Trials (Rogue Mage Anthology Book 1) Read online

  “Language, Shad,” Meshach warned. “Dad’ll be out here any second.”

  Shadrach rolled his eyes, but he didn’t loosen his grip on Grog’s hair. He leaned close to Grog’s ear. “All this symbol crap is nonsense. You know it. You brought that crazy down, made my dad nuts. If it was up to me, I’d bash your head open against a brick wall and leave you for the flies.”

  He twisted his hand, pulling Grog’s hair so hard he expected it to tear free. “Isn’t my call. Dad wants you. And now it occurs to me that you might be an even better symbol if you look more like Christ. Blood on your face, maybe a black eye. And let’s not forget some rusty nails through your hands. Dad would love that.” He grinned. “It would be my pleasure.”

  The door slammed open again and Pastor Daniel stepped through. He was missing two shirt buttons, and someone had scratched his face badly. In the room behind him, voices howled in terror. He smiled upon seeing Grog. “Good, you have him.”

  “Yes, sir,” Shadrach said. “Car’s waiting.” He pushed Grog ahead of him, and the others fell into step behind.

  “This is marvelous,” the pastor crowed as they walked. “Now that he’s back, we can travel to all the cities and gather the faithful. They’ll have to believe.”

  “They’d believe anyway,” Shadrach muttered. “Don’t need this piece of crap.” The pastor didn’t hear his oldest son’s words, instead continuing to chatter about his plans to use Grog as a church sideshow attraction.

  The group turned a corner. The pastor’s station wagon sat at the curb.

  “Meshach, unlock the back door,” Shadrach said.

  “You have the keys.”

  Shadrach growled, and reached in his pocket with his free hand. And his grip on Grog’s hair loosened just enough.

  Grog jerked free and started running. He fled down the cracked sidewalks. Buildings flashed by in his peripheral vision. Behind him, he heard angry shouts and pounding feet. He had no idea where he was going. It didn’t matter. He dashed into an alley, dodging piles of trash and dented cans. Ahead of him, the alley was closed off with a tall chain link gate. Grog flung himself at it. “Up up up up,” he chanted under his breath. The pursuing footsteps were coming closer, driving him to climb faster. The top seemed so far away, but suddenly he was there, throwing one leg over, and then the other. He let himself fall to the ground on the opposite side.

  Shadrach slammed into the gate. Grog jumped back, but the gate held. He shook the gate again, as if his anger would be enough to pop the padlock loose. Grog eased away, then turned to run down the alley.

  “Keep running, Gordy,” Shadrach yelled, his voice echoing off the walls. “You can’t hide forever.”

  Grog ran until the only sound he heard was the slamming of his heart against his ribs. He stopped and bent over, leaning on his knees to catch his breath. It would be dark soon, time to find shelter for the night. Old buildings stood silent and empty on either side of the street. A few people hurried on their way, not paying any attention to Grog panting on the sidewalk. On the corner opposite stood an old church. The door swung in the breeze. Either no one used it at all anymore, or someone inside didn’t care who joined them. He shuddered at the thought of being inside a church again. It was shelter, though, and no one was gathered within to sing and scream. One night, he promised himself, and then he’d move on.

  He climbed the steps, whispering an old counting rhyme Gordon had known as a child, and pushed on the unlatched door. It swung in, revealing an empty foyer. Old bulletins blew across the floor, catching on the leg of a bench next to the sanctuary entry. There’d been carpet once. Someone had pulled it up, leaving the marks of carpet glue and exposed nail heads on the unfinished wood. Ahead was the empty sanctuary, with a shadowed altar.

  He walked as quietly as he could down the aisle. The pews were empty, but here and there he saw evidence of people. A forgotten purse spilled on the floor, shredded neckties tossed aside. Even a few empty plastic food containers, dried out enough to be free of the smell of rot. Whoever had worshiped here no longer came in.

  Ahead of him, up two steps on a raised dais, stood the altar. Every church had one. He’d never feared them as a child. Not until the pastor had used the altar for something painful and terrifying. He shivered, remembering. “Cutting and blood, cutting and blood,” he murmured, turning away. To the left rose a narrow staircase, leading up. No going up, Grog thought. Up leads to the sky. Angels live in the sky. There’d be no comfort there.

  He walked back into the foyer, but before he reached the door, he heard the rumbling of an engine outside. Dodging away from the partially open door, Grog licked his thumb, rubbed clean a spot on the glass of a window, and peered outside.

  The station wagon rolled slowly along the street, its headlights lit. Meshach and Abednego hung their heads out of the passenger-side windows. Grog took a breath and held it. Keep moving, he thought. Nothing to see here.

  The car slowed to a stop in front of the church, and Abednego disappeared inside the car. They were too far away to hear clearly, but it seemed that an argument was taking place. A moment later, the car rolled on, Abednego resuming his lookout spot with a frown on his face.

  Grog let out the air he’d been holding. They weren’t coming into the church. That made the church a good place to hide, at least for the night. But he didn’t feel right sleeping in the sanctuary, and the foyer was too open.

  In the wall on the right stood a slender door. A closet? Grog pulled at the knob, and the door creaked open, revealing a dark stairway leading down. He smiled. Down was better. No angels in the basement.

  He slipped into the shadows, pulling the door closed behind him, and took the stairs slowly, testing each step with his heel before shifting his weight to the next. Sometimes steps groaned, and sometimes they split under foot. Best to go easy.

  The further he went, the darker the space around him became. Grog didn’t mind the dark so much. Unless demons showed up—but he didn’t smell their carrion stink. Nothing but dust and old wax.

  The next step wasn’t a step at all. It was cold, and hard, like concrete. He’d reached the bottom. He sat down on the next-to-last step, leaned back and dug in his jeans pocket for a cigarette lighter. He’d found it on the floor of last night’s house. Scuffed and half-empty, but the yellow plastic glittered if he held it up to a light, and turned the whole world gold if he stared through it. He flicked the wheel, and a bright flame sprung into existence.

  He stood up in a wide open room, the light playing off wispy cobwebs that waved and sighed in the corners of the ceiling. To his right was a wooden votive stand, filled with dusty red candles. Grog’s lighter was beginning to flicker, so he leaned over and lit a candle, letting his lighter go dark. The candle looked lonely, burning all by itself. Grog removed it from its holder and touched its flame to all the others that would catch. The room filled with light.

  On the floor, bluish-gray lines formed a circular pattern. Not just a pattern, but a maze. It filled the floor, looping, turning back on itself, and eventually leading to a perfect spot at the center of the circle. Grog couldn’t stop staring. He’d never seen anything so intriguing. Returning his candle to its holder, he reached out a finger, tracing the whirls and turns of the labyrinth in the air. It reminded him of the mazes he’d solved on restaurant menus as a child, following the paper paths with brightly colored crayons. Whorls of disturbed dust, shining in the candlelight, spun past his hand. A wrinkled sign on the wall caught his eye, and he looked away from the fascinating maze to read the faded words.

  Prayer Labyrinth

  Grog frowned. Prayer brought the angels, and the angels hurt people. Why would anyone want to pray?

  Feel free to walk the labyrinth at your own pace. If you come upon another walker in your path, quietly step around that person and continue. Let your thoughts rise to the Lord, that He may lead you to peace and understanding.

  Peace? Grog stepped closer and touched the word with one finger, stroki
ng the letters on the crackling paper. He hadn’t known peace in a long time, and suddenly he wanted it. Maybe that was the trick. If he walked all the way to the middle of the labyrinth, he would reach God the Father. It made perfect sense. The blood flowed and madness raged because God didn’t know. God would punish all the bad preachers and call all the angels back to Heaven. And Grog wouldn’t have to hide any more.

  Music played behind his eyes, different from the Angel’s terrifying song, full of trumpets and anger. This tune sent him twirling across the floor, laughing at the sparkling dust that rose under his dancing feet. Lifting on his tiptoes at the edge of the painted lines, he bent his knees and hopped off the floor. He landed awkwardly, and nearly tipped over into the midst of the pattern. Panic gripped him at the thought of stepping into the maze from the wrong spot. He righted himself at the last second, and scurried back to the stairs, panting.

  The music didn’t stop. Gentle and soft, it filled his thoughts with memories of kindness and warmth. The quilt he’d snuggled under as a boy. Hugs and Pokemon stickers and loving voices. The smell of baking pies. Mama, before she’d gone crazy and clawed her eyes into bloody holes. All the things that didn’t exist any longer were contained in the song and it was beautiful.

  The maze opened before him, a simple break in the pattern right where the stairs faced. The light from the candles coalesced until it became a beam, pointing at the break. The beginning, he thought. I have to begin at the beginning.

  The music swelled as Grog stood. He walked to the opening. His heart beat hard enough for him to feel it, and he marveled for an instant at the miracle of it. He hummed along with the strange song playing in his head, and took a step, planting his foot carefully in the exact center of the path. Another step, and another. The light from the candles flickered. Grog tried placing the heel of one foot against the toes of the other, until he reached the first turn and was forced to take a wider step. Nothing happened because of it. He didn’t want to reach the center too soon, though. It probably took time to attract God’s attention. Besides, he had all night.

  “Bread of the world, with jelly and butter, wine of the world, spilled on my head,” he sang, tiptoeing along the path. It was a hymn he’d known as a child, but he wasn’t sure of the words any more. No matter. They went well with the music around him, and he liked singing.

  He reached the turn and raised up on the ball of his foot to spin into the next leg of his walk. The center teased him, the way he seemed to come closer and then turn and discover himself on the outer edges of the path. He could jump over all the painted lines, walk straight into the spot in the middle. It wouldn’t be right, though he didn’t know why not.

  Tilting his toes upward as far as he could, he walked on his heels for a few feet, until his calves threatened to cramp. “By froom the turds of blife are shtoken,” he sang, entertaining himself with mixing up the words of the old familiar song, “And pin voose pleath . . .”

  A vision swept over his consciousness, blotting out the dusty basement. His mother, in their kitchen, baking cookies. Before she succumbed to madness. Before the Angel came. He drew in a breath of the rich baking smell. Snickerdoodles. Mama turned to him, a baking sheet in her hands. “We have to let them cool a bit, sweetheart,” she said. “You don’t want to burn your mouth.”

  Grog’s voice caught in his throat. He wanted to tell her how much he missed her, how much he loved her. She smiled at him as if he’d spoken aloud.

  “I love you, too, my precious boy,” she said, sliding the oven mitts off her hands. “None of this was your fault.” She closed the distance between them and wrapped her arms around him. The way she used to, so long ago. “The Angel doesn’t mean you harm,” she murmured into his hair.

  Grog’s eyes widened. She’d been gone before the Angel came. How could she know?

  “It came to smite the pastor, and found him hurting you, an innocent. It tried to give you power, so that you could protect yourself, but it didn’t understand your frailty.” She leaned back from him, and cupped his cheek with one hand. “You’re doing the right thing. Keep walking, and when you reach the center, you’ll understand.”

  “Mama,” he choked out in a harsh whisper. “Stay with me.”

  She released him, with a smile. “I have to take the cookies out of the oven before they burn. Don’t they smell good?”

  Grog blinked away the tears that filled his eyes, and the vision faded. Once again he was alone, in the shadowed basement of the abandoned church. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Mama wanted him to walk. He would walk.

  He couldn’t tell how long he’d stood still. The candles burned as brightly as when he’d first lit them, but the path wound on, around and back again, out and in. He’d lost his taste for singing hymns, preferring to listen to the music that echoed in his mind. It no longer exhorted him to dance.

  His chest ached and his breathing was labored, as if he climbed a mountain, but he continued. What else could he do?

  He reached a turn and pushed himself forward. And with that step, he found himself in Pastor Daniel’s church. Blood stained his shirt, from where he’d tried to keep Mama from blinding herself. He’d come to the church, looking for people who hadn’t lost their minds, people who might help him find his mother before anything worse happened to her. Pastor Daniel held a Bible and wore a smile.

  “Welcome, son. You’re safe with us.”

  Grog shook his head. “I’m not. You’re going to hurt me. I remember . . .”

  The pastor stepped forward, reaching out to clasp Grog’s shoulder. “No one will hurt you here. Come in and join the flock.”

  People started appearing in the pews—a family here, a couple there, one pew of no one but children. All of them stared at him with frightened eyes. All of them had survived the madness, same as him.

  “My mother—” Grog began, but the pastor interrupted him.

  “We are your family now,” he said. “I’m sorry to tell you, but your mother was a terrible sinner. Otherwise she’d be here with you now. The madness only struck the worst evildoers. Says so right in here,” he said, raising his Bible high. His voice rose, too, as if he was talking to the whole room. “In the last days, the innocent will be saved and the evil will fall.” He waved at the altar. “Let us bring you into the true faith, the only faith.”

  A woman sitting alone near the front stood. “Don’t believe him,” she said. Blood stained her teeth.

  Two of the children nodded. Both of them had ragged cuts on their necks. “Run away while you can.”

  One by one, everyone in the church got to their feet, all telling Grog not to listen, not to stay. He knew their faces. These were all the people who’d sung hymns to cover his cries of pain. But now they were all wounded, bleeding, and they were telling him to run. Had they known then? Why hadn’t they helped him before?

  The pastor still gripped Grog’s shoulder, and his smile remained bright. He tilted his head. “They didn’t tell you because they feared being my target themselves. It’s the way people behave. They’re sorry, but they’d prefer you suffer instead of them.”

  His face changed suddenly, melting into a vision of blinding light. His voice deepened, strengthened into the voice of something inhuman. A voice that had once driven him to flee, bleeding, into the night. A voice only he had been able to hear. “I gave you a gift. Use it.”

  Once again, the vision disappeared, leaving Grog blinking in the half-darkness. What gift? Had he meant the softening? That hadn’t come from the pastor—it only happened after he escaped the wild rampage in the church. But it hadn’t been the pastor’s face or voice. It was the Angel’s. Had the Angel intended to help him? The gift . . . Had he somehow been blessed by the Angel with the gift?

  The music that had been his constant companion since he began his walk swelled, surrounded him, and suddenly he recognized it. It was the Angel’s song, the trumpets and grandeur that drove others wild. For the first time, the music felt like a safe space,
a refuge.

  “Gordon!”

  Pastor Daniel stood on the outer edge of the labyrinth. Shadrach was next to him, holding a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other. He reminded Grog of a teenager who wanted to trick-or-treat but couldn’t risk the social danger of wearing a costume, so he grabbed a revolver and hoped it would be enough. “This time, right between the eyes,” Grog murmured. “Pilgrim.”

  “Best come on out of there, kid,” Shadrach said. “I’m aiming for your leg, but it’s awful dark down here. I’d hate to hit something you can’t live without.”

  “I’m not in the middle yet.”

  “Fuck a duck,” Shadrach growled. “I hate dealing with next-level crazy. Get out here.”

  “Son, come with us,” the pastor said, smiling. Grog remembered how safe Gordon felt the first time he saw the pastor smile. But then he’d kept smiling while he cut Gordon, and the smile turned into danger. Grog turned away from them. He was near the center now. Something waited for him in the center. Just a few more steps and he’d be . . . free? Safe? He wasn’t even sure what he’d find.

  Between the pastor calling and the music in his head, Grog almost missed the sudden click of a hammer being drawn back. Would it hurt much to be shot? Was it like a knife slicing butter, smooth and painless? Or should he expect a ripping, tearing shock through his body? Shadrach raised the gun and aimed it, grinning.

  Before he could pull the trigger, the pastor grabbed his arm, yanking his elbow down. The gun fired, the bullet striking the concrete block wall and sending chips flying through the air. Grog ducked, but unlike in all the cartoons he’d ever seen, the bullet didn’t seem inclined to ricochet around the room. He was almost disappointed.

  Shadrach and the pastor struggled for the gun, yelling at each other. Grog turned away again. As long as they were fighting, they weren’t paying attention to him. This was his chance to keep walking, to reach the center and find what he knew must be there.