Nightwise

by R. S. Belcher

  It was on.

  He tried to cook my bones; I absorbed the heat and turned it into five hundred pounds of impaling invisible force moving at roughly eighty-five miles an hour straight into him. He dispersed it into a fragmentation rain, spraying both of us, cutting like a storm of nails and razor blades. The sacrifice play gave him the time he needed to follow up with a spear of devouring light. My partial lack of a soul actually gave me an upper hand in weathering it, which surprised the old bastard. I sent lightning into his spine, crisping his nervous system. He retorted by causing my lower intestines to rupture and boil. He knocked aside my defensive spell and gave me a concussion, which was supposed to shatter my skull. The push left him open, however, and I managed to counterstrike more out of reflex than any tactics. I made his blood boil like he was in vacuum. He countered and punched, and I countered it and punched.

  A war of magic, a duel between wizards, isn’t exactly like you see in the movies or read about in books. Sure, there are spells of harm and defense cast, but at some point, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, technique fails you, training fails you, and you are left with heart and spirit, blood and balls. As with boxers in the twelfth round, it all comes down to the will and the ego, and, trust me, wizards have plenty of both.

  The fight dragged on longer here in the Greenway. The very air was dripping with power, and both Slorzack and I took it in in thirsty, ragged gulps to keep us on our feet, to keep us fighting.

  We were both hurt, bones broken, organs ruptured, flesh burned and bruised. We had run out of cute tricks and flowery words—we were smashing into each other with raw, unrefined power now, sheer will and malice. And I wanted this more than him, I could feel it. I wanted to live; I wanted to beat the wizard who had beaten the Devil. I wanted to be standing when the music came up and the credits rolled. Just once, I wanted to be a winner, not a fucking loser, a joke.

  I stepped into the blast furnace of heat and light, taking one painful step after another closer to the old man. I suddenly remembered a spell I had written in the old graveyard in Covington, when I was fifteen, with Torri, drinking stolen beer and smoking stolen cigarettes. Before the training, before the Latin, just power and passion and the joy of the universe unfolding to me, the joy of magic. It was based off an old Violent Femmes song—“Add It Up.” Most of my earliest spells were lyric based, until I learned the fancy words—and, now, I uttered it through cracked, bloody lips.

  A look of confusion suddenly crossed the old man’s face. He struggled to understand the cadence, the theme, the thesis of the spell; he was being a wizard, and I was being a punk. I took a step toward him, then another.

  Imagine being in a fistfight with someone and he suddenly decided he was going to kill you no matter what it cost him, no matter what you did. Slorzack couldn’t understand what was going on, and by the time he did, it was too late. Another step, closer, so close …

  I screamed. It was made up of rage, energy, will—all my anger, all I had in me, all my losses, my many failures, all my mistakes, every ounce of me that clawed to live and, just once, to win, roared out of me, a flame of a life, my flame, my life. Mine.

  His barrage of destructive power fluttered and parted, and I was up against him, my hands on his throat. I saw the look of surprise on his face for just a second. I drove a fist into his face, and he staggered back, bumping against the desk in the office, towers of books tumbling to the floor, many catching fire from the energies rippling off me. I felt the skin of my knuckles rip with each blow. Slorzack’s hands scrambled over the surface of the desk franticly as I hit him again and again and …

  I felt a dozen red-hot sledgehammers smash into my guts, knocking the wind out of my lungs, burning their way through me, like someone was putting out cigarettes through my skin, through my body. Then I heard the thunder, filling up my ears again and again and again.

  I opened my eyes. I was against one of the walls. Blood was gushing out of me and a snake made of hot, broken glass was crawling through my guts. I was dizzy and wanted to close my eyes and go back to sleep, but there was the horrible pain clawing its way through the numbness, chewing on my guts, my spine. Slorzack, bloodied and burned, eye swollen shut, held up a small revolver, still trailing emerald smoke.

  “Guns,” he said, “work just fine here.”

  He staggered over to the opposite wall and slid down. He checked the cylinder of the gun with a satisfied nod. A realization crossed my mind.

  “Saved your bullet, I hope?” I said.

  Slorzack smiled his blackened, rotting smile. “You certainly gave me quite a … how do you say … ‘workout.’ The best I have ever had. You are a master. Unfortunately, here I am a god.”

  “I won,” I said, and paid for it by hacking uncontrollably for a few minutes. I almost blacked out from the pain. White spots danced in front of my eyes. “I was going to beat you.”

  Slorzack laughed. “You are American. Dying from multiple gunshot wounds and still calling it a victory. You got any cigarettes?”

  I nodded and tossed the bloody pack and my lighter on the floor. He groaned in pain as he crawled over to them and snatched them up. He lit the cigarette like he was making love to a woman. His reaction to his first drag on it was the only human emotion I had seen in his eyes. He held the smoke nestled in his lungs for a long time and then let it drift out of his nostrils.

  “This is the only thing I miss about earth,” he said, holding up the cigarette. “Thank you.”

  “Your hands are trembling,” I said. “You were scared you used all of them, weren’t you? Used up all the bullets.”

  I went away for a little while, I wasn’t sure how long. I was cold when I woke up, and nothing had changed.

  “You can pray to me, if you like,” Slorzack said, putting out the stub of the first cigarette on his arm, then taking another American Spirit out of the package and lighting it. “I’m the only god here, the only devil. I could save you now, heal you, if you beg me to and promise to worship me, cowboy.”

  I managed to work up enough strength to laugh. It was a mistake, and I suddenly realized exactly how Harel felt as he choked and drowned slowly in his own blood.

  “That’s okay, Dusan,” I said. “As gods go, you aren’t very sexy, even when you’re the only one in the room. I’ll pass. Besides, you’re not really a god, you tried that with the whole Chernobog thing and you kind of sucked at it. So you ran away to your little pocket and decided to be … the god of ineffectualness? The god of hide-and-go-seek?”

  Slorzack laughed as well and then hocked up some blood, spit it in my direction, and took another drag on the cigarette.

  “You know those gut wounds are going to take a few days to kill you,” he said. “I think I’m going to sit here and talk with you until you pass out or fall into a coma from the blood loss, and then I’m of a mind to fuck you. After that, I think I’ll eat you. It’s been awhile since I had any real meat.”

  “You’re going to die,” I said again. “I got to Harmon. He’s dead. Before I killed him, I had him disassemble your supply lines. No more food shipments, no more water. Nothing. Just like you said, sport, we are alone here. And the way you checked that gun makes me think you wanted to make sure you still have a bullet for yourself, even though you don’t have the balls to kill yourself. You can sit here and starve and die of dehydration and go even more batshit crazy than you already are. So eat up, asshole, ’cause I’m your Last fucking Supper.”

  He smoked the cigarette and watched me.

  “I can leave anytime I wish to,” he said. “Gather more supplies, return, and have lovely conversations and sexual intercourse with your boiled and polished skull.”

  “Yeah, except you and me both know you won’t leave here,” I said. “Satan is on the other side of that door, waiting to collect what you owe him. Remember him? Gave you your start in the god business? So please, by all means, head back to earth.

  “Tell me why you came,” he said. “Who did this to me an
d why?”

  “No,” I said. I was getting dizzy and my sight was narrowing. I was shivering, I was so cold. “You’ll never know why. Enjoy that feeling, god.”

  He didn’t say anything, and I think I passed out for a while. When I came to, the revolver was in my hand. My head was full of angry, stinging bees.

  “Do it,” he said, still against the wall. “I can’t. I have seen too much, experienced things only God would understand—the power, the emotions, the blood, oh, the blood. I cannot end my existence. My lust to go on forever prevents it.

  “So you, alone of all men in the world, have bearded me in my den. You, who have within you the power of a god but the failings of a man. It is only fitting that you end my life and go back into the world and tell the tale of Dusan Slorzack. I gift you with your life and with mine.”

  I realized how little distance separated us in every way possible. I felt very sick. I pulled myself to my feet, steadying myself against the wall. I almost threw up and passed out again, but I didn’t. I refused to. I flipped open the cylinder of the revolver. There was one bullet left. I snapped the cylinder shut with a flick of my wrist and took aim.

  “Remember this,” Slorzack said. “Never forget the day you slayed a god.”

  I pulled the trigger, and his kneecap exploded.

  He screamed and flopped around on the floor of the Oval Office.

  “Bastard,” he screamed. “Damn you to hell.”

  “You can keep the smokes,” I said. I dropped the gun and staggered out into the dark hallway.

  “Please” was the last word I ever heard Dusan Slorzack say. I shut the door.

  THIRTY

  When I opened my eyes, the ten-spot was whole and in my hand again, and I was sitting next to Boj’s bed in the hospice. Back in New York, back on earth. I felt another blackout coming on, but I was so close to being done with it, I soldiered through it. The lower half of my body was drenched in blood, and I couldn’t feel anything except cold all the way down into my bones.

  Boj was in the bed. All the monitors, all the things attached to him to record the last struggles of his ravaged body with the disease, they were silent and dark. He looked peaceful. That’s a lie; he looked dead.

  He was dead.

  I had not known what I was going to do up until this moment. Story of my life. Now I had one last battle before me. I fought it quickly, and in the end, I think I won it.

  I leaned on the metal rails of the bed to stay upright. The nurses and the orderlies would be coming soon to put him in the bag and zip him up. They would burn him and put his remains in a cardboard box, the fate of people who couldn’t afford a nice plot and a granite memorial. People with no family, no friends to stand for them, to secure their place in immortality, in the memory of man. Boj’s fate was my fate. I was bound for a cardboard box too.

  Leaning against a box of tissues on the stand next to his bed was an old photo of him and Mita. I picked it up and looked at the frozen slice of time. The emotional charge off the picture was like a warm light in the cold, dark forest I was entering.

  I never got them a wedding present. Until now.

  I knelt down next to his still-warm ear and I whispered to him. I told him a story of a much happier world than the one we lived in. This one had a happy ending.

  One wish, two wish, red wish, blue wish.

  I staggered back and kind of fell into the chair next to Boj. Darkness swam at the edges of my sight. I could see the forest. It was dark, and my breath was steaming before me. The ground was covered in snow and it was quiet, so quiet. I felt the pain drowning in an empty place that carried no name.

  I entered the forest.

  When Boj woke up, his body would be fine—the disease gone, the desire for the drugs gone. He would live a long and hopefully happy life, and he’d know I kept my promise. And his Mita would be beside him, waiting for him, holding his hand.

  And I died.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I opened my eyes. I was in a guest bedroom at Foxglove Farm. My chest was wrapped in surgical gauze and I had a drain in my side that burned like hell. I was alone, and my head was fuzzy from narcotics. The pain of my wounds was sore and deep but also distant. I rubbed my face, I was sporting a beard.

  I managed slowly, over the course of about ten minutes of groaning and cussing, to get out of bed without tearing anything loose or bleeding all over the place. Next to the bed was an ice bucket filled with cold Cheerwine bottles and a green-glass vase full of black roses. Thirty-six of them, to be exact. There was a small envelope lying at the base of the flowers with my name on it. The calligraphy was exquisite. I steadied myself and tried to not fall back on the bed as I slid the card out of the envelope.

  It was thick bond paper, very high quality, and the handwriting was intricate and beautiful in ruby red ink that seemed to glow on the page.

  My dearest Laytham,

  Congratulations on your success. You got your man! Thank you for attending to my interests in this as well. I am impressed with how you decided to use your final wishes. Very noble. I assure you I have kept my end of the bargain and your friend and his bride are enjoying their new life—your gift to them, even as your life ended.

  Now, as you well know, returning souls from the dead is a very tricky and nasty business for mortal wizards like yourself, but my abilities are quite adequate to the task of breathing life back into your fragile little bodies of mud and making a few surgical nips and tucks to that silly space-time cage you people insist on living in.

  While I stood over your corpse, your guttering soul in my palm, I considered how best to address this. After all, we had an arrangement for three years of your life for the power that allowed you to fulfill your obligation to your friend and to grant him a new beginning. While your soul defaulted to me, at any rate, I still felt somewhat cheated in our deal. I was considering how I might best torment you to get my investment out of you, when a friend of yours intervened.

  We discussed the situation and she offered a solution that I found amicable to everyone. I think you will agree.

  She has given me a favor, a silent friend within the Court of the Uncountable Stairs, whom I can rely on for a single favor. In turn, I have given you your life back, and I will exact three years of service out of you, from time to time, until your debt has been paid to me in full. You didn’t think I’d let you pay it off in one big balloon payment, did you, my boy? Oh, no, in this agreement, the interest is front-loaded. I assure you I will extract every nanosecond of my investment from you. But I promise you the work will be diverting and worthy of a villain who longs to be the hero.

  Enjoy your life, Laytham, or should I say our life? Though I am, by my very nature and function, hate, I cannot say I am unsympathetic to your desires. Once, long ago, I sought to be the hero of the story as well, but it became clear to me in time that I was most assuredly not. While I have nothing but contempt for you and your kind, there are others who look upon you as flowers in the garden, not the compost. Take time to enjoy the scent of the flowers, for winter eternally beckons.

  As always, a pleasure doing business with you,

  L

  I looked up from the card, and the black roses were gone. I looked down and the card was gone too. Late-morning sun was falling through the windows, and it looked like spring had truly arrived. I hobbled toward the door; my wounds were stinging, and the drain was poking me too.

  “Couldn’t completely heal me, could you, you cheap SOB?” I muttered, and found myself laughing.

  I opened the door and looked down into Pam and Bruce’s living room. For a second I thought maybe I had died and this was Heaven, or maybe it would be pulled away from me in an instant, and I would realize the Devil had found his method of eternal torture.

  In the living room were Bruce and Pam, of course; Grinner and a super preggers Christine; Ichi, looking exactly like he had the last time I had seen him; Didgeri; and a beaming Magdalena.

  “Hi!” she said, look
ing up at me. “Look who’s back.”

  Everyone stood, except for Grinner, who yelled about trying to watch the TV and waved to me absently.

  “Hey, bro,” he said, then went back to the tube. “See, I told you he’d be fine. Can’t kill Elvis, baby.”

  Pam made her way up the stairs, black bag in hand. Magdalena raced up ahead of her and hugged me. I winced.

  “Easy…” I said. “I’m kind of duct-taped together.” Magdalena hugged me and kissed me gently on the cheek.

  “You’ve been here for about two and a half weeks, since Torri brought you here, and Bruce called all of us to let us know,” Magdalena said.

  “Torri?” I said. “Where is she?”

  “She said she couldn’t stay,” Bruce said. “Work.”

  “You were touch-and-go,” Pam said. “But I’m pretty sure you are going to make it.”

  Everyone settled down, and things fell back into pleasant chaos as Pam ordered me back to bed and everyone back downstairs to give me some peace.

  I leaned against the rail and watched and smiled.

  “So pleased with yourself,” Didgeri said. She hugged me gently, kissed me on the cheek, and walked away, shaking her head.

  I was alive, living on credit. Hell, who isn’t these days? I thought back to Boj and Harel and me. The Occult Rat Pack, the old band. I wish I had been able to give Harel a wish too. He deserved one. I guess everyone really does, but supply and demand says otherwise.

  And now these people, trusting me when they damn well shouldn’t, caring when they damn well shouldn’t. I remembered what Harmon and I had talked about, about the true nature of life and the lesson it taught you.

  “Who the hell has the remote?” I heard Grinner bellow.

  “You shall get it back when your beautiful wife and I have concluded watching this Bridezillas program,” Ichi said. “And not a moment sooner.”

  I watched a group of loners, freaks, oddballs, and outlaws enjoy the solace of not being lost in this cold, sharp world, at least not today. There was a treasure here more valuable than all of Harmon’s gold, all of the Greenway’s secrets, maybe even more valuable than being the most badass wizard alive. Maybe.