It Happened One Doomsday

by Laurence MacNaughton

  3

  HAVING RESERVATIONS

  Greyson promised to return the next day. If there was a bright side to all of this, Greyson’s payment for the crystal meant Dru had enough rent money for the month. That was something.

  Meanwhile, Opal’s eyes stayed glued to Greyson’s every step out the door and back to his long black muscle car. “Mmm-mmm.” Opal sighed. “For real, I’m about ready to lick peanut butter off that man’s chest.”

  “Peanut butter?” Dru made a face. “That isn’t even a thing.”

  Opal gave her a knowing look. “Is for me, honey.”

  “Absolutely didn’t need to know that.”

  Outside, Dru’s boyfriend, Nate, crossed the street toward them, lit by the warm Colorado sunshine. Well-dressed, brilliant smile, slightly geeky in a way that Dru always found disarming. But his well-mannered demeanor cracked as he shot Greyson a dirty look on the way past.

  “Uh-oh,” Opal said. “Apparently your boyfriend’s all kinds of jealous of Hunky Davidson and his hot-mobile.”

  “Not a chance. Nate’s not the jealous type.”

  Opal lowered her chin and shot Dru another meaningful look. “If you say so.”

  The door jangled, and Dru came around the counter with arms outstretched. “Honey! Hi! What are you doing here? I thought today was the big free day.”

  “Free day?” Opal echoed.

  Nate gave Dru a quick kiss, then turned to Opal. “Free exams, fillings, extractions. For under-served populations.”

  “He means homeless people.” Dru fussed with his tie and jacket lapels, trying to smooth them out. “So proud of you.”

  “But we don’t call them homeless people.” His smile practically lit up the room. “They’re all just patients.”

  She beamed back at him. “How many? Patients, I mean.”

  “Lost count. Apparently, the line started last night, and it still stretched all the way around the corner when I ran out for lunch. But I wanted to see you before I head back to it. I’ll be late. Planning to keep going until all of them are—” He broke off as the black muscle car’s engine started outside with a sound like a rumble of thunder.

  They both looked. The thud of the car’s exhaust seemed to reverberate through the shop, powerful, menacing, dangerous. With a lurch, the long black car pulled away from the curb and rocketed down the street.

  Nate’s expression darkened as he watched Greyson drive off. “So who was that guy, anyway?”

  “Just a customer. You know, I get all sorts in here sometimes.”

  “Indeed we do.” Opal wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.

  Behind Nate’s back, Dru shot her a warning glare.

  Nate sighed deeply. “Yes. I know. It’s just that every day I worry about you being in this neighborhood.”

  “It’s not like we’re on East Colfax or something.”

  “Hmm. That reminds me.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small flashlight-sized device with six stubby metal prongs on one end. He clicked a button, and the metal prongs crackled with brilliant blue electricity. As the electrical arc crawled from one prong to the next, it left pulsing afterimages in Dru’s vision.

  “Jeez Louise.” Dru backed away, blinking. “What is that?”

  He let go of the button and showed her the bold black letters along the side of the device: SHOCK WAND. “It’s a Shock Wand,” he explained unnecessarily.

  “So I see. Where’d you get that?”

  “From Joe down the street.”

  “Joe, the crazy survivalist nut? The guy who’s worried the CIA is reading his mind?” Dru pointed at her own head and made a swirly motion with her finger. “You know he just sits there dreaming this stuff up over foil pouches of freeze-dried space food, right?”

  “That’s high-protein fuel, by the way, and it’s not that bad. Anyway, I picked up one of these for each of us. Capable of stunning a moose, apparently.” He held it out to her, but she didn’t take it.

  “Pretty sure we don’t have any rampaging moose around here.” She glanced around at the shelves of crystals surrounding them. “Besides, we’re standing in a shop stacked sky-high with magically charged crystals,” she said. “The last thing I want to do is accidentally zap something and blow the place up.”

  Nate made the same face he always made when he was trying not to roll his eyes. He didn’t entirely succeed. “Of course. I don’t mean to interfere with the ‘magic.’” He formed air quotes with his fingers. “I’m just worried about you, that’s all.”

  “I know. And that’s so sweet. But—”

  His phone rang. With a sigh, he shoved the wand into her hands and pulled out his phone. “Dr. Corbin here.”

  Dru held the thing out at arm’s length, as if it would bite her. She offered it to Opal, who backed away wide-eyed, shaking her head no.

  “Correct,” Nate said. “Tomorrow at seven. Perfect.”

  When Nate hung up, she tried to give the wand back to him, but he wouldn’t take it.

  “It’s just a precaution,” he said, “considering the neighborhood.”

  Opal picked up a box of crystals and huffed past him. “Excuse me, Mr. Nate. I happen to live just down the way, remember?”

  “Present company excluded.”

  Dru decided to change the topic and set the wand down on the counter. “So what’s tomorrow at seven?”

  Nate’s thumbs tapped on his phone. “Chez Monet.”

  Chez Monet was the hottest new restaurant in Denver. Nate had teased her that they’d eat dinner there when they were ready to get engaged.

  Engaged. Her breath caught in her throat.

  This was it. This was the moment. Tomorrow at seven, he would finally pop the question. She grabbed the counter for support, expecting the room to start swimming around her. It didn’t, but she was still ready, just in case.

  Nate was too busy tapping on his phone to notice. “Just a business dinner. Trying to get those new investors from Switzerland involved in expanding the dental practice. Chez Monet sounds like an ideal choice.”

  It took a few moments for his words to penetrate her daze. “Oh. Business meeting? So not . . .”

  He paused and looked at her. “Not what?”

  “Hmm?” Her brain frantically tried to change directions and failed. “Nothing. What?”

  His phone chimed. He resumed tapping. “It’s a pain trying to get everyone lined up. My dad, the investors, Tonya—”

  “The hygienist will be there?” Dru asked, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice. Tonya was obnoxiously bubbly, busty, blonde, and had the insidious habit of “accidentally” brushing up against Nate at every possible opportunity.

  “Like I said, big business meeting. Need all hands on deck.”

  Great. So not only was he not going to propose to her at Chez Monet, he’d be having dinner and drinks with a hot, flirty blonde with boundary issues. There was only one thing she could do.

  “I want to go with you,” she blurted.

  Nate’s thumbs paused, and he looked up from the phone screen. “Really? I thought you hated this sort of thing.”

  She did. “No. Not . . . Not at all. I, um, want to be more involved, anyway. With all the dental-ness.” Which was more or less true.

  Actually, she realized, it wasn’t. At all. Inwardly, she cringed.

  But the effect on Nate was immediate. A snow-white smile lit up his face. “Really? That’s great. I’ll set it up.” He gave her a quick peck and headed out the door. “Have to run. Patients waiting.”

  “Bye,” Dru said as the door jangled. She sighed and slumped against the counter.

  Opal came back up front, carefully unwrapping a pack of bubble gum. “Dental-ness?”

  Dru sighed again and held out the Shock Wand. “You want this?”

  “Nuh-uh. Probably drop it down the sink drain and short out half the neighborhood.”

  Dru puzzled out how to pop the batteries out of the wand, then shoved it into the clut
ter packed under the cash register.

  Chewing her gum, Opal tapped one long fingernail on the counter. “You know what you need to do?”

  Dru didn’t have the energy to answer.

  “You need to make that man jealous,” Opal said. “Maybe he didn’t notice that buttercup hygienist yet, but sooner or later he will. Meantime? Make him worried about losing you. Underneath those librarian glasses and that girl-next-door hairdo, you are all kinds of hot, and he ought to know it. He doesn’t even know what he’s got.”

  “What he’s got is a girl who’s worried she’s just too plain weird for him, that’s what.” Dru busied herself with straightening up around the cash register. “I can’t expect Nate to understand magic. Hardly anyone believes in it, outside of actual sorcerers. But do I want him to, really? The fact that he’s so normal is what keeps me sane in the middle of all this.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  Sometimes, Dru needed Opal’s common-sense advice as much as her magical expertise. “Is it bad that I just want him to get down on one knee and propose? What’s wrong with a white wedding? A stable home, so that if we have kids, they’ll grow up someplace safe and normal and not have to worry about demons and monsters? Real monsters?”

  “Oh, so you and Nate having kids, now?”

  “I’m just saying. If we do.” Dru grabbed the duster and swiped it across the counter with unnecessary force.

  “Sweetie, I know what it’s like to grow up around sorcery without being a part of it. My dad, my mom, my brother. But not me. Closest I got to magic is a sparkling sense of style.”

  “Not to be underrated,” Dru pointed out.

  “Thank you. Point is, I know what it’s like, waking up every morning waiting for the curtain to go up, and it never does.” Opal’s penciled eyebrows wrinkled in concern. “But even if I’m just around magic, I’m okay with that. Having one foot in both worlds is just fine, if that’s what you want.”

  “I just want to avoid making the same mistakes my mom made. Getting wrapped up in the danger and craziness of a sorcerer’s life. Constantly being on the move. Always looking over your shoulder for the next creature or rival sorcerer who wants to ruin your life,” Dru said. “I don’t know if it’s possible to have safety and stability, and also still have magic in your life. But that’s what I want.”

  “You know, I think your mom tried to keep you safe from all that. That’s why she never told you about your magical talent.”

  “No, she told me I didn’t have any magical talent. Big difference.”

  Opal held up her hands. “Not saying it was right. Just saying maybe she was hoping you’d have a ‘normal’ life after all. Maybe she was trying to protect you from the craziness.”

  “Well, things ended up crazy anyway. And then I had to learn it all on my own.”

  “Well.” Opal straightened up a shelf of tiny statues. “Least you got magic to learn.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  With an effort, Dru pushed herself away from the counter. “Where’s the broom? I need to clean up after Rane. Again.”

  Opal popped another stick of gum in her mouth. “Well, somebody’s got to. And you know, I’m busy.”

  4

  NINETY-FIVE PERCENT RIGHT

  Long before dawn, Dru woke up thinking about Greyson’s dream. Transforming into a monster and standing shoulder to shoulder beside three others like him. Turning everything they touched into scorched ashes.

  “Doomsday,” he had said. “The end of the world.”

  After that, Dru couldn’t get back to sleep.

  Something about his nightmare sounded uncannily familiar. She knew she’d read about a similar dream somewhere before, probably in one of the thousands of books she kept downstairs in her shop.

  There were occasions that she hated having an apartment right over her shop, which meant she could never get all that far from her work. But right now it was truly convenient.

  Except that it left her with several thousand books to sort through.

  She pulled on a sweatshirt, went downstairs barefoot and sat in one of the ugly armchairs in the back room, thumbing through stacks of dusty books, trying to puzzle out anything she could about Greyson’s condition.

  In the century-old padlocked journals of the demon-hunter Nicolai Stanislaus, she found a passage about a captured demon claiming that the “text of Doomsday”—whatever that was—was hidden among the causeways.

  The causeways were a mythical maze of bridges and tunnels that ancient sorcerers had supposedly built to ensure safe passage through the netherworld, allowing them to walk from one point on earth to another, sometimes thousands of miles away, just by stepping through a portal. Somewhere in this labyrinth of portals, the demon had claimed, lay the key to the end of the world.

  The only problem was that no one had ever been able to locate a single such portal to the netherworld, and there was no proof that they’d ever existed. As far as Dru could tell, the causeways were just a wild myth.

  Then again, demons weren’t exactly known for their truthfulness.

  Whatever the answer was for Greyson’s problem, it stayed tantalizingly just out of reach. At some point, she fell asleep in her chair, the reassuring weight of the old books comforting her like a heavy blanket.

  A pounding on the locked front door woke her again, but she ignored it. After some foggy contemplation, she realized that the warm glow surrounding her was actually the first rays of daylight.

  About the time she decided that she really ought to get up and get dressed, the sound of splintering wood filled the air. A new shaft of sunlight poured in through the back corner of the shop.

  “Yo, D,” Rane called out. “If you’re here, you should know your back door security could use an upgrade.”

  Wood groaned in protest, and the sunlight vanished with a slam. Rane’s footsteps thumped closer through the dark maze of shelves and into the light streaming through the window. The moment Rane spotted Dru, she stopped short. “Oh, hey. I know it’s early, but you don’t mind if I borrow some of your books, right? Need to find some other way to pound out these stinky creatures besides lighting them up and practically burning my face off.” She paused. “Are you in your jammies?”

  Dru straightened up in the chair and moved the books off her lap. “Rough night. Got a lot on my mind.”

  “Let me guess. Problems with Nate, right? Best cure, go running with me, sweat it out.” Rane crossed the shaft of sunlight from the room’s only window, her muscled silhouette glowing for a moment in the light. She browsed Dru’s bookshelves, pulling out occasional volumes and flipping through them.

  A few brown-speckled pages fell out of one of the books and fluttered down to the floor. “Oops, my bad,” Rane said.

  Irritated, Dru snatched up the papers, took the book away from Rane, and sat down again. As she sorted the messily handwritten pages back into order, one particular passage caught her eye:

  Now, there are seven of us. Seven angels or seven demons?

  Neither.

  Seven Harbingers. Seven creators of the new world, because today the world is too sick to survive. The day has come to wipe the slate clean. Do it over, and do it right.

  Apokalipso voluta is the key. With it, we Harbingers will remake the world the way it was meant to be.

  Dru rolled the strange phrase around in her head. Apokalipso voluta. Literally, it meant “the apocalypse scroll.”

  But with magic, nothing was ever straightforward. Hardly anything in a sorcerer’s journal could be taken at face value. Sometimes, they even spread deliberate misinformation to protect themselves.

  Although the sorcerers who came into Dru’s shop were more or less dedicated to fighting evil in its various guises, that was where their common ground ended. Every sorcerer’s agenda was as unique as his or her power.

  Some used their abilities to settle old scores. Others hunted trophies among the creatures of darkness that stalk
ed the night. And still others sought to quench a limitless thirst for esoteric, arcane knowledge.

  Experienced sorcerers with delusions of grandeur and scant morals could take advantage of the lawless nature of the magical underworld. They could prey on weaker sorcerers, stripping them of their enchanted artifacts and research until others banded together to stop them.

  Once the threat was eliminated, those alliances usually fell apart as the limited spoils of magic spread too thin. And so the cycle began again.

  As a result, sorcerers tended to be elusive and paranoid by nature. They hid their research, writing journals by hand to guard their secrets. They couched their notes in vague metaphors and cryptic references, hoping to deceive and confuse their rivals.

  But as Dru flipped through the handwritten journal, something about it left her feeling uneasy. Its brazen claims about remaking the entire world bordered on bragging, as if the anonymous author had absolutely no fear of discovery.

  It was more like he or she actually wanted to be found. As if this journal was meant to serve as some kind of manifesto. A testament to why the world needed to be wiped clean and started over anew.

  If that was true, then what was the apocalypse scroll, exactly?

  She checked the book’s spine. It was a plain, cloth-bound, hardcover journal. Midcentury, from the looks of it. No title or name written anywhere. The front cover was adorned only with the crude outline of a seven-fingered hand.

  “Opal tells me you think Nate’s going to propose,” Rane said, interrupting her thoughts, which were going nowhere anyway.

  Dru set the book down on a cluttered side table and wiped her glasses on her shirt. “Well, Opal also thinks I’ve got plain, girl-next-door hair, so you can’t believe everything she says.”

  Still sorting through the shelves, Rane gave her an appraising look, but said nothing.

  “What does that look mean?” Dru asked.

  “Nothing, dude. Ever since you met Nate, you’ve been going all spastically normal about everything.” Rane yanked another book off the shelf, causing a puff of dust to fly into the air. She flipped it open, then peered past the pages and pierced Dru with a long look. “You’re sure you’re not . . . I don’t know. Bored?”