Authors: Edward Lazellari
CHAPTER 46
INTO THE TRENCH
1
Seth sat in detention, the only student in an empty classroom. In the front of the class a row of teachers’ chairs spanning the room from exit to window were empty except for the one by the door. The chairs seemed warm … recently sat in. Seth had the impression that they all had been occupied until recently, a virtual army marshaled to keep him in the room. But now, only Darcy remained, dressed like the Madonna of the Renaissance, feeding an infant Caitlin from her perfect breast.
The room was decorated with eight-by-twelve-inch pictures of Aandor above the chalkboard, like
National Geographic
images. The archduke’s palace and castle, the Arcadian falls and river that cut through the center of the city, the Great Library, Pentum Square, Magnus’s Academy, the river ports, Golle Towne … and so on.
“We were so proud of you,” said a woman’s voice sitting behind him. He turned. She was about twenty-eight with wavy auburn hair, hazel eyes, light skin, freckles, amply endowed, and dressed in a barmaid’s apron. Seth did not comprehend why she had an Irish lilt, though. “Me and your aunties, telling all the patrons you’d gone off to the city to study magic.”
“Mom?”
“I didn’t think a son of mine would end up in the gutter. Would get a girl with child and throw her to the wolves.”
“I was an ass, Mom. It’s a deep hole to climb out of.”
“Well don’t tell me, lad. Tell her,” she said, pointing to Darcy. “She was a true innocent. She trusted you. You corrupted her, thrashed her dreams, polluted her body, and poisoned her soul.”
“This is a dream.”
“It is and it isn’t,” Allyn Grey said, startling him.
“Jeez, is this room empty or isn’t it?”
“This room contains that which you brought into it.”
“Sounds like dialogue from a Spike TV movie of the week. Why would I bring a Baptist minister from North Carolina into my dreams?”
“I cast a soothe blessing on you while you dozed in the helicopter.”
“I don’t like people getting into my head.”
“I’m a minister. It’s what we do. You needed help unlocking your potential, and since we don’t have time for a year’s worth of counseling sessions, I did what I did. The lady before you is the source of your blockage. She is also interacting in this dreamscape. Whatever you tell her here will remain with her.”
“Maybe the problem isn’t her. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I don’t deserve to be special or have magical powers. Maybe I feel like a phony—being set up to rise so I can have farther to fall.”
“Seth, no one can control your decisions. The best things we can give each other are opportunities. I’ve given you a gift. Use it as you see fit.”
Seth approached Darcy.
“You think that this is a dream,” he told her.
“I stopped dreaming of you years ago,” Darcy said placidly. Seth thought she should have been more bitter.
He got down on one knee and placed his hands on her lap. The texture of her robe felt real enough. Her legs under the cloth felt strong and healthy as they had in her youth. She had been a sprinter in high school. He looked into her large black eyes.
“I’m so sorry, Darcy. I’m in the apartment with Caitlin right now. I brought help … money and a chance for you to clean up. You need to do this.”
Caitlin coughed and gurgled up some milk, which ran over her cheeks and down Darcy’s ebony breast. Seth reached into his pocket to find a tissue and came across a cube. He pulled it out. It was a tiny blue box, with the word
Tiffany
printed on the cover in black. A shiny white ribbon wrapped it. Seth knew what this was. It was an industrial strength soothe—a big pill that cured many diseases. This was the gift. But like all spiritual quandaries, the true power behind the gift lay with the choice of the bearer. Seth could use it to heal himself, free himself of the chains holding back his power … or he could give it to someone else. Grey could not have known about Seth’s sin, but he would not have been much of a minister if he didn’t recognize the quality of Seth’s pain … that of having gravely hurt and betrayed a person who he loved. Seth knew what he wanted to do … what would make him happiest.
“Nice box,” Darcy said.
“It’s for you,” he told Darcy.
“A little late for that, don’t you think?”
“It’s not a ring. It’s hope. You have every right not to believe me. I was not worthy of your trust the last time you gave it to me. But I’m not that person anymore. I’m here to save you.”
She took the box and pulled on the string. The cube glowed a purifying light—white and unsullied as a newborn. “Oh!” cried Darcy. And she smiled.
Darcy and baby faded into the ether. The door was no longer blocked.
Seth stepped through and found himself on a low cliff face opposite an ocean that reminded him of the Pacific. The sun was bright and hot, and flecks of sea spray anointed him as the waves crashed against the cliff. A huge wave had drenched him completely, and Seth laughed. He couldn’t remember the last time he breathed so freely, as though he’d been cooped up in a mountain cave and this was his first ever taste of oxygen-rich ocean air. The cool water invigorated him with possibility. He heard a piercing scream.
Seth awoke with a start.
He was on the loveseat, Caitlin asleep beside him, her head resting against his chest, both of them exhausted from his abridged tales of her mother’s youth. The sun, well past its apex, had begun its descent, marking the latter part of the ever-shortening days. The north-facing room was dark despite there being some blue left in the sky.
A scream from down the block confirmed that it was not his imagination. A series of screams followed from the other end of the block, and then cars screeching, crashing—three, maybe four followed by sirens—lots and lots of sirens. The building trembled ever so subtly.
“What the hell is going on?” Seth whispered. He nudged Caitlin off and pulled out his cell phone. Eleven messages from Cal and Lelani. He regretted turning the ringer off, but with Callum’s master-vassal attitude, it was the only way he’d get any peace to talk to Caitlin. Helping the prince was all well and good, but he had responsibilities to this kid, too.
A loud boom on Avenue C shook the building and rattled the windows. Seth stuck his head out and saw a black cloud billowing from around the corner, illuminated below by a flickering orange light from its source. A convoy of sirens drove past: cop cars, fire trucks, ambulances, even ConEd trucks, all heading north at breakneck speed.
A knock came at the door.
Seth slipped on the chain and cautiously opened the door. A Hispanic lady, five feet tall, in her fifties, holding two shopping bags of groceries, looked at him funny.
“¿Caitlin aquí?”
she asked him warily.
“Mrs. Gomez?” Seth deduced. “Yes. Come in. What’s happening outside?”
“Seth?” queried a groggy voice behind him. “You
are
here.” Darcy stood at the bedroom door wearing a short silk robe that left little to the imagination. “I just had the strangest dream about you.”
The building shook again, this time more violently, as though something were tearing through the basement.
“Aiee!” said Mrs. Gomez. “
Los monstruos!
On TV in bodega … Midtown is fill with
demonios
!”
Seth’s phone lit up again.
“Hello?” he answered.
“EMPIRE STATE BUILDING, NOW!” screamed Lelani through the tiny speaker.
2
Midtown is built on one of the highest points on Manhattan island, a hump of solid bedrock with layer upon layer of tunnels, sewers, and other underground infrastructure rising up from the depths and culminating in the largest collection of skyscrapers in the world. That it was built on a hill to begin with adds to its ponderous height over the surrounding neighborhoods. On a normal day, from the roof of Darcy’s building, Midtown looked like an oncoming wave of steel and concrete ready to crest upon the shores of Greenwich Village. Today that wave included streams of multicolored smoke billowing upward into a darkening sky. It looked like a battle zone. And that zone crept ever closer to where he was standing; the East Village was sprouting its own demons.
Lelani had said if not confronted or threatened, they would simply continue to march until they found the prince—they didn’t get violent until challenged. But tell that to a freaked-out civil service. And nobody taught these things to look both ways before crossing the street.
Across the island he could see the Empire State Building. A flash of lightning arched across from the Chrysler Building to the top of the Empire State.
Son of a bitch,
Seth thought.
Seth headed down quickly. Darcy had put on jeans and a sweatshirt. “We’re going to Mrs. Gomez’s house,” she said.
“No, stay here,” Seth told them. “The monsters won’t come inside.”
“How do you know?” said Caitlin.
“I just do.”
“Mrs. Gomez has to get home,” said Darcy. “Her son is epileptic … stress can trigger an episode. And I don’t want to stay here alone with Caitlin.”
“Where does she live?”
“Two blocks west.”
Seth put on his peacoat. His staff was in the living room. He was about to retrieve it when he felt the tendril of power between it and himself. His instincts told him that it had always been there, even at the very start before he made his first cut into the branch, only now it was clear. He stuck out his arm and thought of the tendril contracting, like a rubber band snapping back to default. The staff whipped through the air across the room and slammed into his hand. It hurt like a motherfucker, but he didn’t let it show because it looked so fantastically cool that even the women were impressed.
“WHOA!” said Caitlin.
“Dios mío,”
said Mrs. Gomez, and made the sign of the cross.
“Move!” said Seth to them all.
The front of Darcy’s building was clear.
So far so good.
Two burned-out cars sat idly in the intersection between Eleventh Street and Avenue B. Seth led them to the corner. One block south to their left, a fire company sprayed three golems with high-pressured water cannons. It only made the monsters angrier. One of the beasts leaped twenty feet and came down hard on the men holding the hose. It batted them around like dominos. Seth tried to hurry the women across the intersection while the beasties were distracted. The old videogame Frogger came to mind as he scooted them across the intersection, trying his best not to get killed. But once finished with the firemen, the beasts noticed Seth and the girls, and all three began charging toward them, gnarling, slobbering, and incredibly pissed off that they’d been given a painful bath.
The phrase “hard air” circulated in Seth’s brain through his panic. And he remembered: It was a spell called “hard air.” He learned it his first year as a way to make dice fall more favorably when gambling. He’d never used it on this large a scale, but it was the only thing he could remember at this moment. Using his newly carved staff as a focus, he pulled energy from a nearby lay line that he swore had never been there before today, filling the staff with its force. Gripping it like a stickball bat, he swung at the beasts with all his might before they reached him and released the spell. A force swatted the creatures across the block, ricocheting them off buildings and the street like plastic soldiers kicked by a bully. The women looked at him, floored by his feat.
“Move!” he yelled.
Mrs. Gomez’s building was unscathed. He saw them to the door and then turned to leave.
“Aren’t you staying?” Caitlin asked.
“No, Sassafras. Now don’t forget what I told you about the money in the trust—and go to school … every day … listen to your teachers … stay away from boys … eat vegetables.” Seth had reached the limits of his fatherly knowledge. He turned to Darcy. “The dream was real. Don’t ask me how, but the box was a second chance … for both of us, it turns out. I’ll try not to blow mine … you have to make the choice for yourself.”
“You’re not staying?” she asked. She seemed upset at the idea of his leaving them … despite everything that she’d been through because of him.
“They actually need me to stop all this craziness. Don’t ask me how or why. If I survive today, I’ll find you again and tell you the whole story. You need to find the strength to stay off the junk—for Caitlin’s sake. Get better—and stay indoors until this monster thing is over.” He turned to leave before he lost his conviction, and did not look back.
Seth co-opted an abandoned scooter with Chinese menus in a basket and great-smelling food oozing through grease-stained paper bags clapped to its rear. Traffic, as he approached Midtown, had ground to a halt; abandoned cars lay all over Fifth Avenue. People still exited office buildings, desperate to get home. No one wanted to die at work—
We want to be in our Barcaloungers in front of the TV when the world ends,
he thought.
Many of the creatures were happy to leave him alone on their march north. It was the challenge that triggered them. Don’t shoot it, hit it, bump it, or snarl at it and there was a good chance it would leave you be. They were programmed to find and kill the prince. Of all the cities in the world Dorn could have chosen, it had to be New York; the most condensed cluster of aggressive, type-A fuckheads on the planet. The regulars in the pubs alone could have set off World War III. If this had gone down in Portland, there’d be a lot fewer fires.
Seth made it to the Empire State Building. A beast driven to frenzy from multiple bullet wounds charged at him. He didn’t have time to charge up another hard air spell—he held his staff before him, holding it horizontally at the middle with a single fist and recalled another spell, one that he’d already used successfully down south. This was the first time he cast it on a living thing. The creature was a patchwork creation saturated with magic. Seth perceived the arcane seams holding it together. As the creature leaped at him, Seth “unzipped” the sorcery and repurposed the freed magical energy toward his spell—the beast disassemble into purple blossoms, starting with those paws reaching out toward Seth, until all that was left was a dense wave of flowers that broke apart on him like a chandelier hitting marble. Seth had learned flower conversion to impress barmaids. As he recalled more of his lessons, it was obvious that his repertoire of spells consisted of tricks that helped him cheat at gambling and get laid. Redemption was going to be a long, long road.