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It was cold, then, the night I died. It should have cooled my head, but it didn’t. I didn’t turn around as I let the door swing shut, didn’t look at my father because I knew he already had his head buried in his hands, didn’t look back because it hurt to know how little he thought of me.
Dust, he called me, once with fondness, but now with some sense of irony. I’d always liked to do different things, even as a kid. I could play the drums decently, I could sing, I started reading early. And I did more and more as I grew older, played basketball, joined the glee club, wrote for the school paper. Jack of all trades, as they say, and in the most painful sense, because I could never stick with anything for long, never long enough to get better, to be good enough at something to really shine. Not even college.
I thought that maybe the business I wanted to start would finally make him proud, but he was right. The hell was I thinking? I didn’t even know what we were getting into. Tech, maybe. An app? That was it. Or maybe it wasn’t. I kicked at a rock, watched it scuttle across the road, followed it into the park I liked to visit.
During the day, that is. Sometimes I jogged through Heinsite Park, when the feeling took me, when my occupation allowed for it, and my last gig as an office temp meant I didn’t have much time to do that in a while. I’d rarely been there at night, but I thought nothing of it, my feet carrying me to the familiar old route I took, walking briskly in sneakers slightly too expensive to really run in, in a jacket that was probably too thin for the unexpected Cal
ifornia chill.
I shouldn’t have passed through Heinsite to get back to my place. Not that night. I shouldn’t have let my anger cloud my judgment. I shouldn’t have helped that lady who said her dog had wandered too deep into the pond. I shouldn’t have bent over to look in the water when I did.
But we can’t change our past, can we? No more than we can affect the future.
“He’s in there somewhere,” the woman cried, her fingers digging into the sleeve of my jacket. “Please.”
Somehow I never thought it strange that I couldn’t hear any splashing nearby. Maybe I was still too focused on my fight with my father. Maybe I was trying to prove that I was worth something, anything at all, by trying to help out a little dog. Of course, as you’ve probably guessed, there wasn’t a dog at all.
Too late I caught the reflection in the water, of a human figure standing behind me, one arm upraised, something long and thick held in one hand. And too late it was when I tried to turn around and thrust my arms up to protect my head, because that something long and thick struck me heavily across the back of my neck. Classic move, I thought, as I fell face first into the pond. It felt like ice.
That’s what you deserve, I thought, as my nostrils filled with water. You’ll never amount to anything, Dust. Might as well lay here and drown in this puddle. Might as well lay here and die.
You know when they say you should be careful what you wish for? Yeah. And generally, you don’t get to pick how you die, either. Knife in the heart? Not fun.
Chapter 2
Somehow, receiving magical power from being stabbed in the heart didn’t make things much better. Would I have resisted then if I’d known that the knife would be the catalyst for my arcane awakening? I mean, yeah. Because dying fucking hurts. You ever been a ritual sacrifice? You ever been stabbed in the heart?
No, no. Let me tell you all about it.
When I came to, my hair was still wet, plastered to my forehead with pond water and, I figured, at least a little bit of sweat. I didn’t know how long I’d been knocked out, only that it was long enough for my captors to drag me to some dark, dingy room and strap me down to what felt like a table.
Stone. That much I remember, the roughness of it scraping across my bare arms, the leather restraints across my chest and stomach biting into naked skin. They’d ripped my shirt off, I guess to make a cleaner job of it, a cleaner cut. And by they, I mean – the others.
I counted eight from where I was lying, maybe ten people in robes, their faces obscured by hideous bronze masks. It was hard to tell what the masks were supposed to represent by the dim light of candles, even though they’d lit enough to encircle me.
It was out of a movie, a horror novel, the exact kind of scene where someone dies, where someone’s still-beating heart gets plucked out of their chest. Kalima.
Struggle. That was my first instinct. But the leather was bound across me too tight, and it only seemed to tighten as I thrashed. One of the masked figures whispered and gestured in my direction, and the leather straps snapped across my body, tightening so abruptly that it pressed the air out of my lungs. How did he do that? If I wasn’t panicked before, the steady constriction threatening to crush my ribcage was more than enough to drive me over the edge.
And that was when my mind caught up with me, and my second instinct to scream tried to force its way out of my body through my mouth, except that I could make no noise at all. I was gagged, tight enough that even the loudest bellow I could muster just broke against the dam of whatever my captors had rammed up against my teeth.
Every failed exhalation only wasted more of my breath as the air shot out of my nostrils. The straps across my chest tightened even more. I heard one of the masked figures chuckle. It was then, when they saw that I’d tired myself out, that the robed strangers began a slow, wordless chant. My body was slick with sweat by then, the damp of it gone cold against my skin. Somehow, all I could think of was how I had left things with my father.
Every grunt and hiss the figures uttered from behind their grotesque metal faces made the shadows lengthen, made the flame in every candle jump higher. I groaned into my gag, fought against my restraints. That’s when I saw him.
He was the tallest of them all, his face not just a bronze mask like the others, but adorned with horns, spikes reaching to the ceiling in vicious points. And in his hand, the verdigris dagger.
By the candlelight I could see that the metal of it was greenish, like tarnished bronze. All along its shaft were spines, sharp and pointed, its hilt a wicked claw. In the figure’s hand, it looked like a talon. At the dagger’s pommel glowed a single gem, like an eye. And the blade was slender, curved, like something used for skinning.
I struggled, bucked anew. It was true, what they say, about the body being newly consumed by adrenaline, how strength surges in times of great peril. And what peril it was. The chanting from the circle around me grew as the cluster of figures tightened around their demonic master, this bronze-faced god with his horns gleaming in the firelight.
Somehow, through the frothing panic of my fear, I still had enough of my mind left to notice something. The figure who had tightened my restraints with just a gesture of his fingers was now right by my feet. They’d done a good job of restraining my upper body. The rest of me, not so much.
I kicked upwards, hard and rough, and it was only when my foot connected with the figure’s bronze mask that I realized I still had my shoes. Good. He shrieked, flecks of blood dripping down the edge of his mask. Good, again. I got the fucker in his teeth. More importantly, now that I had him distracted, the leather restraints around me had seemed to loosen.
I didn’t know how kicking him in the teeth made that happen, exactly, but all that mattered was that I finally had an opening. The leather straps fell off my chest as I started struggling once more, and even as the figures rushed at me they couldn’t control me long enough to pin my arms down. I shouted madly into my gag as the tall man plunged the dagger at my chest, the chanting all but ceased.
My hands flew up by instinct, clutching around the dagger’s hilt in some vain, pointless attempt to stop its descent. The spines all along its sides ripped into the palms of my hands, tearing stinging gashes into my fingers. I screamed, and screamed, and no one heard.
