Dark Prince

by Russell Moon

  She lays her fingers on it in an odd sequence, like the walking legs of a tarantula. She looks at it so closely, I feel like she is going to lick it, and when these noises come out of her—deep, sensual, as if nobody is here watching her—I feel she just might.

  “Do you see?” Winston asks Arj.

  “Of course I see,” Arj answers. “How could I not see?”

  “So soon,” Winston says.

  Arj shakes his head, in a kind of admiring disbelief.

  “What?” I ask.

  “We were just noticing how … thoroughly the ring has grown into you,” Eartha says.

  Marthe is still lost in her fawning. I’m getting embarrassed.

  “That’s enough,” Arj says, and she backs off.

  “Yes,” I say, turning my hand over and back. “There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about that.”

  “No,” Eartha says, “there wouldn’t be. But you wouldn’t want there to be. You are the Prince, after all.”

  “Please don’t say that,” I say.

  “We have to say that,” Winston says.

  Arj suddenly seems impatient. “We understand, by your presence here at the school, that you are with us,” he says. “That you have found what you needed to find and that you are ready to join us in healing our people.”

  I find myself staring at him, is what I find. I find all of them staring at me. I haven’t really found much more than that, and I feel like telling them.

  But I don’t. There are signs, finally, that I can at least control my mouth. And after seeing what I’ve seen, I am not willing to disagree with them anymore, to let them in, one way or another, on what’s in my head.

  The bell screams loudly for everyone to get back to classes, and everyone responds. Nearly everyone. Mortal kids and magic kids alike stand like zombies, return trays, deposit rubbish in bins, as if the bell is somehow attached to their cerebral cortexes and they do not control themselves.

  The Council and I stay where we are.

  “Come on, Marcus,” Eartha says. “We know.”

  “We know,” Marthe says.

  “We know,” Winston says.

  Baron, wisely, says nothing.

  “We know,” Arj says, “and time matters. So please, let’s not mince our words.”

  “Great,” I say. “Let’s not, then. Why don’t we start with all this ‘we know’ stuff. You all want to let me know exactly what it is we know?”

  “We know that you have been back. To Port Caledonia. We know you saw what you did. You have seen your past, your future, your capabilities. We know you have been with him. You have felt his evil up close, and thus must be prepared to help us now. To undo the unspeakable tragedy he has wrought.”

  He is very sincere, our Arj. As far as I can tell. He seems truly to believe this, that I am all packed and ready to go.

  “I have done no such thing,” I say, snapping.

  I stand, looking down at their expectant, witchy faces. Finally, I settle on Eartha, on Eartha’s most expectant, most heartbreaking, Jules-esque face. Yet not Jules now, so obviously not.

  I remove the silver feathers, which I still have in my rear pocket.

  “Recognize these?” I ask.

  She demurs. She looks back up at me.

  I hold the feathers high above her head. I let one drop.

  It falls like a lawn dart and lands with a thikk in her shoulder.

  She winces. Tears come to her eyes. She hangs tough.

  “First, I am not part of your coven, so I will lie when I need to, as you all, I am sure, will continue to do. Second, I do not want to be followed anymore, by anyone. And tell that to your father.”

  “He didn’t follow you,” she says in a thin and wavering voice.

  I drop the second feather, which cuts through the air with the sound of an arrow shot from a bow. It sticks, alongside the other, in the thick of her trapezoid muscle. Tears start to fall silently down her cheeks.

  “I guess I need to be more specific,” I say. “I do not want to be followed by anybody’s familiar either. I’m growing fairly sick of familiars, frankly,” I say, leaning down into Eartha’s face. “You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  She says nothing. But Arj does.

  “It is very poor form,” he says carefully, but forcefully. He stands up to me as he says it. “Very poor form among our people, to interfere with another’s familiar. Only bad will come of it. You have already done it once….”

  This is new. The feeling I am feeling is new. It feels, for the first time since I was a young boy, like there is an honest-to-God fight brewing. And just as it did then, it feels like a fight at least part of me does not want.

  I feel, right now, so alone, so frightened and tiny and out of my depth. Part of me wants to hit the ground and roll onto my back and expose my belly the way a weaker wolf does when he’s confronted by a dominant one.

  That part is completely and decisively routed by the other part of me.

  “Well then,” I say, turning from Eartha to lean as close in on Arj as it is possible to lean without touching, “rude familiars better be kept locked up, lest I revert to my bad form.” The voice emitting from me has only the remotest connection to my own. It sounds like I’m gargling granite chunks and burning coals as I speak.

  Arj stays with me. He is, as far as I can tell, the best they’ve got and is not without a certain calm menace of his own.

  “No one here denies your power, Marcus. But there are limits. There will always be limits. Do not forget that, as your father did.”

  The instant he mentions my father, there is a searing flash across my brow, across my eyes, heat and blasts of red rocket-light, and, fleetingly, his face in my sight. He, himself, inside me right now, uninvited, filling me up. He has stayed away, giving me time. But now I can feel he is backing me up. I don’t want him.

  I wince, cover my eyes, rub them, then look back up.

  And am as stunned as I can be to find Arj, and all the rest of them, on their knees before me.

  “Knock it off,” I say, looking around with no small wave of embarrassment overtaking me. But the cafeteria workers just go about their business, sweeping, mopping, stacking trays and clanging silverware and crashing plates into the giant steaming dishwasher. As if this were nothing out of the ordinary.

  “Say the word,” Arj says, “and scores of your people will be here, sweeping down those stairs to join us here in front of you.”

  “Really?” I say. “Then tell me what that word is, so I can be sure not to say it.”

  “This is your life now,” Arj says. “This is to be your kingdom. At least it will be when we have accomplished our goal and won this war.”

  “This war,” I say, thinking back to when my father first brought it up to me. “Are we talking about, basically, a whole nation of you people against one guy?”

  “Do not be fooled,” Arj says.

  “I’m trying not to be,” I say. “Answer the one simple goddamn question, and that will be a nice start.”

  “He is not merely ‘one guy.’”

  “Still. Still, you can’t answer a straight question. That’s hardly the beginning of trust, now is it, Arj?”

  It is really starting to bother me, this idea of everyone wishing me to trust them, and still the lot of them talking like sleazy backwater politicians.

  He opens his mouth to speak but nothing comes out, though he tries desperately.

  “No, you answer me,” I say, pointing at Baron.

  He grins. “It is everybody against the one,” he says with some satisfaction. “But the truth is, he is powerful enough that the odds are against us.”

  “Without you,” Eartha says.

  “Then the odds are against you,” I say. I decide, right now, that this is my speech, my declaration of intent, while I have the whole council here, while I have them prone before me and I am in official and final speechmaking position. I did not intend this, was scared to do this, but I cannot hold
back.

  “You are right about some things,” I announce. “I have learned. And I do believe he is evil. And so are you.

  I hear gasps of dejection, I don’t know from whom. But I decide I don’t want to hear anybody’s gasps. So I cut their air. They concentrate now on regular breathing, and listening.

  “I believe your fight, your war,”. I fairly spit the word over their faces, “is probably pretty even. So you want to be able to continue your line, and he wants … whatever it is that he wants, and I don’t really care who gets what. My only consolation is that there’s a fair chance you’ll just cancel each other out and in the end just disappear into nowhere. Which suits me just fine. So don’t ask me to play anymore, because I won’t play. Don’t ask me to fight, because I won’t fight. Don’t ask me to be leader, because I don’t want to lead anybody. You’re all the same. Enjoy each other.

  “So thanks, it’s been a certain pleasure. But I’m going back to my life, to my home and my mother and my dog and my peace. And right now, I’m going back to class. To learn something.”

  I hop down and march away from them, toward the big double-door exit to the cafeteria.

  The truth is, though I feel almost invincible, I am waiting for the bubble to burst. Waiting to be ambushed from behind as I walk. Either in the conventional way, with someone throwing a chair at my head or rushing up to insert a steak knife in my kidney. Or in some novel, inventive, airy-fairy way with magic that would leave me both crippled and begging their forgiveness.

  But … nothing. I walk out the cafeteria doors, and … nothing. Up the stairs out of the basement, and nothing. Nothing still on the first-floor landing, where I turn slightly to watch my back before I head up the second flight and the third with nothing, nothing, and nothing following me up the whole way.

  With every step, I grow braver.

  Could it be? Could it be that I have grown enough—in their eyes, in stature, in power and authority—that we have reached the point where I can say and do whatever I choose without fear of reprisal? Even if what I say is I quit, I decline, I refuse? That even if their power stretches beyond what I imagined, I am immune?

  That thought fills me with such elation that I feel, for the first time in memory—since before what happened to Jules, and even months before that—like living and breathing and walking through the rest of this life may be starting to be a viable idea again.

  It has been too long, in psychic terms, since I have sat properly in a classroom. But at least I remember where I am supposed to be.

  When I reach the top floor, I walk to the very first classroom door, let myself in, and ease on back to the farthest row, the farthest seat from the teacher’s desk, head down all the way, just as I have done thousands of times before, in thousands of classes throughout the years, through thousands of happier, simpler moments.

  I settle in, unnoticed by all.

  Except, I realize, the teacher.

  The new teacher.

  Arj.

  I run one tense hand through my hair and nearly pull out a chunk with the agitation I feel.

  “You still fail to understand,” he says, speaking in the manner of every teacher of American history since 1945. He walks the length of the classroom, past a roll-down map of battlefield Europe, past the scribbled blackboard names of Patton, Montgomery, de Gaulle, and Rommel.

  “The choices,” Arj says, over the heads of all the rapt students of history, but to me personally, “are not quite what you think they are.” He begins gesturing to points on the map with a long stick, but neither he nor I pay any attention to what he’s pointing at. “There is no neutrality. Not for you anyway. You cannot walk away from us. You cannot walk away from who you are. We are not—and by we I mean the coven as well as your father, for we know well what he is up to—asking you if you would like to participate in what is going on. You are a part of what is going on. What we are asking is, what side are you coming from?

  “Opting out here is simply not viable. It makes no sense. Saying you want to be on neither side of this conflict is akin to saying you want to be on neither side of life and death. An alternative does not exist.”

  I am looking all around me now to see if anyone else sees what I see, if anyone else hears what I hear. There is a healthy mix of magic and nonmagic in the room, but affiliation does not seem to matter. As Arj speaks, they all take notes, as if this will all be on a test.

  “Then I guess I don’t really know what my choices are,” I say.

  “Yes you do,” he says. “You have been there. You have seen. Remember about not lying, Marcus. Everybody knows everything. You saw. At Dr. Spence’s.”

  Oh. Oh. I am ill, suddenly. I need to be sick.

  Instead …”I don’t know what I saw,” I say honestly.

  “You saw that running gets you nowhere,” he says quickly. “Remember the vast expanse, the big empty, the running forever and winding up where you started?”

  My mind returns immediately to the infinite cold blackness that was the attic. I get a chill remembering it, and the feeling in my stomach turns to one as vast and empty as the void itself.

  “But more importantly,” he says, “running gets you nowhere forever. And it gets you nowhere alone.”

  There it is. The old certainty that whatever has happened can always be topped. Whatever is absolute is merely the skin of another layer of horror. That this has no intention of ending peacefully.

  And Arj wastes no time in suggesting how horrific things could yet get.

  “And who’s going to watch your loved ones if you are not around?” Arj says.

  I jump to my feet and hear a roar so profound come out of me, I scare myself, not to mention finally get the attention of all those around me. I have both hands extended in front of me, ready to do damage, when I realize at the last instant that the teacher I am about to open up is not Arj.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he asks, with the practiced, quiet fury of an old-school schoolteacher.

  “And where’d you get them bulgy eyes?” one kid blurts out, and half the class starts laughing.

  The other half, the shimmering magical half, remains frozen and silent.

  I hunch over and beat it out of class, with commotion continuing, and the teacher threatening everything from expulsion to bodily harm.

  I am panting with combined fear and rage as I throw myself against the wall of the empty third-floor corridor.

  I am sweating so much I am weak with dehydration. I still feel it pumping through me, more than just the pulse of a racing anxious heart, more than the overworking of my lungs trying to blow down walls and doors in front of me.

  I feel it, the other, the bloody problem of all the goddamn problems. The magic. An obair, rising up like a crashing tide inside of me, getting so powerful all normal human internal combustion that has kept me alive till now is simply being pushed aside into insignificance. I feel as if at this moment, I could have an honest-to-God heart attack and it would make no difference to me whatsoever. I would continue to run—harder, stronger, faster, meaner—on an entirely different source of power.

  One that heats me up to almost unbearable levels.

  I crash into the boys’ bathroom across the hall.

  I rush to the sink, turn on the taps, and thrust my head underneath the faucet. The cool water is soaking me through, running over the top of my head, matting my hair flat to my scalp. Over the back of my neck, closer to the source of the heat, helping to bring it down, bring it down, helping me think cooler thoughts.

  I look up, dripping madly. My hair has gotten so long it hangs like a black shower curtain between me and the mirror, between me and unfortunate me.

  Until I part the mess evenly down the middle, to release me.

  My god. I look at my fingers as they pass before my eyes. My fingernails, without my noticing, have grown to the length of peanut shells. They are yellowed like old bone and are so thick and hard they would have to be cut with metal shears.
>
  I stare into the mirror to catch my gaunt, haggard face, looking disturbed and sad, staring deep into me with those mismatched eyes.

  Which are, of course, not my eyes at all.

  “Time, Marcus,” is all he says to me. “Time.”

  I cannot say Arj lied about the relentlessness of it all. I know I will never be rid of this, rid of them.

  I reach my hand up to the mirror as he, of course, does likewise. His ring reflects my ring, both so incredibly twisted and imbedded inside us that they may by now be rooted in our feet.

  I touch the mirror, my hand flat to where his hand is flat, and I feel the cool touch of glass there.

  I hold that for seconds, then more, holding likewise his eyes with mine.

  “Time,” he says once more. “Time, Marcus.”

  “Time,” I say, and as I say it I begin to curl my fingers. My creepy, long-taloned fingers.

  My incredibly, incredibly, alarmingly strong fingers.

  My thrillingly strong fingers. I curl them, no longer feeling mirror glass, mirror glass no longer daring to resist me. I bend and bend, I force my fingers through his fingers. He fights back. He stops me. He reverses things momentarily, bending my fingers back, until I will have no more of it, until I feel that storm again inside of me, coming up through me, and I am breaking him.

  First in spirit, because I am becoming by the second stronger than him. And then literally.

  I see his eyes boring into me as he wills me to stop. But this is not enough. I bend his fingers, squeeze his bones, push and push until I am leaning into the mirror with my whole self.

  And I hear the unmistakable snap of fiber, of cartilage, of the tendons in his wrist, and I see him fall away from me, backward, squirming and finally yanking out of my grip and spinning away into nothing but the deep white space behind him.

  And I am left, again, with me. Nothing but me.

  Smiling me, in the mirror. Unsettling, wicked, pleased, smiling me.

  When I leave the school, I am figuring on going home, wanting nothing more than to spend whatever time I can away from the magical freaks at the school and the war and whatever business is keeping them afloat.