Published at 8th of March 2024 7:43 am

Chapter Ten

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I opened my mouth to continue but was interrupted by the hex crucible clanking into the deck at my feet. My first reaction was to recoil but I realized that, without skin contact, the crucible was useless.

“Alice!” Trix said, outraged.

“Shut up,” Alice said over her shoulder. To me, she said: “Colm, I know this looks awful, and it is, and if you never want to seem me again after this then I completely understand. I just want you to know that this bitch behind me fucking LIED—“ Alice spun on the other woman.

“I did no such thing,” Trix said, her normally calm and unflappable demeanor replaced with irritation barely controlled. “It’s not my fault you drew the conclusions you did—“

“I told you,” Alice interrupted. “I told you that misdirecting and allowing me to draw false assumptions is the same as lying. We are through.”

I raised an eyebrow at this. This did not sound like the normal interaction between a warlock and their patron (matron?). This sounded like a family spat.

“Alice, come on,” Trix said consolingly. “No one would have been harmed! In fact, the whole thing would have saved dear Colm here from the very gruesome fate that led him to me in the first place.”

“IT DOESN’T MATTER,” Alice shouted, displaying an impressive set of lungs. I winced and glanced at the door. I hope she didn’t bring the entire ship down here. “I told you I would only work with you if you were 100% up front, and that the people we targeted were DEMONSTRABLY EVIL.”

“Well, from a certain—” Trix began.

“TO ME, GOD DAMN IT!” Alice shouted. “From MY point of view! And you fucking KNOW IT.”

She took a deep breath and turned back to me. “She told me—or LET ME BELIEVE—that you were one of our usual marks. That you were killing people in rituals or whatever it is that warlocks do.”

“I don’t kill people,” I said after a moment. “I just sell their souls to Trix here.” Alice’s expression fell, like she couldn’t reconcile that with what she knew of me. “But, in my defense, I only target murderers.”

Alice frowned. “Like… Dexter? A warlock Dexter?”

My turn to frown. “Who?”

“He doesn’t watch television,” Trix supplied.

Wait, does Trix watch TV?

The rage I had felt had cooled. Mostly because it had shifted to Trix and there wasn’t a lot I could do to her, especially when we were still under contract. Speaking of…

I kicked the crucible behind me and approached Trix, cutting off what Alice was about to say. Alice backed away, a concerned frown on her face. “I do believe this is a breach of article 6B in the contract,” I said.

Trix gave me a wide grin. “If this was a ploy to get you to default on your contract, you’d be right. But I wasn’t lying when I said I was trying to protect you. If the protection happened to get you to default, well, that would be too bad, but no fault of mine.”

“Protect me from what?” I asked, my voice low and in the back of my throat.

“I am unsure of the how,” Trix admitted. “Shortly after our last meeting, a piece of intelligence regarding the movements of your pursuer—not The Pursuer, mind you, there’d be nothing any of us could do with him on your tail—came across my desk. It led me to believe that there would be an opportunity to apprehend you in the coming months.”

Growing horror made me stomach fall. I had thought that I had lost him—or it, I doubt it had a sex. I hadn’t heard a peep from it in over seven years. Of COURSE there’d be an attempt now.

I was away from my protection.

I felt my shoulders fall and I leaned my head back, tempted to scream at the ceiling. Instead I sighed explosively.

“Of course!” I said, slumping.

“Of course,” I repeated, softly. “The first time I feel something close to happiness, I am being hunted.”

I straightened after wallowing self pity for a few seconds. No time to bask in my idiocy, we got shit to do. Alice was looking at me with sympathy, which I both felt grateful for and also filled me with with a simmering rage. The rage was just a byproduct of being tricked. We both were. I knew Trix well enough to know that she could manipulate the truth with artistry and skill to the point where she didn’t need to lie.

I shoved those thoughts aside. I glanced down at my magic stick and remembered my reason for coming down here.

“I assume one or both of you are responsible for the aura surrounding the ship?” I asked.

“What aura?” Alice asked.

“I beg your pardon?” Trix said.

Uh oh.

“I found you two because I was tracking the source of a subtle aura surrounding the ship,” I lifted the table leg I had enchanted for emphasis. “It led me down here but branched when I detected another aura,” I pointed behind me at the crucible.

Trix frowned. “I am unable to use the majority of my senses thanks to your rather thorough circle,” she said, concern growing on her face.

Alice opened her mouth to respond but I interrupted her by raising my hand at Trix.

“Then what good are you?” I asked.

The part of the circle that had been changed was the part that I referred to as the Lock and Key. I had made it so that anyone stumbling on the circle wouldn’t be able to interact with it. While I had been talking to the two women, I studied the alteration and saw that they or whoever they had alter the design had done so in a hurry and had just replaced the Lock and Key with a basic design that was basically the magical equivalent of a circuit—something to conduct energy and fill space.

I sent my power forward along with my will, shoved Alice out of the driver’s seat of the circle and cut Trix off from our world. Unlike the times when Trix left of her own accord, where she simply ceased to be, this time there was a flash of light and a scream, as if from far away.

Ignoring Alice’s protests I turned around and stalked out of the isle, slowing to scoop up the hex crucible. I studied it briefly, finding the part of the spell that activated its enchantment and moving the panel it was on just slightly, disrupting the alignment and making the whole thing a paper weight. With it no longer generating aura, I lifted my stick (it was more of a club, but ‘magic club’ doesn’t sound right in my head) and began to hunt down the original aura.

It led me to the staircase at the end of the hall. I reactivated the attention spell (What about Spell of Disregard? That’s not bad, actually.) that had allowed me to get down here without issue and descended the stairs.

The crew down here were harder to avoid. I stood out with my slacks and clean shirt, holding a stick and a giant 12 sided die. One man in coveralls stopped me and I just gestured at the stick with a “What can ya do?” expression and he frowned after me in confusion as I passed him. I checked over my shoulder and saw him shake his head before going back to what he was doing.

I found myself in what looked like an anteroom for the engine room. Big plastic headphones like the kind you see on construction sites hung from hooks on the wall next to the door across from me. I could hear the groan of engines through the door. I crossed the room and opened the door awkwardly, juggling the stick and crucible—

Holy shit that’s loud.

I closed the door grabbed the headphones and discovered they were fancy ear plugs. I put them on and opened the door again. The blast of sound that came through this time was muted and I hurried through into the engine room.

I haven’t spent a lot of time around giant machines so I could tell what one mass of metal and noise was from another. All I could say was that the big engines that moved the ship were impressive. I consulted the stick and followed it to back of the room and to my right.

It took a while, plus a few close calls with various coverall clothed crew, to find the source. I had to take down a peg board filled with hanging tools, creating what would be in other parts of the ship a great racket but in this room was just a muted crash. What I found was a work of art.

Studying as many ancient magical tomes as I do, you quickly come to realize that there are many ways to communicate your intents with magic. That was all magic was basically, a way of making the reality you wanted come to life by various forms of conventional and unconventional communication, backed by power. Simply put, the spell on the wall is beautiful.

It was full of flowing artistry, each line melding into another or branching organically. It was so beautiful and different from my own work that I had to study it for several minutes before I could even begin to guess at its function. I was stymied. There wasn’t enough power in it for it to effect much. But the efficiency and elegance of design made me think that whoever put it here knew exactly what they were doing. If this spell was a performance car, my own spell work was a 2012 Ford Fusion.

Finally it hit me. It’s a beacon. That’s why the aura is so diffuse. It’s not supposed to do anything, it’s just supposed to mark the ship. But why bother? You can literally track cruise ships with a simple google search. Well, maybe not accurately.

Whatever this thing is, I didn’t like it. Going over it once more to make sure there wasn’t an embedded trap, I raked my hardened nails over it and disrupted the pattern. With a puff of discordant power, the beacon unraveled. I grabbed some shop towels from a nearby bench and wiped the evidence off the wall then left the mess of tools and peg board for some unlucky crewman to clean up. I turned for the exit to find Alice waiting for me.

She was also wearing the big earmuffs, looking a little silly. I debated saying something cutting to her before I realized she probably wouldn’t hear me. Instead I walked past her without meeting her gaze, my expression a storm cloud.

I dropped the earmuffs on the ground as soon as I exited the engine room and began to make my way to my room, where I planned to stay until we hit Hawaii. I was also planning on unplugging the phone from the wall. I heard the door to the engine room open and close behind me.

“Colm, wait!” I heard a moment later.

I ignored her and continued to move down the hall, ignoring the inquisitive crew as I all but bulldozed them out of my way. Can you tell I am angry? Because I am. I am furious. I’m not even sure at what. Being angry at Trix was pretty useless. I still needed to pay her so I can complete my current bargain, otherwise I’d default per our contract and she’d get her hands on my soul. Obviously once I paid and got my gift I was through with her, though.

Being angry at Alice was also probably not fair. If what she said to me and Trix was true, she was tricked into grifting me. And while I can sympathize, it still meant that she fucking GRIFTED ME. Our whole interaction was based on her tricking me to get what she wanted, which was a lock of my hair—

I stopped in my tracks and spun around, almost forcing Alice to run into me. I put my magic stick under my arm and held out my now free hand.

“Hair,” I said.

“R-right,” Alice said, quickly putting the lock of my hair in my hand. It was a small, one inch bundle tied with masking tape.

I shaped a spell in my mind. “Brenna,” I muttered.

The lock of hair abruptly burst into flames which leapt a good foot into the air, leaving an acrid smell behind and a bit of ash in my palm. The feedback from the spell raised the temperature of the air around my body by a few degrees.

Alice recoiled from the sudden fire, staring at me with wide eyes. My first impulse was to apologize, but my anger wouldn’t let me. Instead I turned and continued on my way to my cabin.

When we made it to the passenger deck Alice used the open space to get ahead of me, forcing me to stop or shove past her. I stopped and closed my eyes, taking a long, deep breath.

“Colm, please, I—I know this is fucked up,” Alice began.

I opened my eyes and regarded her, then our surroundings. We were getting curious glances as the tension surrounding us was rather obvious. I then realized I had let the attention spell fall when I had cast my little fire spell back in the hallway. I formed a spell in my mind, an irritation spell, and pulsed it across the deck. It was a rather overt use of power but no one would be able to figure out I was the cause. Various passengers suddenly became very uncomfortable and found other places to be.

Alice reacted to every pulse with a wince, but otherwise didn’t comment.

“Are you a warlock too?” I asked once we were relatively alone.

“N—not really?” She said. “She—Trix you called her? She and I have a sort of… working relationship. At least we DID until that conniving bitch lied to me.”

Her face transformed with anger before she schooled it and put her attention back on me. “I—I don’t know what to say. I just, from hanging out with you, I didn’t get the feel that you were some evil asshole like the usual guys she hires me to hex. You’re nice, funny and not pushy, not things I associate with people who sell their souls, you know? So—God I don’t know what I’m saying.”

She ran her hands through her hair, looking up at me through some loose strands. “I got a weird vibe about this whole thing. And then I remembered she didn’t go into the usual list of crimes our targets were guilty of. At the time I thought it was just her and I getting into the flow and not needing a whole briefing, but now I think that you don’t HAVE crimes to list—unless my taste in men has really tanked.”

I have to say, seeing her so flustered and seeming so genuine with her remorse was doing a lot to alleviate my anger towards her.

“And—and I just wanted to, I don’t know, EXPLAIN or something, so you don’t think I’m a horrible cunt or something, because I really did have a wonderful time with you, and that luck charm was super thoughtful even though I had to pretend I didn’t know what it was—“

She was barely pausing and I held up my hand to slow her down. She abruptly stopped and looked at me with her big, expressive eyes.

“What made you certain I wasn’t what Trix implied?” I asked.

She winced. “I don’t normally talk about this, but—I mean, hell, I owe you this at least,” she lowered her voice after looking around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “I kind of have a built in lie detector?”

I raised my eyebrow. “Can I test this?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“I have killed beings colloquially known as demons. I have kidnapped thirteen people. I consider myself a forgiving person,” I said, rattling off the sentences. “Which of these were lies?”

Alice’s eyes got wider the longer I spoke. “The, uh, the last one.”

“I haven't killed a human,” I continued. “I still own my soul. I am absolutely furious. Are these sentences true?”

She nodded.

I took another deep breath.

“Alice,” I began, looking to my left out to the ocean. “I don’t trust easily. Most of the people in my life have betrayed my trust in some way, some minor, some egregious. I have very few friends. Due to some rather serious circumstances that force me to stay isolated, you are the first person I spent more than a few hours with since I left college. The fact that our—relationship, or whatever you want to call it, was started with deception—“ I paused, looking for a word.

“It hurt?” Alice supplied.

“It enrages me,” I said through my teeth, finally turning back to her. “I’ve been pushing myself to the limit for so long, I’m burnt out, I-I-I—“ I took another deep breath. “I’m less angry at you and more at the general situation. I get that you were lied to as well. But if I’m perfectly honest with myself I’m close to a psychotic break and this situation is the lit match sailing through the air to land on my kerosene soaked brain. I need to be alone, I need to calm down, and I need you to fuck off.”

My words hurt her. She nodded, not meeting my eyes. She turned and began to walk away.

“At least, for now,” I said. “I—I’m sorry. I need—sorry.”

She turned, regarding me sadly. “I’ll give you space,” she said.

I turned and walked the other direction.

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