Single Dad//Teen Necromancer (Patreon)

I have been editing Dungeon System the last few days, but I've also been putting together a proof of concept for the next series. I've got enough chapters now to give you guys a taste.

It's gonna be a little slower paced at first, more of a urban supernatural thriller, that winds up to full fantasy eventually.

Tell me what you think in the comments.

Prologue: Shades of Grey

Kenneth Peterson could smell the tang of blood through the pouring rain. The water threw it up into the air, and the scent smacked right into his face as he opened the door to his cruiser, causing him to scowl.

Nothing good ever associated with that smell.

He radioed in as he got out of his car, approaching the driver’s side of the mangled sedan, irritated about stepping out into the deluge. He was unsurprised to find a teen behind the wheel.

Another kid who didn’t know how to drive in the rain, the cop thought, pulling out his flashlight and scanning the car. Typical teen car. Cluttered with junk, but he didn’t see any other passengers…

“Unh.” The girl groaned, bleeding from her eyes and nose as she reached toward the backseat, ignoring Kenneth entirely.

“Ma’am, you’re gonna be alright, there’s an ambulance on the way. Was there anyone in the car with you?” Ken asked, scanning the burst-out windshield. It sure as hell looked like there’d been another passenger, and they’d gone straight out the front.

She gave another groan, her body twisting around the seat as she reached for…there wasn’t anything but trash and a bunch of wiccan-looking brass baubles scattered across the back.

“Ma’am, I’m going to need you to stay still.” Don’t make my job any harder than it has to be, alright? Ken left the second half unspoken. “Moving can aggravate injuries. Stay still until the paramedics get here.”

Her energy seemed to leave her as she paused, panting.

Good enough. He turned around and scanned the street with his high-powered flashlight. There was no sign of another passenger. No blood smeared over the pavement, no body, no debris aside from bits of windshield glass.

Did a bowling ball pass through or something? Ken thought with a scowl, walking forward and scanning the ground hard while he started cracking a few flares. There were a million ways to miss someone in the dark while it was raining, and Ken just hoped he wasn’t leaving someone to die in the cold.

After a moment of fruitless searching, Ken hustled back to the car.

Damn, I hope I didn’t miss someone, Paul would chew me out for a week. Either it had been an inanimate object, or the passenger had…walked off without a scratch.

Pfft.

“Ma’am, I need you to answer me. Was there someone else in the…shit.” The woman’s jaw was relaxed, her eyes open and staring. That didn’t necessarily mean she was dead, but it was a bad, bad sign.

Ken leaned forward and reached through the window to press his fingers against the woman’s ‘juggler’ as Norm liked to call it.

Despite the cold rain gradually stealing the heat from his fingertips, Ken was able to make out a faint pulse…until it stopped.

“Fuck!” Ken unlocked the door and leaned in, unhooking the seatbelt before he grabbed the chick by her armpits and began hauling her out of the car, onto the sidewalk. Normally you don’t move someone until the experts show up, and you definitely don’t put them in the rain to lose body heat.

But there was only thirty seconds or so until the ambulance arrived. He could hear the sirens approaching already. If he could keep her heart beating, and her blood oxygenated until they arrived, he could save her life. For those thirty seconds he would have someone’s life in his hands.

For those thirty seconds, he would be a god.

FWOOSH!

A blinding flash of light from the sedan knocked him on his ass as he was hauling her out of the car. Blinking the afterimage out of his eyes, he scrambled to his feet, peering into the car.

One of the little brass tchotchkes he’d dismissed earlier was…floating in the center of the backseat, emitting a rapidly dwindling glow.

The fuck is that? Ken thought, reaching in and snatching up the little thing. It was surprisingly heavy for brass. Never seen brass float, neither. Is this thing what caused the crash? I’ll ask later. More important shit to do.

Ken tucked it into his vest pocket and turned back to the girl, dragging her the rest of the way to the sidewalk before beginning CPR.

Aside from the rush of saving a life, there was also much less paperwork he’d have to do if the girl lived to fill it out on her own. He could file the weird thing in his report at the end of the day, or give it back to her if it wasn’t dangerous.

Ken winced as he put his lips over her bloodied ones and began forcing air into her unmoving lungs.

SCREEECH!

Ken looked up into the headlights of an oncoming truck, hydroplaning and totally out of control. He couldn’t make out the drivers face past the brilliant light, but Ken thought he could see the grinning skull of death itself.

Not like this, Ken thought, his body turning cold as he tried to move. His legs were cold, his knees refused to unfold fast enough to get out of the way.

The truck slipped through him. Ken got a brief flash of the inside of a six cylinder engine, followed by a cab and a bed.

The truck crashed into the guard rail behind him before coming to a stop some thirty feet beyond him.

Ken took a shuddering breath.

What the…hell?

***Later***

“The gold,” Paul said, flipping through the report.

“Gold?” Kenneth asked.

“The gold in the back-seat?” Paul said, frowning.

“I thought it was brass knickknacks.” Kenneth muttered, suddenly hyper-aware of the lump in his vest pocket. He hadn’t thought about it since he’d pocketed the thing. Was all of that gold? That’s a fucking fortune. Who on earth would think a teen would have millions in gold in the backseat?

Paul lifted an eyebrow, giving Ken that infuriatingly smug ‘I’m better than you’ look.

“Anyway, the gold is going to stay in evidence until we can figure out whether or not it was stolen. If we can confirm it wasn’t, it’ll go to the girl’s next of kin.”

Kenneth knew how this actually worked. The top brass were going to sit on the gold for a time, to see if anyone actually knew it existed. The girl’s only next of kin was six months old, and the baby-daddy lived separately in a run-down suburb for the desperate. The chances were decent no one knew how rich the girl actually was.

Once a few months went by without anyone stepping forward to claim it, the record would be altered, the gold would ‘cease to exist’, and everyone involved would get a fat bonus, if not an outright promotion to keep their mouth shut.

Which would be chump change compared to the sheer volume of gold in the backseat. The brass were the ones going home with the lions share, buying their boats and vacation houses as usual, and Kenneth was expected to bend over and take it.

Ken tolerated it because that was just life. Making a stink about it would get him punished for the rest of his career or just plain fired. Same if they found out he contacted Baby-daddy.

He resisted the urge to touch the gold in his pocket. Not until he was out of his captain’s field of vision.

Chapter 1: So you might be Psychic

***DREAM***

Tom was dreaming about work.

Tom had what most people considered an odd condition: He repeated every day over again in his dreams. Rather than explore misty forests, or ride bumblebees, or be chased by implacable foes, or something cool like that, he got to experience each day twice.

On some days this was a great thing, like when he visited Disney world when he was twelve, or when he lost his virginity.

Other days it was more of a curse.

“You gotta come pick up Lily’s stuff.” Came Mr. Ben’s voice over the cell phone.

Tom’s skin went cold. Again. He listened to himself babble the same denial as yesterday.

“But I-“

Lily’s former landlord gave a raspy sigh. “Look, kid, the end of the month is coming up quick, and if you don’t help get her furniture out of the house, I’m gonna have to hire somebody to help, and that’s gonna come out of her deposit. They should be here in an hour.”

As usual, Tom’s dream followed the exact same pattern as the day before. He’d heard that the brain would conjure fantastic fantasies to explain the random firing of neurons as they stored the memories from the day before.

Tom was envious.

Tom slipped his phone into his vest pocket, shoulders tense.

“What’s up, man?” Jacob called from across the aisle. Jacob had thick black hair, a short, skinny body, and a vaguely French facial structure. He was one of Tom’s work friends, those people you only associate with between the time you clock in and the time you clock out.

The fellow freight guy was stocking bath supplies with mind-bending speed, blazing through his pallet and tossing boxes back with a constant ‘hup’ ‘hup’ ‘hup’. A thin sheen of sweat was raised on his brow as he worked.

“I gotta go. Lily’s landlord is –“

“Say no more!” Jacob interrupted, holding up a hand before itching his nose furiously. I’ll cover housewares. I’ll probably be done with mine by midday anyway.”

“Thanks, Jacob.” Tom said, his body dragging itself away from the towering pile of housewares.

Tom started walking toward the exit in a tired shuffle.

Ellie. Ellie doesn’t have a mom now. The sudden realization from the day before struck him again, just as potent in the dream as it had been the first time.

The thought of Ellie turned back to Lily. How beautiful, vibrant and exotic she seemed, and yet bothered to give the skinny nerd the time of day. He’d gathered the courage to tell her she was pretty and she’d basically stalked him after that.

Not that he’d minded. The girl didn’t have any family of her own, and Tom’s grandparents had been more than happy to welcome Tom’s girlfriend to theirs.

Just three weeks ago she’d died in a car crash.

He couldn’t afford to miss work. Not with a hospital bill that was going to land on them sooner or later.

Tom’s groaned and leaned against the grocery aisle, knocking a few boxes of cereal off the shelves, spilling great grains all over the floor.

Great. Fucking. Grains.

Tom resumed his shuffling gait toward the exit, mind clouded with a fog of overwork and sleep deprivation. Even in his dream, he was strung out.

He felt a meaty hand clamp down on his arm. Attached to the hand was a fat wrist, and a chubby arm, and finally, a face.

Dan.

Manager Dan.

Dan the Manager.

A.K.A. the guy who decided who to hire and fire. That Dan. The Dan who was constantly looking for an excuse to fire him… Tom’s eyes narrowed. Dan.

“Where you goin’?” Dan asked, gum smacking between his teeth as he gave Tom a grin that had nothing to do with happiness. Well, maybe for Dan.

“My girlfriend’s dead. Her landlord’s gonna take the money from her deposit to move her stuff out unless I... I have to…” Tom pointed toward the door.

“Right,” Dan said, ignoring the words that were coming out of his mouth. “Here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna stay, and you’re gonna work your ass off and then go deal with baby-momma’s crap because it’s Sunday, and we’re up to here with freight.” He said, motioning above himself. “Am I clear?”

“He says he’s going do it in an hour.”

“Tom,” Dan said, flicking him in the forehead. “Stop and think. It’s the middle of the night, the man’s pushing eighty. You think he’s gonna be able to move all her shit without anyone’s help? He’s dead in the water.”

Mr. Ben hadn’t exaggerated. Tom remembered that much from the day before.

The sheer injustice of being forced to work for eighty bucks while he could have saved four times that amount in fees got under Tom’s nerves, even in his dreams.

“I don’t –“

“Look at it this way,” Dan said, his smile growing wider. “You walk out that door, you’re not coming back. Not with the amount of time off you’ve been taking recently. You move too slow. You only do about two thirds what Jacob gets done.”

“Jacob’s on cocaine.” Tom said, sticking to his script from the day before.

“I don’t care. You leave now, you leave for good. We need you here on Sundays.”

Tom vividly imagined punching Dan in the face with everything he had, unleashing a primal howl and tearing a metal bar off the clothes stand before beating the insufferable twat to death with it.

He imagined it so hard he could feel the skinned knuckles and the pain in his wrists as the metal pole transferred shock back to his hands.

There was a strange tearing sensation all around Tom’s body as he hauled back and punched Dan in the face. The sight of the fat bastard’s eyes wide, blood spraying out of his nose as he flailed backwards was absolutely priceless. The memory would live inside him for the rest of his life.

Tom blinked.

What just happened?

This didn’t happen when he was awake. Awake, Tom had swallowed his anger, thought hard about his daughter, and finished his shift like a responsible parent, only to discover lily’s apartment already cleared out.

“You little shit, what the he– you’re fired!” Dan said, his voice shrill as he crab-walked away from the skinny kid staring at his own skinned knuckles like an idiot.

“Am I…actually dreaming, or what?” Tom asked, staring at his knuckles as blood began to bead up on them. There was a sense of…something worming through his stomach. Guilt? All of a sudden, Tom was reminded of a little girl from elementary school.

Suzie Collins. He couldn’t remember much, just red hair and freckles, and a deep-seated sense of shame.

What the hell is going on?

“I knew it, you’re on drugs! Get the fuck out of here!” Dan the manager shouted, his voice sinking back to his usual artificially deepened timbre as he climbed to his feet, looming over Tom as best he could.

Tom honestly wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or not, so he had to treat it like it were real and salvage the situation to the best of his abilities, and that meant moving Lily’s furniture and preserving some of her deposit.

“I gotta go,” Tom said, brushing past the manager and aiming for the rear entrance. Dan flinched out of his way, getting out of punching range. Tom vaguely waved to Jacob the Cokehead whipping through freight on the way out the back of the store, slamming his palms into the metal bar and pushing out into the night air of the employee parking lot.

Tom’s car was a piece of shit Subaru. The previous owner’s dog had literally eaten the seats, the lining on the ceiling, and the seatbelts. It made him smell like wet dog wherever he went, but it was cheap, and the engine was healthy.

He couldn’t afford to buy new seatbelts.

Tom slid into his car and pulled the empty belt down, pinning it to the side of his seat with a couple safety pins there for that express purpose.

He couldn’t afford to pay the ticket for not having a seatbelt either.

Tom took a deep breath and headed over to Lily’s apartment, just a couple blocks down the road.

Lily’s place was always an enigma. Her apartment was in the middle of a slum, yet filled with old things, fine furniture, and heavy wood. How she managed to support herself after highschool was a mystery. How did someone with no family afford an apartment with no job? That kind of lifestyle? How did she even move the furniture? The obvious answer would probably run in the vein of drugs or prostitution, but Lily never came off as that kind of person.

Well, the answer probably didn’t bear thinking about.

Not anymore, anyway.

Tom sighed as he put the car into park, looking up at the squat two story apartment building with a moving truck in front of it.

A couple big dudes that made Dan look cute were relaxing next to the truck, drinking coffee. One waved at him. Tom waved back.

The truck had Big Tim’s Moving Co. stenciled onto the side, along with a picture of a dude hauling a dresser with a happy smile.

Tom followed the stairs up to Lily’s second story apartment. It was a place he’d visited so many times, he could’ve gotten the right door with his eyes closed.

Tom walked into the apartment that still smelled like her and spotted Mr. Ben with his own coffee. The wrinkled old man gave him a nod.

“Tom. Didn’t expect to see you.”

“I didn’t expect to be here,” Tom muttered, poking a vase and watching it wobble. After taking a moment to pause and consider it, he’d realized he was still dreaming, except now he was dreaming about things that hadn’t happened.

How come I didn’t know I could do this? He thought, frowning.

Once again, the thought of Suzy Collins came back to him, and a vague sense of shame.

Weird.

“Well, coffee’s done. You ready to move some furniture?” Mr. Ben asked.

Tom shrugged. “Not that much different than what I was just doing. And hey, can we dump the furniture at my house? I’d rather not get the bill from the self-storage place, too.”

“Yeah, we can do that.” Mr. Ben said with a shrug. “You’re lucky you showed up on time.”

Tom shook his head and got to work hauling chairs and couches.

About halfway through the night, he was carrying a dresser downstairs. Somehow he’d gotten the heavier end when the damn thing decided to bite him. A piece of façade came loose and sliced into Tom’s palm, proving that the dresser was not hardwood and also a jerk.

Tom hissed and dropped the dresser, which caused the moving guy to drop his end too. Normally, that would be it, but the dresser practically exploded when it hit the staircase. The flimsy wood was concealing a secret compartment filled to the brim with gold coins.

Tom and the movers stared in stunned silence as the gold coins rattled their way down the stairs, like a tinkling waterfall of pure money.

“Is this real, or like, a D&D prop?” One of the big guys asked, picking up one of the big coin and inspecting it’s imperfect surface. The coins looked homemade, rather than the crisp perfection of gold coins Tom had seen minted by the U.S. government.

A glint of silver caught Tom’s eye. Resting inside the false wall of the cabinet was a book with silver lettering on the side.

Tom leaned closer, trying to make out the words, when he noticed everything was getting blurry. Tom blinked his eyes, but it didn’t clear up.

Matter of fact everything got blurrier, and over everything else, he began to hear the sound of Gramma’s cast iron pan clanging in the sink, meaning breakfast had just been served…

***AWAKE***

Tom woke up with a rapid intake of breath, sitting up and blinking the afternoon sun out of his eyes. He glanced over and spotted his own window letting in the light, his own room covered in dumb anime posters he hadn’t bothered to take down since he was twelve.

So it was a dream, Tom thought, climbing to his feet, his body aching from the freight work he’d done the night before. He felt a crinkle in his left hand and raised it up to his face, staring blankly at the paper he saw there.

It was the combined receipt for two different bills: one for two hundred dollars from Big Tim’s Moving Co. and a second for a hundred and seventy from Badger Self-storage.

Tom had to concentrate for a moment to remember how the day had actually ended.

He’d finished his shift at work, gone and argued with Ben for an hour or two before coming home. After that, he’d collapsed into bed and passed out instantly.

Which brought him to now.

Tom staggered out into the living room, the smell of bacon and eggs making his stomach do flips in anticipation. Gramma always made a second breakfast for when he woke up in the afternoon.

Once Tom blinked the yawn away, he froze.

There, in the center of the room, with his baby hostage, was his nemesis. A demon in human form…

Carol.

“Looks like your sperm donor’s awake,” Carol said, bouncing Ellie on her knee. “Yes he is!” she nuzzled his baby.

Now, when you hear the name Carol, you think dumpy middle-aged woman with three kids and a book club where they talk about how unsatisfied they are with their sex life.

This Carol was not that Carol. This Carol was skeletal, with all the appearance and mannerisms of a meth head, without the rotten teeth.

If there were anything to complement this she-beast about, it would be her teeth. They were immaculate, and almost feral the way she bared them whenever Tom came close to her.

How she came to be Lily’s best friend, Tom would never know. He didn’t even wanna know. They were together a lot though, when Tom was dating Lily, and the skinny bitch did just about everything short of cold-blooded murder to get rid of him.

When Lily wasn’t looking, anyway. When Lily was in the room, the demon morphed into a lapdog, and she was ever-so-pleasant.

Well, Lily was gone, and he’d never see that Carol again.

Tom freed Ellie from the demon’s grasp and held the little meatball against his chest, bouncing her gently in place.

There was just something so calming about holding his daughter. Tom felt like he was literally recharging from sheer cuteness.

“Oof, you’re getting heavy. You’re a little chubster, you know that?” he asked, Inspecting Ellie at arm’s length. His baby had fantastic eyes, part of them being a pale grey like his own, while there was a wedge of her iris that was green like her mother.

She reached her tiny hand up with malicious intent.

Tom sighed as he deftly moved Ellie away from his hair in order to avoid a bald patch. “I know, pretty soon you’re gonna start learning words, and I’m gonna have to stop body shaming you.”

She smiled at him with an uncomprehending gaze.

Man, I need more of this.

“But at least right now the verbal abuse slides right off. You forgive me, right?” He said, tweaking her nose.

Ellie sneezed.

“Hey Carol…” The next words felt like pulling teeth. “Can you watch Ellie for another couple days? I need to take care of some stuff.”

“Of course.” Carol said.

“Really?” Tom asked as he gave Ellie back, frowning. Carol had been watching the baby tirelessly every day for weeks now. Didn’t she have a job, or a family, or something?

“If I allowed you to raise Elenore she would grow up to also be a spineless peasant. This little one is destined to crush the enemies of house Ku’leth. Isn’t that right my little unheard-of freak of nature?” She blew a raspberry on Ellie’s tummy, causing the baby to shriek.

“I don’t care about your LARPing,” Tom said. “But if you try to steal my baby, I will break your neck.”

“Tom!” Gramma shouted from the kitchen.

Shit, Tom winced.

“Is that any way to talk to a lady!?” Gramma demanded. “After she agreed to watch Ellie, even?”

Carol’s demonic smile grew inhumanly wide while maintaining heavy eye contact.

Tom apologized. “I’m sorry, Carol, that was incredibly rude of me.”

“Better.” Gramma said.

“I meant to say, I’ll hunt you down and respectfully sever your spine.”

“Tom!!”

Tom sat down at the breakfast table while Gramma gave him the stink-eye. Despite the glare, she overloaded his plate with enough bacon and eggs to feed a small army, sliding it directly off her skillet onto his plate.

“You’ve got to be nice to girls, Tom.”

“I’m not convinced that is human. Let alone a girl.” Tom said, thumbing towards where Carol was bouncing Ellie on her lap, her neck turning nearly a hundred and eighty degrees to watch them.

“Lord help me. It’s Suzy Collins all over again.” Gramma said, crossing herself.

An intense feeling of formless guilt washed over Tom, and he paused, fork full of eggs halfway to his mouth.

“What happened with Suzy Collins?” Tom asked.

“You don’t remember?” Gramma demanded, looking very disappointed in him.

Tom shook his head.

“One year when you were eight, you decided you didn’t like that little girl, and you bullied her mercilessly. You spread rumors about her, about her parents. We kept you away from her family while you were home from school, but somehow you kept at it, coming up with new things to embarrass her with.

“And somehow or other, all those mean lies you told about her turned out to be true. Her dad really was having an affair, her mom was drinking most of her dad’s money.”

Gramma paused, her gaze distant.

“Her family split up and Suzy went with her mom. Last I heard the woman lost custody and that little girl went into foster care.” Gramma sighed, rubbing her temples.

Tom took a slow bite of eggs, processing that.

When he combined it with the inexplicable sense of shame he’d had when deviating from the course his dream had set for him, a half-remembered picture started to emerge. His grandmother’s testimony filled in the blanks.

I think I might have a superpower, Tom thought idly, taking a bite of eggs.

He half remembered going over to Suzy’s house and snooping around in his sleep. Then when he woke up, no one knew what he’d done, except for him. Then he’d used that information to hurt a little girl.

When her family had gotten divorced and she’d moved away, he’d had a life-defining realization of how much of a complete asshole he’d been and had basically shut down the what if aspect of his dreams entirely, exclusively repeating the day before in his sleep for eleven years.

Until now.

Tom was still on the fence about possibly being psychic. Any rational person wouldn’t immediately jump to the superpower conclusion. They would try to find a more logical explanation for what was happening, and Tom was a fairly rational person.

Maybe his brain was so stressed that it had flipped some kind of switch and he’d dreamt about gold coins as a way of giving him some temporary relief.

Tom reached into his pocket and pulled out a key with a dinky little plastic badger dangling off of it.

Badger self-storage.

Well, I guess there’s one way to find out for sure, Tom thought, dropping the key back into his pocket.

“Thanks for breakfast, Gramma, I gotta go start moving Lily’s furniture. End of the month’s coming up quick.”

The steel-haired woman nodded, dismissing him from the table.

Tom slipped on his coat, snagged his wallet and keys, and gave Carol a parting glare before tromping out into the afternoon sun.

After a short drive and entering the code from his receipt, Tom was standing in front of the rolled-up door of the storage unit. The light barely penetrated the unit, casting all of Lily’s furniture in a dim glow from the street’s reflected sunlight.

He scanned the dim enclosure for a few seconds before he found what he was looking for.

There. Tom cleared a path to the cabinet he’d broken open in his what if dream. He hauled the cabinet forward until it was in the cleared-out section, then he began tapping on the back of the furniture until the sound turned hollow.

Tom pulled his knife out and stuck it behind the thin plywood painted to look like solid oak, then he started prying.

A minute later, the back of the cabinet popped off, and a flood of gold coins washed out onto the concrete floor of the storage unit, like he’d just hit triple seven.

…Tom stared.

“Holy shit, I think I’m psychic.”

Chapter 2: So your Girlfriend was a Necromancer

Grampa peered through his bifocals, clearing his throat as he tapped away on the ancient LED calculator straight out of the eighties. The old man’s voice was deep and calming, though it had become the faintest bit reedy over the last couple years as he shed muscle mass.

He reached out and shifted stacks of gold coins into neat little piles like a croupier.

“That’s your college education there,” he said, before making another pile of roughly the same size. “That’s Ellie’s.”

“The last of the mortgage,” he made another stack. “The rest of your car payments.” A small stack. “Medical bills.” Another. “Back taxes.” Another.

Tom’s visions of being a rich bastard lounging on a yacht diminished at the same rate as the pile of gold coins. It had gone from an impressive pile in the center of the table to a measly handful.

Grampa glanced up from his calculator.

“You look disappointed.”

“I guess I was expecting more.” Tom admitted.

“Son, your life has just become a thousand times better, you’re just too busy gazing at your navel to realize it. Let me give you the short and sweet version.”

He took a deep breath, pondering his words. “You’re free.”

“Huh?” Tom grunted, not quite getting it.

“Each and every one of these debts is designed to chain you down, bleed you out. They don’t expect you to pay them off. They don’t even want you to pay them off. What they want is for you to keep making payments, until you’re all used up.”

Grampa rarely spared Tom’s feelings or beat around the bush, but this was particularly blunt.

“You got no chains holding you down. You can go, get an education, get a real job, and earn enough to stay above water for the rest of your life.”

“Assuming no more medical bills.” Tom blurted without thinking. He winced up at his grandfather’s thunderous expression.

“I tell you what, you little shit, when I get too sick to move again, just leave me in my room with my thirty-eight,” Grampa said. “It’s a damn sight better than letting them bury my family in debt just so I can drool in a hospital miles away, tied to the bed like a fuckin’ hostage!”

Tom’s hairs stood on end when he realized Grampa had said when, not if.

“Bill!” Gramma said, smacking Grampa on the back of the head for threatening to kill himself again. The old man grumbled, rubbing the handprint out of his bald scalp.

Tom paused for a moment. The old man was right. He was free. Tom could use this opportunity to quit his job and find a better one. Something that made enough money that he could afford to keep the old man alive.

Still, try as he might, Tom couldn’t think of any kind of job that would let a nineteen-year-old accomplish that, short of sucking off millionaires.

And Tom wasn’t that pretty.

One of Grampa’s sayings smacked him in the back of the head.

If you can do something no one else can do, no matter what it is, there’s a way to make a fortune off it. Don’t matter if it’s swinging twelve inches or farting on command.

As far as Tom was aware, nobody else could live an extra day free of consequences in their head. Except…there are no consequences.

He could rob a bank in his dreams and get away scot-free when he woke up, but…the money wasn’t gonna be there either.

Nothing he did in his dreams could actually help him.

Tom decided to seek answers from a higher power.

“Grampa, if you lived an extra day when you slept each night, but it didn’t have any effect on the real world, what would you do?”

“You mean besides renting a hooker for the night and skipping out on the bill?” Grampa asked, his eyes dancing with mirth a moment before Gramma caught him in the back of the head with another slap.

Tom hadn’t considered that possibility, and it floored him, but he played it cool.

“Yeah, besides that.”

“Well, I’m assuming we’re actually talking about you.” Grampa said.

“Nnno?” Tom said, unable to meet the old man’s eyes.

“Relax, I ain’t gonna spank the shit out of you like I did with Suzy Collins. You’re old enough to have a lick of sense now.”

That begs questions. Tom opened his mouth to ask, but his grampa kept right on rambling.

“So I guess what I would do if I were you, is poke around people and places I normally wouldn’t or couldn’t for fear of repercussions, and try to find some opportunity there. I’d get into some gunfights, maybe grab all these coins and lose ‘em all on a roll of the dice if it got me the right phone number.

“When you wake up, you’ve got the phone number, and you’ve got the coins. They say knowledge is power, and power can be easily converted to cash.”

He tapped his temple. “Dream smarter kid, not harder. Just make absolutely sure you don’t use your–” He made air quotes. “’Psychic powers’, in a way that could land us in a steaming pile of shit, like stealing, or trafficking or something that crosses someone. No matter how easy it is, you couldn’t possibly know if you’re eventually gonna get caught for it within the same day, so don’t risk it. Ever. Try to focus your dreamwalking gimmick on stuff without an owner, like DB Cooper’s money, or an unowned gold vein in the mountains, or…something.”

“A gold vein,” Tom asked. “Seriously?”

He pointed at the pile of gold. “That right there is enough cash to get an all-day helicopter ride up to a remote location in the rocky mountains and spend the day looking for treasure. The people who can afford to do that don’t need the money, and the people who need the money can’t afford it, but you…” he left the rest unsaid.

Tom sat there, absorbing the old man’s wisdom about gaming the system in a safe and sustainable way, mentally taking notes.

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this.” Tom said, when the old man finished his rant bitterly complaining about taxes.

“You live long enough, you start thinking what if, a lot.” Grampa shrugged.

So, it looked like it would take time and elbow grease, but sooner or later, Tom would be able to strike it rich by functionally spending fifteen million a year surveying the shit out of gold-bearing mountains.

And that’s just off the top of his head. There’s gotta be other things I can do with this.

Sure it wasn’t quite as handy as knowledge of the future, but it was still a world of possibilities open only to him.

Tom felt like he was going to vibrate out of his seat.

I’m gonna be rich!

“Holy shit. It’s like my life is on easy mode now.”

Grampa scoffed. “Your life has been on easy mode since you was eight.”

Tom had a blast of sudden realization. He could’ve been looking for his opportunity for a decade already. They could be rich NOW!

“Why didn’t you tell me!? We could’ve been rich this whole time!”

“Tell me, what would you do if you saw an eight-year-old with a gun?” Grampa asked.

“Oh, I get it.” Tom said, rolling his eyes. Obviously, the answer was ‘take it from him’, and Tom’s psychic powers were the gun.

“There’s a difference between growing up rich, and growing up right.”

Gramma interjected. “If we’d used you to make money…you would’ve turned out wrong. We knew enough to know that.”

Tom really, REALLY wanted to see it their way, but from where he was sitting, he’d watched them struggle under a mountain of pointless debt the entire twelve years since they’d adopted him.

The fact that they did it on purpose in order to set a good example made absolutely no sense.

“Okay, it’s fine,” Tom said, rubbing his temples.  “Whatever. Let’s make a plan to move somewhere we can get full use out of this.”

“Eh,” Grampa shrugged. “I’m happy here.”

Tom sighed.

“Fine. We got time to figure something out. In the meantime…” Tom glanced at his phone “I gotta get to work.”

“I honestly thought you’d quit.”

“Oh, I will,” Tom said, pocketing his phone. “But it’s gonna be on a Sunday when we’re understaffed.”

“That’s my boy.”

Tom cruised through work, his mind elsewhere the entire time. He did the bare minimum amount of work necessary to avoid a reprimand from Dan, all the while thinking about that black book. His grandparents hadn’t really seen it when he’d put it in his room. They’d been too busy staring at the motherlode on the kitchen table.

He got home at just after eight o’clock in the morning, collapsing into bed and passing out.

***DREAM***

When he opened his eyes again, it was the morning before. He still had the receipt in his hand, and Lily’s gold was still sitting inside the false back of her cabinet.

Ugh, I forgot about that.

He climbed to his feet and shrugged on his coat, hearing the sound of Gramma in the kitchen.

Tom was again assaulted by the sight of Carol first thing in the morning.

“Looks like your sperm donor’s awake,” Carol said, bouncing Ellie on her knee. “Yes he is!” she nuzzled his baby.

With a tearing sensation, Tom deviated from the dream’s script, silently giving Carol the finger while Gramma’s back was turned. He then sat down and ate a plate of eggs and bacon before excusing himself to go deal with Lily’s stuff.

I think I’m gonna take my first real day off in – shit, like a year and half – Tom thought as he idled out of the driveway.

He opened the storage unit, pried open the false panel in the cabinet and grabbed the book, leaving the gold coins behind before climbing back into his car and heading home.

He couldn’t take gold coins with him, after all.

Laying with his neck propped up against the wall, Tom inspected the silver title of the heavy black tome.

The Unified Theory of Soul magic

Basics To Advanced

-Lar-Ell The Beckoner

“The hell am I looking at?”

Tom shrugged. I’ve got the day off, might as well do a little light reading.

He cracked the book open.

There are people who call what we do monstrous or evil, destroying souls and trafficking with foul demons, paying in the blood of the innocent to receive unholy power.

Those people are stupid.

The first law of necromancy is –

CRACK!

“AH, what the hell!?” Tom shouted, jumping in place and glancing over at his door.

“Thomas, sweety, did you peek at something you shouldn’t have?” A sickly-sweet voice that set his nerves on fire and kicked his fight or flight response in the ass oozed its way through the door.

The voice was different, but the tone. Tom recognized that.

CRACK!

Five massive black claws the size of kitchen knives burst through his bedroom door around the handle. With a pinch, the claws removed the bolt from the door, and it swung free, revealing a nightmare.

Carol’s grin had widened to an inhuman degree, her gaunt, skeletal appearance barely containing the growth of new bone inside her skull that protruded outward. She’d grown some kind of armor and claws that shone like obsidian.

Her eyes locked on the open book beside him before she glanced up at him, malevolent glee dancing in her eyes.

“Never before have I been so happy to fulfil my duty. Honestly, I thought you’d slip up with Ellanore long before you ever found the book.”

“Carol, what’s going on!?” Tom demanded, his heart slamming against his ribs as he backed up against his Baldur’s Gate poster.

“This!”

The demon nanny lunged forward with a feral smile, swiping at Tom’s face.

Tom yelped and threw his arms up in front of his face.

The claws sank into his forearms and tore them asunder. The pain didn’t have time to register as demon-Carol yanked his incapacitated arms down and jammed her other hand straight into Tom’s chest, skewering his heart.

Tom was assaulted by the most intense, violating pain he had ever experienced in his nineteen years of life. Unfortunately, he couldn’t voice it, since his lungs were pinned to the back of his ribs.

It takes about five seconds after the heart is destroyed for the brain to realize it’s fucked and shut down, sometimes more if the body has plenty of adrenaline.

With a wet squelch, Carol withdrew her claws, allowing him to topple to the ground. His mangled arms refused to break his fall or hold the red stuff inside him.

As Tom’s vision darkened, her heard Carol’s faint voice.

“At least I don’t have to worry about the En’Hol anymore.”

***AWAKE***

“Gah!” Tom shot out of bed, clutching his chest and panting as his heart tried to escape it’s prison. Sweat drenched every inch of his body, like he’d just run a marathon overnight.

Carol’s cold grey eyes bored into him from where she sat beside his bed.

“Holy fuck!” Tom scrambled backward, slamming his back up against the corner of his room…again.

“What’cha dreaming about, Thomas?” Carol asked, watching him with her signature grin. Her eyes flickered to the black leather-bound book where he’d dropped it on the nightstand the night before, then back to him, radiating a sense of barely restrained energy. “Dreaming about something you shouldn’t be?”

Chapter 3: So you Want to be a Necromancer

***AWAKE***

“Nope.” Tom said, his breath coming in ragged gasps as he stared at the terrifying being in front of him. “Just a normal, everyday nightmare.”

“Of course,” Carol said. “Hey, isn’t it your weekend today? Why don’t you relax and read while M and I finish breakfast.”

Tom’s gaze flickered to the book.

The Unified Theory of Soul Magic

Basics To Advanced

-Lar-Ell The Beckoner

His gaze flicked back to her face.

“I think I’ll help with breakfast, actually,” he said, causing the creature to pout. He slowly slipped around Carol, keeping his back pressed against the wall of his room until he got to his door. He slipped out backwards and shut the door, then snatched Ellie up from where the baby was passed out face down on the floor on a pile of blankets.

The little lump of flesh barely stirred against him, just as happy to drool on his shirt as she was on the carpet.

Tom on the other hand, had a more pressing decision to make.

In the kitchen, Gramma was making breakfast for him, dinner for everyone else.

Tom’s first instinct was to scream, run out the front door and down the street, barefoot, and at full speed.

Thinking through the haze of fear, Tom rationalized that Carol hadn’t gutted them previously, and he shouldn’t give her a reason to do so now. Like dealing with a wild animal, you gotta stay calm, and definitely DON’T RUN.

His bedroom door clicked open behind him.

Tom took a deep, calming breath and made his way to the kitchen, daughter still sleeping on his shoulder. “Could you open the window?”

Still, an escape route is never a bad idea, he thought as Gramma slid the window open for him.

“I thought you were going to help cook?” Carol asked as she entered the room, making his hair stand on end.

“Eh, there’s not enough room in the kitchen for three people, and how often do I get to spend quality time with this little stinker?” To Tom, his words sounded nervous and insincere, but Carol simply shrugged and joined Gramma in the kitchen, chopping onions without a care in the world.

Every once in a while, Carol peeked over her shoulder at Tom’s daughter before returning to her task, eyes dry despite being on her fourth onion.

Lily, what on earth were you into? Tom thought to himself as a genuine, honest-to-god monster helped his gramma cook dinner.

Afterwards, Tom spent a couple hours ferrying Lily’s furniture to their garage, then went to work. As desperately as he wanted to shove his daughter and his adoptive grandparents in the car and set out for another country, he had no idea what would set Carol off.

When you don’t know what the rules of the game you’re playing are, it’s best to maintain the status quo until you do.

Jacob was his typical self, tearing through the pallets of freight like nobody’s business with the good cheer of someone high on coke. It was annoying to listen to his get-rich quick schemes, but at least the short freight-man didn’t get paranoid when he was on drugs.

That was a blessing.

The entire night, Tom’s mind was on Carol and the book, trying to unpack exactly what had happened. Tom knew it had to have something to do with the book.

The first law of necromancy is..what?

Tom probably would have dismissed the book as being a typical feel-good wicca book for affluent young women who want to escape reality, but…getting stabbed in the heart for opening it made him reassess his opinion.

There, in the Freddie’s, Tom made his plan while restocking microwaves and tupperware. Unsurprisingly, his grandfather’s advice gave him a good idea of where to start.

***DREAM***

Tom opened his eyes, his heart hammering painfully in his chest, just as it had been the morning before.

He glanced over and spotted Carol hovering over him, practically drooling.

With a tearing sensation, Tom deviated from the script, staying still and matching Carol’s gaze with his own, gradually calming his heart.

“What’cha dreaming about, Thomas?” Carol asked, watching him with her signature grin. Her eyes flickered to the black leather-bound book where he’d dropped it on the nightstand the night before, then back to him, radiating a sense of barely restrained energy. “Dreaming about something you shouldn’t be?”

“Nope,” Tom said, throwing the covers off and picking up the book from the nightstand, carefully watching Carol’s reaction.

Carol tensed. But she didn’t attack. The coiled tension that rolled off her body was palpable, like a snake about to strike.

Tom tucked the book against his side. “I’m going to get to work putting Lily’s stuff in the garage.”

“…Sure.” Her gaze tracked him like a predator as he slipped out of the room.

“Grampa,” Tom said as soon as he made it into the living room.

Grampa laid his newspaper down on his lap and glanced over his bifocals at Tom and gave a grunt, which translated to - “What is it?”

“I need to borrow my college education.”

“You dreaming, kid?”

Tom scowled and gestured across his throat as Carol came out of his room, heading for the kitchen.

Grampa lifted an eyebrow before shrugging and bringing the newspaper back up.

“It’s in the safe.”

Tom went down into the musty concrete basement and opened the bigass safe his grampa used for collectables and actual valuables. In this case, there were two ten thousand dollar stacks of hundred dollar bills from when Grampa had sold a few of the coins the night before.

Crisp bills with a yellow band wrapped around them, denoting their value for all to see.

Tom hesitated to touch it. It was one thing to see gold coins on the table and another to see money he was more familiar with, more than he’d ever seen in his life, sitting there in one place.

That’s a year of unloading freight, he thought, hands trembling.

That’ll do.

Tom pushed his way past the reverence and snatched up both stacks, closing the safe before heading back out. He gave Grampa a brisk wave, then carried the book out to his car.

He could feel Carol’s eyes on his back as he got into the car.

“Oookay,” Tom gripped the steering wheel tight and took a deep breath, before he pulled out and got on the road, dialing up a number in his contact list that he’d never thought he’d need to use.

“Yeah?” Jacob sounded out of breath. The cokehead must have been doing something strenuous, but whether that was a hot date or stealing a car, Tom had no idea.

“Hey Jacob, this is Tom, how would you like to call in sick today and make twenty grand by driving me on a ten-hour trip to Omaha?”

No hesitation.

“I’m in.” Jacob hung up.

Tom rolled his eyes. Wait for it.

A moment later, Tom’s phone rang again.

“Where do I pick you up, then?” Jacob asked, sounding a bit embarrassed.

“I’ll be at your place in a couple minutes. We can take your truck. Don’t forget to bring some coke, I don’t want you spazzing out halfway there.”

“I…don’t know what you mean.” Jacob was a terrible liar.

A minute later, Tom rolled into Jacob’s driveway. He lived in a run-down mobile home he’d inherited from his grandmother in a slightly scuzzy part of town. The money he would have put towards rent went up his nose.

Jacob’s car was a rusty truck that rivaled Tom’s car for sheer mistreatment. It was covered in splotches of rust that had formed around minor dings and dents and slowly worn the paint away, the interior was covered in a thick layer of dust and dog hair, enough to make anyone sneeze.

The heater didn’t run in the winter, and the radio had long since been pawned. There was a hole in the floor you could see the road through.

But Carol wouldn’t recognize it.

“Hop in!” Jacob said, leaning out the window and slapping the side of his truck as Tom pulled in.

A couple minutes later they were on the interstate, Jacob smiling and beating his palm against his steering wheel to some imaginary jams.

“Do you…want the money?” Tom asked a few minutes later.

“Oh yeah, the money, yeah, I do.” Tom said, shaking his head like he’d just woken from a fugue.

Tom pulled out the cash and set it on the dash.

“Holy shit, I didn’t think you were serious, or only had like, a hundred dollars or something.”

“You were willing to drive a twenty hour round trip for a hundred bucks?”

He glanced at Tom and shrugged. “I’ve never been to Omaha.”

“You ever fought a demon?”

“Can’t say that I have.” Jacob said, scratching his chin. “Unless you’re talking about the C.”

He turned toward Tom with a horrified expression. “Please tell me this isn’t a ‘you need God get you off the drugs’ ambush.”

“It’s not.”

“Thank God.” Jacob wiped an actual cold sweat off his forehead.

For the first hour or so, Tom sat patiently in the backseat while Jacob made conversation, waiting for his lead on Carol to grow.

Then he opened the book again.

By Tom’s reckoning, Carol was some kind of supernatural entity bound to protect the book and Lily’s baby. Otherwise, how would she know he had or hadn’t opened the book?

In his dream, when he had opened the book, she was on him like flies on shit, but in the real world, when it had simply been on his nightstand, she’d done nothing.

Any normal person instructed to protect a book would understand that having it on your nightstand means you’re gonna read it. They would know that and move to intercept.

But she did nothing.

That suggested she would only go bonkers when it was opened. Some magic contract or something.

Wait, don’t immediately assume magic. There might be some cell phone guts embedded in the spine or something.

Although, since Carol was a demon, Occam’s Razor kinda cut in the other direction there. It was more simple to assume magic for both Carol and the book, than it was to assume Lily knew how to hotwire a cellphone and summon demons.

Well, whatever, Tom thought, glancing down the highway behind him before returning his attention to the first page of the book.

There are people who call what we do monstrous or evil, destroying souls and trafficking with foul demons, paying in the blood of the innocent to receive unholy power.

Those people are stupid.

The first law of necromancy is that souls cannot be created, nor can they be destroyed, nor can they be prevented from reaching the Other Side, wherever that may be.

The second law is that a Soul Pulse cannot be created by means other than an interaction between a soul and gold.

And anyone who’d spoken to a single Outsider would know that they accept no payment but Soul Pulse for their services.

Anyone who fully understands these three things could extrapolate that by the laws of the natural world we are simply incapable of the vast majority of the things they accuse us of.

Curiousity piqued, Tom flipped to the next page.

A soul cannot be created, stopped from passing on, nor can it be destroyed. These three things are foundational to the Soul pulse, because while souls cannot be stopped, they can be delayed.

The force that acts on souls that draw them to the Other Side, henceforth known as The Call, is an immutable fact of the universe. Souls are drawn by The Call, and nothing can stop it, for it grows the more it is resisted, until the resisting force is overwhelmed. No necromancer has ever managed to create a device that could delay the passing of a soul to the Other Side for longer than a few seconds.

The soul pulse is a reaction that takes place when a soul is forced to make a revolution around a unit of gold. When the Call draws a soul past gold, there is a small amount of resistance, which causes the Call to increase its pull. This interaction between a soul, the Call, and gold deposits a small amount of Soul Pulse into the gold.

This tiny amount of Soul pulse is the reason why gold has been so coveted over the years, causing men to lose their sanity over it’s acquisition. Gold passively generates the tiniest amount of Soul Pulse as ambient souls are drawn past them, giving them the faintest magical signature.

That magical signature is what drives people gradually mad.

The First Soul-magician to create a soul engine, Benson Mortain, discovered that by using a material much more resistant to the passage of souls than gold, he was able to guide souls in a tight loop around gold, maximizing the exposure it received from a single soul, and therefore the amount of magic that was acquired, in the process, discovering the minimum unit that can be used for a practical application, or traded with Outsiders, the Soul Pulse.

A consummate mathematician, Benson discovered that the formulae for the maximum power derived from a Soul was:

P= SGC

C represents the Call. However, since C is theoretically infinite, We use this formula for expected power from a given engine instead.

P=SG(R^2)

P is expected Soul pulses, R in this equation is a mathematical notation denoting the resistance of the guiding coil, while G is the surface area of the Gold, and S is the number of souls. Once the resistance of the guiding coil has been surpassed by C, the soul leaves.

This shows the importance of finding materials for guiding coils with high resistance to S passing through them, as it primarily dictates the efficiency of a soul engine.

In the beginning, however, there were no manmade materials with a higher resistance than gold, except umbillical cords. Benson Morain’s first soul engine made use of one until he bartered with Outsiders for better materials.

There are several theories as to why umbilical cords resist souls passing through them, but the most widely accepted is that a soul passing through an umbilical cord would disrupt the delicate formation of a new soul, resulting in a stillbirth.

Tom lifted his head up, blinking.

“Umbili – The fuck did I just read?”

Tom shook his head and tried looking for an index, hoping for a chapter titled: Carols, and how to banish them back to the bowels of hell.

Unfortunately, there was no index. If he wanted information on how to get rid of Carol (or at least figure out the pitfalls) he needed to skim.

Tom began skimming through the book, through page after page of diagrams, mathematics, handwritten notes and techniques. A few things he read made his stomach churn with barely restrained disgust. It mostly involved skinning stillborns.

The preface had said they weren’t capable of most of the horrors they were accused of. Tom stumbled into a few of the ones they were capable of.

Nope, nope, nope, Tom thought, flipping through pages.

Ahah! Finally, Tom found a chapter on Outsiders – what the book called demons – and began devouring it.

Long story short, it appeared that Carol was from a caste of low-class guardian outsiders called Nim’tek, and she had most likely been contracted by Lily to serve as added protection for her baby and her secrets.

“Well, that’s great,” Tom muttered as he scoured the description for usable information. Nim’tek were hired in units of decades. It would take another nine years before Carol went away on her own. At minimum.

Tom flipped to the next page, and his eyebrows rose as the book detailed a ritual that would get someone in contact with the Outsider equivalent of ‘Customer Support’.

Maybe they’ll have answers for me. Don’t get me wrong, I fear for my immortal soul, but if I contact them during a dream, I’ll at least have that safety net. And there might be a way to get some answers on how to get rid of her.

That still left the problem of how he was going to get Soul Pulses to connect to them. It wasn’t exactly a toll-free number.

I mean, I have the gold, but the other ingredients include some things that I’m not gonna be able to get my hands on in this lifetime.

Fine ground Elm ash mixed with goose fat to create a waterproof ink for the spell. Those two are relatively easy, but finding a freaking ‘cured umbilical cord?’ That’s like…damn near impossible.

Come to think of it, he could go dumpster diving outside a hospital and maybe find one. And maybe contract HIV and hep. C in the process.

Wait, it said the first necromancer bartered with Outsiders for better ingredients. Maybe Lily had some of these better ingredients. She summoned Carol, that must mean she had the stuff to do it…somewhere.

Tomorrow I can search through the storage unit and see what I can see. If I’m lucky, All the stuff I need to get rid of Carol will be squirreled away in there.

“Hey, Tom, I don’t mean to alarm you, but there’s a car gaining on us pretty fa-“

CRASH!

Jacob yelped and tried to keep the wheel steady as a SUV smashed into the back of the truck. A moment later, it pulled alongside them and smashed into the side of the truck with no regard for itself, sending them into a spin, and careening violently into the ditch.

“Ugh,” Jacob’s eyes widened a moment before the passenger side was ripped off the hinges and Tom was torn out of the seat, the seatbelt snapping off.

Carol turned him around to face her. Once again, she’d sloughed off her human form, reverting to a part-gargoyle, part skeleton…thing.

“Thomas Sweety, did you –“

“Peek at something I shouldn’t have?” Tom couldn’t resist. He probably should have resisted, though.

Chapter 4: Storage Unit of The Damned

She blinked at him, cocking her head.

“It appears the breeding stock has manifested a bloodline. But which one, and will it stop this?” She held up a single talon and placed it against his throat.

Aw, shit. He’d put Carol on guard, and she was gonna kill him slow this time. The only thing he could do now was try to pump her for more information.

“What do you mean by breeding stock? What are you gonna do to my daughter? Who was Lily, rea-”

She silenced him with a claw through the vocal cords. A flare of pain went through his throat as harsh air whistled through the wound in time to his ragged breathing. He clamped his hands over it, but it barely helped.

“There’s a playbook for dealing with an En’hol.” She said as he clutched his bleeding throat. “And I’m about to run you through it, step by ste-“

Carol was interrupted by a crowbar to the back of the head.

Jacob, the short, wiry man was outside of his truck wielding a crowbar. His face was covered in white powder and his eyes were bloodshot and bulging.

“AAAAH!” Jacob gave a berserker scream and lunged forward, raining blows down on the staggering demon. She weathered them for a moment before slashing her razor-sharp talons at the cokehead, forcing him back.

I gotta get out of here, Tom thought, staggering to his feet. He wasn’t stupid enough to think he could win, or run away, he just needed to end the dream before he spent the next sixteen hours getting tortured until he was braindead.

Note to self, find a better way to wake up, Tom thought, putting every last fiber of his being into running away from the brawl and into oncoming traffic.

***AWAKE***

Tom lunged out of the sheets, gasping for breath and massaging his throat where Carol had put a hole through it.

“Hiii,” Carol said, a couple feet away from his bed. “Breakfast is ready.” Her eyes landed on the book on the nightstand above his mattress.

Tom bit his lip and choked back a yelp, nodding silently.

Tom went through the motions of breakfast, did the dishes while Carol bounced Ellie on her lap, then drove over to Badger Self-storage with a crowbar and a mission: find the materials he would need to make a soul engine and place a call to some demons so they could give him advice on how to deal with another demon.

So this is my life now? Tom thought, shaking his head and looking at the crowbar in his hand. It’s entirely possible that my brain finally fixed itself, and now I’m dreaming those wild crazy dreams that normal people have when they sleep.

When a cured umbilical cord spilled out of the back of Lily’s couch, Tom realized that his life was what was crazy, not his dreams. Or maybe it was my girlfriend who was crazy, he thought, inspecting the package with Ellie’s name and birthday on it, and trying not to puke.

Tom set it aside and began carefully searching his way through the rest of the storage unit. He found a box of carefully preserved butterfly wings, separated by color, along with the bile of different kinds of animals.

A preservative, maybe? I don’t fucking know.

Tom was beginning to gather a little pile of weird and creepy shit in the middle of the storage unit.

Tom was absolutely sure that the Ziploc with his daughter’s umbilical cord in it was the weirdest thing, bar none, until he found the brain in a jar.

An actual fucking brain in a jar.

The glass was wobbly and bubbled, like it’d been made in the 17th century, and the bottom of the jar was a thick layer of gold, streaked with odd impurities that were too regular to be an accident. There was a round hollow in the gold that looked like it was meant to receive something, about twice the size of the gold coins.

On the front was a plaque that read simply, ‘uncle Tabbeth’.

Well, Tom thought, hefting the jar thoughtfully. I guess this is just par for the course.

Tom put the jar with the rest of the pile and kept searching, eventually finding a rather large pile of bizarre paraphernalia of every shape and size, including the ink he needed to give the Outsiders a call, but something didn’t sit right with him.

It felt incomplete.

Where were the finished products? The half-finished projects? The walking skeletons? That was apparently one of the easiest things to do as a necromancer, as soul pulses were ideal for reanimating dead flesh. The life-energy required no phase-shifting.

Many of the ingredients showed signs of being used heavily, too. The nacre dust only had a quarter of the pale, pearlescent powder left, but the sides were caked with it, the interior covered in scratches and wear, like it had been used heavily.

And yet, Tom didn’t see any sign of what it’d been used to create.

Was Lily selling it, trading it? Storing it elsewhere? Was trafficking with demons how she’d gotten so much gold, or was she already rich? Carol had called him ‘breeding stock’, which asked some very serious questions.

Mysteries for another time, Tom thought, grabbing the ingredients and carefully stacking them inside a box while mentally checking off his list of things he’d need to perform the ritual.

Crap. There’s no frog slime.

Frogs weren’t hard to come by. They were in season right about now, too.

Tom pulled out his phone and called Jacob.

“Yeah?” Jacob said, his voice sounding like he’d been woken from a dead sleep.

“Hey, it’s Tom, you wanna go to the lake and catch some frogs?”

“I’m in.” Jacob hung up.

Tom rolled his eyes and texted the cokehead the details before loading up the Subaru with occult supplies. As he closed the door, he checked his phone.

Only a few hours until he had to go to work.

After work, Tom added the jar of slime to the ingredients and got to work making a soul engine. He was absolutely exhausted, but a soul engine was going to be a multi-day process, which meant that at the very least, he would have to make it and fill it with soul-pulses in the real world so it would be ready to use when he slept the next day.

He went shopping at a few local hardware stores, dipping into his ‘college education’ to pick up some smelting equipment that he hadn’t found in Lily’s stuff.

He was hiding in the basement with a crucible of molten gold held over a carved out cast when Carol poked her head in, and spotted what he was doing.

Tom just about jumped out of his skin, spilling droplets of molten gold everywhere as he picked up the blazing torch and held it out in front of him, trying to ward off the creature with fire.

The skeletal woman scanned the scene in front of her. She cocked a brow at the soul engine ingredients laid out on the table, then peered at him a moment longer.

Any second now, she’s going to change, turn into a demon and fucking gut me, Tom thought, his arm shaking, heart hammering in his chest. It was beyond obvious what he was doing, for anyone who knew what was in the book, or had spent time with Lily. Carol was likely both.

And I’m not sleeping right now! He thought, adrenaline making his limbs shaky.

“En’hols,” Carol muttered, shaking her head at him before flicking on the air vent above his head. “Ellie’s passed out. If you were planning on getting any sleep today, now would be the time, your grandmother says.”

And just like that, she left him alone. Caught red-handed, and she didn’t care.

Tom frowned, slowly lowering the torch. Is it just the book then? Was she bound by some kind of hyper-specific instructions to kill whoever opened the book?

I wonder what would happen If Ellie opened the book? He had the fleeting idea of having the baby fumble the book open to see what would happen before he violently shook it out of his head.

Tom wouldn’t tolerate that line of inquiry. Even if it would work, even if it was in a dream…he wouldn’t bet Ellie’s life on anything.

There were certain lines people couldn’t cross before they slowly stopped being people. The consequence-free environment of his dreams had given Tom ideas to do some bad things to people, but he realized that since nothing in his dream-reality changed anything in the real world, the only thing that changed if he hurt people, would be himself.

And there was no way Tom could see himself becoming a better person if he indulged every whim and petty grudge as he slept.

Speaking of sleep, Tom thought to himself, noticing his half-cooled crucible of gold, and the nagging sensation of his eyes slowly closing on their own.

We’ll pick this up tomorrow.

Hopefully, Carol wasn’t just waiting to kill him in his sleep, but Tom was relatively sure by this point that if one of her kill-conditions were tripped, she would throw all subterfuge aside and just rip him to shreds.

That, and Tom was very tired. He’d spent hours catching frogs, then loaded freight, then assembled a miniature smelting setup.

I should take the day off tonight, He thought, suppressing a yawn.

It was time for bed.

Tom went upstairs and stumbled into his room, collapsing into bed. The last thing he saw was Carol holding his sleeping daughter, standing in the doorway, watching him with an unblinking stare.

Whatever, he thought, closing his eyes.

***Kenneth Peterson***

Going around back was the most dangerous part of a bust. A lot of people thought it was going in the front, but that wasn’t so.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, perps rabbit out the back, and when you’re the guy standing there between them and escape, they can get a little…agitated.

Not to mention greater distance to the cruiser, and therefore from backup, a spare firearm, the med kit, etc.

Which is why Ken preferred to let kids who didn’t know any better go around back, basking in the lingering shine of perceived indestructibility from their days in the academy using airsoft guns on each other.

When Ken’s internal count got to twenty, he smashed the rickety door open, bits of paint flaking off on the bottom of his size eleven boot.

“Chicago police department!” Ken shouted, announcing his presence.

The bowl of amphetamines in the center of the living room was rocking cartoonishly in place as the perp had already made it halfway to the back door.

Keeping his head on a swivel for the dreaded wildcard that would get him killed, Ken launched himself after the guy. Brian would cause the perp to skid on his heels, and Ken would blindside him from behind and subdue him.

Speed was the name of the game. The faster they got the perp under control, the safer everyone would be.

Ken made it to the back door in three huge steps, where the perp on the patio was lurching to the right on account of Brian stumbling over some kid’s toys to the left.

Twenty seconds wasn’t enough time to get through the back yard? Are you kidding me!? Ken thought, lunging to the right to follow the perp while Brain shook the playset off his foot.

Now it’s gonna be a fucking foot-chase.

Ken did not like foot chases. Cops were carrying an extra fifteen pounds in the form of body armor and gear, while perps were often skinny as shit, and extra motivated.

Fat criminals tended to get weeded out by strong competition.

Just as he expected, the perp sailed over the fence with the grace of a goddamn athlete. Were rabbiting an official Olympic sport, Ken was fairly sure this guy would take home the gold.

Ken followed after at full speed, arm up, hoping to catch the perp’s ankle and drag him down, or at least pin him long enough for Brian to go around the other side.

Ken fully expected to whiff, slamming into the fence and watching in frustration as the perp made a beeline for safety.

Ken did whiff, missing the perp’s ankle by a couple inches, causing him to growl in frustration. A strange feeling assaulted Ken’s senses. He felt unnaturally cold, like he’d been dunked in mint extract for an instant.

Ken sailed through the fence, colliding with the fence-jumper mid-landing. The two tumbled to the ground, but Ken recovered first, twisting the perp’s arms behind him and cuffing them together.

Ken started the body search and reciting the Miranda rights, but his attention was on the fence he’d just slipped through. There was no comical Ken-sized hole in the fence, it was completely whole.

How in God’s name?

Brian made it around the side of the dilapidated house, and promptly started to try and climb the fence.

“Go around!” Ken gritted out as the dumbass started bending the metal poles with his sheer weight.

“But you –“

“Does it look like he’s still running?”  Ken asked.

Brian sighed and dropped off the fence with an audible twang. The kid probably just wanted an excuse to jump a fence.

“C’mon,” Ken muttered, dragging the perp to the cruiser and shoving him in the back.

“Alright Brian, you missed the layup, you do the paperwork,” he said, handing Brian the chunky pad. Ken was originally planning on using seniority to foist the paperwork off, but Brian’s error made things easier.

“Fine.” Brian snatched it from him and started filling out the Who What When and Wheres.

Ken confirmed that Brian’s attention was elsewhere, then turned his back on him and glanced inside his vest pocket.

The golden doodad was faintly glowing and sizzling with some kind of force that he could barely feel in the back of his mouth, like there were some pop-rocks in there or something.

Did this thing let me slip through solid steel? Ken thought, frowning.

He’d held onto it this entire time, as a kind of macabre souvenir. Somehow every time he thought of pawning it, he remembered the dead girl. At the same time, he hadn’t gone out of his way to tell her boyfriend about it either. The kid would probably blow all the cash before any of it made it to the daughter.

So it sat there in his pocket for the last two weeks, silently urging him to pick a side.

Last month…

Ken was taught that adrenaline makes your memory wacky, so he’d assumed he’d actually dodged the car or jumped over the hood on reflex. That’s actually what he’d written in the report, too, because when you start claiming that a tesla went through you, they start warming up the section eight papers.

He’d maintained it so steadfastly that he’d even convinced himself.

But just now? That wasn’t adrenaline messing with his head. The perp was already ahead of him, there was no way he was going to catch up without a lengthy chase. The next second he was underneath the perp, tangled up in his legs and collapsing to the ground.

The only way that could happen is if he went through the fence.

Kenneth glanced back at Brian, who was still doing paperwork, scowling at the pad in his lap.

He took a step up to the mailbox in front of the flophouse, and focused on that feeling from earlier. A chill swept through him as he reached through the metal paneling of the mailbox and withdrew a letter.

Chapter 5: Organic, Free-Range, Ethically Sourced Human Souls

***DREAM***

“So, Carol, are you human?” Tom asked. He had decided to spend his day off interrogating Carol, maybe figure out more about what set her off. In this case, knowing exactly what made her hulk out could save his life.

She cocked a brow.

“Of course.”

“So you can lie.” Tom made a note. Lots of figures in folklore couldn’t lie, but it seemed Outsiders were not in that category.

“I take offense to you insinuating that I’m both lying and not human. I celebrate my hatching day the same as everyone else.” Carol said, feeding Ellie with a bottle.

“You’ve got sarcasm too, apparently,” Tom said, making another note. He didn’t get to take the notepad with him, but physically writing something down often let him remember it better. Tom had a more action-oriented memory.

“I’m not sure where you’re going with this, but I must say, it’s very imaginative.” Carol said, smiling with her lips peeled away from her canines.

“Right, right,” Tom said, scratching his head with the pen. “When you call me breeding stock, what do you mean by that?”

“I’ve never called you breeding stock.” She snapped.

“Out loud,” Tom corrected. “I’m pretty sure you think it.”

Carol’s eyes narrowed. “It seems as though you really have manifested your bloodline. That’s troublesome,” she said with a scowl.

“Care to explain what that is?” Tom asked.

“Nope.”

Tom sighed, making a note and underlining it. Bloodline -breeding stock, parentage? How did Lily/Carol know? Parents famous? Magical? Super-heroes? Villains? Needs more info.

“Let’s switch gears and do some hypothetical questions.”

Carol watched him with guarded interest.

“Lets say this book-“ Tom said, holding up The Unified Theory of Soul magic. “-and that baby,” he pointed at Ellie. “Were tied to separate train tracks across town, and you could only-“

“I would use my cellular device to contact you, then promise to kill everyone you love if you did not rescue the book, I would then proceed to save Ellie personally, because she’s a little sweety!”

Carol blew a raspberry on Ellie’s tummy, making the baby burst into shrieks of laughter before she turned her dead eyes on Tom again.

“Hypothetically.”

Tom’s phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and recognized Manager Dan’s phone number. Nothing like a little petty revenge. Sure, Tom wouldn’t hurt anybody in his dreams, but that only went so far.

“Where the hell are you?” Dan’s voice came across needy on the tiny speakers of his phone. “If you’re not here in the next thirty fuckin’ seconds, you can kiss this job goodbye.”

“Dan, something really important came up, I’m really, really sorry, but I’m gonna need you to take a deep breath, get down on your knees, and put some slob on my knob.”

Tom hung up and turned the phone to silent before tossing it in the trash.

“So Ellie has a higher priority to you than the book? Does that reflect your personal position, or Lily’s last orders?”

“You’re clever for a half-wit.”

“Thank you,” Tom muttered, making a note before glancing back up at her.

“What is an En’Hol?”

“Nothing you need to worry about.”

“Why would you call me one?”

“I never did.”

Tom paused. Right, this was the same day he’d assembled the smelter. Something that hadn’t happened yet in the dream.

“So I’m going to make some guesses.” Tom said.

“You called me breeding stock, and En’hol, multiple times in potential realities, so I would guess that the two are somewhat linked. Is En’hol a family or does the word represent a specific kind of ability? Both?”

“Can’t say.” Carol said with a smirk. “Oh, but potential realities, huh? Tell me all about it.”

“It’s nothing you need to worry about,” Tom threw the words back in her face.

“Brave, aren’t you?” She asked.

“Not really.”

After he hit Carol with the ‘potential realities’ bombshell, she became increasingly difficult to pry information out of, so Tom decided to wait until tomorrow she forgot about the interrogation night.

Honestly his biggest haul was semi-confirming that Carol had priorities, and placed Lily’s daughter over the book. It made sense to Tom, though.

What kind of mom would knowingly prioritize her own child below a book of secret, powerful, magical knowledge? Especially when the aforementioned child could easily open it by accident before they could even read?

I suppose a few bad ones might, Tom thought, rubbing his forehead. It kind of hurt that he wasn’t more important than Lily’s book, though. That stung.

Then again, she probably wasn’t planning on being dead at this point.

“Can necromancy bring back the dead?” He asked.

“Nope.” Carol said, bouncing Ellie on her lap.

“I’m gonna go get something from the store, be back soon,” Tom said, climbing to his feet and stretching his legs before heading out the door.

Outside he dialed up Jacob.

“Hey Jacob, you wanna skip out on work today and do a road-trip to Omaha?”

“Fuck yeah, I’m in.” Jacob said before hanging up.

***AWAKE***

If Tom put off opening the book for three hours instead of one, Carol was unable to catch up to him before he woke, allowing him to study the text at his leisure.

After he got off work, Tom got right to putting together the soul engine. His cast from the night before was beginning to crumble, so he needed to make a new one, and…

It’s kind of crap, isn’t it? He thought, comparing the cast he’d designed while completely sleep deprived to the one he’d seen in the book. In order to maximize exposure, he needed a sort of helix shape carved out of the gold itself.

Hmm… Tom fixed that issue by creating a papercraft helix about the width of a pinkie,  then filling it with tightly packed casting sand, holding the entire thing suspended in the middle of the empty space of the cast with gold spikes he’d cut off the gold coins with a pair of pliers.

Once that was done, Tom cleaned up the cast, cut out some channels for air to flow back out as it was replaced by gold, then carefully lowered the other half of the cast down, securing either side of the helix in place.

Here goes nothing, Tom thought, pouring the molten gold into the cast.

The glowing orange metal spilled into the cast, sending plumes of smoke up as the casting sand was scorched into a solid.

“Agh, I forgot the vent,”  Tom muttered, waving the smoke away from his face and stumbling over to the switch at the bottom of the stairs, causing the rumbling hum of the vent to come alive above him, sucking all the nasty smoke away.

Tom frowned at that for a moment. Something about the vent nagged at the corner of his mind.

After a moment not being able to figure it out, he shook it off and headed upstairs, fixing himself a sandwich as he waited to make sure the gold was completely solidified.

When he came back, he was thrilled to find the fist-sized chunk of gold without any obvious defects. The helix didn’t seem to have touched against any of the walls, and the gold spikes holding it in place had melted to join the liquid gold.

Tom couldn’t have asked for a better result. He pried the gold out of the singed casting sand, clipped off the sprues and sanded them down until he was left with just the cast.

It was an ugly hunk of lustrous gold in the shape of a cylinder, with a tight spiral going through it as thick as his pinky.

I mean, I’m no artist, but damn. I’m almost proud of myself.

He cleaned the sand out of the helix, and got everything nice and shiny before he went to bed.

It’s my weekend starting tomorrow, I should be able to finish up making an engine, then give Carol’s bosses a call before I have to go to work the next day. Of course, to finish, I’ve got to… Eh, I’ll deal with it tomorrow.

Tom spent the night studying the section on Soul engines and the math behind it.

The resistance of a properly cured…ugh…umbilical cord, was one point eight, and the total surface area was as close to full as Tom could get it, Meaning the maximum amount of soul pulses he could expect was…

(1.8)^2 (~1) (1) = ~3.24 soul pulses per soul.

Of course, Tom didn’t expect his design to be perfect. He was more likely to get far less, but it was good to have a ballpark number.

Establishing the phone call only took one, so he should be okay.

Making the gold cylinder turned out to be the easy part. The hard part was prepping the umbilical cord.

Well, you wanna learn necromancy, you gotta get your hands a little dirty, Tom thought, struggling to keep his lunch down as the smell of cured umbilical cord washed over him.

The method for preparing the cord was first, to hollow it out completely and preserve the flesh chemically, toughening it for use. Lily must have done that part already.

The second part was to take butterfly wings and crush them into a fine powder, then spread that powder on the inside of the cord using frog slime.

Why? Fuck off, that’s why. According to the book, butterfly wing dust, when applied in the proper manner, made a conduit one-way, so that the Call would drag the soul through the engine, rather than back out the path of least resistance.

I think it has something to do with the scales. From what Tom had osmosed through biology lessons and babysitter Discovery Channel, butterfly wings were covered in tiny scales that contributed to their iridescent nature. These scales were incredibly delicate and fell off easily.

I’ll bet the advice to apply them in the same direction every time is to make sure all the scales are all aligned the same way, he thought as he pushed the soft scale-covered bristles of the pipe-cleaner through the umbilical cord, again and again.

Please let this be over.

Only it wasn’t over.

Next he had to coat the outside of the cord in nacre dust, then feed it through the helix without tearing it, then tattoo a magic spell on the base of the fragile material to draw in souls.

The project he thought would only take the weekend kept him busy until the week after.

Through that time, Tom committed more and more of the book to memory, taking his nightly road trip to Omaha with Jacob, who was, to an extraordinary degree, up for anything at all times.

Maybe that’s the coke, or maybe the coke is a symptom of being down for anything.

By the next weekend, Tom had a theoretically functional Soul Engine. It wasn’t much to look at, but it should do what he needed it to do.

All right, now I just need to kill somebody…

Hmm…

“Hey Grampa?” Tom asked at dinner/breakfast.

Grampa grunted between a mouthful of peas.

“Where’s a place where a lot of people die, but isn’t dangerous to go?”

“Nursing home.” Grampa said without pause. “They drop like flies in there. Their family just drops ‘em off like garbage day, and they waste a way in a couple years.”

Hmm…

“You couldn’t force me to go to a nursing home. I’d rather drown myself with a catheter.”

Tom blinked that imagery out of his mind, then refocused on the old man, noting the sunken appearance, the slight tremor in his hand.

“Hey Grampa, I need an excuse to go to a nursing home. Let’s pretend you’re senile.”

“You dreaming, kid?”

“Nope. I gotta hide a lump of gold somewhere people die a lot.”

“I’m gonna have to take a hard pass on that plan. Whatever you’re doing, I don’t wanna be a part of it, and I forbid you from getting caught and ending up in jail.”

Tom scowled and finished breakfast. At least he had an idea for a target, if not an easy pass inside.

So Tom spent the next couple nights practicing breaking into the biggest nursing home in Chicago. By all accounts, them having the most old people should mean the most dead people over time, right?

All Tom needed was a single soul-pulse to complete the ritual, then he would be able to call up Outsider Customer Service and get the lowdown on how to get Carol to not attempt to murder him or his family should they accidentally open the book or put Ellie at risk.

He should only need to leave the thing on the roof for a couple weeks before someone should have statistically died within the engine’s radius.

At first, Tom got caught on the way down the ladder every time, before he figured out that the nursing home had security cameras, and they saw him every time. The only way to approach the place unseen was a narrow path the old people walked to get some fresh air that ran close to the side of the building before dipping into a miniature park with big elm trees that shaded the area…and made security cameras useless.

Once he dropped off the package on the nursing home’s roof three times without a hitch, Tom was ready to do it for real, and get his ethically sourced soul pulses.

Tom’s heart was racing as he broke into the nursing home ‘For Real’, hunched over with a quiet, loping gait, his face covered by a ski-mask. He climbed up his ladder silently, avoiding the midnight duty by about five minutes, then placed the soul engine on the roof, secure in its steel box meant to look like a nondescript attachment to the vents.

He was halfway down the ladder when the wall in front of him blinked red and blue.

WOONK. A siren blip made him freeze in place, turning his head, muscles creaking.

Chapter 6: Breaking Bad

An ambulance was at the entrance of the nursing home, a couple beefy paramedics hoisting up a withered woman who seemed to weigh nothing at all, sliding her cot into the back of the boxy vehicle.

A light from the top of the ambulance flashed Tom right in the face.

Oh, thank fucking god, he thought as he shuffled the rest of the way down the aluminum ladder and picked it up. Tom ran down the path toward the miniature park, trying his damndest to be invisible. He was wearing dark clothing and the paramedics were busy, but all it took was once stray glance and he’d be toast.

Once he got outside the grounds of the nursing home, it would be a short jog over to his car, parked a couple streets down so as to not make it obvious which roof he was prowling.

When he crossed the threshold, he took off his ski mask and slowed down, his heart hammering in his chest. A kid walking through an urban street in the middle of the night with a ladder was an eyebrow-raiser, but not something that people would go out of their way to investigate.

If he was wearing a ski-mask, that changed things entirely.

He threw the mask into an alley on the way over to the Subaru, hoping no eyes were on him.

The trip back to his car was uneventful, and Tom got the ladder into the back of his beat-up Subaru without incident. He was about to close the back hatch when a beam of light settled on him, blinding his hard-won night vision.

Ohshitohshitoshit!

A door opened and closed, but Tom couldn’t do anything but cover his eyes against the spotlight.

“Whatcha doing with a ladder at two in the morning?” A voice asked.

“Taking it to my grampa. I just bought it. I work the night shift,” Tom said, his mind whirring at top speed.

Listen son, the key to lying to the cops is keeping all your points of failure in line. Keep everything as close to the truth as possible, and make everything that you say as impossible to disprove as you can. They’ll peck at your story, but if you do it right, they’ll leave you be. And end every sentence with sir. Gets their rocks off.

Thanks, Grampa.

In this case his point of failure was his Grampa, but hopefully grampa was quick enough on his feet to corroborate Tom’s story.

“You got a receipt?” the cop asked, stepping closer, out of the glaring light. The cop was your typical ruddy-cheeked two-hundred pound white guy with a crew cut.

Tom could swear they had some kind of mold for beat-cops.

“Yeah, it’s in the car. – sir.” Tom said, heart jumping into his chest. He actually did have the receipt, but Tom didn’t like the intensity of the questioning. He didn’t like anything about the current situation.

His body wanted him to start running immediately, but his mind knew that was the fastest way to fuck himself over. They had his license plates, he was already caught. Right now he just needed to play it cool so they dropped it.

The cop leaned over and scanned the back of the Subaru for a moment before he put the beam of light in Tom’s face. His gaze lingered on Tom for a gut-wrenching moment.

“We’ve got reports of somebody trespassing through people’s backyards. You take a shortcut through somebody’s lawn earlier tonight? Maybe on your way to the store?”

They were a couple blocks away from a suburb, so it was within reason.

Stupid trespasser making life difficult for me.

“No sir, I have a car.”

“This is your car?”

“Yessir.”

“I.D.”

Tom fished out his wallet and passed the whole thing over. The cop deftly took out his driver’s license and went back to the car, the cruiser’s floodlight pinning him in place like a bug on a display.

Oh, great, they’ve got your I.D. now.

Tom could only sweat his ass off for what felt like an hour while they ran his plates.

“You go by Tom or Thomas?” the officer asked as he ducked back out of the cruiser.

“Tom, sir.”

“You carrying any drugs?”

“No sir.”

The officer checked his pockets, took one last look at his car’s shredded interior, then nodded.

“Have a good night Tom. Get those seatbelts replaced.”

The cop handed Tom a ticket for the seatbelts, then headed back to the cruiser, and just like that, they left him alone. Tom let out the biggest sigh of relief since Ellie had been born.

“I gotta get the hell outta here,” Tom muttered, ducking into his seat.

When he got home, Tom got right to work on the summoning circle. It was…well, it was impossible to know for sure if he got it right after only one day. Tom’s memory was good, but it wasn’t perfect.

He made a rough sketch of the diagram for contacting Outsiders from memory, gathered all the ingredients he could remember, then went to bed.

Over the next couple days, he would consult the drawing in his dreams, comparing it to the one in the book, and make changes to the sketch as soon as he woke up, making a line slightly thicker here, adding a missing detail there.

Eventually, his sketch in the real world was a perfect copy of the one in the book. Good enough to risk getting started on the spell itself.

Tom was not looking forward to going back up on the roof of the nursing home and seeing if his net had caught any old-people souls, but he would have to eventually.

Over the course of two weeks, he painstakingly inscribed the complex arrangement of runes on the floor using a caulk gun filled with the thick black sludge, checking and double checking the book for every possible thing that could go wrong.

All the squiggly lines of the spell travelled inward, toward the as-yet missing power source, which should theoretically light the whole thing up.

It kinda looks like a creepy eye, Tom thought as he carefully checked over the symbol on the floor, comparing it to his sketch.

It was done. The black design on the ground was as perfect as he could make it. Now he just needed the power source.

I wonder if two weeks is long enough for someone to have kicked the bucket. Tom thought idly as he clomped up the stairs out of the basement. It was eight in the morning, he’d been working on the spell all night, and he was glad to find Gramma making dinner/breakfast for him and Grampa.

“It emerges.” Grampa said without dropping his newspaper. The old man was a stubborn holdout for paper, when he could’ve just as easily been reading on his cell-phone. Then again, being stubborn was kind of Grampa’s shtick.

Tom blinked against the light of dawn and suppressed a yawn, glancing at the paper.

Hero Cop Makes Another Daring Drug Bust

Tom idly scanned the back of the newspaper as he sat, picking out the major details, like the fact that the guy had been outgunned six to one and disarmed the bad guys without suffering a single wound. It was highly unusual, but it wasn’t unheard of.

Good for him I guess. Tom wasn’t that uncharitable, even though a cop had almost caught him in a misdemeanor a while ago, he’d rather not see news about them getting plastered across the sidewalk.

Tom was quickly distracted by bacon and eggs dropping onto his plate.

“Did I mention how much I love you, gramma?” Tom mentioned between forkfuls of greasy calories.

“Yeah…It always seems to peak around breakfast,” She said with a hint of sarcasm, rinsing off the pan.

“MM.” Tom grunted.

***Kenneth Peterson***

“That was some stunt you pulled there,” Paul said, reviewing the body-cam footage while Ken waited patiently for his boss to finish his tirade.

“That. Right there.” He said, pausing the film right before one of the dealers pulled the trigger.

“I don’t know how the fuck you didn’t get blown away right there. You’re obviously staring down the goddamn barrel in the video.”

“He flinched.” Ken said, his voice even.

“If he did, it’s sure as hell hard to see.”

The captain turned back to Ken. “Normally, I’d give you a thorough cussing for taking so many stupid risks, but somehow you make it look like it’s spring cleaning and you’re the damn maid, and now the Mayor himself is asking about you specifically, and asking me some stupid goddamn questions, like ‘if one guy can do it, why did it take this long?’”

Paul leaned forward. “You and I both know human beings can’t possibly match that standard, so you’re gonna shake the mayor’s hand, smile for the cameras, claim your exploits were the result of your training and the support of your fellow officers, take the promotion, and fade into obscurity, is that understood?”

“Yessir.”

Paul shook his head, watching Ken closely.

“Well, if you were looking to advance your career by being stupid, it looks like you hit the jackpot. Now half a dozen other kids are gonna try the same thing and get killed. I should shove my foot up your ass, but it needs to be sparkling for the press conference. I’ll see you in an hour.”

“Sir,” Ken said, recognizing a dismissal when he heard one.

Ken left the office and relaxed. Paul didn’t know about the gold…thing. He hadn’t brought it up once. That meant no one else had realized what they could do.

I’m a fucking superhero. Like Green Lantern, or something. He’d been able to turn cold and let those bullets pass right through him. It was fucking beautiful.

In a few days the wad of gold from the girl’s car was going to disappear, but it wasn’t going to be wasted lining the pockets of his superiors, it was going to go to someone who deserved it. Someone who could use it:

Kenneth.

All he had to do was slip into the evidence room from an exterior wall, grab the loot and slip right back out.

He hadn’t really planned exactly what he was going to do with it once he had it. Hand them out to other cops so they could kick major ass too?

Then again… a faint, nearly unconscious voice told Ken that if he just handed the magic doodads out, he would no longer be special.

...Actually, you know what, they would probably fall into the wrong hands in a matter of weeks, he rationalized. Secrets shared between more than one person never stay secret, and sooner or later, some criminal would get their hands on one of them, and then there would be supervillains.

The responsible thing to do was to keep it to himself.

And did the city really need a team of superpowered crime fighters? Not really. They hadn’t needed them before, they wouldn’t need them now, especially if he did the city a favor and kept the secret of the gold from getting into the hands of the bad guys.

Which it would if the brass sold it wholesale.

You’re welcome, Chicago, Ken thought as he straightened his jacket, heading out towards the locker room.

In the meantime, he had to touch up his shave, comb his hair pretty, shine his shoes, get any creases ironed out of his uniform, and pin on his medals. He wanted to look his best for the cameras when the Mayor shook his hand.