Book 3, Chapter 5

Chapter Five

Albright

Albright laid his glasses on the desk and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Run that by me again?”

He was in his office, which was seeing much more use this last month with the boss “indisposed” with his sudden inhumanity. His desk was covered in papers, folders, two laptops in addition to his desktop, open bottles of Pepto-Bismol, Advil, and Tylenol, as well as a fetish Dr. Skirrah gave him that was supposed to keep disorganized energies away. It smelled like formaldehyde. It mixed well with the smell of his half-eaten lunch (it was well into the evening), which itself was trying to overpower the scent of several takeout containers overflowing his waste basket.

“Everyone we assign to scry Hayes comes back with the same thing,” replied Marta, his new assistant. The woman was a good head taller than him and built like a Valkyrie, with cold blue eyes, pale skin, and pale blonde hair. Broad shoulders filled out her combat uniform she insisted she wear despite the fact that her job was mostly clerical. On one hip hung a battle ax that he knew from the one time she’d allowed him to hold weighed a good thirty pounds.

She pulled a folder out from under her arm and began to lay out a series of reports and some pictures, making his desk even more of a mess. The pictures depicted a star in space. Albright replaced his glasses on his face as he skimmed the reports. He didn’t need the glasses to read things right in front of him, but it strained his eyes to go from close to far repeatedly and he didn’t want to add to the already massive headache he was fighting with far too much Advil and Tylenol.

“A star?” Albright asked.

“Specifically, a star about to go supernova,” Marta clarified, not quite falling into parade rest.

Albright pondered the mystery for a few silent moments, going over what they had discovered about the strange man. With a slow inhale, he snapped his fingers. “Attention wards.”

“Sir?” Marta asked.

“Hayes is an accomplished warlock and summoner, but views his best proficiency as attention wards. It took us weeks of dedicated searching after we imprisoned him to find his place of residence, and it was so coated with differing layers of attention and obfuscating wards that it drove several of our investigators to have nervous breakdowns. They kept forgetting their own names,” Albright reached over and tapped a quick sequence on his desk phone.

“Scatton,” answered a rough voice surrounded by cacophonous background noise.

“Bill, it’s Albright,” Albright began. “Got a puzzle for you; how would you use an attention ward to keep people from scrying you?”

“Huh,” said Bill. Albright could just make out the sounds of him chewing on the end of a pen. “Well—one second, boss.” There was a rattle as the phone was lowered. “YA’LL SHUT UP! I’M ON THE PHONE!”

Marta raised an eyebrow at Albright, which he ignored.

“Sorry about that, boss,” Bill said on a suddenly much quieter line. “Attention ward for scrying? Huh. Hmmm. Well, normally, attention wards are about diverting attention. The problem with being scried is that if you’re being scried, you’re either doing something that's gathering attention or the people doin’ the scryin’ know who you are. That’s why we call ‘em ‘wards,’ for the most part, because they ‘ward away’ attention, as it were.

“But if someone was fixin’ to shove their nose in my business, I’d find something either in my past, present, or future that would be eye-catching, that I was involved with, and I’d place the biggest, meanest attention ward on it. At that point, it wouldn’t be an attention ward because instead of warding attention, it’d be directing it. I guess it’d be an attention charm, I reckon? Or a geas? You know I’ve been pushing for a magical standardization of terms. It’s bad enough when the French and Egyptians get in the same room without all these Celtic and Welsh terms—“

“Thank you, Bill,” Albright cut off the man. “That was a great help.”

“S’what I’m here fer,” Bill replied. “ALRIGHT I’M OFF THE P—“ the line went dead.

Albright had been watching Marta’s eyes as Bill started the second half of his explanation, and her expression matched what he felt; disbelieving dread.

“That—“she began, pausing to look at the image of the star on his desk. “If Hayes is using that same technique—“

“—It would imply that he has something to do with a supernova,” Albright finished.

“How are you not alarmed by this?” Marta asked.

“Oh, I am,” Albright replied with a sickly grin. “I just have context. You weren’t there when we went into that warehouse. He went from taking on a shoggoth mostly by his lonesome, to killing several hundred cultists, to breaking into a greater summoning ritual, to beating an avatar of the Distiller in a fist fight.” Albright reached up and rubbed the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “The one thing I can say with certainty when it comes to Colm Avery, AKA Liam Hayes, is that the man shines under pressure.”

Albright began laughing, his silent chuckles shaking his shoulders. “Then he takes a three year nap, beats up most of our guards and two of our most seasoned strike teams, does something to the boss where he turns into a giant, angry fire cloud and escapes—all without killing anyone.”

Albright continued to laugh. Thanks for that, by the way, Colm. I didn’t think you’d remember… or even pull it off.

“If he wasn’t an abomination, I’d offer him a job!” Albright took a moment to get his mirth under control. “Tell the seers to focus on other avenues—a few can keep trying, just in case something changes, but if they aren’t getting results, we need to try something that will.”

Marta nodded and made a note in her phone. “On that note, we have some info on what he’s been doing in the last month.”

“Oh?” Albright said, hiding his disappointment with practiced ease. “To what do we owe our sudden luck?”

“One of our analysts, Chad Hesch, was looking into his online activity,” Marta began. “Which was mostly YouTube tutorials and true crime podcasts. Apparently Chad got it into his head that if Hayes went around hunting unconvicted murderers, he might try again.”

“And did he?” Albright prompted, reaching for the report and beginning to scan it.

“Not as such,” Marta replied, but seeing Albright read the report, went silent.

“...He’s hitting prisons?” Albright said slowly, lowering the report.

It was kind of brilliant. He didn’t have to do any investigating, just sweep through death row. Albright looked down at the report, but couldn’t find what he was looking for. “How many has he hit?”

“That we know of? Eleven,” Marta said. “The problem is that he can manipulate memories, so unless someone thinks to check physical records, no one suspects anyone of being missing.”

“So he just cleans out a prison’s death row, wipes everyone's memory, and moves on?” Albright asked.

“Pretty much, except he skips an inmate every now and again,” Marta replied.

Albright blinked up at her, before snapping his fingers. “They’re likely innocent. Make a note that as soon as we’re out of this crisis to send a screener to check out the prisoners Hayes skipped.”

Albright paused, not wanting to know but having to ask. “Do we know how many prisoners he’s taken?”

“That we know of, a little over a hundred,” Marta replied. "But until we check with every prison, it could be many times that. There's over two thousand prisoners on death row in the United States."

“Christ,” Albright said, reaching for the bottle of Pepto.

  *

Colm

“This is a big fucking spell,” I muttered.

When I had planned this spell out with Other Me, I kind of had an idea of how big it had to be. It was the most complicated spell I’ve ever seen, maybe one of the most complicated spells done by humanity up until this point (if I was still counted as a member of team human).

I put the last line down with the field chalker I had stolen from a Big 5 and stepped back to examine my work. Over two square miles of North Dakota were covered in big, sweeping chalk lines that were themselves covered in additional spells to protect from the wind and rain that had been plaguing me for the past couple of days. The moonless night and the overcast sky made it so that there was practically no light to see, but I didn’t really use light to see anymore, so I wasn’t bothered.

The spell had to be this big because the energies being manipulated needed the surface area to not burn the spell out once activated. If Other Me were to cast the spell in his true form, he could do it with a thought because he was simply that powerful, and rules like thermodynamics and physics were suggestions he humored because the sound of the universe having a hernia was irritating. Since I wanted to continue to exist on Earth as a human, I needed to take steps to keep reality intact.

I turned and regarded the three buses filled with my sacrifices. I guess it was go time.

I walked up to the first bus and opened the doors with a slight push of my mind, walking in. The terrified passengers all watched me, some forgetting to breathe. I let my voice take on the double-harmonic quality that was easier to use now than my natural voice.

“Okay, so, good news and bad news,” I began, standing in the middle aisle and regarding my captives. I must look like a nightmare with my light-absorbing, coal black skin, shaggy, knotted hair, and eyes as dark as my skin. When I had first seen my reflection in a gas station bathroom the first night of my breakout, I had thought they were all black like those contacts you see in movies, with no variation. But upon closer inspection, you can make out my iris and pupil if you squint. I had discovered that maintaining eye contact with my prisoners unnerved them greatly, and I wasn’t sure if it was because they’d seen me destroy reinforced concrete with my mind, grew tentacles, or because of my fucked-up eyes. “The good news is that this is almost over. The bad news is that you’ll see some shit tonight that might make you insane.”

I turned and gestured at the driver, a homunculus I’d bound a lesser servant spirit to. It looked like a five-foot Ken doll someone had microwaved until it just became goopy and then dressed in whatever was lying around. “You’ll all follow my assistant, they’ll show you where to stand. Move single file, no pushing or shoving. If you run, I’ll break your knees, and the guys in front and behind you will carry you.”

As I said the last bit, I grew several tentacles that writhed through the air and moved down the sides of the bus, coming close to but never touching many of the inmates. I was wearing a brown leather trench coat that had a mantle, which hid the rips in the back of the coat my tentacles made when they emerged from between my shoulder blades. To these guys, it must look like I was growing tentacles out of the mantle of the coat.

When their fear grew to the point I thought they’d break, I pulled the tentacles back in a slurping motion, like I was drawing in spaghetti. “Let’s get started,” I said and exited the bus.

I did the same spiel on the next two buses and only had to break one guy's legs with a couple of telekinetic pokes. Three hundred and thirty-one murderers stood in the center, some huddled together for warmth while others were trying to project some strength by standing apart from one another. Two meaty-sounding “thwacks” alerted me to a homunculus breaking up a small fight between a few of the prisoners.

Once the prisoners were settled I went and repaired the lines they had marred with their passage, then grew some tentacles with eyes on the ends. I stretched them high into the sky and looked over my work, touching up a few lines that had gotten a little blurry despite my protective spells.

After an hour, I knew I was putting off the spell and pulled the tentacles back into my body. I stepped into a smaller circle built into the grander design of the whole spell and gathered my will and power, throwing it into the lines around me.

“I, LIAM HAYES, KNOWN TO MOST AS COLM AVERY, SUMMON THE THREE ARCHONS OF THE CROSSROADS!” I bellowed to the cloudy sky, the wind suddenly kicking up and rain falling in a thick sheet over me. “I LEAVE THE DOOR OPEN, I HAVE PAID THE PRICE, AND I AWAIT YOUR ARRIVAL!”

Suddenly, the white chalk lines exploded in light, as the power I had dumped into the spell ran through the lines radiated heat and light. There were several cries of pain from amongst the prisoners, some being too close to the now molten-hot chalk turning the dirt into slag. Lightning struck the edges of the spell, adding further power to the spell. I hid a smile as more strikes hit the spell, making it pulse with each additional strike. That had been my idea; turning the spell into a lightning rod. I had almost impressed Other Me with it. These giant workings tended to bring crazy weather as a sort of karmic feedback. As I understand it, people expect thunder and rain during huge fuck-all magic, so you got thunder and rain. I figured, since there’d be thunder, there must be lightning: why not use it?

It made the spell a few degrees more complicated because I had to build resistors and transistors into the spell to keep the flow of energy steady. But it was already so complicated that no one but me and a few demigods or gods could comprehend, what’s a few more lines?

In front of me, three larger circles, each sized so that a minivan could rest comfortably inside, began to pulse. As the rain turned to steam as it hit the spell, the three circles began to draw in the steam in three vortexes. The vortexes soon changed from white steam to a variety of colors, which resolved into three portals.

Simultaneously, three beings stepped through the portals, two looking irritated and the third looking positively thrilled.

“Oh, Colm,” Axtrixxinizinia said, hugging herself as she met his gaze. “You sure know how to make things exciting.”