***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 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 second 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 soul magic 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 Fred Meyer’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’s 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 the cash. 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,” Jacob 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 passenger seat 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 some kind of 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 hot-wire a cell phone 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 soul magic 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’s spoken to a single Outsider would know that they accept no payment but soul pulses 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.

Curiosity 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 draws 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 soul monger 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 its acquisition. Gold passively generates the tiniest amount of Soul Pulse as ambient souls are drawn past it, giving it the faintest magical signature.

That magical signature is what drives people gradually mad when exposed to gold.

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, Mortain discovered the minimum unit that can be used for a practical application, or traded with Outsiders, the Soul Pulse.

A consummate mathematician, Mortain discovered the formula for the maximum power derived from a single soul:

P=SGC

C represents the Call, which provides the force pulling souls to the afterlife. 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 is drawn out of the engine.

This shows the importance of finding materials for guiding coils with high resistance to souls 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 umbilical cords. Benson Mortain’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 heck 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 techniques for skinning stillborns.

The preface had said they weren’t capable of most of the horrors they were accused of. Tom stumbled onto 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, maybe 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 soul monger 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 an 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.