Chapter 4 #2
He began to laugh. It was too ridiculous. What would his college friends say if they knew that magic wasn’t just relegated to stacks of books and twenty-sided dice? Cards, and video games, and fantasy movies?
He laughed until his ribs hurt, laughed until his breath came in rapid, jagged heaves that slid easily into hyperventilation.
Too much, too much, too much.
The familiar tingling in his hands pulled him out of his head and back to the car.
He focused on the tingle, on the feel of the leather wheel beneath his palms. His breathing slowed.
He focused on that as well, feeling the expansion of his ribs and the stretch of the new scar.
One breath in, one breath out. Again and again until the whirling in his body calmed and settled.
A roar filled the garage as he started the car, and he began the journey home. Which therapist had taught him that process? The various counselors and psychiatrists all seemed to blur together in his mind, a single amorphous blob lobbing various bits of advice at him depending on the situation.
When had he seen the first one? Maxim followed that line of thought, since it was much easier to travel down while also having to focus on driving.
He’d been seven, probably. That sounded right. He had the faint memory of a kindly old woman conversing with him lightly while he played with plastic toys. The woman had offered him a wind-up dinosaur as she’d asked why he’d rather hide under an overpass than go to school.
He still remembered how the bumpy scales beneath his tiny fingers had grown slimy with his sweat at her question.
At least his coping mechanisms had improved in twenty-four years.
Maxim pulled into his garage without any memory of the drive that had taken him there. Now home and as safe as he ever was, the previous discoveries hit him with the force of a truck.
Monsters lived in New Hawkshead. Actual monsters. When he was younger, he would have given his left foot to know this, and probably would have foolishly walked right up to the creature, poked its shiny black carapace, and gotten his head ripped off for it.
He slapped the light switch in the kitchen. The sun had already set, and his reflection stared back at him from every window. Dirty, filthy, wrecked.
Clothes fell to the floor on his way to the bathroom. Normally, he would hate the thought of blood soiling the as-yet-unblemished carpet. After four months in the condo, every surface was just as clean as when he’d moved in. Tonight, he couldn’t summon the energy or the mental capacity to care.
Maxim stepped out of his underwear and into the shower before the water was even warm. Blood mixed with dirt as it swirled into the drain.
And not only monsters had barged into his carefully constructed worldview.
Magic was real.
Witches were real, and Pippa Beverly was one of them.
Thanks to too many fantasy book cover illustrations undoubtedly painted by a bunch of horny men, Maxim realized that he’d always had a mental image of witches as scantily-yet-elegantly clad sorceresses waving about long sticks from which erupted great fountains of magic.
(Thinking about it now, totally dick metaphors.) They were consistently posing in ways that implied they lacked internal organs, with metallic brassieres and expressions that foretold a sexy sort of doom.
Maxim slowed in the middle of scrubbing shampoo into his hair.
And then there was Pippa. Her outfits were understated, her demeanor mostly innocuous.
She was pretty. Nicely shaped. She filled out her skirts and floral cardigans in ways he absolutely should never admit to having noticed, and definitely never admit to having appreciated.
She was also terrifying.
This morning, he would have scoffed at the idea of Pippa being the danger someone could encounter in a dark alley.
God, of course she was distracted at work. Of course she didn’t give a shit about being a legal assistant. Why would she bother with mundanities like dossiers, collated copies, and the specifics of personal injury when she could do magic?
Maxim finished rinsing his hair, then gave his body an extra once-over with the shower head in case any bits of the dark alley lingered on his skin in the form of dirt or expired vegetable scraps.
Yet . . . she had healed him. She had saved his life. In a world with demons and monsters and magic, there must also be some sense of good and evil, and if she had stopped him from bleeding out mere minutes after berating him, she must be on the side of good.
Right?
As he toweled off and emerged out of the shower stall, he nudged his boxers out of the way with his toes.
They weren’t bloodied or torn like the rest of his clothing, but he still considered them ruined, if only for the fact that he would forever associate them with a great amount of unpleasantness.
Had he seen his spleen? What did that even look like? No. Best to try and forget completely.
Maybe he would burn his clothing from today.
Shove it in the glass-enclosed gas fireplace and let the flames tear down the fabric into scraps of charred fibers and unhealthy chemical off-gassing.
Or, to cut down on toxic fumes, he’d just stuff them all in a garbage bag and hope no one found its contents in a few years and opened a murder investigation.
He’d deal with that all later.
His reflection scowled back at him in the mirror.
Better. Still wrecked, but at least no longer filthy.
The scar on his stomach snared his attention.
About the size of his fist, it sat to the side and a few inches higher than his navel.
He ran his fingers lightly over the weal, and when that revealed no change in sensation, he twisted his torso and arched his back so it shifted over his abdominals.
There wasn’t any pain; the only change was in the appearance.
Maxim understood he had a certain sense of vanity, and the sight of the new, large scar on skin that had so recently been unblemished sent a pang of disappointment through him.
Yet if given the choice between scar and death, he’d assuredly choose scar. He wasn’t that vain.
He poked it again, as if it would encourage the patch to scuttle off.
It was certainly not the life change with which he’d expected the day to end.
He’d planned to come home, pour a glass of celebratory whiskey, sit and relax for all of thirty minutes at the most. Then he would dive headfirst into ideas he could pitch to Crossly and Williams so his first day with them would be as smooth and perfect as possible.
But in that thirty minutes of relaxation, he would finally feel that he had been heading toward something great. Soon, he would be helping the city and its citizens and making lives better. He would be proud of himself. Happy. Satisfied.
Instead of a promotion and an abundance of pride, Maxim ended his day with a vicious-looking scar and a whopping sense of unease.
He scrubbed away the remaining droplets that trickled over his body, carefully folded the towel, and hung it on its rack.
On his way out of the bathroom, he kicked his underwear into the hall to join the scattered clothes, but caught by some unseen current from a nearby vent, they floated onto an end table and settled atop a squat, unlit candle.
Maxim grumbled, then plucked the boxers off the table and tossed it to the floor. Kicked it again for good measure.
About to continue to his bedroom, he lingered on the candle.
An ex had given it to him years ago when they’d dated.
It was one of those large ones, the sort that, without its three wicks, looked like a cream-colored wheel of cheese.
Ciara had claimed that when he burned it, it would “help him find his center.” Whatever that meant.
He hefted it in his hands and brought it to his nose.
He always liked the way it smelled: citrus and cloves and a bit of cardamom.
It was nice. Just like the miniature salt lamp another ex had given him with vaguely similar instructions.
William had said all he’d need to do was plug it in, focus on the pretty orange glow, and try to chill the fuck out.
Unfortunately, chilling the fuck out was not one of Maxim’s hobbies.
If he were seeing such things in someone else’s house, he might wonder why they’d brought tokens of their past relationships and set them all on a little table like some sort of masochistic shrine to failed love.
Sometimes it helped, though, to remember why they had left: apparently, he was too obsessed with what would make him feel complete to pay attention to who was around him.
What would either of them say to him now? He had fallen so far into the desperation of a potential promotion that he’d vilified himself to an entire office. Maybe not the entire office. Well. Most of the office.
Maxim set the candle back on its stand and scrubbed hands that now smelled like spiced oranges over his face.
His mind was already in a riot; there was no need to add regret to that as well. He needed exercise. Focus.
He threw on a pair of shorts and a sleeveless shirt, then thumped down the stairs to the punching bag that hung in the garage.
Night sounds made a desperate attempt to sneak in through cracks in the drywall: crickets, distant highway traffic, one lonesome coyote. Maxim drowned them all out as he rolled his shoulders, stretched his arms, and wound the wraps over his hands and wrists.
The bag thumped in response to his punches.
He relaxed into the rhythm of burning muscles and prickling sweat.
In the warm rush of exertion, his mind could lie back and let his body take over, channeling old lessons on form and flow and breath.
The missed promotion fell away, as did the fanged moth demon that had stabbed him in the stomach.
A powerful kick set the bag swinging, and Maxim held it steady as he waited for his breathing to slow.
He couldn’t shake the image from the alley: a woman swirling flames and shimmering air between her hands, manipulating the world around her.
It was as if he’d caught sight of an entirely new landscape through a kaleidoscope. There were pieces, little fragments of truth, and he could not settle until he saw the whole of it.
Maxim struck the bag again, and again. Each punch rattled another unknown along his arms and up into his head. What other impossibilities existed? Where would it all lead? Was it going to be too dangerous to find out?
One certainty stuck out through the growing jumble: he had to know more.
He and Pippa Beverly were not done with each other.