***DREAM***

Tom checked the state of the soul engine every night in his dreams, climbing onto the roof of the old folks home and checking the lump of gold. Tom wasn’t sure how he would tell whether or not the engine had caught a passing soul…

Until it did.

Tom didn’t know how he was feeling what he was feeling, but when he looked at the fist-sized chunk of gold that last night, he felt the sensation of some kind of power sizzling against his soul. Or maybe his organs? It was a fluttering, starting sensation that edged between a caffeine overdose and the butterflies of a first love, with a pop-rock sizzle thrown in there for good measure.

That thing was charged.

“Sorry, random old person,” Tom whispered, taking the gold out of its camouflage container. “I really hope the book was right about it being painless and your soul gets to move on no matter what.”

Tom probably would have done it even if it wasn’t painless. He had a walking bomb named Carol living in his house with his grandparents and daughter. There wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to remedy the situation.

He scampered down the ladder, hustled to the place where he’d parked his car, then drove back home.

Here we go.

Tom took the lump of gold out of his pocket and carefully placed it in the center of the spellwork. He squinted his eyes as the thick black grease blazed with light, pulsing outward from the soul engine in the center.

Above the glowing ink, an image began to form from motes of light, and Tom’s body tensed, half-expecting an eldritch horror to create a portal and feast upon his sanity.

Tom was pretty sure mental damage was the only thing that could stick.

I should have grabbed Grampa’s thirty-eight as a panic button.

Oh well, it was too late now.

The image sharpened to reveal a full-body picture of a naked purple woman. Her eyes were black with neon green irises that cast their own light, and writhing black tattoos covered her slightly plump body in ways that were…unnaturally pleasing to the eye.

Tom blinked, swallowing saliva and refocusing his gaze.

“Tremble, mortal, for you have contacted Ilspeth eighty-nine of the Outsider Communications Center,” she said in a somewhat bored monotone, looking at some invisible thing in front of her, instead of Tom. “How may I direct your conjuration?” She glanced up at him, and Tom thought he saw a sudden glimmer of amusement in her eyes.

“Umm.” Tom was dumbfounded for a moment as the woman peered at him, raising an eyebrow. Tom quickly consulted his notes.

“I’m looking for information about how to banish a Nim’tek?” Tom asked.

“Ferol are one hundred and fifty soul-pulses per minute. Shall I connect you to one?”

“Umm… I don’t have that much.” Tom was pretty sure he didn’t.

She frowned. “Well, how much do you have?”

“Maybe two?”

“You don’t know how many Soul Pulses you have?”

“Not exactly,” Tom hedged.

She stared at him for a moment.

“You’ve never done this before,” she said with a wicked smile. “I get to take your conjuring virginity.”

“Was it that obvious?”

“Two soul pulses won’t get you much of anything, but my advice is free. If I were you, I would buy a cheap gauge with your two pulses, and take out a small loan to purchase a familiar.”

“Why?”

“The gauge allows you to know exactly how many Soul pulses you have, which is vital for further trading with Outsiders, and familiars are able to link to soul engines and funnel souls back to them, allowing you to cast a much wider net and increase your profits safely. Send them into a plague zone or battlefield with no risk to yourself or your engine.

“Since this is your first time...” She winked at him. “Your soul should only be able to withstand the strain of a single servant. That limit should increase as you become Inured.”

I have so many questions, Tom thought.

“How much is the loan?”

“A standard Hez’keth is a paltry thousand soul pulses, an amount you could repay in a few short years with its aid.”

Tom thought it over for a moment. He was in his dream right now, so there was no consequence to saying yes…probably. And he would get to see whether these people were being honest with him or not.

It would be a good litmus test.

“Sure.”

“Alright,” she said, dark energy swirling around her wrists. “I’m going to need you to bleed no less than a teaspoon on the spellwork. Anywhere is fine. In the meantime, I’ll look up your planar address, and we can get that familiar to you in just a moment.”

Her eye twitched, staring at something offscreen.

“Something wrong?”

“Your address isn’t in the system, so it’ll take a little extra paperwork.” She sighed. “But that’s for me to worry about. I’ll go check with Clorian, be right back.” She walked out of the hologram, disappearing off to the side.

Tom idly thought of a demonic office building, where each and every one of the demons had a tiny cubicle where they fielded calls day in and day out. Tom might not even be that far off the mark.

A couple minutes later, the Outsider returned, re-entering the blank hologram and fixing him with a neon stare.

“ Are you ready?”

“Umm…” Tom glanced around the basement and found a box cutter without any rust on it, along with a small bottle that had been holding some tiny screws. He dumped them out on the table and held the box cutter up to his thumb.

…

“Anytime now,” she said, making a ‘hurry it up’ gesture. “Time is soul pulses around here.”

“Hey, I’ve never deliberately cut myself before,” he said, waggling the knife at her.

“A little advice for a virgin then?” she said. “Cut fast with a quick jerk. Before your mind has the chance to back out.”

Tom rolled his shoulders, took a deep breath and made a quick slash across his thumb.

“Fuck!” He held his throbbing thumb above the little bottle, watching the blood dribble into it, slowly working its way up the sides.

“That’s plenty. Thank you for contacting the Outsider Communications Center,” she said, glancing off to the side. A moment later, the hologram was replaced with a scroll and a turkey thermometer. A moment later, the crackling sensation of power inside the soul engine guttered out and the line went dead.

Tom blinked. It was a pretty fancy-looking turkey thermometer. It had a long tine of what appeared to be flawless platinum with an ivory backing, with markings inked into it that ranged between zero and four hundred.

No, not a turkey thermometer. A gauge. Which meant the scroll was the familiar. Maybe? Tom was really outside his area of expertise at this point. And where the hell is my info on Carol?

Tom leaned forward and opened the scroll, revealing a massive array of complex runes that looked almost like boxy Chinese characters. They were sizzling with the same faint energy he’d been able to feel radiating from the soul engine.

Interesting, he thought, peering down at the letters. They sure didn’t look like gold. Does that mean things other than gold can store soul pulses?

At the very edge of the scroll was a compact script that seemed hastily drawn. Surprisingly, Tom could read it. At least, he could read everything inside two runes written on either side of the words.

A Nim’tek can be banished through lethal damage, a divine smiting, or being commanded to leave by the owner of its control ring. Waiting for its contract to run out is ill-advised, since they are largely a…belligerent species.

In order to summon the familiar, write your name in blood at the bottom of the scroll. The repayment schedule is twenty soul pulses a month for five years. If you forfeit on your payment, the Familiar will immediately be repossessed, its contract terminated. Should the familiar no longer exist, such as being erased by divine magic, you will still be required to repay the loan. Should you fail, your soul will be claimed as payment and fed through the Infinite Spectrum to recoup the loss.

Controlling a familiar and linking them to your soul engine is entirely intuitive, so don’t worry. Although, since your soul is completely virgin ground, you may feel a slight…tearing sensation.

Good luck! —Ilspeth 89 -Kiss Emoji-

Tom cocked a brow. “Wow.” That was an intense penalty, all right.

Tom rolled the scroll up and set it aside.

Nope. Tom had no idea if damage to his literal soul transferred between his dreams and the real world. He knew mental damage carried over, so why risk it?

He’d gotten what he wanted: info on Carol.

Now he needed to figure out what to do with it.

Tom climbed back up the stairs, holding his shirt around his oozing thumb.

“Sounded like you were talking to someone down there. What’cha up to?” Grampa said from where he was taking his evening nap in the living room. Ellie was splayed out across his lap, resting up so she could put maximum effort into fussing later tonight.

“Conjuring demons. Apparently they have a call center, loans and wage slavery.”

“So Earth and Hell are pretty much the same, then?” Grampa asked.

Tom snorted, rummaging through the junk drawer in the kitchen for some bandages, securing them over the cut on his thumb. “And yes, I’m dreaming, so you don’t have to worry about it.”

“I never doubted you for a second,” Grampa said, closing his eyes.

Tom grabbed a soda out of the fridge and collapsed onto the couch, setting Ellie on his lap and feeling every individual spring poking him in the ass.

It felt like home.

Okay, so I don’t have the ability to smite things with divine power. I probably wouldn’t be able to kill Carol, nor do I have a control ring.

Tom’s brows twitched, and he almost dropped his soda onto his daughter.

Lily must’ve had one. Tom’s brows furrowed as he narrowed down the possibilities in his mind.

Yes. She always wore the same ring. Lily had always worn a silver band with fool’s gold cubes emerging from the band itself. The entire thing was covered in tiny runes…very similar to the ones he’d seen on the familiar document. That has to be the one.

Damnit.

Lily had been buried with that ring.

That presented some serious challenges.

Okay, let’s weigh our options here, Tom thought to himself.

Option 1: Kill Carol with lethal damage. Tom could theoretically attack her many times in his sleep to figure out the magic combination of ass-kicking that would make the bone-armored creature expire. But…he’d be out a babysitter, and if one single thing went wrong, Carol might kill him and/or his grandparents.

Option 2: Dig up Lily’s grave and grave-rob Carol’s control ring. Then… Tom frowned. It wouldn’t really be a problem if he could make her either raise the priority of his entire family above the book, or remove the order to protect it entirely. And I don’t lose a babysitter. Carol was a bitch, but he didn’t want to kill anyone if he didn’t have to. And having her on his side was far preferable to killing her.

“Is grave robbing a felony in illinois?” Tom asked aloud.

“Unh.” Grampa shrugged.

Tom pulled out his phone and dialed up Jacob.

“Yeah?” The cokehead answered the phone between pants, totally out of breath.

“Hey Jacob, you wanna dig up my girlfriend’s corpse with me?”

Grampa opened a single eye and raised a brow.

“Awesome, I’m in, let me—”

“There he is!” A voice shouted through the phone in Tom’s hand.

“I’mma call you back!” Jacob shouted, followed by the sound of running.

Tom hung up.