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The Pruitts, the dead god I found at their home, those were victims of supernatural circumstance, of arcane crime, in the exact same way that I was. One of the Lorica’s Eyes – Romira, in fact – had found my body already shoved into a freezer, barely steps away from being buried six feet under.
The Lorica rescued me, pulling out all the stops to infiltrate the morgue and retrieve my body, somehow replacing it with a simulacrum that was convincing enough to show the authorities that one Dustin Graves was well and truly dead.
They buried that copy of me in the ground. My father watched and wept as they lowered it into a hole, and I watched from the shadow of a tree as he cried over a mannequin, unable to tell him that I was fine, that I loved him, that I was alive.
And that was the price of this second life I had received, that the Dustin Graves I once was could no longer exist. I had to excise all parts of my routine from my former life, old haunts, what few acquaintances I had. I have to admit, I was mildly happy that my idiot roommates had to scramble to find some other loser to start making rent again.
The only problem was Norman, and that was a sizeable issue, too. I couldn’t just stride through the front door with a “Hey dad, been alive this whole time, what’s good?” I could tell his emotions were fraying as it was. “A secret society of wizards saved me. I’m not actually dead, also, I can do magic, and so can my coworkers.” I mean, where would you even start? He didn’t need the walking corpse of his zombie son strolling in and fucking his life up any further.
But there has to be a way, I thought, even as I watched him peering through the microwave window, waiting for his stroganoff whatever to finish cooking. Maybe a series of notes, or maybe someone from the Lorica could ease him into it. Maybe I could beg one of the alchemists to brew up a potion of forgetfulness, if that even existed, just to make everything the way it was again.
But I had no answers then, and neither did Thea, who had promised to help me find the people who tried to kill me. I sighed, stepping into the shadows in the garden, then breathed easier when I stepped out of the darkness directly onto the sidewalk, safely out of view of our old house. And the job offer was so attractive to begin with, being asked to become a Hound.
“How would you like to find your own killer?” she asked.
Fuck yeah. Which wasn’t how I responded exactly, but you get the gist of it. And it came with decent benefits too, and a bigger paycheck than I’d ever gotten from any of my godawful jobs. Sure, it’s the age of the internet and everything, but somehow nobody in Valero was ever hiring, especially not some kid with a scattershot job history, no recommendations, and oh, no degree. I might have mentioned it quietly before, but I’ll restate it now for emphasis: the Lorica damn near saved my life, then turned it around, and then some.
The paycheck was even enough for me to get a shitty apartment of my own. No roommates, even. It was no coincidence that it was walking distance from my dad’s place. I could afford a little more now, and considering how things ended between us, I figured it was good for me to have the freedom to check in on him every now and again.
My place was a tiny little studio in this block of apartments meant for college students, so it was livelier, well, noisier than I would have liked, but it was a place to keep my bed, and my unfortunate growing collection of gaming consoles. Don’t judge, my life could get super stressful. You try getting murdered some time.
Sure, I kid about it, but almost every day I would think of the same small set of questions. Who would want good old Dustin Graves dead? I had few friends, and no enemies, as far as I knew. Why did the cultists single me out? As I began the slow climb home, up on the third floor, I slapped my forehead.
Why didn’t I ever remember to do groceries?
Because I’d been away for a while. At least I had an excuse this time. But I’d been so tired from working straight through the night, then accompanying Thea to meet the entity. All that Chinese from lunch had burned off, too.
I groaned, thinking of how much more convenient it would have been to just pop into my place, heat something up, wolf it down, then pass out for twenty-four hours. Suddenly dad’s frozen stroganoff dinner was sounding pretty tempting.
I turned around and dragged my exhausted ass down the street, down a couple of blocks to the nearest source of food my frazzled brain could reliably find. There was this awesome place further down that did these incredible steak burritos, but who had the energy? I settled, mentally, for a burger. Salty, greasy, filling, just what the doctor ordered.
This place had been one of my regular haunts even before the whole human sacrifice thing, actually, but the staff changed so frequently that nobody ever stuck around long enough to remember me. Plus keeping my stubble and growing out a longer hairstyle made for a surprisingly effective disguise.
Good thing too, because the burgers were incredible. It was one of those places that was halfway between a proper restaurant and a fast food joint, the kind that tried to be hip and still serve the good stuff. There were neon signs plastered all over the Happy Cow – grim name, I know – in a kind of throwback to the twenties diner aesthetic that was supposed to appeal to us young folk.
The Happy Cow didn’t know what it wanted to be, in short, and the floors were almost always a little oily and slippery, but the food was top notch, so I couldn’t complain. And the lighting was kind of terrible, so much that not even the manager remembered me, probably because I still took the extra precaution of wearing a hooded jacket.
I ordered a double
cheeseburger, a Coke, and both a large fry and a large onion ring because screw you, I was starving. I tucked myself into a corner seat, one of those high stools where you ate facing the window, maybe because I was daring anybody to judge me for the giant heap of food I was about to demolish.
Didn’t remember chewing very much, only that it was all delicious, the hot, juicy patties with the edges singed just a little, the crunch of fresh vegetables and the warmth of a lightly toasted bun, and all that melted cheese. That was all I really needed in life, you know? Cows, carbs, cheese. I knew that as long as I ticked off all the major food groups, my body was going to be fine.
But as I sucked down the last of my Coke, somehow still remembering enough of my manners to pat at the corner of my mouth, I realized that something was off, and not just the rodents. I watched aghast as a darting, frenetic procession of rats made its way from across the street over to the Happy Cow’s dumpster. Gross. My skin crawled at the idea of this happening all over Valero. How long were they going to be disoriented by Resheph’s death?
Yet it wasn’t the rats that bugged me. I looked around. Everyone in the restaurant was busy doing their own thing. A girl with tattooed sleeves and a septum piercing ignored her boyfriend while she tapped at her phone. An older bearded man sat alone, dissecting his burger, separating bun from patty to apply just the right sized dollops of ketchup and mustard, then putting it back together again. Everything seemed fine, but I just knew that it wasn’t.
Okay, I told myself. Play it cool. You’d think by now I’d have been smart enough to arm myself, but I wasn’t exactly a fighter. It’d be nice to have a knife on your person, sure, but someone could wrestle it away and use it against you. And I was nowhere near the point where I’d been taught any proper defensive magic – or offensive stuff, for that matter, but even if I could cast something I knew the Lorica wouldn’t take kindly to me frying people with lightning bolts. So I dumped my trash and walked out of there as calmly as I could, like nothing was wrong, like I hadn’t caught a whiff of something in the air.
I hadn’t made it two blocks when I noticed the two men on my tail. One was just as tall as me, the other even taller, and beefier. I knew just from the cursory glance over my shoulder that I wasn’t built to take on even one of them. I also knew that heading straight back to my apartment, as tempting as that was, would only show them where I lived, if they didn’t know already.
Damn it. What did they want? Call me paranoid but something in my gut told me that this wasn’t just a mugging in the making. These people had something to do with the Pruitt murders, maybe, or the cultists. Or both. The Black Hand.
The scar on my chest began to itch. I stuck my hands deeper down in my jacket pockets and kept walking, turning down the wrong way in hopes of shaking them off, maybe stepping into a shadow before they could see. But they were too fast, and they were gaining on me, too.
Persistent. Okay. Next corner, I told myself. The exact next corner, and I would step into the shadow of the nearest tree or lamppost, then try, for the first time, to emerge all the way back home. I almost didn’t care at that point that I might end up half-stepped into a fire hydrant. Whoever these guys were, they had no plans of stopping.
I looked over my shoulder one last time as I approached the next block, making another left turn as I noticed that only one man was still pursuing me, the taller, broader one. Where the hell did the other guy go? It didn’t matter. I turned the corner, my eyes darting wildly for the first shadow I could find –
