1. Will
Chapter one
Will
There in fact could be too much cheese
S creams echoed in my ears as I jolted from the vision. Flailing, gravity dragged me down, and I smacked my face into the ledge of the easel as I toppled to the floor.
Mother fucker .
Rubbing at my throbbing nose, I winced at the icy feeling of my paint-covered fingers.
Startled, I stared down at my hands, flexing my messy fingers and finding them stiff and cold... Like stone.
A burning sensation on the back of my left hand flared then, and I scowled at the birthmark there. It was a simple thing, smooth and the color of a fresh scar. Sometimes when I inspected the mark, its shape reminded me of a crown. I rarely noticed it, but every time my mind was forced into the past, back to that vision of the man of stone, the damned thing blazed like the time I slipped getting out of the shower and burned my bare ass on the radiator.
It felt like a warning. I only wished I knew of what.
The blaring of music in my ears from my earbuds helped ground me. Because like every other time I had that specific vision, it all felt so... real. Like I was living it myself. And it took me a moment to separate myself from the past and return to the present.
While my heartbeat regulated once more, I groaned down at the front of my clothes now soaked through with the gray paint I’d apparently spilled during my vision. At least I’d thought to put a tarp down over my hardwood floors before beginning today.
I muttered curses as I stood, but when I caught a glimpse of the piece I’d been working on for the past several hours, my words halted. Because my once near-empty canvas was now a full-fledged painting.
A sheen of rain blurred the scene, but behind the droplets, I could make out ominous clouds dampening a red sky. In the center of the painting, lightning struck the top of a damaged, gray tower. And falling from the tower, a man with long, blond hair.
Was it my best work? Probably not. But it wasn’t horrible. Even in my trancelike state, I’d painted texture on the tower’s stones and had added individual strands in various shades of gold to the man’s hair.
While I set to work cleaning up my mess, my head was somewhere else. Some time else.
After cleaning up the spilled paint and then washing myself, I ignored the rest of my messy room and wandered to the kitchen in search of something to eat. Especially when I realized the last thing I’d eaten was a small bag of Funyuns I’d found peeking out from under my bed last night.
Yanking open the fridge in search of sustenance, I scanned the shelves with a rumbling stomach. Only, the fridge was mostly empty because someone, me , had forgotten to go grocery shopping. Again. Whoops.
An expired carton of milk sat mostly unused in the fridge door, along with mostly empty condiment containers. A few cans of beer were shoved to the side of the top shelf beside some random Tupperware containers housing... I had no idea. And at this point, I didn’t dare open them, wondering if my dad would notice if I just threw them away. Besides the beer and Tupperware, a very suspicious odor roamed from the closed, yet stuffed, veggie drawer.
My brother Otto and I needed to be better at eating our veggies, it seemed.
My dad would have a cow if he discovered we hadn’t restocked the fridge while he and my stepmom Dorothy were out-of-town. They had taken Nana to one of her school friend’s funerals this past week, the third this month. Our parents had both gone with her, so they could share driving responsibilities, and had driven halfway across the country for the funeral to save on airfare.
They were supposed to get home tonight, so we still had time to stock up on groceries before my dad discovered we’d let perfectly good food go to waste in the fridge simply because we’d been too lazy to cook it.
As if to prove to myself I wasn’t completely lazy, I fished out our nana’s cookbook and thumbed through its pages. I remembered seeing one of her recipes recently for hex-Mex soup that hadn’t seemed too complicated. I hadn’t tried it, but I was pretty sure we had most of the canned ingredients in the pantry. The stuff we didn’t have, I would risk using a summoning spell for. Hence, hex-Mex.
Sure, some might call it stealing, since this particular spell required me to have a specific object or item in mind to work properly, but you know, no one would notice a random rotisserie chicken and bag of shredded cheese missing from their grocery store.
I grabbed some cans from the pantry and a few seasonings from the spice cabinet. After dumping the ingredients into a large pot, I started the stove, and used the spices to draw a summoning circle—like the one in the book—in the center of the bean-tomato-corn mixture that was heating up.
This was where things could get tricky. For as long as I could remember, I hadn’t had the... best of luck, you could say, when it came to using my magic. It was a curse passed down from generation to generation on my late mother’s side, and it didn’t matter how diluted our blood was. If I used magic, no matter how simple the spell, then odds were something unexpected would happen.
Especially since my power tended to work best when the focus drifted more toward magic that dealt with the natural forces, like water and air. Elemental magic just came more naturally for me than the rest of my family, and I didn’t even need a book or specific spell to control it. Unlike other forms of magic, I simply needed to picture the result I wanted to achieve with the elements, and my magic would make it happen.
Well, sort of. I’d once managed to produce a lightning bolt when practicing my control of electricity. But that backfired when said lightning bolt struck me. And I sure as shit hadn’t tried summoning lightning again. Because electrocution fucking hurt .
So as the pot grew to a boil, and the steam from the hex-Mex wafted up to meet me, I took a deep breath and felt for that light within myself, that little current of magical essence that made me and my family different than the average person.
Motes of magic flowed down to my fingertips, albeit a little haphazardly.
I directed it toward the summoning circle dissolving into the soup and closed my eyes. I envisioned shredded cheese, making sure to visualize the amount of said cheese so I wouldn’t summon too much of it.
Once, I might have said there was no such thing as too much cheese. But that was before an incident a year ago where I’d simply summoned cheese and had to spend three hours cleaning buckets-worth of dairy deliciousness from every nook and cranny of the kitchen. So yes, there in fact could be too much cheese.
Immediately the pot started to bubble and swirl like a whirlpool, spinning faster and faster until the spices were completely mixed into the soup. An orange haze began to emanate from the middle and then a giant block of Monterey Jack cheese floated up from the middle of the mixture.
The soup stopped spinning, and the ridiculously large block of cheese bobbed on its surface, mocking me.
Sighing, I grabbed a grater and bowl. With the help of my handy-dandy tongs, I managed to snag the cheese out of the soup.
It took me forever to get it shredded, but when I felt like I had enough, I decided to use it to make another summoning circle on the bubbling mixture’s surface.
“Okay, Will,” I said to myself, wiggling my fingers over the soup. “Just need the meat. You can do this.” After a breath for courage, I muttered, “Please don’t summon a live one like last time.”
In my head, I pictured one of those rotisserie chickens from the grocery store down the road, imagining its savory flavor and tender meat.
Once again, the soup heated to a boil and swirled round and round in the pot. I watched with bated breath as the orange glow started at the pit of the whirlpool. But instead of shredded chicken—or hell, even a package of chicken breasts—something furry began to rise from the pot. To my dismay, what appeared to be a cat-snake-demon head arose from my hex-Mex.
“Lord Human!” the head boomed as the soup stilled, though it still bubbled around the head’s fur. The demon obviously didn’t care about the heat though, coming from Hell and all. “You have summoned me to do your bidding! What evil has my lordship planned for the world? Plagues? War?” The demon’s ears quivered as he eyed the pot of hex-Mex he floated in. “Perhaps food poisoning?”
“What? No! I... actually didn’t mean to summon you.” The demon’s face drooped with a pout, his whiskers twitching. When fat tears pooled in his catlike eyes, I added a quick, “Sorry, it’s nothing against you personally or anything. It’s totally a me thing, not a you thing. I’m sure you’re... great. At what you do.”
“Sooo, you don’t want my help with world domination?” the demon asked with a furrow of his furry brow.
Shaking my head, I pointed to the boiling pot his head stuck out of. “No. I, uh, was just making some hex-Mex. It’s a new recipe I thought I’d try out.”
“Oh,” he said, clearly put out the only plans I’d had were to eat, not dominate. “Well, I don’t think it worked.”
“Clearly.”
His orange gaze shifted around the kitchen while he lazed about in the bubbling soup, and he licked some hex-Mex from his chin with a long, forked snake tongue. “Hmm, needs salt.”
I rolled my eyes at his audacity. “Well, I’m not going to eat it now, so it doesn’t matter!”
His tongue dipped down into the pot again. “So, I can eat it?”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I let out an exasperated huff and tried to relax. It wasn’t the demon’s fault I was hangry. “Help yourself, I guess.”
Spinning around, I grumbled to myself while I ignored the demon head chilling in a boiling pot of failed hex-Mex soup. Rummaging through the contents of the pantry, I once again searched for something to eat. When I found a chocolate chip granola bar left forgotten in the corner of the pantry, I snagged it in triumph. Before I could take a bite, however, a throat cleared loudly behind me.
I glared at the demon over my shoulder. “What?”
He dipped his chin into the soup. “Can you add some salt?”
So that’s how I found myself feeding a cat-snake-demon lunch.
Apparently, his name was Gerry. He’d proudly graduated TU, Tartarus University, with 56 dishonors, and, in his words, "Worked damn hard to finish second bottom place of my graduating class.” He had 882 siblings, a snow globe collection (where every single one was a souvenir from each dimension, galaxy, and world he’d visited or helped dominate), and was the proud owner of a demon betta fish named Gerry Jr. Jr. When I asked him what happened to the OG Gerry Jr., the demon looked around shiftily and just said I “didn’t want to know.”
He was in the middle of telling me about his 256th least favorite sister when the garage door swung open, revealing my brother Otto.
Otto didn’t notice us at first, his blue eyes glued to a video playing on his phone as he closed the garage door with his hip. But as Gerry’s rant cut off, his gaze flicked across the living room to the kitchen. Otto’s pierced brow rose as he glanced between the demon and myself before he sighed.
“What did you do?”
I studied my fingernails. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Will—”
“Another human!” Gerry bellowed. “One with metal stabbed through his face. Interesting. Say, metal human, do you have any need of world domination assistance?”
Otto blinked slowly as he came to a stop beside me in the kitchen. He rubbed at his chin, his fingers stained red from goji berries, having come straight from his apothecary he’d set up in the garage. Like his mother, Dorothy, Otto was quite skilled at making all sorts of potions, especially healing tonics. And with the amount of my spells that backfired, it was no wonder we had an entire cupboard filled with them. “Not today, no.”
“Bless it all,” Gerry grumbled, appearing thoroughly put out. “This new generation of humans is so lazy. It’s like not even one of you wants to plot the end of civilization anymore.”
Otto studied the pot of demon soup, scratching at his lilac-dyed hair before turning to me. “So, this is new.”
“Not really. Remember that time I tried making a sandwich and accidentally squeezed the mayo into some rune and summoned the glob demon?”
Rolling his eyes, Otto moved to the fridge to glance inside. “Of course I do. We had to replace the carpet because his goo melted the fibers.” He frowned at the contents of the fridge. Or lack thereof. “So, should I order some lunch?”
My stomach rumbled, clearly not full from the granola bar. “Yes, please.”
Gerry cleared his throat, and Otto and I turned our attention to him. “As much as I appreciate this meal, if neither of you have any evil plans I can assist you with, I do believe I should be getting home to Gerry Jr. Jr.”
“Gerry Jr. Jr.?” Otto asked.
“His demon betta fish,” I said. “Don’t ask.”
Otto nodded. “Got it. Well, I’m going to order something and take a quick shower while you take care of”—he waved a hand at Gerry—“this.”
After Otto left, Gerry sighed. “Well, if you change your mind on world domination, here’s my card.”
Sulfur swamped the air and, with a poof , a smoking card fluttered down in front of me.
Snatching it, my brows rose. A picture of a glaring Gerry holding a glass bowl with a floating, upside-down betta fish took up the front, and flipping it over I read: Where domination becomes a reality. Give Gerry a summon for help with any of your future conquesting needs.
Below were some summoning instructions I disregarded before tucking the card away into the pocket of my sweats. “Uh, thanks. I’ll do that.”
Gerry disappeared with a splash, and I hissed as hot soup splattered my arm and the front of my shirt.
With a sigh, I quickly dumped the remaining soup, cleaning up my second mess of the day.