Nergal effectively depopulated a historic swath of Boston called Back Bay East, just east of Boston University. The DMA never released the details of how an ancient Mesopotamian death god spawned in Boston Common, knocked over a souvenir stand, and deliberately smashed a statue of Edward Everett Hale.
I don’t know what kind of beef a Mesopotamian god could have with a Unitarian minister from the 1800s, but Nergal took extra time to smash this statue, while he left a number of others standing.
He charged across the suspension bridge and politely stepped around the statue of George Washington, ignored the monument to ether, carefully avoided the statue of Alexander Hamilton, and stomped on any modern buildings in his way.
Later, they traced his path and saw he was deliberately wrecking corporate housing and office buildings that had been built in the last century, zigzagging through ten city blocks until he was finally stopped by Bluestar 7 at Madison Tower, right before he hit Storrow Drive. Some people think he was summoned to destroy the Houdini Plaque on the Harvard Bridge, but he never made it that far.
Most people think Nergal destroyed the Harvard Bridge, but that was actually destroyed in a magical backlash from whatever spell Arthur Walton used to take the god down. Fifteen years later, no one had bothered to replace it. They just cleared away the rubble and abandoned the whole area. The Houdini Plaque was still there in 2058, referring to a bridge that no longer exists.
My apartment building was a converted fraternity house by the Interstate, just barely outside the Zone, close enough that I still had to cross the street to get anything dropped.
Newbury Tower had been built right on the river, and Harvey Madison built his tower to be taller than the magic school that was less than a mile to the west.
In his diary, Madison said he built his tower as a weapon to destroy Newbury Tower and kill all the mages who refused to let him in, but the crazy bastard died before he could figure it out.
Evan’s rift had been fenced in to the east of a historic old church that had burned down in 2048, back when gangs were still fighting turf wars in the Zone.
Now, fifteen years after his death, Nergal’s miasma covered most of Back Bay East, from Massachusetts Avenue to the Public Garden. The military set up zombie containment at an old recycling center during the attack, and most of the old fortifications were still there.
When you live in a world with a lot of demon attacks, you end up with a lot of emergency shelters. The federal government had built a small shelter under this recycling center in 2023, when giant monsters started spawning in the river, about where the Eliot Bridge used to be.
So, immediately after the Nergal attack, the military turned the area into a sprawling half-assed military base, starting with a concrete fortification built over the hatch to the old shelter. But the miasma rolled in a week or so after Nergal’s death, and they had to abandon the area. The result was Crazy Henry’s shooting range, a steel and concrete structure that ended up with three and a half walls.
Crazy Henry was a homeless veteran who lived there for a while before he disappeared. I always held out hope that he just left on his own and finally found a proper place to live, but you don’t seek out a dead god of death to get that kind of help.
There were still chairs, tables, and lockers full of old military equipment in the structure, so I went there sometimes, when I needed a slightly warmer place to sit. Three walls were still better than no walls at all.
I wandered over to Crazy Henry’s a few days after our battle with Titus, nursing a stray idea, now that my wounds had more or less healed.
The shelter had a flat concrete roof with a hatch and an improvised ladder leading down, and it wasn’t quite as high as the roof on a house would be. I looted half a dozen trampolines from an old sporting goods store and set them up around the roof, figuring that even if my levitation failed, I could land on something soft, and maybe even bounce back up.
I levitated up to the roof easily enough, but looking down, even with an acre of trampolines below me, I froze up, and was tempted to just take the ladder down. Something about the magic of the rift had overpowered my fear of heights at the time, but now it was just me, alone with gravity.
I wrapped the levitation spell around myself, and stepped off the roof, hovering just like I thought I would… until I looked down, panicked, and dropped like a rock, as the magic drained out of me. I hit a trampoline from way too high, bounced off, and landed face-down in the dirt, hard enough to knock the wind out of me.
Learning my lesson, I rearranged my trampolines, and tried again. This time, I hovered a little longer and was able to control my descent. I repeated the experiment twenty times that afternoon, amazed to see that while my physical body was exhausted, I still had plenty of magic in the tank, and could have probably held myself up for hours, if I had to.
* * *
I came home dirty but uninjured, and took a long shower, alternating hot and cold to ease a collection of sore muscles.
Lydia was hovering in her usual spot as I sat down, but she had fully committed to the human suit by this time. I hadn’t seen horns or a tail for days. She was changing clothes seemingly at random, copying outfits she saw in catalogs, or from watching live cam feeds of students walking around at BU.
That day she was wearing a t-shirt with writing on it, but the writing was blurry and obscured. At first, I thought it was a design statement, then I realized Lydia was copying directly from camera images, and the girl wearing this had been too far away for Lydia to read what her shirt said. My laughter slowly trailed off, as I realized how bizarre this was, and how quickly an error like this could give us away.
I was about to tease Lydia about her mistake when Jeeves popped up an alert. “A news clip has been posted that features someone from your contacts. Should I play the video?”
I said yes and immediately saw Denise Hardy, standing with an older man who was trying very hard to not look rich. I recognized his face but couldn’t place it. Then I turned the sound on and heard a news anchor do her introduction, “Boston’s most eligible bachelor was seen out on the town last night with Boston’s most eligible witch. Billionaire philanthropist and environmental crusader Mitchell Snyder was seen with Denise Hardy, the daughter of retired super-hottie Cecilia Hardy.”
The video cut to a pair of gossip guys sitting at a table, a bald one and an ugly one.
“It’s been a while since we’ve seen Denise,” the ugly one said. “After blazing her way through the Bluestar convention circuit in her teens, she started her career as a supervised healer at Boston Medical Center while she was still in school. She earned a degree from Newbury Tower and was recruited by Bluestar 7, before abruptly leaving the team after less than a year.”
Footage of a very young, very hot Denise in Bluestar blue scrubs, posing with a team of doctors and nurses in an emergency room.
“B7 had a lot of trouble keeping mages before Danny Carter joined the team,” the bald one said. “Rumor is, Jade Katt doesn’t like witches, especially famous, photogenic witches who steal her camera time. Hardy ‘retired’ early and went back to live with her mother. She’s still on call with the team, but now they only use her for animal control.”
Footage of a slightly older Denise, in a filthy Bluestar 7 jacket, trying to coax some kind of monster out of a shopping mall. The giant bird was taller than a man, and it was pissed, but Denise calmed it somehow and led it to a giant hovering cage. The bird squawked in outrage as the cage was hauled away.
“Denise has been staying out of the spotlight recently,” the bald one said, “but our photographer caught her at a ‘business meeting’ at Spoke and got this from Mitch…”
The camera switched back to a dignified man in his forties, talking with the easy authority of a man who could buy the restaurant he’s sitting in.
“Miss Hardy is helping me with a project. Denise and her family have been protectors of the natural world for centuries, so I can think of no one better for this undertaking. You’ll see a formal announcement next week, but in short, with help from Denise and her mother, I think I’ve found a way to use magic to restore parts of the Congo Basin. Our old governments started their wars with no regard for the Earth they were scorching, but my company is going to change all that, and restore some of the most beautiful, and some of the most valuable land on the planet.”
“Yeah,” the bald one laughed. “Mitch has been talking like this for a decade, but none of his plans have worked, so he finally got desperate enough to try magic. Or maybe this was a little more than a business meeting…”
The camera switched to a zoomed image of Mitch and Denise in his limo. Mitch had forgotten to put his privacy shields up, so the photographer got a full view of the two of them kissing and groping each other like teenagers. Or maybe he hadn’t forgotten and had called the photographers himself. Obviously, whatever line of bullshit this guy was using, Denise was all in.
“A fucking billionaire, really?” I sighed. “She told me people had heard of her, but if I’d known she was this famous, I would’ve been too scared to talk to her at all.” Red-faced, I jumped to my feet and kicked my chair over. “God dammit!” I shouted. “I had that girl in my arms. The most beautiful, most amazing girl I ever met, and I just walked away. What the fuck is wrong with me?”
Of course, I was looking at the thing that was wrong with me, but Lydia was very carefully not saying anything, trying to make herself small as I raged.
“Denise gave me the chance of a lifetime, and I just…” I gritted my teeth and put my head down as the magic surged in, making my aura flare.
Lydia said my name in a soft warning tone, but I waved her off.
“I got it!” I shouted. “I got it. I just need to take a walk.”
I stormed out of the apartment and jogged to Henry’s range. I gave a little hop and landed on the roof. In my memory, I got a boost from a trampoline for this jump, but when I watched it in Azael’s mirror, I just jumped from the ground and landed on the roof like it was nothing at all.
I sat on the dirty concrete and deliberately did not cry. My emotions were surging, alternating angry and sad, and the magic was surging with them, in and out with each breath. I knew I couldn’t really hurt anybody in the middle of an abandoned junk yard, but I had to learn to control this. If I lost my shit and surged on the street, I could really hurt somebody.
The anger faded, and now I was just sad. Lonely, empty, and sad. I didn’t realize how much I had been counting on Denise until she was snatched away. In my head, we belonged together. Meeting her so soon after meeting Lydia, the way we bonded instantly at that party; it felt like fate, like God was pushing us together to give me a choice. Fight the demons and you get the girl.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
But now what did I have? That whole night felt too good to be true. I used Lydia as the excuse, but I was really just scared. I couldn’t let myself love Denise, because I felt like I wasn’t good enough for her, like I would never be good enough for her.
I had this sudden urge to run to the potion shop, but shit, if she was already famous enough to be making out with billionaires, she really was out of my league.
I wiped my eyes and told myself I wasn’t crying. On some level, I knew it was just the college equivalent of a schoolboy crush, but losing Denise had shaken me so hard, I couldn’t even bring in magic. I took a little hop and tried to wrap the levitation around my body, but nothing happened. Whatever magic battery lived inside me was dead.
I sat back down and tried to calm myself, but this wasn’t an anger problem anymore. I was feeling dumb, and worthless, and just plain tired of myself, so when I tried the magic again, it was like mashing the button on a dead phone.
I sighed and realized it was time to admit defeat. I opened the roof hatch to take the ladder, but I hadn’t used the ladder today. I hadn’t even gone inside before I launched myself onto the roof. The ladder had fallen over sometime during the day, leaving me with no easy way down.
If it was daylight, I might have tried to jump from the roof onto a trampoline, but to try it in the dark? Not even normal city dark, but Nergal miasma dark? I would break my neck.
Okay, I thought, no reason to panic. I’m just a little depressed right now. I just need to work through my shit, and cheer myself up enough to use magic again.
Two hours later, I pissed down the back of the building from the roof and admitted that this had become a serious problem. The sun was down, and it was getting cold fast. I had stormed out without a jacket, and the wind was whipping me around, threatening to push me off if I got careless.
I closed my eyes and tried to project my thoughts at Lydia, but nothing happened. Two hours after that, I gave up all pretense of dignity and started calling her name out loud. I spent an hour shouting “Lydia!” at the top of my lungs, but she obviously couldn’t hear me.
I spent a cold, lonely hour scrolling through my contacts, realizing I had lost touch with all my guys from Innovex, and Judy was now more or less my only friend.
Finally, I just gave up and slept on the roof.
* * *
Lydia wasn’t just waiting in her usual spot when I came home the next morning, bruised and bleeding from bouncing off the frame of a trampoline again. She ran up to hug me and stopped short, when she realized she couldn’t. Apparently, I could touch her as much as I wanted, but she couldn’t initiate it until she got permission.
God help me I almost gave it, just to let somebody warm me up. Just to feel like someone gave a shit about me, after I’d spent a freezing, miserable night contemplating my failures as a student, a wizard, and a man.
I grabbed a shower and slumped in my chair across from her. “Did you hear me calling you?”
“No,” she confirmed. “Whatever god rules this place does not tolerate demons, so I couldn’t hear your thoughts. Even sound can’t get out. Which is why you really should train somewhere else, somewhere I can guide you and heal you and catch you if you fall.”
Something surged in my chest, triggered by her straightforward offer of help.
“I couldn’t cast magic up there; I was too depressed. Lydia, if this is how it works, I’m no good to anybody, not even your Master. What’s gonna happen if I freeze up like that during a fight? What happens if I lose my powers during simple levitation and drop like a rock again?”
“You’ll do exactly what your ancestors did,” Lydia said. “I’ll absorb energy from you when it threatens to overwhelm you, and I’ll give it back when you need it, so you can draw magic from me, no matter how you feel inside. But I need to establish a tether with you, and you’ve been resisting me for weeks.”
“You have the same answer for everything. No matter what the problem is, it always comes back to ‘let me do my job.’”
“You may not like being forced into this partnership, but pairings like ours, they have been very effective, for a very long time. And beyond that,” she said, coming down from her perch to get closer. “The sadness you feel right now is just loneliness and frustration, two emotions I can deal with very quickly, with your permission.”
“So, you’re gonna make it all better by giving me a hug?”
“I’ll make it better by reminding you what you are.”
“And if I decide I need this for practical reasons, to establish a tether with you, how do we do it?”
Lydia crossed her arms and swished her tail. “Guess.”
“So, it’s a sex thing?”
“Technically, it’s an alchemy thing, but sex is the quickest way to do it, unless you’d like me to drink your blood.”
* * *
I made Lydia stay in the living room and closed the bedroom door behind me, determined to suffer alone. Then I did the dumbest thing I could possibly do and pulled up news stories about Denise Hardy.
The search pulled up an endless parade of men, mostly high-profile superheroes from the convention circuit. Mostly young, mostly handsome, and always touching her in a way that said they were more than friends.
Denise was beautiful now, but seven years ago she had been… wild. The news reports said she moved to California and went full bad girl after high school: drinking, smoking, taking drugs made for witches, and sleeping with any man she wanted, until some family emergency brought her home.
She dropped out of the news for a while after she came back, apparently tending the store while her mom was in rehab, even checking in for a few weeks herself. Denise had been a boring, media-shy good girl for the last few years; tending the shop, taking care of her mom, only emerging to go on dangerous or disgusting animal calls.
Her popularity soared during a summer break back in California, in the orbit of a boy band front man who had some kind of weather control powers. His live shows were epic, as he used his powers to conjure multicolored lightning and make it rain on the audience, every time he cried on stage.
He and Denise got serious for a while until Cecilia had some kind of relapse, forcing Denise to move back to Boston. She had only been back for a couple years when I met her and had apparently moved on from her super-powered pop star.
This girl wasn’t just out of my league, we weren’t even playing the same sport. I closed my screens and went to sleep, trying to tell myself it was no big deal. One perfect night didn’t make this girl the love of my life, and even if I had stayed, there’s no way a girl like this would have picked up her phone for me the next day, a demon-haunted loser who barely had a job.
But if I didn’t have Denise, what did I have? What would I ever have? Should I sell my soul to Evan and hope he could hook me up with another witch? Truth was, I only had the courage to talk to Denise because she was the only girl there who was close to my age; the only girl who didn’t do a little sniff and back up when she realized I was a witch.
I didn’t know what ambitious modern witches were looking for these days, but I knew I was not it. By the time I fell asleep, I hadn’t just convinced myself I had lost Denise Hardy, I had convinced myself I had lost the best chance I would ever have at love.
* * *
I woke up the next morning in the mood to do something stupid, so I ran out to the bunker again and launched myself onto the roof, making damn sure the ladder was in place this time.
I was in full rationalization mode, playing the bullshit mind game smart people play with themselves to justify doing stupid shit. That’s the worst thing about being smart; it’s so easy to be emotional, while telling yourself you’re not being emotional at all. I was clinging to some weak rationalization about needing Lydia to regulate surges, when I really just needed someone to hold me before I fell apart.
I had created a file out of this magic book, but I wasn’t learning it. I wasn’t even reading it, not because I was afraid of the spells, but because I was afraid of the journals, afraid of the horrible crimes my ancestors had committed, through centuries of killing for Lydia and her Master.
Finally, I said, “Jeeves, search Taltorak for direct references to a succubus named Lydia.”
I spent the whole day on the roof, channeling the spirits of dead men. Their journals were a rambling, incoherent mess. Page after page of weird obsessions with weather, politics, and the movements of ships. Stefan wrote sixty pages about trains for god’s sake, working out an engine that would run on magic instead of coal.
Most of the references were “I told Lydia” kind of stuff, with very little about Lydia herself. I can’t get to my hardware, and I can’t conjure Taltorak from here, so I’ll have to give you general impressions from memory.
Xavier referred to Lydia as “my angel” and wrote about her progress like a proud father, bragging about how quick her mind was, how she excelled as a natural mimic; how quickly she learned to sing and play instruments.
Jacob was hard to read, even after I used Jeeves to strip out the thees and thous and translate his Latin into modern English. He started as a deeply depressed, deeply wounded young man, despondent over his injuries, and morphed into a full-on evil wizard in just a few years. Lydia told him what she wanted him to be, and he embraced it, transcending his physical limitations by refining his intellect and charming the shit out of any demon who would slow down for a conversation.
Jacob was convinced he would have died as a miserable, bedridden drug addict if Lydia hadn’t rescued him from his mother, writing: “Lydia saved my life and took my soul. I consider it a fair trade.”
Tobias wrote a hundred pages of tedious moralizing and pleas to God, spewing hatred on Lydia and the Master who sent her. I quickly got bored with Tobias and saved big chunks of his diary for later, which turned out to be a big mistake.
Laurence may have been charming in person, but he wasn’t much of a writer. He wrote more about ships and women than he did about magic or demons, and he made it clear that he loved his wife Joanna more than he ever loved Lydia. He was the only one to openly share a demon with his wife, but he wrote about Lydia as if she was just a toy they played with, after he met the true love of his life.
Anson appreciated Lydia as a warrior and a battlefield healer, giving her credit for the countless times she saved his life, but he, too, lost interest in her after he met his wife Brielle.
I was surprised to see Stefan talk about being poor, since I thought he was the son of German royalty or something. He was, but his family lost everything when he was young. Stefan wrote that his father, Luther Kovach, was a slave to the bank until the Nazis came along. His diary was filled with pages and pages of antisemitic nonsense, blaming Jews for everything that went wrong in his country and his life, like he had to constantly remind himself why he hated them.
I had a hard time finding any positive emotions in his writing, but he said Lydia and the power she brought with her were a dream come true for him. He delighted in being of service to his Führer, who he saw as an avenging angel, sent to punish the people who had bankrupted and destroyed his father.
Grandpa Jim wrote nothing, so I ended up with half-remembered musings from a family full of sloppy writers. I had done the most limited search and read maybe two percent of what they wrote collectively, but I got the impression that they were generally happy men who loved Lydia and were grateful for the power they had been given. Even Tobias loved it, once he started healing people.
And while none of them wrote explicitly about having sex with Lydia (except Tobias, yipes), none of the others seemed to regret it.
They weren’t exactly writing love letters about her, but they didn’t seem to hate her, and they didn’t complain about the missions. I was deliberately searching around stuff I didn’t want to see, but there were a hundred sentences like, “Lydia saved me,” “Lydia healed me,” “Lydia killed the sentry that surprised me,” “Lydia got a message back to my men and told them where I was.”
I knew it could all be a trick, but my ancestors seemed to be confirming everything Lydia had said to me, describing exactly the kind of partnership she had promised. They appreciated her. They trusted her. And most of them were deeply grateful to her, for helping them find their wives. Some of them even trusted her to watch over their children, as a literal demon babysitter.
My ancestors described Lydia as a great comfort: a lover, a teacher, and a nurse, who was always there when they needed her, but there was something pathetic about their gratitude. Grown men, incredibly relieved to have a demon, so they didn’t have to deal with human women anymore.
I guess this is why most of them did not go looking for wives. Lydia made them do it, guiding them through the process, setting them up with women with the right combination of grit and genetic potential to carry on the bloodline, counting on the overwhelming power of Kovach magic to do the seduction for them.
So, the method I used on Denise, overwhelming her with a demonstration of power, that wasn’t just an indulgence or a clumsy slip on my part, that was the primary way my ancestors got laid. And unlike me, none of them seemed to be embarrassed about it, because Lydia convinced them it was the most natural thing in the world.
* * *
I wrapped the levitation magic around myself as the sun went down and stepped carefully off the roof, just barely avoiding another painful fall. I had told myself I was going to fight this contract as I walked away from Denise, determined to free myself from the family curse and return to her as a triumphant hero.
But now I had nothing to return to, and no real will to fight. How was I supposed to fight for a soul I thought was worthless? How could I fight for a life I had already ruined? And how could I turn myself into some kind of magical superhero, when I could barely get myself off a roof?
Even with an organized, translated book of spells, I still needed the courage and the will to cast them. Walking back from that dirty lump of concrete, I felt like I would never have either.
I had another insane urge to run to the potion shop, throw myself at Cecilia and Denise, and beg them for help. Or maybe call Daniel Carter and spend the rest of my life in divine witness protection, working some bullshit remote tech job, pretending I had never tasted magic at all.
Or I could take Lydia’s offer and try to feel the confidence my ancestors felt. Whatever her motives, Lydia had taken this collection of shy, damaged boys and turned them into powerful men. Could I take what Lydia was offering me and turn it around somehow, using her love to inspire myself, while I twisted the magic to fight this contract?
I needed to be stronger. I needed to be better. And I needed to believe in myself in a way I never had.
I know how feeble this sounds to an angel, but I gave myself to a demon because I needed to silence the voices of Judy and my father and a dozen shitty teachers, and start listening to someone who believed in me, until I could finally believe in myself.