by Ben Reeder
“There was a time when I would ground you for coming home after ten,” she said. “How was your day?”
“Traumatizing,” I said. “We went to a crime scene, Lucas found a murder scene, then we went to New York and talked to the Council. Oh, and I watched a demon gut a cultist before I killed it.”
Mom was silent for a moment, her eyes wide and troubled. “Chance…you know I hate the things you see, all the terrible things you go through. There are days when…when I want to tell Corwin you’re done with this whole magick business until you’re eighteen.”
“Why don’t you?” I asked, only realizing I was halfway to serious after the words had left my mouth.
“Because if you don’t stop these things, they might show up anyway, no matter what I do. And even if I told you not to do it, I know you would anyway. Besides that,” she stopped and looked at me with a smile, “I know that if you don’t face it, someone else will have to. Someone who is not my son, who might not be… as ready as you are to deal with it.”
“Someone who isn’t already broken, you mean?” I asked. I tried to add a little bit of a laugh at the end, but it came out sounding a little bitter to my ears.
“Chance, sweetie, you’re wounded, but you’re not broken,” Mom said. “Wounds can heal. You’ve already done a lot of healing since you’ve been home.”
I stood there for a minute, trying to make some sense of that. Was I better? Maybe the nightmares weren’t so bad. Maybe I could sleep with a sheet instead of huddling in sweats, but I still slept on the floor. “Yeah, I guess I have,” I said.
“You have,” she said, standing and coming over to me. “And I’m proud of you.” She folded me up in a hug for a moment, then held me at arm’s length. “Now, go to bed, sweetie. It’s late, even for an apprentice mage.” I followed her upstairs and headed for my room. Once I had the door closed, I changed into my sweats and a clean t-shirt, then pulled the sheets off the bed and laid them on the floor. I had a text from Shade that was an hour old, so I sent her a reply, but after ten minutes with no answer, I plugged my phone into the charger and laid it next to my head. My heart felt a little empty as I pulled the sheet over my shoulder and closed my eyes.
Chapter 8
~ Children possess that most sacred of gifts, the ability to be both foolish and wise, often in the same moment ~ Idris Myrdden, wizard to King Arthur.
Dulka chases me through the halls of a school. Endless rows of lockers slide past on either side of me, even though I don’t feel like I’m moving at all. My legs push against the floor, but I feel as if I’m swimming through thick sand or something. Desperately, I look for a side hallway to turn down, some place to hide, but only the chipped blue paint of the lockers stretches out in front of me. I push off with the other foot and seem to float in midair for a moment before the other foot hits the ground. My chest heaves, I’m out of breath, but I might as well be standing still. I look over my shoulder, but I can’t see into the darkness behind me, all I can hear is the sound of Dulka’s cloven feet slamming onto the linoleum and his bellowed threats.
When I turn my head back to look forward, Dee is standing in the middle of the hallway. Her pajamas are rumpled and she’s holding her stuffed Dr. Hooves in one hand. The other is rubbing at her eyes. I struggle to take another step and get enough breath to tell her to run at the same time. Then she looks at me and frowns.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“Run!” I try to yell, but it only comes out as a strange croaking sound.
“You can’t run in dreams,” she smiles. “But you can fly! I like to dream because I can fly all around while I’m dreaming. Try it!”
I push off the floor with my next step, and I float into the air again. But this time, I don’t come down. Behind me, Dulka roars again, and I fall to the floor.
“Run!” I moan. Dee’s eyes get wide and she looks into the darkness behind me.
“Oh, this is one of your bad dreams,” she says, urgency in her voice. I push up off the floor and float into the air. “Fly as fast as you can. I’ll be right there!” She closes her eyes tight, then I’m flying past her, suddenly able to move much faster. Why haven’t I flown before? Up ahead, I see a hallway, and I zoom around the corner, wondering if this is what Ren feels when he’s flying. Ren? Wait… I can’t be here, I realize. What did Dee say? ‘You can’t run in dreams.’
I’m dreaming. Or whatever you call it when you’re having a nightmare.
I feel a gentle hand on my shoulder, and I know a microsecond of fear, knowing that my reflexes are about to kick in.
My eyes opened, and Dee was sitting beside me on the floor. My chest was still heaving, just like in the dream, and my heart was pounding. But my hands were still drawn up to my chest. I hadn’t even tried to hit Dee.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “It was just a dream. It was just a bad dream. You’re okay now. You’re okay.” Her hand moved to stroke my hair as I lay there and stared at her, unable to move, unable to push the fear back into the tiny little box I had made for it. But with every word that Dee said, every touch of her small hand, the cold feeling started to recede, like so much ice melting in my chest.
“Dee,” I finally managed to say, sitting up. “You shouldn’t have woken me up like that. I might have hurt you.”
“No, you won’t,” she said. Her voice carried a tone of such utter conviction that I found myself believing her and not understanding why. “Are all your dreams like that?” she asked, her eyes big now.
“This one…wasn’t so bad. You caught me on a good night.”
“That isn’t a good night, big brother.”
“It is for me. Compared to most nights, this is a good night.” I tried to smile, but the look on her face was so stricken that I couldn’t hold it.
“That isn’t fair,” she said, big tears welling up in her eyes. “You try and help people all the time, you saved me and Mom and practically the whole world once! Why don’t you get to have good dreams?”
“I’d settle for no dreams at all, sis,” I said. “But… it’s like Mom told me tonight. Something inside me is hurt... and the part where dreams come from, I guess that part got a little messed up, too. Maybe it’ll get better someday. Who knows?”
“I wish I could make it better now,” Dee said with the same iron in her voice I heard in Mom’s sometimes. A tear slid down her cheek and she scrubbed it away with one fist. My heart broke a little at what she was taking on.
“Dee, don’t worry about it,” I said. I reached out and pulled her to me in a hug. “Fixing me isn’t your job.” My voice cracked a little, and I wanted to hold her tighter just because she wanted to help me so much. She mumbled something into my chest, and I loosened my hold a little. “What?”
“It’s not a job,” she said. She pulled away a little and looked me in the eye. “Remember when that jerk at that other school tried to cast a spell on me?” I shuddered at the memory of hearing her screams over the phone and nodded.
“Yeah, I remember.”
“And that guy who was in my room trying to hurt me?”
“I remember him, too.”
“And when Mom…well, anyway, there’s a lot of times like that.”
“I know, and I’m sorry…”
“You’re not getting it,” Dee said. “It’s like, whenever something bad happens, you’re always there. When that guy cast that spell, and you were like, a billion miles away? You still saved me. No matter what happens, I know you’re going to be there somehow. Because that’s what brothers do.”
“But, Dee, you’re still-”
“Remember when he was hitting you, and I knocked him on his butt?” she asked. I had to smile at the memory of her putting my father on his ass with an iron-cored wand. Like me, she didn’t like to acknowledge that he was related to us. I wondered what she might have done to him if she hadn’t been using a wand that was actively trying to ground out any magick she put through it.
“Yeah.”
>
“That’s what sisters do.”
“You know not everyone can do that kind of thing, right?”
“I don’t care,” Dee said, sitting up straight. “It’s not a job. It’s what my big brother does, so that’s what I’m going to do. We look out for each other. You’ve done it for me plenty of times. So, I’m going to look out for you while you sleep.” She gently nudged my shoulder and scooted off the sheet, so I lowered myself back down.
“Okay, now go back to bed,” I said. She pulled the sheet up over my shoulders and leaned down to kiss my cheek.
“Good night, big bother,” she said. “Sweet dreams.”
“Good night, little sinister,” I quipped back. She laid a hand on my head, and sleep snuck up on me and smacked me with a sledgehammer.
I woke up to Mom calling Dee’s name. The panicked note to her voice brought me from deep sleep to fully awake in a heartbeat. Dee was sitting cross-legged against my closet door, Dr. Hooves clasped in front of her, blinking like a confused owl.
“She’s in here, Mom,” I called out. Two seconds later, my door opened and bounced off the wall, but Mom was already at Dee’s side.
“Dierdre! What are you doing in here?” she asked.
“I was fixing Chance’s dreams,” she said, then broke into a wide yawn. Mom turned and looked at me.
“She woke me up from a nightmare Mom. And I didn’t try to hit her.” Mom’s eyes went wide when she heard that. She’d seen what happened when people touched me or woke me up out of a nightmare. It had earned Lucas a black eye and a bloody nose the one time he’d done it.
“Did it work?” Dee asked. “Did you have good dreams?”
“I don’t think I had any dreams,” I said. “It’s better than bad dreams any night.”
“Let’s get you ready for school, young lady,” Mom said. “And we’ll talk about this dream thing after school.” Mom gave me a long look that I figured meant we would be having a long talk about it.
My phone pinged during breakfast and seeing Shade’s name on the text brightened my morning considerably. Now it was just a matter of surviving the rest of the day.
Everyone was waiting under our tree when I got out of the car. Ren flew overhead and settled into the branches while I walked across the lot. Once again, Lucas and Monica were leaning against the tree, this time with her facing him. She wore an oversized black t-shirt that tried valiantly to hide her curves and failed miserably, somehow clinging in all the right places. Her skirt did a better job, but she still caught a lot of stares. Lucas, on the other hand, was dressed in a white button-down shirt and jeans, looking older than his seventeen by a long shot. Wanda sat with her back against the opposite side of the tree, a tablet resting on her black pants and her phone in her right hand. A red vest showed up bright against her black satin blouse, and I had to admit, made her look pretty damn sultry. But none of them compared to Shade.
Her leather jacket covered a gray t-shirt that draped below the waistband of her jeans, and a pair of black, low-heeled boots took over at the knee. Maybe it wasn’t high fashion, but she made it look damn good to me. Where Monica’s beauty was in her plentiful curves and generous endowments, Shade was flowing arcs and supple shapes. I put my hands on her hips and pulled her closer to me so I could lean in and nuzzle at her neck for a moment before I nipped at the soft skin below her ear.
“You look great,” I said as she smiled at me.
“Mmm, you’re not so bad yourself,” she purred after a kiss that left my heart pounding.
“Guys, please,” Wanda moaned. “The involuntarily chaste need a break here.”
“We really need to find you a rebound girlfriend,” Lucas said.
“There are a couple of eligible girls who’d love to go to prom with you,” Monica offered.
“Not interested,” Wanda said. Monica looked to Lucas, and he kissed her forehead and shrugged as he made reassuring sounds in her ear.
“If you change your mind,” Monica said, leaving the rest trailing.
“Not likely,” Wanda said. “Besides, I got a few hits on what Chance and Lucas turned up yesterday.” I frowned at Lucas, but he shrugged it off.
“Whatcha got, Nancy Drew?” he said.
Okay,” Wanda said, getting to her feet and looking at her tablet. “So, this Rending? It’s freaking nationwide, not just here in New Essex. The Dark Web is full of chatter on it. People looking to get out of contracts, and people looking to keep them in one. The thing is, whoever spills the blood of the Half-Caste Chylde can break their contract and still keep whatever they gained from it. But there’s something else. You’re not going to like it.”
“I already don’t like anything about this whole situation,” Lucas said.
“Well, it’s about to get worse. The Rending isn’t just about contracts. It’s about breaking bonds. Contracts are just the current flavor of the month, because they’re easy.”
“Easy?” Shade asked. “Why?”
“Every Infernal contract has a clause that can negate it,” I said, recalling the forty-seven contracts I’d tempted people to sign. “Demons won’t sign one without it. Most of the time, it’s about results. If you’re not rich and famous by a certain date or some such, it’s all null and void. But there’s also a set of conditions that get you off free as a bird, even if the demon fulfills his part of the bargain. Usually, they’re damn near impossible to meet. Like your feet not touching dry land for a year and a day, but not traveling across salt water, things like that. But if I understand what Vortigern was telling us, if you can meet those terms during The Rending, then you’re off the hook. But what other kinds of bonds does The Rending break?”
“Seals on prisons and binding spells,” Wanda said. “And guess who’s name keeps popping up all over the place?”
“I have a bad feeling about this,” I said. “But I’m going to guess anyway. Mammon.”
“Ding ding!” Wanda said. “You win a fabulous prize. None other than the crown prince of the Inferno himself. But there’s a catch.”
“Does it make this better or worse?” I asked.
“Depends. Got a demon horde handy? Because it doesn’t call for your standard blood sacrifice.”
“What does it call for?” Lucas asked, but I had a sneaking suspicion I already knew.
“The slaughter of innocents,” Wanda said. “The blood of a hundred children, to be precise.” Damn, I hated it when I was right.
Chapter 9
~ Do not be fooled by a pleasant face. A wolf only smiles to show you his teeth. ~ Proverb among wizards
Lucas and I made it to Forensics in time to see Wanda walk out the door with her own copy of the police department’s “Get Out of Class Free” letter. This one wasn’t a surprise, since today was Wanda’s scheduled Ride-Along with the Essex County Sheriff’s Department. She walked like a woman with a purpose, and I pitied anyone who crossed her today.
“I hope she doesn’t end up at a scene like the one we had,” Lucas said. “There’s been enough dead girls in this town.”
“Amen, brother,” I said. “A-men.” We sat down and waited for Dr. Corwin’s teaching assistant to show up and take over. I texted Shade to let her know where Wanda was going, then I settled in to wait out the rest of the day.
After the last bell rang for the day, Lucas and I headed for Dr. C’s place. Even if he wasn’t there we knew what was expected of us. If we weren’t covering something new, we had standing instructions to review the previous day’s lessons, and a long list of things we needed to improve on.
Halfway there, my phone rang, and when I snuck a glance at it during a red light, I saw Wanda’s name on the call ID. I hit speaker when I answered it.
“Chance,” Wanda gasped before I could say anything. “We got lucky. We caught a break!”
“Wanda, what?” I asked as I accelerated through the intersection. In the background, I could hear Wanda panting and the sounds of someone moving through brush.
“On my Ri
de-Along,” Wanda said, then cursed. “Someone tried to abduct a girl this afternoon! Ow, damn it! She got away!”
“Wanda, where are you? What’s going on?”
“Her dog! I’m following her dog through the Shawnee Trails Conservation Area. She’s alive, I can feel it, but…she’s still in trouble.” With a general destination in mind, I floored the Mustang.
“What about the cops? I asked. “Aren’t they with you?”
“The dog showed up when we were leaving. I tried calling Dr. Corwin, but I haven’t been able to get ahold of him. I need you to let him know what’s going on. But I need you and Lucas and Shade in front of me, and hopefully, in front of the girl. Hang on a second…” The background noise dropped considerably, then Wanda’s voice came through again. “According to my phone’s GPS, I’m heading northeast, about a mile or so from a little suburb called Mindenmines. Look for the Third Street turnoff.” She disconnected the call then, and I grabbed the phone from my seat.
“Call Dr. Corwin!” I hated using the voice commands, but I wasn’t just driving, I was driving dangerously fast. The phone rang a few times, then went to voice mail. I hit the disconnect, then told it to call Lucas.
“Dude!” Lucas answered a moment later. “What’s up?”
“Short version…no still too long. Um, Wanda’s trying to find a missing girl, she wants us to get ahead of her somehow.” I laid out the situation more precisely and was met with a moment of silence. I could almost hear the metaphorical gears turning in his head.
“Monica, can you pull up the map of Shawnee Trails?”
“Already on it,” I heard Monica’s voice in the background. There was a click and her voice came through louder. “Chance, there’s some kind of creek or something that runs between the conservation area and Third Street, and a tall fence beside the road. She’s trapped if she’s running north.”
“Okay, I’ll see if I can get to her. The signal here is crap. You guys get some distance and try to get ahold of Dr. C. and the police!” I ended that call and held the phone up in front of me again. “Call Shade.”
