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 Suzie 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 D.B. Cooper’s money, or an unowned gold vein in the mountains, or…something.”

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

Grampa 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 he’d found in the cabinet. 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.

Lying 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 soul magic 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, he 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 its 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?”