my neck. What now? I was supposed to have the rest of the day off. I sighed and touched two fingers to the stone. Thea’s voice in my head sounded distant, laden with echoes.
“Dustin? Sorry, I can sense you’re disappointed, but I promise you can take the day off tomorrow. There’s stuff that needs doing. I’ll meet you out front once I’m done with Odessa. What are your thoughts on lunch? Chinese? My treat.”
“Sure,” I thought back, doing my hardest to pretend that I wasn’t bummed. “Why not? What’s the occasion?”
“Well, I’m hungry, for one,” she transmitted. “Also, you’ll need to eat up, get some strength back. Today, you’re going to meet your very first entity.”
Chapter 5
“Eat that up,” Thea said, piling more food on my plate. “It’s good for you.”
She’d been doing that all throughout lunch, transferring slices of meat and delicious hunks of deep-fried this and that with her chopsticks directly onto my ever-growing heap of food.
“You’re too skinny,” she said through a mouthful of rice, not for the first time since we got there. I grinned sheepishly, a little puzzled by why she was so concerned, but admittedly flattered that she cared.
I liked it when she got all maternal like that. I complied, doing my best with my own chopsticks, popping another dumpling into my mouth. The wrapper burst as I bit into it, releasing a hot gush of soup that the geniuses at the Seven Dragons restaurant had somehow managed to smuggle into the dumpling.
“Xiao long bao,” Thea explained earlier, after I had very visibly expressed my elation over this tasty new treat. “Really clever. They chill the broth with gelatin before putting it in the wrapper with the meat. Then when they steam it, it all turns into soup. Delicious.” And delicious was right. I’d eaten six of the suckers already.
Although I still had no idea why we were there at all. The Seven Dragons was a lot fancier than the Chinese places I was used to eating at. I mean there were plenty of options for dining around Valero, but nothing quite like this.
The faint music piping through the restaurant switched readily between Asian pop and what Thea generously described as Chinese opera. The interiors themselves were finished in rich silken red, with golden sculptures and accents here and there. And the dining area itself, of course, smelled delicious. But I knew that this wasn’t just about a guy and his boss eating out.
I swallowed another dumpling, and another mouthful of rice. “This isn’t what I was expecting,” I told her.
“How do you mean? I told you, there’s way more to Chinese cuis
ine than egg rolls. Or orange chicken, which isn’t even truly Chinese. Did you know that Americans came up with that? Kind of dilutes the experience, if you ask me.”
One thing to know about Thea was that she was chockfull of these informational tidbits, little factoids about whatever it was we were currently experiencing. It was never to show off, that much I knew, but I could never shake the feeling that she sometimes did it in an attempt to disarm me, or to distract from the truth of the matter.
“It’s not that,” I said, pushing a grain of rice around on my plate. “I mean I knew we were coming out for lunch, but you did mention that other thing.” I leaned forward over the table, glancing to either side of me before speaking in a softer voice. “You know. Meeting an entity.”
“Ah. That.” Thea leaned back and set down her chopsticks. She patted at her lips with a napkin, then smiled. “Would you believe me if I told you that this was all part of it? We’re gathering reagents.” She raised a hand, beckoning our waitress over.
“Uh. Reagents? From a Chinese restaurant?”
Thea nodded, at me, then at our waitress. She fired off a fluent barrage of phrases in Chinese, the second time she had done it that day. The waitress nodded, grinning, then scuttled off.
I couldn’t help myself. “So you speak Chinese?”
There was a quirk in Thea’s smile, but there was no trace of condescension when she spoke. “Mandarin, actually. And a little, yes. Mostly enough to order in a Chinese restaurant.” She smiled in a way that told me that wasn’t true.
I wondered how much else Thea was hiding, how many other talents this woman had. I couldn’t help feeling a little bit smaller considering how badly I spent my own free time. I mean, she was studying foreign languages and I was on my couch playing video games and grinding out levels. Yikes.
