Cursed: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Thrice Cursed Mage Book 1)

by J. A. Cipriano

  Besides, if I succeeded in taking him down, I would get to “do more” with Ricky anyway. While I wasn’t a huge fan of delayed gratification, nor was I exactly one hundred percent sure what her thanks might entail, I’d be a pretty poor excuse for a man if I gave up on saving Sera to find out. I was Mac Brennan after all, and while I was starting to get a picture of who that was, something told me even the Mac Brennan of my past would kill the villain and save the girl.

  “Wipe that stupid smirk off your face,” I told myself, rubbing my temples with my fingers before taking a step toward the stairs. The distinct feeling I was stepping into a viper’s den settled around my shoulders like a well-worn cloak. “The doorway into Hell beckons.”

  Part of me wondered what would lie ahead. I doubted Van expected me to get past Ricky. Hell, I very nearly hadn’t. It was only dumb luck that I’d happened to save her and her brother when I was just a stupid kid, albeit a violent, rage-filled kid. It seemed insane to imagine that I’d actually done those things. I’d planned on killing her brother and it was only a fluke that made me a hero instead of a villain. The realization made my blood run cold. Even over the course of this day, I’d killed more people than I cared to admit. It made me wonder if I was better off not remembering my past. No one good could kill that many people and feel nothing.

  I sighed. Either way, no good would come from dwelling on it now. If I didn’t focus, I was going to get dead fast. I had no idea what was beyond that door, but I found it hard to believe I was about to just walk into his inner sanctum unmolested. I needed to be ready for anything.

  With that happy thought, I moved into the stairwell. The air temperature dropped with every step I took so that by the time I was a couple floors down, I was breathing mist. My teeth chattered together despite my best effort to keep my noise to a minimum.

  The sound of things slithering in the darkness set my nerves on edge, but the tunnel wasn’t much bigger than I was, and while it wasn’t exactly well lit, it was still lined with torches that cast emerald light into most nooks and crannies. If there was something slithering, it had to be far below me or within the rock surrounding me. Neither case boded well. I resolved to take things one at a time. If giant demonic slugs burst from the woodwork and tried to melt my face with eye lasers, I would be ready, but there was no sense getting worked up about it now.

  I stopped, taking a moment to wipe my clammy palms on my jeans before moving forward. My shoe plunged through the rotten wood, and as I tried to reach out and grab hold of the banister, I teetered and fell flat on my back. The stairs beneath me broke, and I found myself careening through the darkness in a hail of debris. After what felt like forever, but was probably only a second or two, I plunged into a warm, thick river of slime, though from my screaming someone probably thought a little girl had fallen to her death.

  The dark river swept me forward, the current so strong it was all I could do to keep my head above sea level as I was thrown into the concrete on all sides. I was definitely in some kind of weird sewer system that smelled like rusty nails and old pennies. Thankfully, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, only it was made up of green flames.

  I threw my arms up in front of me as the river surged forward at Mach speed. Red light streamed from my tattoos as I grabbed at the stone next to me. My fingers clawed gouges in the cement walls before I was torn free by the current and thrown head over heels into the fire. I burst through it like the Fonz doing a bad motorcycle trick and smacked into the cement floor with a thwack that loosened all my teeth, even the big ones in back.

  The surrounding concrete was smeared in blood, some of it was old and dried and some was fresh and glistening in the green firelight along the river behind me. Skeletons lined the wall to my left, some shackled in thick iron manacles while others had been tacked up in poses that made me hope they were already dead when it’d happened. If not… ugh…

  A person dressed in one of those stars and moons robes I had seen in Jack’s bar oh so long ago, turned from his perch on a bone white podium and looked at me. His face was covered in purple tattoos and even though his pierced lips were set in a grim expression usually reserved for people about to disembowel puppies, I shot him my best smile.

  “Ayyy,” I said, giving him a thumbs up from my position on the floor. He must not have been a fan of Mr. Fonzarelli because his first reaction was to try to gut me with the giant wavy dagger in his hand.

  I rolled sideways as his blade struck the cement floor hard enough to throw up sparks. I scrambled to my feet as he came forward like the goddamned Terminator, and I knew I only had a second before he was on me. That didn’t worry me nearly as much as the half-dozen guys standing behind him pointing similar knives at me.

  Chapter 19

  There were so many of them I wasn’t sure I could take them all on. It wouldn’t take much for one of them to get lucky one time. That’s all it would take to permanently end my fledgling career as a hero. That said, I wasn’t about to go out without a fight. My name was Mac Brennan, and I didn’t give a damn about going quietly into the good night.

  “How about we all just take a minute and talk about this?” I said, holding my hands out in front of me in the universal sign for “please don’t stab me, you crazy cultists” as I tried to buy myself time to think of a proper plan.

  In response, the one who had tried to stab me opened his mouth wide, revealing a nub where his tongue should have been. His jaws snapped shut, and he tapped his lips with his knife.

  “So I’m guessing you aren’t much for conversation,” I replied as a pit opened in my stomach. Here I was standing in front of a bunch of dudes crazy enough to have their tongues all cut out, and I was trying to reason with them? Nope. It was time to go with plan B. Kill them all and let God, Satan, or whoever these guys worshiped sort them out.

  The lead one slashed at me. I dodged and drove my right fist into his nose. Crimson light spilled off my tattoos as my knuckles met his face with so much force his head evaporated. Blood fountained up out of his neck as the rest of his body toppled forward onto the floor to collapse into a pool of slowly spreading crimson.

  I casually bent down and picked up the knife while I tried to figure out how I’d literally obliterated a man’s skull with one punch. By the time I’d stood back up, the remaining cultists were closer, spread out in a wide semicircle around me.

  “I’m going to go out on a limb and assume me literally crushing a man’s skull with one punch means little to you all,” I said, gesturing at the fallen man with my new curvy knife.

  They rushed me, which was sort of expected. I sidestepped the first one while stabbing my knife into the throat of another as I slipped past them and booked it down the hallway behind them. Footsteps followed me down the narrow stone hallway which was exactly what I wanted. A huge wooden door braced in black steel was visible only a few meters away. Sliding my bloody knife into the waistband of my pants, I spun around and splayed my right hand in front of me.

  “Ignis!” I shouted and like before, fire ripped up from my palm. Scarlet light burst from my tattoos, filling the tiny corridor with hellish shadows as I unleashed a gout of hellfire that blasted into the onrushing cultists like they’d been sprayed with napalm.

  They flailed and clawed at the fire as it ate across their flesh and robes alike, reducing them to twitching masses of blackened flesh in the time it took me to blink three times. The surrounding stone was red hot, and even from here, the air was almost too hot for me to breathe. Bile rose up in my throat as I turned away from them and stared at the door. Even though the cultists had been bad guys, I wasn’t sure anyone deserved to die a death like that. Hell, they hadn’t even been able to scream.

  “It all comes down to life choices,” the feline in my mind whispered, and I got the distinct impression she was rubbing her cat paw across my brain. “Sometimes people choose to do good, other times bad, but what is important is the choice.”

  “Still,” I whispered and be
cause I couldn’t think of a better reason, said the word again. “Still.”

  “Indeed,” the cat replied, and that seemed to be enough because a strange calmness descended over me as she receded back into the recesses of my mind, leaving me with the haunting revelation that one day very soon I might wind up burning to my death over and over again from now until eternity.

  A chill crawled up my spine on icy fingernails as I turned my attention back toward the door. I must have moved the rest of the way across the hallway without realizing it because the door loomed in front of me like the last gate before a dragon’s hoard. I reached out toward it as though drawn by a magnetic force, and as my fingers brushed against the polished bronze handle, an electric spark leapt up my arm. My tattoos blazed to life like a neon sign outside a strip club.

  My fingers clenched around the handle, and before I could stop myself, I’d jerked the wooden door open. It was surprisingly easy to do since, despite its immense size, the door seemed to weigh little more than a plastic bag. The room beyond was completely unlike I expected because it looked like the man cave I’d always wanted, you know, assuming I could remember wanting one.

  The floor was covered in that weird gray paint with the flecks of white and blue in it I’d seen on the floor of machine shops, and the far wall was completely filled by a ginormous television playing the scene from Field of Dreams where Ray asks his father if he wants to have a game of catch in an endless loop. Baseball memorabilia, autographed by everyone from Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio to Mike Trout lined the other walls.

  A bar reminiscent of the one I’d seen in Jack’s stood along the left wall, but where that one had been polished oak, this one sparkled with dark obsidian. A man about five feet tall with a shaved head and a pirate goatee stood behind the bar, eyeing me with cool cholera-green eyes.

  “Care for a game?” he asked in a voice that was like the scratches outside my window late at night. He waved toward the room, and I followed his gesture to see everything from foosball to backgammon. Every single game, machine, or table was immaculate and done in that same emerald-flecked obsidian style. It was a little weird because I hadn’t remembered seeing the machines before. Had they just appeared?

  “Where the hell am I?” I asked, apprehension leaking into my voice.

  “You’re in my game room,” the man replied, wiping his pale hands on his emerald bowling shirt before snatching something from behind the bar. He placed a Pabst Blue Ribbon on the bar and pushed it toward the empty stool in front of him. “You might as well make yourself comfortable. You’re going to be here a while.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but no sound came out. Instead, a strange high-pitched squeak that reminded me of a dying mouse left my lips. I swallowed and tried again. Same thing. Cold sweat began to trickle down the back of my neck as the still smiling guy leveled an unblinking stare at me.

  After several seconds, he shook his head and opened the tall can on the bar before setting it back down. “There, I even opened it for you. I happen to know this is your favorite brew, so you might as well come and drink it. I’d hate to see it go to waste.” He quirked a mocking grin at me. “After all, beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.”

  “Wait, you know my favorite beer? And it’s Pabst of all things? Seriously?” I asked before clamping my hands over my mouth in shock. I’d spoken, so why couldn’t I do it before?

  The man’s eyes sparkled as he patted the bar with one stubby hand. “I know everything there is to know about you, Mac. I’ll even tell you since I’m in a rather giving mood.” He gestured toward the stool again, but I was too stunned to do more than stand there and gape at him. “Stay awhile and listen.” An evil glint flashed through his eyes. “It isn’t like you have much of a choice anyway.”

  The door behind me slammed shut, and I jumped. I spun around to look at the door, but it wasn’t even there anymore. Instead, there was just a big, smiling portrait of Pete Rose on a Wheaties box. Laughter that ran across my nerves like brambles and fire filled the room, and as I turned back toward the guy, I saw he was now occupying the seat beside where he’d set the Pabst.

  “Why don’t I have a choice?” I asked, moving woodenly toward him. Every step I took seemed to fill my mind with sawdust and packing tape, making it so I could barely think by the time I sat down next to him. Even though he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds soaking wet, I got the feeling he could break me over his knee with little effort.

  “My Cursed has asked me to stall you for a bit, and because I am feeling particularly generous, I have decided to help him this one time.” He pushed the beer into my hand. The can was frigid in my grip and served to drive away the fuzz on my brain. “It really has nothing to do with him though. I was more curious about you, Mr. Brennan. This isn’t the first time we met, and I’m very interested on seeing how you’ve gotten on with yourself.”

  “It isn’t?” I asked, releasing the can of Pabst as I turned to stare at the tiny man. I had come to this guy for help? I could hardly imagine myself doing it because he seemed… evil. For me to have gone to him was truly troubling. It meant I had been out of options, and when people are out of options, they tended to do stupid shit like make deals with demons for power.

  “No, it is not, Mr. Brennan. We met when you summoned me and begged for my help.” His lips curled into a twisted smile that made me feel like a worm on the end of a hook. “I refused, naturally, but it looks like you found someone else to help you.” He flicked a hand disdainfully at my tattooed arm. “Part of me wonders who, but most of me knows you don’t yet know.” He sniffed, his nostrils flaring wide as the smell of sulfur and brimstone drifted off of him like bad cologne. “There is no mark of claim upon you. That means part of the deal has remained unfulfilled.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to figure out what he was going on about. I knew he was just trying to stall me, and while I wasn’t sure why, he was the first person to know about who I was.

  “Mac, can I call you Mac?” He waited until I nodded before continuing. “Mac, you came to me seeking power to save someone or was it something?” He waved his hand dismissively through the air. “I don’t quite remember the details because I don’t go in for that whole noble savior thing. It takes too long to twist your kind of people to my whims. I’m more into the whole gamblers and rapists thing. Not hard to push them the last few steps into full on bloodthirsty Hell minion.” He shrugged and tapped out Stairway to Heaven on the bar with his fingers. “You can see why I’d opt not to help a person like you. As many people as you’ve killed, you’re not really evil at heart. At least, not my kind of evil. The big guy upstairs may disagree. You’ll have to let me know what he says when you meet him.”

  “So you were too much of a douche to help me because I wouldn’t, what, kick puppies?” I cried before I could stop myself. If what he said was true, I’d likely come to him for help to save that mother and son, and he’d refused, not because I wasn’t qualified, but because he didn’t want me saving people? Seriously? Who the hell did he think he was?

  “Now, now, there’s no need to curse.” He sighed at me and I got the impression he was disappointed with my outburst. “We’re just having a nice conversation here, but if you insist on being rude, it can become a not nice conversation very quickly. Trust me when I say that will not end well for you.”

  I took a deep breath, forcing my sudden anger to recede. He was stalling me. If that was the case, I had to get past him. That left just one tiny problem. I didn’t see any doors or passageways.

  “If you know so much about me, what’s my mother’s name?” I asked because I was sure he wouldn’t know the answer, but as I said the words, I realized he could say anything and I had no way of knowing if he was telling the truth. I didn’t remember my mother at all. It made me sadder than I cared to admit.

  “Her name is Martha. She died of cancer a few years ago.” He smiled smugly at me, and as I tried to l
et his words sink in, he continued to talk without pause. “I also know one other important thing.” He reached out and patted the pocket of my trench coat. “You, sir, are a fine darts player.”

  “A darts player?” I asked, still trying to process the fact that my mother had died of cancer, and I couldn’t remember anything about it. In that moment, I was functioning almost entirely on autopilot.

  “You remember darts, right? It’s the game where people throw metal tipped cylinders at a circular board trying to get the bull’s eye?” He smiled at me, revealing a mouth full of translucent shark-like teeth. “Go on, check your pocket.”

  I glanced at the spot he’d touched. There was a pocket on my trench coat I hadn’t noticed before even though I had a hard time seeing how I’d missed something that obvious. I had searched myself pretty well over the course of this little adventure. The idea that I’d missed something that noticeable made my gut tighten in apprehension. What else had I missed? I checked my pocket but not because he told me. It was because I wanted to do it.

  There was something in my pocket. I pulled the object out and stared at it in shock. It was a silver case about eight inches long with an angel emblazoned on its lid. I flicked it open and saw, much to my astonishment, three darts lying on a bed of black velvet. They were steel tipped with pencil-shaped barrels and crimson flights.

  “On average, no man who carries his own darts isn’t at least passably good at the game.” The guy at the bar said before pushing himself off his stool and leaning in close to look at my darts like the concept of personal space had no meaning. “It’s not a hard and fast rule of course. You could be a poser, or someone with delusions of grandeur. Hell, you could be someone who played for years and is still terrible at the game. Let’s face it, not everyone can play well. Just like not everyone can dunk like Jordan, no matter how hard they train. Life isn't fair.” He tapped the darts with one finger. “But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe, you’re this side of awesome.”