Life for a life, p.1
Life for a Life, page 1
Life for a Life
A Pact novel
By D. Brumbley
Also by D. Brumbley
The Jannah Cycle
The Initiative
The Rebels
The Fugitives
The New World
The Ironborn Cycle
The Ironborn Claim
The Heartborn Mate
The Lightborn Queen
The Elements of Moonlight
Rise with the Tide*
Run with the Wind*
Down with the Fallen*
Pact
Life for a Life
Love for a Memory*
*forthcoming in 2021
There will be
a very meaningful
dedication here,
probably.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imaginations or used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
ISBN: 979-854778831-4
Life for a Life. Copyright 2021 by D. Brumbley.
Published by Two in One Publishing.
Cover art by Diana Sousa.
All rights reserved.
Distributed by Kindle Direct Publishing.
One
Before
Rocking back and forth on her feet, all Molly could feel was anxiety. Chewing on her bottom lip, she pushed her thick-rimmed glasses higher on the bridge of her freckled nose as she peered into the bar from the outside. The evening was chilly, but still she hesitated, even though she knew her boyfriend was inside waiting for her.
He said he would have a drink while he waited, and then they could grab food and head out, since he knew she didn’t particularly care for crowds. While she watched she saw a waitress in a tight t-shirt laugh at something Tony said, and his charming smile encouraged a brief graze across his elbow when she walked away. He didn’t look anxious, or fazed, and he didn’t even seem to notice when the waitress walked back to a friend and pointed him out with a smile behind the bar.
But Molly noticed.
Tony was too good for her. Too charming, too smart, too hot with his hipster glasses and arms that proved his strength and muscles underneath. The waitress was out of her league as well. How she had managed to snag Tony, she still wasn’t sure. Her wavy, mousy brown hair was almost always a mess, and she never could figure out makeup, other than the occasional lip gloss. Often she spent her time in jeans, an oversized t-shirt, and converse shoes.
A lot of her time was spent in a dark room developing photos, and in the red glow, it didn’t matter what she wore or how much makeup she had on. All that mattered was the black and white art floating in the dektol that eventually made it into a picture frame. She wasn’t that smart, she wasn’t a conversationalist, but she found her home in photographs.
Every moment frozen in time was re-imagined by whoever gazed upon it, and that, to Molly, was magic.
Well. Until she met Tony.
Magic had taken on a new meaning recently.
After building her resolve to head into the crowded bar, she pulled her hair back and walked in, making a beeline for her boyfriend. “Hey.” She mumbled when she was close enough, even though it was loud. “Sorry I’m late.”
“Hey, no, you’re alright.” Tony slid off his stool to pull her in when she got to him, giving her a quick kiss as he hung onto her at the hip. He was grinning as he took a handful of her oversized shirt, quietly possessive of her while also teasing her for what he had referred to before as her ‘uniform’. “Did you have to wait a while for a ride on the way over here?”
She shook her head but melted into him easily when he pulled her in, all too happy to have him as a human shield from everything and everyone. Tony was the first real friend she’d had in a long time, and when they became something more, he became her everything. Her parents were all too glad to be rid of her when she went off to college, the accident that she was in the first place. The last holiday season she had spent with Tony instead of her own parents. “Rideshare was a little behind, but nothing crazy.”
“I don’t have anything for that, I’m sorry to say. Being on time has never mattered to me enough to try and…you know.” He took his seat on the stool again and reached a hand up to scratch his arm just under his sleeve. There was the faintest glimpse of a tattoo below his sleeve, the lower few spokes of a stylized wheel with flames surrounding it.
Molly’s gaze snagged on the glimpse of the tattoo but she eventually cleared her throat and reached for his drink. Even though she hated beer, she took a gulp anyway. “I’m not worried about…that.” She remained at his side, grateful that he was still holding on to her when the waitress came back.
“Ready to order, hot stuff?” The waitress had strawberry blonde hair and a figure that had the attention of every man around them, women too. “Looks like your friend finally made it.” Even the waitress’ smile was perfect, almost blindingly white.
“You heard her, hot stuff, what’re you hungry for?” Tony turned it back on Molly with a smile, pointedly not looking at the waitress. “I just need some potato skins, I think. And some water. We may be here a while.”
“A club sandwich and some fries.” Molly responded afterward as she eyed the waitress, who clearly had eyes for her boyfriend. Before the beautiful snake could slither away, Molly leaned into Tony’s ear. “I thought we could get the food to go?”
“Oh, yeah, sure.” He got out his wallet and started counting out cash. “You’re right, walking and talking would probably be better.”
She watched the waitress disappear to put in their order to go, and she relaxed again. She had an undeniable pull to women and men, but Tony was hers, and she didn’t need anyone vying for his attention. Molly felt bolder around women, safer, but just barely. Anxiety and self-consciousness kept her from saying much to anyone at all. “Everywhere you go. I bet she thought I was your sister at first.”
“I don’t have a sister. And if I did, I wouldn’t have the fantasies about her that I have about you.” He kept his voice down to keep the conversation between them private, but he couldn’t help the smirk on his face. Getting a blush from his intensely-shy girlfriend was too much fun for him to pass up.
As her cheeks burned with both embarrassment and desire, she leaned in to kiss him gently. “I still don’t understand you. But I…” Molly pressed her forehead to his. “I love you.” The noise around them fell away for just a moment, but she knew it wouldn’t last. Anxiety was always a breath away, even in the special moments. It wasn’t the first time that “I love you” came from her mouth, but usually she was too afraid to say the words very often. She didn’t want to scare him off.
“I love you too, Molly.” His hand tightened its grip on her shirt, as if to keep her from running away. He always seemed nervous about that, for reasons he had never explained. “I hope you still feel the same way after you know…a little more about where I came from.” His look went down to his sleeve again, nervous as always about the mysterious tattoo hiding beneath it.
Molly had seen too many strange things happening around him, and he finally promised he would explain everything to her, as well as he could. But he was clearly just as nervous about the conversation to come as she was about everything else in life.
“Whatever you have to say won’t change how I feel.” Molly wasn’t confident about much, but she was confident that Tony was her person. She didn’t want to lose him. If there was a way she could be sure she would never lose him, she wished she could find it.
It wasn’t long before the waitress returned, this time with their food in a bag and without a smile. Tony left cash on the receipt and they shared the rest of his beer to finish it off before they headed out of the bar. He had a car, at least, while she walked everywhere around campus and lived on student loans that would eventually drown her. He lived right off campus in a studio, but she lived in the dorms. Molly clung to his arm as they walked toward his car. “Your place or mine?”
“Up to you. Mine has a bigger bed.” He grinned, doing his best not to be nervous about the conversation to come. “And fewer roommates. Though my neighbors have been a pain in the ass lately. All kinds of loud all night and day. Guy can’t get much sleep.”
Molly kissed his cheek before they walked up to his car, holding onto the food as he unlocked the door and opened it for her. “Your place. And stop looking so nervous. It makes me nervous.”
He stood beside her door as she slid past him to get into it, shaking his head. “As much time as I spend telling you not to worry about things? This is…this, is something worth being nervous about. Anybody who isn’t nervous about this thing is…doing something very, very wrong with their lives.”
He closed the door for her and went around to his side, starting the car and pulling away from the bar to get back to campus. As he settled in, taking deep breaths, he put a hand down on her thigh to hold onto her as he drove with one hand, eyes on the road but thoughts clearly swirling.
She glanced over at his expressions a few times as they drove, but they didn’t talk on the short drive back to his place. After silently climbing up the stairs into his studio apartment, Molly left her converse by the door and plated their food before she
“They do, that’s true.” He went to the table with her and took a seat while she poured the wine, though he was looking more at her than he was at the food. He met her eyes as she finished pouring, then put out a hand to gesture at the kitchen drawers across the room.
One of the drawers slid open as his fingers beckoned to it, and a handful of forks and knives bundled themselves together, floating in a jumble across the room as she watched. They drifted down onto the table as if set into their proper placement by some unseen waiter. It was one of the first times he had ever done anything so openly around her, but he was clearly trying to remind himself that he had promised openness and full disclosure for the evening.
“That one,” he began tentatively, “is…actually one of the easier ones to balance out, so long as I don’t try and push around anything too extreme. I just can’t move from wherever I am for a while if I use it. Mobility for mobility.” He balanced the statement by swishing his wine from one side of his glass to the other before taking a sip of it.
It was amazing that Molly only managed to spill a few drops of wine on the faux-wood table, but she grabbed a paper napkin to wipe it up once she wasn’t worried about being impaled by floating silverware. Her breaths were shallow, and she couldn’t respond at first when she took her seat at the table. “I might need you to pinch me so that I know this is real.” Molly’s hand trembled a little as she grabbed her glass of wine. “Other than real weird.”
Antony just grinned and flicked one finger, at which her fork picked itself up and poked her arm gently before it drifted back on the table beside her plate. “It’s both. Real and real weird. Even to me, and I’ve been living with weird for a long while now.”
Her initial reaction was to freeze when a floating fork poked her in the arm, but she reached for a french fry once the fork was still again. “A long while? So…you’re experienced with this…I mean, is it magic? Do you call it that?”
“People call it a lot of things. I personally try not to call it anything if I don’t have to. Magic doesn’t feel quite right, but it’s as good a word as any.” He almost reached for his wine again, but settled for one of his potato skins instead. “All it is, at the end of the day, is balance. There’s lots of people like me who would come down hard on me for oversimplifying it like that, but it’s true. I don’t have a magic wand, I didn’t study it in some kind of school, and I wasn’t born with it. It’s given, from one person to another. It’s a little more like measles that way than magic.”
“Measles.” She wrinkled her nose but cleared her throat and pushed up her glasses again as she stared down at her food momentarily. When she looked across the table at him again, she studied him carefully. “So, it’s not…good or bad, it just… is? Like air? It just exists?”
“It just exists.” He confirmed with a nod. “And it…I don’t even know how to say this in a way that’s really going to say it all…it…it does not care.” He met her eyes, his arm moving a little away from his body as if he could distance himself from the tattoo under his sleeve. “It doesn’t care about me, or you, or right, or wrong, or good or hurt, none of it. It does not care. It will do whatever you ask it to, so long as you have some way of paying for the balance of it. It doesn’t care what it takes or what you ask. I’ve known a lot of people who’ve destroyed themselves that way.”
Molly still didn’t know where she stood as far as religion or believing in God, with any certainty, though she knew she believed in something. Was this that something? “Not God, then. People always describe Him, Her, It, as something that dictates morality. This is just a…thing?” She chewed on her lip slowly before she took a gulp of wine. “Are you scared of it?”
“Like nothing else in the universe.” He answered immediately, then seemed to think better of it. “And at the same time…not really? It’s not…it’s not really active, if that makes any sense. It’s never harmed me in a way I didn’t consent to beforehand.” He thought for a beat. “That came out sounding kinkier than I think I meant it.”
A nervous laugh escaped her chest and she followed it up with gulping down the rest of her wine. Instead of refilling her glass, she abandoned her food and moved her chair so that she could sit closer to Tony. “This isn’t like a weird cult, right? I mean…are there a ton of people who are in on this and I’m in the minority? Like when you read these fantasy novels and vampires and werewolves were always living there, lurking, and humans were the prey all along?”
He shook his head, holding her hand as he leaned back to do more talking than eating. “There’s some groups that make it into something like that. There’s people who make it into a lot of things. Some are more like churches. Some are like…packs.” He took a deep breath, and needed a sip of wine before he went on. “I don’t really know how many people have it, though. It’s not a unified group. Most of the time, when I see someone else with it, one or the other of us just nods and moves on as quickly as we can.”
She gripped his hand with both of hers and stared down at their joined hands. “And you’re trusting me with this information? I mean…you don’t owe me anything, I just…does this mean that I’m part of it now or something?”
He shook his head, squeezing her hand as he looked her over. “It’s not like that. Just because you know about it doesn’t…bind you to it.” He gestured up at his sleeve, which drew itself up over his shoulder to show the tattoo on his bicep. “This binds you to it.”
The tattoo was a five-pointed star inside a circle, and looked, for all that Molly could see, like nothing more than a plain tattoo. The flames around it had clearly been added later, but the star itself still appeared dark and fresh, its lines clean and crisp the way an old tattoo never would have been. “I was…really young when I got this. I wasn’t ready for it. But I’ve managed to not get myself destroyed by it so far. Mostly.”
Molly leaned in closer and she hovered her hand over it until he gave her nod. Once she had his permission, she ran her fingers along the lines slowly. “It doesn’t look very scary. Especially on your sexy arm.”
Her opinion just made him laugh, but he didn’t stop her examination. “It doesn’t look like much to you, but to anyone else who has it, and to me, it…glows a little. Like…” he looked up and pointed at one of her photographs in his kitchenette, framed in a place where it was easily visible. It was a work she had done with a long exposure and some light painting, creating a blaze of fire surrounding a still shot of the moon through some trees. It was one of his favorites she had ever done. “A bit like that, actually. Not quite as bright as your work, but enough for someone to see if they’re looking for it.”
“Really? So it’s like a…living thing?” Her eyes widened before she looked up into his eyes. Molly could easily get lost in his eyes, and had, so many times. She realized she should feel more nervous, but with Tony, she didn’t. All she wanted to do was kiss him.
“It feels alive sometimes. I don’t know if it properly is or not.” Being a medical student, he certainly should have known, but he had no idea. “The thing behind it…speaks. Some people just call it the Voice. But it doesn’t feel exactly alive. Maybe it is. I don’t know.”
Going with the newfound curiosity instead of fear, she kissed his cheek gently. Tony was her safe place. “What other magic can you do?”
He turned his head into the kiss, and pulled her in for a fuller one afterward, his lips warm against hers in spite of his nervousness in the conversation. “The rest of what I do, I try very hard not to do lately. It all comes with a cost I’m not interested in paying right now. So I stick to moving things around without touching them.”
“Okay.” Molly moved from her seat and slid into his lap as she straddled him and wrapped her arms around his neck. “So if you want to acquire new magic, you just ask?” She kissed him after the question, trading questions for kisses.
