Prologue A Man With No Name #2
Magic poured into the alley, filling it so high the man could barely breathe against it.
He couldn’t see it with his eyes, but he felt the saccharine demon slosh around him, a tide of poison.
It wriggled through his guts like a bad breakfast. The rest of the traffickers tripped back from the body, covering their mouths from the onslaught of sickness.
They shared a look, and then they turned tail and sprinted for the light of the streets beyond.
Not a breath from safety, Magic yanked the woman to the ground by her hair.
It cranked her jaw open and bulged her throat as it crawled inside.
Her screams choked to gurgles around the creature.
Magic writhed under her skin like a trapped animal before finally snapping all her muscles and bones straight. It stood her up like a wooden doll.
“See?” it said out of her mouth with its voice. Howling winds, widows’ screams, orphans’ wails. It spoke with the song of chaos. “We helped.”
“You just killed this woman too,” the man said, breathing hard. “That wasn’t necessary.”
“But the vessel is so fresh.” Magic admired the woman’s hands, glowing pale in the scraps of moonlight from above. “We have never even known these people,” it purred, dragging its stolen palms down the woman’s torso.
“I can tell.” The man passed a look out at the city beyond the alley.
He should have guessed it before—the frenzy, the destruction.
This city was a buffet, but it didn’t even know it was being feasted on.
Magic was chaos given a will. It moved through all creation, through every world, with the sole purpose of indulging in as much debauchery as possible.
It’d probably been lured in by the whiff of insanity, but now it was ruining this place all on its own.
Most worlds were old enough to have already suffered some Magic-drunk fool trashing it once.
Eventually, that world would rise again.
Sometimes, remnants of Magic worked its way into bloodlines from the age before, and those blessed with abilities could wield that diluted, tamer magic to rebuild their worlds.
There would be an age of growth, then peace, and then there would be a city like this one, that would draw Magic close.
And then the cycle would start again, and end again, and start again.
It was the rule of all worlds: chaos, and Magic, would always win.
And by the looks of it, Magic had secured its first foothold in this new world.
They didn’t have long, then. Which meant the man needed to find his wife and escape this bloating body before it burst.
“You don’t do things for free.” The man crossed his arms, punching his cheek with his tongue. “I didn’t ask you to save me. I don’t owe you shit.”
Magic wheezed out a laugh. “Don’t you understand that we like you, Favorite? We wished to assist you, so we did. We ask nothing in return.” Magic brandished the woman’s chest at him like a weapon. “However, we do have a proposition for you.”
There it was.
“I’m not killing anyone for you,” the man said.
Magic pouted and, in a second, it was on him, nose to nose. “But it will be easy, and we wish to make a lucrative deal.”
The man didn’t want a deal. He wanted a mirror.
“We can also give you that.”
The man knew better. He shook his head and refocused. He was here to find his wife, not to make back alley deals with a body-stealing fiend. He turned on his heel. “I don’t need anything that bad,” he said, stepping over the showman’s body.
“Not even her?” Magic might as well have grabbed him by the throat. “Your time is running out. Soon, she’ll be gone forever. We can bring her to you. Or more, even, for the right price.”
Magic smoothed a hand up the man’s spine, the brutal chill reminding him of the woman he’d been chasing across world after world. It slipped into his vest and snatched the chain out before he could stop it.
“Less than one more link. Months, perhaps.” Magic prowled around him, dangling the mostly decrepit chain before its nose.
Ninety-nine of its hundred links were crusted in grime, the only bits saved from ruin being the clasp cast in the image of his wife’s hands, nails shining silver.
The tip of the very last link glimmered still, representing the few months he had left to find his wife before she’d be lost to him forever.
He’d searched for her for the last ninety-nine years, scoured worlds and come up with nothing.
Magic was right. He didn’t have time to be wrong anymore.
“Bring her here?” The man thinned his eyes like he might squint through Magic’s deceptions. “Or is she here already?”
“We could answer that. But it would cost you, Favorite.” Magic dropped the chain, and the man caught it just before it hit the ground.
He squeezed that last link, the last thread to his love.
Would this be worth it? He’d already burned himself once playing games with tricky Magic.
That was how he’d lost his wife in the first place.
But he only had about two months left, by his count. He’d been looking for her for longer than he’d had her in the first place, yet not a single second of that search had dulled the love raging in his chest. There was no deal he wouldn’t suffer for the chance to have her back.
“I only need to be close enough to get to know her.” The man licked his lips, remembering the wording of the original agreement a century ago: Only once the owner of your heart has named and loved you once again may she remember your name and love.
The man blew out a shaky breath. Where he was from, names were given, never owed—interchangeable and earned, for better or for worse. The man had taken four names in his time but wore the name his wife had given him like a glistening thumbprint on the crown of his head. An anointment.
“You must have a name,” she’d said, hands on her hips and kohl-lined lip pushed out in a pout. When he replied that he did not, she said, “Then I will call you Mose.”
For as long as he was hers, he was Mose.
Mose was a man in love with a priestess with silver in her fingers and stars for eyes.
A man who had a simple life, a simple job, but who’d climb the side of her palace wall and haul himself to her balcony nightly.
He enjoyed dancing, and he lived with his friend in a small apartment, and he wore his hair short and curly.
He’d snuck off with his wife at dawn to be married and bound himself to her with her goddess as their only witness.
He’d sworn to love her until the fire in his chest coughed smoke and frosted over.
The man who’d lost his wife was not Mose. Mose would not have made the mistake the man had when dealing with Magic.
So until he found her again, until she loved him anew, he would be nameless.
Acid pumped through the man’s gut. If she did not rename him and fall in love with him again, she’d never remember their first love.
Asking Magic to turn the tides of her heart would cost him more than he had to bargain with.
Then again, he was lucky she’d fallen for him once.
A second time was the tallest of orders.
But he’d rather she choose him again than be forced to love him.
“You will not change her in any way, nor I. You will not influence her thoughts. You will not remove the memory from her mind after the encounter.” The whole time he laid out his terms, his common sense rattled the cage he trapped it in.
“We will leave you unscathed,” Magic said. “All you have to do is deliver us a heart. A heart for a wife and a mirror. Lucrative proposition.” It tapped the girl’s lip.
“Whose? And how?” The man raised a brow. A heart? Not the worst of asks, especially not from Magic. But heart-taking could be athletic business, and the man was getting damn old.
“A man’s. An inconsequential one. It is important to us.” Magic danced around his most important question, twisting the girl’s hair on a finger.
“And why can’t you do it yourself?”
“We wish not to.” Magic pouted, wilting suddenly. The man moved on instinct, grabbing the girl’s body in his arms before it could drop to ground. Then the buzzing of the body it wore reminded him what, exactly, he held. “So, Favorite, do we have a deal?”
The man closed his eyes. This was a terrible idea. But he was prone to those in his extended age.
“Fine. We have a deal.” Just as the man made to drop the cretin in his arms, Magic screwed the woman’s face into a grin.
It began almost human, her cheeks bunched and red.
Then they went black, and then her lips split and bled, and the evil in her smile swallowed her eyes.
Blackness crawled over the whites, the pupils, until they were swirling whirlpools in her face.
Magic spilled free from those pitch eyes.
It had no form, but the man felt it swamp the alley.
He was too awestruck even to drop the body, not until Magic ripped the last of itself from the vessel and the corpse sagged in the man’s arms, nothing but a pile of leathery skin.
The man set the body down beside Magic’s initial victim, the showman. Then he noticed the daggers they wore, and realized he’d come with only one blade.
Well, they did try to drug and kidnap him…
He relieved the bodies of their weapons and slid them into his belt, then stared down the frigid, black air that Magic soured in front of him. “All right. Take me to your inconsequential man.”
Magic buzzed with glee, making the man flinch.
It darted from the alley, a whistling wind high on the air he could just about follow through the winding streets and up the steepest hill he’d ever climbed.
All to come to a mist-shrouded, rickety-looking inn at the opposite edge of Amaris.
Every wooden board on the outside looked slapped on, organized by air instead of nailed together.