Sorcerer's Creed Books 1-3

by N. P. Martin

  That was the whole point of the video as far as Gordon Grayson was concerned anyway. He wanted the supernatural element to be running scared. While vampires and other supernatural creatures may have been powerful and numerous, they were still outnumbered many times over by the Sleepwalkers. No matter how powerful the supernatural element was, they couldn't defend against that many people gunning for them.

  And going by the media reports, it seemed the hunt had already begun. Across the world, Sleepwalkers were banding together like groups of vigilantes to flush out the monsters in their neighborhoods and kill them. They gave interviews on local news stations where they voiced their outrage that such creatures were in existence all this time and no one had saw fit to warn them. "Our kids are not safe!" they would scream. "We won't stop until every last stinking creature is dead!"

  You couldn't blame the people for being so outraged. Their actions were motivated by fear, which Grayson knew was one of the most powerful motivators. If you wanted to stir up a revolution, then stirring up fear first was a good way to start one.

  And while the world was going mad, the members of SciCane were partying on down in Grayson Manor. As you do, of course, when you've just turned the world upside down. Nearly a hundred people occupied the great hall, all of them guzzling from bottles of wine and strong liquor that Grayson had obviously provided to them. To keep his followers happy, of course.

  I grabbed a bottle of whiskey and hung out with Sam and his dorky friends for a while. They looked at me like I was some kind of awesome revolutionary like fucking Che Guevara. Their naivety was painful to watch as they discussed in drunken slurs how different, and how much better, the world was going to be when they had finished enacting their leader's plans. Looking around, I saw a hall full of rejects. People who didn't belong in normal society for one reason or another, hence why they ended up joining Grayson's cult, having no idea (or simply not caring) that their great leader viewed them as nothing more than minions to do his bidding and carry out his dirty work. But for the time being at least, everyone I spoke with in the hall felt like they belonged for the first time in their lives. Not only that, they felt like they were making a real difference. They were changing the world. Which they were, of course, but maybe not in the way they thought. They thought that once the playing field had been leveled and magick and the supernatural became commonplace, and the traditional power structures had been torn down, that the world would be some harmonious, magickal place where everybody would get along and be free to do their own thing without interference from above. They thought the human race would evolve into this wondrously magickal species who would go on to spread knowledge and goodwill throughout the universe. I don't know whether this was wish fulfillment on their parts, or whether Grayson had filled their heads with utopian fantasies, but either way, it was complete nonsense.

  The only thing certain about Grayson's plan was that it would plunge the world into complete chaos, especially when phase two was put into place. It was bad enough that the Sleepwalkers had been awakened, but Grayson was planning on empowering them with magick. What kind of magick or how much, I still didn't know. I just knew any amount of magick in the hands of the uninitiated would end in disaster. A fucking blind man could see that. Grayson himself surely saw it, which made me wonder if he didn't have some hidden agenda, though I couldn't speak as to the nature of such an agenda. Maybe he wanted to rule the universe. He seemed the type to want to do so, and in my experience, all power mad motherfuckers like him wanted to either rule or destroy the world. They couldn't help it, because when you have that much power (like Mr Black had), it became a question of one or the other. Rule or destroy. The question was, which one was Grayson going to pick?

  When I was finally able to tear myself away from Sam and his best buddies, I took my by now half empty bottle of whiskey and started to head to my quarters. As I was doing so, I spotted Jordan from across the hall. She seemed to have the same idea as she slinked away through one of the exits with a bottle of something in her hand. Right then, I thought it a good idea to follow her and join her in her room if that's where she was going. If nothing else, it was a better idea than going back to my own quarters and drinking alone.

  "Jordan," I called when I spotted her going down a long hallway. "Wait up."

  Jordan stopped and turned around as I jogged down the hallway towards her. "What do you want?" she asked, clearly not in the party mood.

  "Nothing much. I just thought you could use some company." I held up the bottle in my hand and nodded at the one in hers. "Better than drinking alone, right?"

  "Says who?" She started walking again, and I followed her.

  "Says someone who drinks alone all the time." I caught up with her and fell in beside her as we turned a corner into another wood-paneled hallway.

  "Maybe I like drinking alone."

  "No one likes drinking alone."

  She shook her head and then stopped by a door in the hallway. "Fine," she said. "One drink, and that's it."

  I smiled and nodded, her inference that there was to be no funny business not passing me by. "Okay." She opened the door, and I walked into her quarters with her, closing the door behind me. The room was a lot bigger than mine, and the bed in the center was also a four poster, though again bigger than mine. It didn't look like it had been slept in recently though. The sheets were still immaculate.

  "You weren't enjoying the party?" she asked as she grabbed two glasses from a cabinet in the corner of the room, coming back to hand me one.

  "Not really," I replied as I accepted the glass and sat down on the chaise lounge while she sat on the other end. "It was like Jack Nicholson had dropped them all of in the bus for the school disco." Jordan burst out laughing, which surprised me. "You've seen One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest?"

  "Of course," she replied, still smiling. "Hasn't everyone?"

  "I guess so. I just thought you'd have been too busy over the years to watch movies, what with the whole quest thing with your father to find...what was it again?"

  Her smile faded, though not completely. She'd drank too much already to keep up her usual guarded seriousness. Which I was hoping was the case when I decided to follow her.

  And that's not the only thing you were hoping, eh? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge...

  I paid the thought no heed. Just my sex-starved brain and it's wishful thinking. I blamed all the recent adrenaline.

  "I didn't say what it was," Jordan said.

  "Come on." I relaxed back into the chaise lounge and took a drink. "I thought we were on the same side now. The least you can do is fill me in. If nothing else I'd like to hear about your adventures up till now."

  She snorted. "Adventures? I wouldn't call them that."

  "What then? What would you call them?"

  Jordan stared for a moment as if deciding if she could really trust me. In the end, I think a combination of the alcohol she'd consumed and a desire to connect with another person other than her father pushed her into opening up. And if the only other people she had to talk to were the one's in the great hall, I didn't blame her. "Alright, Creed," she said, settling back into her seat in a resigned sort of way as if she thought it would somehow do her good to talk to someone. And of course, I was happy to listen, not only because I hoped she would discuss the Dark Codex and its whereabouts, but also because I was genuinely interested in Jordan Grayson. And attracted. Don't forget attracted. "What do you want to know?"

  "I want to know what brought you here," I said. "I want to know how you ended up in the Grayson Dimension."

  "Fine, but afterward, I want to know how you ended up here."

  I nodded. "Deal."

  "Needless to say," she began. "I'm here because of my father..."

  17

  Jordan's Story

  Thirty-seven years ago, Jordan Grayson was brought into the world by Gordon and Marie Grayson. Gordon was a research scientist of little note at the time, and Marie was a respected defense attorney. As an
only child, Jordan led a happy life for the first seven years of her existence. She excelled at her private school, always staying in the top few percent of her class, showing a particular talent for art. Her drawing skills were apparently well beyond her years, and she spent many hours each day sketching and painting. To balance things out, her mother enrolled her in a gymnastics class, and also a martial arts school, both of which Jordan took to immediately, showing great promise in martial arts in particular.

  Then Jordan came home from school one day to find her father crying in the living room. Immediately, Jordan knew something terrible had happened. She had never seen her father cry before, not even when both his parents died within months of each other the year before. Jordan dropped her school bag to the floor as her own tears began to flow, and she asked her father what was wrong. Although somewhere inside, Jordan already knew what was wrong. Something had happened to her mother, she knew.

  And something did happen. Her mother was attacked at her office by a man she put away a few years before, a psychopath named Tommy Farnes who went down for assault. When he got released, the first thing he did was seek revenge on the lawyer who put him away, Marie Grayson. Farnes beat Marie Grayson over the head repeatedly with a stapler that he grabbed from her desk. He didn't stop hitting her with it until another lawyer walked in and restrained him. But by then it was too late. Marie Grayson went into a coma and never came back out of it. She died a month later when the machines keeping her alive were switched off.

  Needless to say, things changed for Jordan after that. She lost all interest in her studies and dropped to the bottom of her class. She stopped drawing and painting as well. The only thing she kept up was her martial arts training, and only because she had this idea in her head that she would one day get revenge on the man who killed her dear mother.

  Gordon Grayson threw himself deep into his work after his wife died, switching the focus of his work to the nature of consciousness. He thought if he could isolate a person's consciousness, then perhaps he would be able to download it some way and save it somewhere until another body was found to put it in. It was pipe dream stuff no doubt, but Gordon was motivated by grief, and the desire to save his little girl should anything happen to her in the future. He wanted to create a backup of her consciousness should it ever be needed, as well as his own.

  The result of all her father's constant working was that Jordan rarely saw him. She was looked after part time by a hired nanny. The rest of the time she looked after herself, which she soon became good at. The desire for revenge never left her either. She spent her days hating the man who ended her mother's life, often fantasizing about killing him in horrible ways. After many months, it was all she could think about, until one day she decided that something had to be done.

  "I was about eight years old," Jordan told me as she lay on the chaise lounge and continued to drink vodka while I guzzled my bottle of whiskey. "And all I could think about was killing that son of a bitch that took my mother from me." She shook her head. "I blamed him for everything, for taking everything away that was good in my life."

  "That's some heavy shit for an eight-year-old to be carrying around," I said. "Didn't your father notice what was going on with you?"

  "I kept it well hidden. He thought I was getting on with things. Not that he gave it too much thought anyway. All he cared about was his work. Sometimes I thought he resented me for being alive, that he thought it should have been me who died and not my mother."

  "I'm sure that wasn't true."

  "You don't know my father. He can be spiteful, resentful. Mean even."

  "I know the type."

  "Your father was the same?"

  "You could say that, but we'll talk about him later. Continue."

  Almost three years after her mother's passing, two things happened that would change Jordan's life forever.

  The first thing was that she saw Tommy Farnes one day on her way back from her martial arts class in downtown Los Angeles where she used to live. She stopped dead when she saw him, knowing there was no way it wasn't him because every detail of his face was burned into her brain by then. But he was supposed to be in jail. Why was he out walking around without a care in the world with some woman hanging off his arm?

  "It turned out, Farnes had been given an early release for helping the Feds with some case," Jordan said. "The bastard had made a deal. I didn't know that at the time though. I just thought it was incredibly unfair and unjust that he should be out walking the streets. It felt like a snub from God, even though I've never believed in God, but that's how it felt. And I got so fucking angry, seeing that man smiling with his girlfriend as he walked into a cinema..." She trailed off and shook her head as if the feelings she described were still fresh in her. Which I knew they were. Such feelings never went away. They just got pushed to the back of your mind over time where they sat festering until you thought about them again.

  "So what did you do?" I asked her.

  "Something came over me. It was like a coldness, and all my other emotions shut down except for this burning desire to kill Farnes. I knew right then that I had to do it, if not for me then for my mother."

  "And did you?"

  "I followed Farnes and his girlfriend into the cinema. A few other people were there, but I hardly noticed them as I took a seat right behind Farnes. I sat there for a while, shaking like a leaf, terrified that he would turn around and notice me, even though he wouldn't have known who I was. But I had it in my head that he would know when he looked in my eyes, that he would somehow recognize my mother in me. But he didn't turn around because he was too busy groping his girlfriend." Jordan stopped and took a shuttering breath as if she was going to cry. "I'm sorry. I've never spoken about this to anyone before."

  "That's okay," I said, refilling her glass for her. "Take your time. I know how hard this stuff is to talk about."

  Jordan nodded, sipped from her glass, and then continued. "After a while, the fear I felt going in there just seemed to leave me, and I felt calm because I knew what I had to do next. I'd never been more certain of anything in my life, in fact. I reached down into my training bag where I had a sai that I trained with. You know what a sai is?"

  I nodded. "An Okinawan piercing weapon. I have a set at home."

  "Well, I took the sai out of the bag, and I held it for a minute while I waited for Farnes to stop kissing his girlfriend. Eventually, he did. Then..." She trailed off as her eyes focused downwards as if she was reliving the whole event. "I thrust the sai into the back of Farnes' head, in the hollow of his skull. He didn't know what hit him as I kept the sai in his skull for a minute. As his girlfriend started screaming, I leaned over and looked into Farnes' eyes just before he died. 'For my mother,' I told him, then I pulled the sai out of his skull at the same time as the smell of shit and piss filled the air around me. I felt nothing at the time, apart from the satisfaction of knowing he was dead, the man who took my mother from me."

  It was hard to believe that an eight-year-old girl could do such a cold-blooded act of murder, but I knew from her eyes she was telling the truth. "What happened after?"

  What happened was she got home to find her father in a state, babbling that everything had gone wrong and that they were all dead. They being the seven people who were killed by the evil spirit he inadvertently allowed into this world. Of course, he didn't explain any of that to Jordan at the time. He just told her they had to go. Jordan, having just killed a man, wasn't particularly stable herself, mentally speaking. In her mind, running made perfect sense because that way, if anyone came looking for her for killing Farnes, she wouldn't be around and therefore wouldn't go to jail.

  "But little did I know that the rest of my life would be one long jail sentence," she said, sounding drunk and more than a little bitter.

  "That bad, huh?" I asked.

  She smiled exaggeratedly and nodded her head. "Fucking...bad."

  I stared at her a moment before speaking. "I don't get it, Jord
an. Why have you stuck around for your father's crusade all these years when you clearly don't believe in it."

  "I believe."

  "I don't think you do."

  "Alright, Creed," she said, waving her glass antagonistically at me. "Tell me why you think I don't believe."

  "I think you know the answer to that already. You followed your father because you had to, because you were only a kid at the time, and because you thought the police were going to be after you for killing the man who put your mother in a coma. You probably feared going to jail for the rest of your life, so you gladly ran along with your father. And over the years, you've stuck with him out of guilt, because you somehow see this as being your punishment."

  Jordan stared at me for a long time after I'd finished, her face going from angry to sad, and then to drunken stoicism as she flopped her head back on the chaise lounge. "You don't know me, Creed. Killing Farnes, that's not even the worst thing I've done. If you knew some of the things..." She trailed off and looked away.

  "Things you've done for your father, you mean?"

  "Yes, but it makes no difference. I did those things, not him. Me."

  After refilling my glass, I sat in silence for a while as I contemplated Jordan and her story. She had more darkness in her than I initially realized. A lot more. But I had no doubt that her darkness grew out of her loyalty to her father, and her deep-seated guilt over killing a man at age eight. Fuck, she was just a kid. How could something like that not fuck her up? I also couldn't be sure, but I was pretty certain Jordan's father used her guilt over that incident, and her fear of getting caught, to control her, and to force her to do whatever he asked of her. It was hard not to feel sympathy for Jordan. She was just another damaged soul, abused and taken advantage of by someone who should have been looking out for her instead of using her for his own ends. Let's just say I could relate.