Magic Awakening: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Spirit War Chronicles Book 1)

by Stephen Allan

  “Stop!” I screamed. I was maintaining a furious expression, but I was also becoming emotional at the disturbing realities of Nuforsa’s words, and if there was one thing I was not going to do, it was cry in front of this demon.

  “Stop? OK. I’ll make a deal with you, Sonya. I will stop when you pledge your loyalty to the Dark Lord. When you swear to him your skills, your knowledge, your life in the fight for the spiritual realm with the self-righteous Yevon, I will stop.”

  Just a mere day and a half ago, there were many things I was. Atheist. Absolutely sure of the lack of an afterlife. Completely confident in Earth being the only world I would ever step foot on.

  Now many things had changed. God was real. The devil was real. Demons were coming to take the spiritual realm, and they were invading the human world slowly to increase their chances of defeating God and his armies.

  But one thing had not changed, and I swore to it that I would never change. I would never pledge loyalty to anyone except those who served justice, honor, fairness, and respect. Whatever Mundus was, whoever he was, whatever his ambitions were, the demons I’d encountered held none of those qualities. Carsis did. My brother did. In the little time that I’d gotten to know him, DJ sure as hell did. Even the Brits did.

  So I couldn’t even say there was a chance I would agree to it. I would take the mental torture so long as I lived. I spat on Nuforsa’s robes, which earned a kick to the face, but one that I felt quite proud earning.

  “You are the little bitch I thought you would be,” Nuforsa said, her voice even but so cold it could’ve frozen the floor. “Your behavior is atrocious. I am not surprised. What else would you turn out to be with your mother dying so young and no father in your life? I bet your father, whoever he was, could see it coming. He probably saw you screaming as a baby and knew he couldn’t put up with it. You’re the reason your father left, Sonya. How do you feel about that?”

  I stayed on the ground, writhing in pain, actually happy that I was hurting so much the words didn’t register as much as they could have.

  “You’re an orphan because you’re despicable, Sonya. You—”

  But then a loud explosion roared from above as a massive fireball came from the ceiling. Nuforsa quickly ducked back as blasts of energy shot through the hole. Nuforsa raised her arm and shot green waves of energy toward the opening, but a cascade of blue shots forced her to back up even further. She suddenly vanished into thin air, leaving Nicholas and me on the ground.

  Wearily, I turned my eyes to the sky and saw a figure drop down. It was Brady.

  Brady? The fuck?

  He didn’t smoke any—

  “Come on, let’s go! What the hell?” he said when his eyes fell upon Nicholas. “Damnit, whatever. Get your guns, you can get them with her gone.”

  A portal appeared out of nowhere once more on the floor, but this time, it was clear it was heading toward the human world—from looking through it, it looked like it would take us to a private canal just by Durty Nelly’s. I looked for Carsis but didn’t see him anywhere. Brady didn’t look like he had cast it. Who—

  “Come on!” Brady yelled, interrupting my thoughts.

  As best as I could, I grabbed my guns, staggered to the portal, more falling than actually walking through it. I collapsed into a wall, looked up, saw open sky, and was about to pass out when Brady came through, clutching Nicholas by the chest and placing him on the ground. Nicholas still wasn’t moving.

  “Is he…” I said, out of breath and in so much pain that I would probably need about a dozen cortisone shots just to sleep.

  “Dead? No,” Brady said. “But it’s bad. Carsis will be here any second. You need to lay low. I’m taking you—”

  “I’m—”

  “Stop,” he said. “You almost died in there, or worse…”

  His voice trailed off.

  Slowly, I rose, staggering toward Durty Nelly’s. I heard Brady yelling for me, but my hearing was fading, everything sounding like it was coming in a tiny underground tunnel, a constant echo. My vision was blurring, but I refused to pass out. I refused to let myself be carried. I would make it home.

  I reached the hostel, and Carsis was nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t even imagine what people who saw my face must’ve thought. Just touching it to get a sense of the bumps and bruises was so painful I didn’t check twice. But as I so often did in life, I ignored the pain and focused on the task at hand.

  I took the stairs one step at a time. I struggled to the next floor up. I found Room 115, pressed my card against it, and only my momentum allowed me to crash on my bed.

  Chapter 9

  I woke up to Carsis muttering something under his breath I couldn’t make out. Given that Brady apparently knew how to broach the spiritual realm and had rescued me, I didn’t see a whole lot of point in pretending to be asleep anymore. I quickly sat up but groaned as the soreness in my body washed over me like waves on the beach. Brady crouched beside my bed. Behind him, Nicholas rested on a bed, where Richard and DJ stood, talking quietly but not distraught. Carsis was at the door, walking out.

  “You doing OK?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I lied, but I wasn’t going to admit the pain even if he pushed me. I had more pressing concerns. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

  Brady didn’t even bother to shrug to acknowledge his situation. The only positive I took from that moment was that Nicholas didn’t seem dead, and I wasn’t either.

  “Where do you want me to begin?” Brady asked.

  “Hmm, maybe at the part where you knew how to find me. And don’t say because I went into the men’s bathroom. I mean how did you know all of what was going on? You might as well start from square zero, not square one.”

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  I was a bit surprised to see him this accepting. It wasn’t the Brady I knew. Even though I was pissed at him, a bit of fear crept in that he was entangled beyond his desire—as seemingly all of us were in this room.

  “You asked how I knew where you were going. Yes, the men’s bathroom played a role, because it helped me limit where you had gone in the spiritual realm.”

  “So you do know.”

  And here came the defeated shrug. I was pissed off, yes, that he hadn’t revealed this to me before, but on the other hand, he’d seemed willing to talk last night. Things had come up—I wasn’t that angry.

  “Yeah.”

  “And how do you know? Devil’s Eye?”

  “Sort of,” Brady said. “The truth is, I’ve known about this for a long time. Over a decade, in fact. I… You know you’re not going to like what I’m about to say.”

  I kept silent. Brady looked so hurt and, honestly, I was still in a great deal of physical pain that I didn’t want to make this any harder for either of us than it was.

  “I’ve known about the spiritual realm for over a decade. Everything that you described after Devil’s Eye, I knew about. I didn’t think the drug would actually allow you to see into the underworld. I mean, how many kids dress up as devils for Halloween and don’t suddenly shift into the spiritual realm? But once it did… it’s frustrating, and I’m pissed off at myself. For the better part of a decade, I’ve tried to make sure you didn’t learn the things I knew and had to deal with the demons I’ve had to.”

  “But Nuforsa—”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to listen to that bitch over me,” Brady snapped.

  I was uneasy. What Nuforsa had said was not without truth.

  I thought back to the one statement she had made, a statement so clear and cruel that I could hear it now and see her in her red robes with her pale, narrow face.

  “Really? Really. Think about it, Sonya. You and your brother weren’t particularly close before he went to college. Sure, he took care of you, made sure you got to school, all good. But wasn’t it not until he came back that you two became close?”

  “I believe you,” I said, but this was a topic we’d have to revisit when my
face didn’t look like hot soup, and Nicholas wasn’t in some deep-freeze hibernation.

  “I would hope so, I am your brother after all,” he said.

  “And who better to believe than the guy who always watches me,” I said, both sardonic and genuine at the same time.

  “I always know I can count on the sister who tries to bust my balls harder than any interrogating enemy,” Brady said with a chuckle at the end.

  “OK, but Brady, I need to know more,” I said. “Why did you keep this a secret from me?”

  Brady’s face contorted for just a flash of a second. I recognized it as the face people make when they’re asked an especially revealing question and are deciding whether or not to lie. Brady cleared his throat. I sat up, ignoring the unbelievable pain in my abs and lower back.

  “I first discovered everything about the spiritual realm at about age 10. No one should ever have to see the things I did, let alone a young boy. But I did. It terrorized me. I didn’t want to deal with it. And if I didn’t want to deal with it, why would I want my little sister to deal with it? You were just a small child, and we’d just lost Mom. If I had to throw on top of you that your nightmares were real? I—”

  “OK, fine, I can live with that,” I said, placing a comforting hand on my brother, showing some real emotion with a wavering voice. “But I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m 20. I’m an adult in the CIA. I’ve got two guns that I carry with me at all times. I have killed people and have seen others kill others in brutal, inhumane fashion. If there are demons, they aren’t nearly as frightening as the demons we face here on Earth.”

  Brady leaned back and crossed a single leg as if forming some sort of barrier between the two of us. This was a bad sign, I thought.

  “Look, I’m your older brother. Yes, I sometimes am obnoxious about protecting you. Yes, you’re going to push back, because you are tough, and you’d be tough even if life hadn’t thrown all of these shitty things your way. But in the end, older brothers protect when the parents cannot, and part of the responsibility of protecting is figuring out when the protected can fight for themselves. I never knew the answer. I still don’t know the answer. If you hadn’t had the Devil’s Eye, would you ever know? Honestly, probably since Mundus is coming after the human realm, but I really don’t know. On the one hand, maybe I should have given you more credit for being the strong woman that you are now. Maybe I should have realized you’ve been as independent as I am since the day Mom died, even though I wanted to think I could play a role. But on the other hand… I don’t know what Nuforsa said to you, Sonya, but I can promise you she’s only just getting started. If you think fighting ISIS is bad, you’ll want to have them over for ice cream in Iraq long before you face Nuforsa. No human should ever have to undergo the psychological torture she can inflict.”

  I knew all too well. I prided myself on having never broken under pressure before, even if I came awfully close. But I had asked Nuforsa to stop. How did she know the things she did?

  “All I can say, practically speaking, since you know now, is that I am sorry for not telling you earlier, but try and understand the place I was coming from.”

  “It’s hell,” I said tongue-and-cheek, and that got a genuine, hearty laugh from my brother. “So then if you’ve known that things have been going on for a decade or so now, then what is changing? Why are demons crawling in the real world? How did Devil’s Eye get here? Was what Carsis said true?”

  “Carsis answered most of that already, as I’m sure he told you what I knew,” he said as I noticed Richard heading out of the room. I didn’t want to piss my brother off by looking away as he spoke, but I was curious why DJ remained in the room. “With Yevon allowing free will to continue, Mundus wants to amass an army and preemptively take the realm. But he doesn’t have enough, so he’s ‘recruiting’ on Earth by having his demons transform humans into mindless shifters who will do his bidding. Shifters who become werewolves, dragons—”

  “It’s interesting because, at one point, I saw a giant black and gold dragon,” I said, as the floor around me creaked. “And I thought I was going to die, but it instead attacked another serpent.”

  Brady looked surprised, but he quickly gathered himself back up.

  “I’m not surprised. Mindless doesn’t quite equal completely obedient. The nature of being in hell is that you probably aren’t the most loyal person anyways, so there’s a lot of infighting and jostling for status with or even usurping of Mundus. Just be glad it worked in your favor.”

  “Have you ever seen Mundus?”

  “No,” Brady said immediately, with real fear in his eyes. “I have not seen him. And I pray that I never do. I do not want the devil in the same room as I.”

  There was something very precise about his words that left me wondering why he had said them as he did. With the silence, and the creaking of the floor, I used the opportunity to look back at DJ, but he had his back to us, his hands by his side, examining Nicholas. I looked back at Brady, who had also looked over at DJ.

  “You don’t know anything else about Mun—”

  “Just what you know,” he said.

  “Fine, Devil’s Eye?”

  “That’s honestly something I knew nothing about before this trip,” he said. “I suspect a demon planted it in the coffee shops here, knowing curious humans would want a hit, and it would mark them for easy pickings. Who? I don’t know. That would’ve taken some impressive subterfuge to plant the drug and then get it sold without being noticed, but in any case, it’s here.”

  Devil’s Eye, at this point, was the least of my concerns. Humans would take the drug because, like me, they just had to go for the most ridiculous and extreme things they could find. It would suck losing those humans.

  But what would suck more was if more demons arrived. More demons like Nuforsa. Demons…

  This is my life now. This shit is real. What the actual fuck?

  This was not what I’d signed up for when I decided to go on vacation. It was vacation, damnit! Instead, I was dealing with something far worse than the hell on Earth. Was this just another wild dream? It wasn’t the first time I’d dreamed of demons. In fact, I could vividly recall the dream I had on the plane about fighting a skyscraper-sized demon. Maybe this all was just part of it.

  Maybe it would end soon. Maybe…

  I’d never refused a mission before. But this wasn’t really a mission, either. This was something I had just stumbled upon by smoking Devil’s Eye, and now a series of unfortunate and bizarre events kept sending me back to hell. I didn’t want this. I wasn’t getting paid to do this. The CIA had no knowledge of this—of my work, or possibly either of hell, though everything in that office was on a need-to-know basis.

  I was out. Fuck this. I was sore, beaten down, tortured psychologically, and no closer to knowing if I had accomplished anything worth a shit. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be doing in these missions. I had escaped two hell holes and tried to rescue someone else. It was all reactive, not proactive.

  “Well, it may be here, but I’m not dealing with it,” I said.

  The look on Brady’s face shocked the shit out of me. It was one of defiance.

  “Sonya, we have to deal with it,” he said. “It’s here. We’re a part of it, like it or not. We’re a huge part of it, actually.”

  “Well, I don’t like it, and I don’t have to deal with it. How the hell are we supposed to win a fight when we don’t even know what the objectives are?”

  “The objectives are simple, sis. Either defeat Mundus or make him so impatient that he attacks a human and brings the forces of heaven upon him, ensuring his defeat.”

  “That’s great, except one, I’m not dead, so I don’t need to save the spiritual realm yet. Two, you say defeat Mundus like it’s just assassinating a target in ISIS, but news flash, even you seem scared of the devil. You’re out of your mind, Brady.”

  “I’m out of my mind?!?” Brady said, his voice rising. “I am?!? Do you thi
nk I want you in this, Sonya? Do you really believe that after all of these years of trying to keep you away from this realm that I’m happy and relieved that you can finally join me? Fuck no! But there’s a disturbing reality out there that if Mundus gets enough human souls and has a strong enough army, he’s coming for our world, and when that happens, it’s too late. You and I have skills and a resiliency almost no one else has, and we can’t just let that by.”

  I shook my head violently.

  “You want me out of it? Keep me out of it. I don’t do shit that I don’t know enough about. I have no briefing until now, and I still have no objective that’s doable. Sorry, Brady. I’ll stick to touring, hanging out with friends, and watching you guys watch football at 2 a.m. on Monday mornings. You go fight a fight that’ll never end.”

  The more I said the words, the more ludicrous I realized they sounded. And, also, the more cowardly they sounded.

  Cowardly? No. Smart. The CIA always says it’s better to refuse a mission you aren’t sure you can complete than to push ahead for the sake of one’s ego.

  Just get the hell out of Amsterdam. Go someplace else.

  Brady looked beyond hurt. He had now crossed his arms in addition to crossing his leg, his breathing was labored, and his face was red. He shrugged, holding his shoulders at the top for far longer than he normally did.

  “Fine,” he said. “But there will come a day—perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in a year—where you will have no choice but to fight. And by that point, it may be too late. Mundus may already have enough powers that nothing can stop him. And if that happens…”

  He said nothing more. He stood up without warning, walking away from me, but seemingly with purpose, as he shut the door behind me. I let out a long sigh and rolled over.

  I heard DJ walking. I blushed when I realized DJ had heard everything. Everything! He thought we were raving lunatics, probably high off our asses, talking about some bizarre shit that made no sense whatsoever. Mundus. Nuforsa. Demons. Yevon. Spiritual realm. It was like a potpourri of weird names and concepts thrown into a conversation with the goal of making it cohesive.