Shadow Magic (Darkling Mage 1)

I scratched at my chest, maybe unconsciously, my scar itching and burning as I eyed the knife. There wasn’t much light in the alleyway, but whatever sun made it in there still caused the edge of the blade to glint in a way that made me a little too uncomfortable.

“Part of the process,” Thea said, her voice softer and lowe

r, adjusted to be reassuring. “Trust me on this.” She set the knife carefully down on the ground, as if to assure me further, then placed both the Seven Dragons takeout and the bag from the bodega down as well. She got to work, sitting on her haunches, not seeming to care at how close her flawlessly white pants were to the filth of the alley.

“I’m guessing we’ve got the right spot?”

“Yep,” Thea said, flipping open the box of chalk. She cocked her head at the near wall, gesturing at something there. “See for yourself.”

I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t noticed, but something was marked on the wall, not quite in the spray-painted softness of the graffiti left there, but with a more definitive kind of precision, sharp edges and perfect lines deliberately placed, almost as if made with a stencil. I couldn’t tell what it was exactly, this octagon with its criss-crosses of lines through the center, but I can tell you that it looked arcane and mysterious enough for me to buy Thea’s story about tethers.

She huffed as she began sketching something out on the ground. “Truthfully,” she said, “I had all these supplies back in my office.” She scratched a few more lines into the asphalt, then looked up at me, grinning. “But where’s the fun in that? This way we got to go on a little field trip together.”

I smiled and shook my head. It had been an interesting afternoon, to say the least, and watching as she sketched out more symbols in chalk, I couldn’t help but think that it was about to get even more interesting. She incanted under her breath, her lips moving as she went.

The drawing on the ground was starting to take shape, a loose collection of sigils and glyphs I didn’t recognize from any language, all arranged in a ring. Thea drew a circle around the entire thing, as if to close it, then rummaged through her pockets for a lighter. She set the tea candles at specific intervals, then lit them.

“Okay,” she said, getting up and brushing her hands against each other, patting off the chalk dust. “Story time. Sometimes it isn’t enough to use incantations or hand gestures to get the magic flowing, especially for bigger projects like this. We’re opening a doorway to another plane, after all. Knock knock. That takes more power, and that needs a circle.”

My eyes widened at the thought of it. “So is that why cults exist? In terms of ritual magic, I mean. Bigger circles, not just of symbols like the stuff you drew, but actual circles of people?”

Thea looked up and tilted her head. “To a point, yes. You’d need a large enough group of like-minded people to get something going, or failing that, a large enough circle. For best results, both. It’s the beauty of magic. It’s like a built-in failsafe.” She dusted her hands off some more, then laughed.

“I mean who ever heard of a giant summoning circle? The logistics alone. Still,” she said, bending over to pick up the takeout bag. “That’s the kind of stuff we don’t want happening. Big circles, or big groups of people? All that energy and psychic ability directed towards the same goal? That’s how you get an apocalypse going.”

A squeaking from the corner of the alley called my attention. I grimaced at the sight of so many rats rushing for the darkness, even in broad daylight. Thea only shrugged. “They’re still discombobulated after Resheph’s death. Don’t mind it, Dustin. It only takes time.”

She stuck one hand into the takeout bag, retrieving, of all things, another fortune cookie. This wasn’t explaining anything for me at all. Thea noticed my confusion and piped up again.

“Like I said, different entities, different tastes. This one likes Chinese restaurant fortune cookies. I wish I could tell you why.”

Cookie in hand, she thrust her arm out over the circle, crumbling it into dust, letting the pieces fall into the chalk drawing. Then she picked up the knife and held her hand out again.

“And their tastes and reagents can change, but it’s pretty unanimous that every entity expects a little bit of blood.”

Before I could protest, Thea had poked the knife into the tip of her thumb. Blood welled up immediately, a big enough drop that I could see it fall and splash onto the cement. It hissed, then smoked.

Something changed in the alley just then. Perhaps it went colder. Maybe it became darker, and I knew I didn’t imagine the way the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end, electric. And that strange chittering definitely wasn’t there before.

Thea dropped the knife and picked up the takeout bag, her lips moving, but her mouth making no sound. Another incantation. I kept staring, waiting for her to say something audible, when a low humming emanated from the wall. The symbol on the bricks was gone. In fact, most of the wall was missing, replaced by a pulsing, silvery oval.

“A gateway,” Thea said. “Your very first one.” She beamed proudly. I looked at the portal uncertainly, then swallowed.

Thea beckoned, one hand lugging a plastic bag stuffed with fortune cookies, the other waving for me to step through the shimmering gossamer doorway. There was no backing out of this now.

“Come on, Dust. She’s waiting.” Thea smiled encouragingly. “Time to say hello.”

Chapter 6

Magical transportation is an unusual concept, the kind of thing that needs to be experienced to be truly understood. I still haven’t had tons of practice with shadowstepping, mainly because I’ve never had to stay inside of the darkness for very long. Not that I would want to. It could get bizarre inside the Dark Room, the name I’ve given the eerie dimension I have to traverse every time I shadowstep.

The shadows are cold, and it’s hard to breathe. And there are different shades of dark, if you can believe that. Sometimes, in the scant seconds it takes me to walk from one shadow to the next, I fancy that I can see things moving in the black ethers. But the worst is the silence. When you’re in that swirling chaos of darkness and shade, and you realize for the first time that you can’t hear a single thing – not even the sound of your own voice as you scream in fresh terror – it cuts a little notch out of your soul.

Strange, I know, that someone should be so apprehensive of their own powers, but the Lorica taught us to respect those elements that were out of our control. And the world hiding behind shadow, that was a whole lot of stuff that was out of my hands. All I could do was accept the rules of that other dimension, to adjust to its realities. It was the same approach that I kept in mind when we entered the gossamer portal.

The gateway Thea and I stepped through was unnerving, to say the least. There was an immediately different quality to it, not the bleak silence and blackness of the Dark Room, but this odd feeling of thickness. Viscosity, maybe. The gossamer portal offered some resistance as we moved through it, forcing us to walk as if in slow motion. Even Thea seemed to have some trouble, forcing herself forward through what felt like an invisible barrier. Ever been in a Halloween haunted house? That was kind of what it felt like. Like walking through spiderwebs.

What awaited us on the other side was no more comforting. Dimness, all around, not quite like the dreary black of the shadows I’d become familiar with, but its own kind of pervasive dark. There were no fires here, magical or otherwise, like at the Lorica, only unseen sources of a sickly green light, cast over the entirety of the immense room. The white of Thea’s clothing turned into a pale, diseased jade, the same color as the huge swaths of silk draping from the ceiling.