“Hurry up,” Craig said.
“Give me a minute,” I said, trying not to lash out at the man. “I need time to think.”
Craig left me alone after that.
I glanced over my shoulder, burning that image into my memory. The man’s long tweed coat, slightly swaying, stirred up by a passing breeze; his sunglasses hiding any semblance of emotion that might have been in his eyes. The rest of his body betrayed nothing except a stony exterior. Thinly pressed mouth, both hands on the walking stick, and standing shoulder width apart, exuding confidence that he knew what he was doing and that he belonged there.
Me, on the other hand…
I was definitely stuck out; scrawny, dressed like a bum, and looking just young enough to be impressionable. And impressionable meant scareable. Scareable meant a victim. Already, a few of the kids from across the street were glancing my way without breaking off conversation. I was starting to gather attention.
Then again, I gathered attention everywhere I went. I didn’t belong anywhere—I never did. No matter how badly I wanted to fit in, I never would. Especially now that I’d never go to college, while everyone else was starting to get their early decision acceptance letters—plus being homeless at the age of eighteen without so much as a single person that I could call family or friend—
The kid with dreads looked my way.
Before I could lock eyes with him, I looked down, muttering to Wol. “Ideas?”
“Isolation,” Wol said immediately.
“Jesus, like those animal channels? We’re not hunting him, Wol.”
“Are we not?” he drawled carefully.
I opened my mouth to reply, but couldn’t.
Shit. All I wanted to do was talk to him. But I couldn’t just walk up to him in front of all his friends and strike up a conversation now, could I? I was an outsider. At best, they’d shut me out. At worst, they’d take me to an alley, take all my shit, and kick the crap out of me. Been there, done that. I had no fantasies about Craig Richtor jumping in to save me.
His friends. They were the problem.
I needed to get rid of them.
Wol was right. I needed to isolate my target from his herd, so to speak. This was exactly like a hunt.
But also, most predators aren’t pressed to hunt on the spot. They like to stalk. Watch their prey. Study it and pick out the one who looks weak. But the kid in dreads? He was in the center, and there was a sense that he was sort of respected. The other kids wouldn’t really make jokes at his expense; not ones that openly showed disrespect anyway. No, this kid was hardly the weakling of the group. He was someone important, and he wouldn’t be going anywhere soon, even if I took the stalking approach.
I needed to do something. Change the situation somehow. But that was the million-dollar question. How?
“Think like a practitioner, Jain,” I told myself.
“Hurry up, Boy,” Craig urged, his body language anything but impatient.
What were the tools in my arsenal? Conjuration, Abjuration, Thaumaturgy. I was a bit lacking in the conjuration aspect at the moment. I hadn’t made any new contracts, and I doubted summoning a freaking folktale nightmare in the middle of New York in broad daylight would help. That left Abjuration and Thaumaturgy. Abjuration wasn’t really any good against anything that wasn’t a preternatural—at least that’s what my limited knowledge said.
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Which left Thaumaturgy. The weakest of my three disciplines. Yippee.
I could feel my metaphysical muscles strain when I used thaumaturgy. Unlike Conjuration and Abjuration, which came easily to me, the thaumaturgical practice required a lot of input from Wol. Sure, I could come up with the ideas, but it tired me out. I usually stuck to tracking spells, and the last time I tried something that wasn’t a tracking spell was because I was literally going to get killed by an American Pacific Forest Folklore monster if I failed.
Yet, it was probably one of my most versatile tools.
I studied the group of kids one more time. There were a little over a dozen of them. All of them were definitely high school age and taking drugs from our target. The building looked abandoned; there was a ‘FOR SALE’ sign right on the door. Probably why they could hang out there. No residents meant no one to complain.
The idea hit me.
I knelt behind the street light, rummaged in my backpack, and brought out a small piece of glass. Taking chalk, I drew a circle around it. Wol poured power into it without me even asking; the circle came to life, glowing for a second, then dimming right away.
I could feel the weight of Craig’s attention; it settled on me like a physical weight. He was paying attention to what I was doing.
“Hwari?” I asked.
‘Caller?’ She appeared right out of the ground.
“Go draw the circles on there,” I said, pointing with my chin.
‘How many, Caller?’
“All of them,” I said.
The abstract motion was enough for Hwari to understand. She melted into the street and then streaked across the pavement as a long stretch of shadow with two bright golden spots—the only scales of hers that held any color.
I watched her draw the circle, then fed the circle with more power from Wol using our Practitioner-Familiar connection. Then I opened my Third Eye.
It was always a strange feeling, slightly closing my eyes so that they were half-lidded, and seeing the supernatural world superimposed on top of the physical plane—the one in which my body existed. The world became one of symbols and signs. I was seeing connections, elements, primordial forces; that sort of thing.
Technically, my Third Eye was always open. It was just a matter of how much I wanted it to be open. Right now, I needed to focus.
There were two strings intersecting the world in front of me. One was made of white string originating from the circle in front of me, and another was made of murky shadow from Hwari’s circle across the street. Taking both in opposite hands, I brought them close together, then knotted them. I blinked away the Third Eye, my vision returning more.
“I hope you have good cardio,” I murmured.
Craig didn’t reply, but I had a feeling he understood.
My trap was set. So I waited. It didn’t take long.
A car drove by. A dark sedan. It would do.
I took the handle of my eldritch gravity knife and slammed it into the glass inside the circle.
Simultaneously, every single window on the first floor of the building right behind the kids exploded.
It was like a crack of thunder slowed down, then broken down into individual sections, except infinitely more jarring than a single instantaneous sound. More than a dozen windows had shattered, forced into hundreds of shards by the connection between the glass, which I personally broke into pieces. The effect was only amplified by the fact that the car’s driver—shocked, no doubt—pressed on the pedal so hard and the car sped down the block out of sight within seconds.
I hoped the landlord of that building had insurance… and if he didn’t, well, I didn’t have much sympathy for landlords of NYC anyway. Most of them are shell companies for millionaires at any rate.
The kids didn’t scream; they didn’t yell. I just heard a couple of ‘Oh shit!’ and ‘Fuck!’ and every single one of them started bolting.
“Now,” I snarled in satisfaction, but a rush of footsteps told me Craig was already running.
I’m ashamed to say it took me a while to catch up.
Craig had managed to corner the kid in a little dumpster lot.His back was to me.The kid was breathing heavily, but I saw him eye the dumpsters next to him and then the fire escape.I was wrong.He was even younger than me.Maybe a freshman or a sophomore.
I leaned on the wall, watching the two play it out.
“Don’t even think about it,”Craig said.He swung his cane and stepped forward.
The kid backed up, probably more on instinct than any rational thought. He’d only dug himself deeper; he was right in between the two dumpsters now. He was trapped.
“Man, what the fuck?” he said.
The Black Dog freaking dropped down from the sky like an anvil in a cartoon show behind the kid, with its jaws poised right over his forehead. With that much mass, the resulting metaphysical ripples were large enough for mortals to feel them.
And for a second, I think the kid saw the Black Dog.
“Wha-WHAT THE—AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH, AHHHHHHHH, AHHHHH.”
No coherent thought. Just fucking fear. Base fear took over his brain because his tiny lizard brain could not make sense of the Black Dog. The Black Dog’s neck stretched towards the boy, his red lips curving into that self-pleased, sinister smile once more.
“Stay back, Practitioner,” Wol said guardedly. Hwari was in front of me too.
There was no need, though. My feet were frozen in shock.
“Shouldn’t be slinging that much weight at your age, Boy,” Craig said calmly.
The dog’s head kept snaking towards the boy, plastered with that damned grin.
“AAAHHHHH, AAAAHHHHH.”
He kept screaming, crawling on all fours away from the dog.
Until he bumped into Craig’s legs.
The kid looked up.
Right into Craig’s eyes.
From behind, I saw Craig tilt his sunglasses down and make eye contact. Smoke curled up from where Craig’s eyes were supposed to be.
He took off his gloves and took the boy’s face in his hand, making eye contact. Atleast, that’s what it looked like from the back.
“Dog?”
‘Yes, Sorceror?’
“How’s he looking?”
‘Ah… yes. The morseling has done enough. We can LOOK.’
“Watch my back, Boy,” Craig said.
And the boy stopped screaming. He just made wordless moans, grunting like some sad, pathetic animal once in a while. The screams… they had been bloody horrible.
This? This was worse.
Everything happened so fast.
Then Craig was done. The boy fell, jerking with stutters of convulsions. The old man kneed him, shoving him onto my side.