Magic Awakening: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Spirit War Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  “You like them too?” Brady said, all of the annoyed silence suddenly gone, replaced by the wide, eager eyes and growing smile he got when he met a fellow Jets fan. “Dude! Hell yes!”

  Oh no, I thought. Even in the UK, they like the Jets? Goddamnit.

  “Yeah man, been following them ever since the NFL started playing over here. I tell you, I’m sick of the Patriots on top of the league.”

  “I know, right?” Brady said. “It’s so sickening seeing my good name tarnished by their quarterback, I refuse to say his name out loud, it’s like Voldemort to me. But—”

  “Hey!” I shouted, refusing to let my desire for weed get railroaded by a conversation about professional athletes. “As interesting as this conversation is—and how little it compares to the matters of real football—the question at hand is if you two would like to join us for some Amsterdam delight.”

  The two boys looked at each other, and I immediately knew by their glances they wouldn’t join us.

  “We got loaded last night with DJ, and while he’s like Superman—”

  “Wolverine.”

  “Superman.”

  “Wolverine.”

  “Whatever superhero who can process alcohol better than us,” Nicholas said, noticing my glare. “We are still reeling a bit. We were actually about to settle in for a nap but would be happy to join you guys wherever DJ is tonight.”

  “That’s… already decided, I see,” I said.

  “Oh, love, sorry, Sonya, partying with DJ is not a thing to miss out on,” Nicholas said. “Trust me.”

  It’s different when DJ gazes into your soul and wants to see you without your clothes on.

  But we did come here for a good time. So, maybe.

  “Deal,” I said.

  Brady and I took a couple of minutes to store his bag and other items in the hostel locker. I did the same, but as I approached the door, Brady looked at me concerned.

  “Did you remember to charge your phone for the day?”

  I put my hands on my hips and nodded. Of course my phone was charged. But that wasn’t what the question was actually for.

  “Yeah. And you got full battery?”

  Brady put his hands on his hips, running his hands on the outline of his guns, and nodded.

  “Fully charged. Let’s roll.”

  We walked out the room when I had a sudden, strange sensation hit my gut. It felt like I had contracted a literal bug that flared inside me. Heat rose to my head, and a surge of pain overcame me. I called out to Brady to stop as I waited, hoping that it was just a bad case of acid reflux. But why would you have that if you didn’t eat anything since lunch yesterday?

  Whatever, it’s just jet lag. Tough it out.

  “You don’t seem well,” Brady said, his voice oddly certain, like he knew this would happen.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I think my body’s revolting against the lack of sleep. But we can sleep tonight after drinks. C’mon. Let’s go enjoy ourselves. Google said the place to be is Greenhouse Effect.”

  I waited for the casual shrug of acceptance from Brady, but it never came. That bothered me more than the troubling sensation I’d felt in my stomach. Just in case something was going on I didn’t know about, I patted Ebony and Ivory to confirm their presence.

  We passed the reception hall where Carsis again gave us a friendly smile. I nodded back, and he asked us again if we were going to enjoy the local fare. After confirming that we were headed to Greenhouse Effect—“an excellent choice, quiet, local, and with some mighty good strands”—he again reminded us not to do Devil’s Eye unless we had plenty of experience.

  Well, I had plenty of experience at handling extreme situations. I had some experience smoking weed before joining the CIA, but since then, I’d gone celibate like a priest. But unlike a priest, I could relapse into my old ways without consequence. Provided, of course, I limited it to today.

  Which meant we’d have to go for the hardest shit we could find.

  We scurried through the Red Light District, my brother attracting the taptaptap of girls from the windows, begging him for twenty minutes of their time… and, more importantly to them, fifty euros. I caught my brother taking a look at a few of the Barbie dolls—let’s be real, none of them actually looked that natural—and told him if he went through the doors, I would have DJ every night just to spite him. Brady nervously laughed, his eyes never leaving the girls in the window.

  We passed the last window with a tall, lanky, busty blonde inside and turned right out of an alleyway. Immediately around the corner was Greenhouse Effect. I loved it.

  Outside, four small tables—the kind a couple would share a pasta dinner over—along with two benches large enough for three adorned the store’s front space. All of the chairs faced outward, none toward each other. I thought that was cute. Watch the world go by as you fly high! About half the tables were taken, with a couple people looking like the stereotype of a stoner—raggy clothes, long facial hair, ponytail, glazed eyes—but most just looking like ordinary white Europeans.

  I reached the door first and entered a small room with a sloped ceiling and a “club” in the back. In front of me, I saw a menu with the different types of marijuana, two white younger women with Jamaican-style hair, and signs advising how to best handle marijuana and a list of legal and illegal activities. I looked back at Brady, whose eyes had set on the menu, but to me, there was no question what I was getting.

  Devil’s Eye. I knew what Carsis had said, but in warning me about how bad it was, he had practically handcuffed me to this outcome. In a mission, I would take the time to investigate Devil’s Eye myself. I would research where it originated from, what its side effects were, how addictive it was, and dozens of other questions.

  But here? When my only mission was to “When in Rome” Amsterdam, how could I not?

  As soon as I caught the eye of the younger, skinnier woman of the two, I smiled and pointed my hand on the menu.

  “One order of Devil’s Eye, please.”

  “Are you sure? I must warn you, this will get you stoned to the point of becoming delirious if you are not careful.”

  “I—”

  “Sonya, she’s got—”

  Hell no. No, Brady, no.

  “I get it, alright?!? I’m a grown woman. I’ve been figuring things out since I was 7!” I said, alternating between Brady and the woman. When I saw she was taken aback by my outburst, I took a deep breath through my nostrils. “Sorry. My brother thinks I’m 13, not 20.”

  You have to learn to control your emotions better, Sonya. You know that’s what the CIA has hammered home on you.

  “I understand,” the woman said, a slight smile returning across her face. She knows. She gets it. “But with that said, we do have to mention that we’ve had numerous reports about people going crazy when they do this stuff. The only ones we’ve seen handle it are the ones who have been here for some time.”

  I wasn’t going to change my mind at this point, not when my brother had tried to shoot me down and I’d made such a scene out of it. But I did make a mental note to take it slow, smoke it casually, and not dive head-first into the experience.

  “Understood. I won’t sue if I die.”

  When the woman didn’t laugh, I became mildly concerned I was about to do heroine in the shape of marijuana. But I handed her a ten euro bill, got some change back, and was handed the drug. I held it in my hand like it was part of a crime scene, analyzing its appearance as if it could give me some sort of clue to the future.

  But when Brady got his, I lost interest in studying it and regained interest in smoking it. We walked outside and sat at one of the benches. The view afforded me a straight-ahead shot of a narrow street with a canal on its left and buildings of a few stories on the right, with what looked like a gorgeous church on the left but upon closer examination was just a high-end restaurant designed like a church. I laughed, thinking there was absolutely no way a church of any kind would want to be in the midd
le of this vice-land.

  I rolled the joint, accepted a light from Brady, and took my first puff. Even though I knew what smoking weed felt like, because of all the hype and warnings, I expected it to fry my lungs and tongue and leave me rolling on the ground in pain. But honestly, after I’d taken two puffs, it felt just like all of the other experiences I’d had. It felt a little stronger going down my lungs, but it didn’t feel like something so potent even the Dutch worried about it. If anything, it just felt good to smoke again.

  We sat there in silence, people watching as we smoked for about ten minutes. I deliberately took it slow, having only three puffs over that time. I instead observed everyone walking by. Everyone just seemed so relaxed. It was the antithesis of Boston and New York. Very little noise, maybe one car every five minutes—and that car was electric, minimizing its sound pollution—and plenty of bikers who rode with smiles on their faces. I wished I had grown up in a place half as happy as Amsterdam.

  “You know what would be a great idea right about now?” Brady said, his eyes starting to gloss over. “Pancakes.”

  “Pancakes?” I said, but I smiled as I said it, starting to feel good about making Amsterdam our first stop.

  “Sonya, Amsterdam has, like, the greatest pancakes you’ll ever eat in your life. Take the greatest pancakes you know in America. Wherever. Just don’t say IHOP. Then spread them out, place ingredients inside them, and you’ve got the mind-blowing experience of an Amsterdam pancake.”

  I smiled giddily, the weed starting to hit me. So far, it hadn’t done anything more freaky than before. The world still seemed normal. Physics still applied. My body remained where it was. We were good.

  “Pancakes,” I said with glee.

  “Pancakes Amsterdam,” Brady said.

  “Pancakes,” I just echoed as I put the remainder of the drug in a bag and stood. My legs felt light, and I couldn’t stop smiling, so nothing really felt unusual.

  Just as we went into the second narrow alleyway, though, I saw the first thing that made my mind go “oh shit.”

  We passed by a giant church—“Oude Kerk”—and heard the tapping of the hookers in the windows. Normally, I didn’t even blink, but as I became more sensitive to stimuli around me, I turned. I’d expected to see a woman with long legs, blonde hair, and underwear that had the thickness of dental floss.

  But instead, staring back at me was an angry set of yellow eyes, a long tongue, and smoke. I heard a loud scream, the kind that a woman fearing for her life would make, and quickly turned to Brady, who had not reacted at all. When I looked back, the expected blonde girl had returned, smiling and waving at her targeted men. I kept my eyes on her, sure that she would transform back into the demon I just saw—or that the demon would appear, or that I’d get knocked in the head and told I’d lost my mind, which, let’s be honest, I knew I had.

  Nothing happened, though. Men kept staring at her, she kept waving to them, and my feet kept moving forward. I thought about opening up to Brady, but sure that I would get needless grief for smoking the strongest stuff I could get my hands on, I didn’t say anything. Maybe if Brady would indulge me, but I didn’t have the desire to hear unnecessary, “comforting” talk.

  I didn’t see any other bizarre sights as we walked toward Pancakes Amsterdam, though my legs and body continued to give the sensation of a drug high. I actually liked that. I wanted to feel grounded in what I knew weed would do, not start hallucinating imaginary monsters of the underworld.

  But when we reached the restaurant and sat down, the world began to spin. From my seat, which gazed out toward the canals, bike riders, and train station, I saw several things that I shouldn’t have. Hazes of smoke, all of them different colors—some red, some purple, some yellow, many of them blends of colors I couldn’t quite pin down. The cries of monsters like werewolves, dragons, and bats. I swore at one point a giant spider crawled under a bridge, but when I blinked, it had disappeared. One minute, it felt like hell had frozen over. The next, it felt like hell didn’t exist.

  “Sonya!”

  I snapped back and looked at Brady. He was still my brother. But even he seemed a bit different. One of his eyes was his normal brown. But one was an odd mix of yellow and red, flickering back and forth between the two colors. None of this made sense. Marijuana shouldn’t make me hallucinate. It mostly relaxed me, made me see things as if from new angles and perspectives, but it never made me imagine that spiders the size of Hummers were crawling around a city as crowded as this one without anyone else noticing them.

  “Sonya, damn, that shit hit you hard,” he said, more concerned than mocking. “You OK?”

  “Your eyes…” I said. It weirded me out more than it should have that I could hear myself well, not as if I was a hundred miles from my body as sometimes happened with highs. How bizarre was that, that I got paranoid about having a normal sensation. “They’re flickering.”

  “Really hit you hard,” Brady said, his face becoming serious. “We need to get you back to the hostel.”

  “No, it’s…” I said, my voice trailing off as I looked outside and saw what looked like an overly muscular demon biting the neck of a man—who didn’t even flinch. I reached into my jacket for Ebony and Ivory, but Brady quickly grabbed my arms.

  “Brady!” I said.

  “Shit, you’re fading,” he said, but I didn’t feel like I was fading. In fact, I was beginning to feel more alert than ever. “Come on, lean on me, I’ll take you back to the hostel.”

  “Brady! It’s fine, I’ll just… I need to use the bathroom,” I said as the same sickening feeling hit my stomach.

  I rushed downstairs, past some confused waitresses, and slammed into the door. I didn’t even close the stall door behind me as I curled up on the floor. It had gone past annoying to painful like someone was tearing at my insides. I moaned and regretted ever taking Devil’s Eye, swearing to listen to Carsis from here on out. The world seemed to shift before my eyes, and suddenly, I felt my body surrounded by some invisible, tight force that held me in place.

  Seconds later, it vanished.

  The pain was gone.

  I stood up. I couldn’t hear anything outside any longer.

  I pushed open the door and saw an empty building. The stoves, ovens, and pots and pans had vanished. The place had gone black. Only the stairs remained.

  “Hello? Brady?”

  No one answered. I was done playing. Even if I was hallucinating this, I couldn’t take any risks.

  I pulled out Ebony and Ivory, ready to fire them at a moment’s notice.

  I slowly climbed the stairs, each step unmercifully loud, as if announcing my presence to whatever… whatever dimension I’d wound up in. No, I had to be hallucinating this.

  But this was way too perfect to be a hallucination. The world had changed drastically, but it remained the same in a way. The rules of physics hadn’t changed. Gravity hadn’t disappeared. Sounds—

  A loud scream came from outside. But it was most certainly not a human cry.

  I ducked along the edges of the wall, taking care not to peer my head over until I could position myself for a fight. I reached the front door, took a deep breath, and stood up just enough to see outside.

  I wished I hadn’t. I wished I’d never taken Devil’s Eye.

  The sky had turned completely black, the clouds rumbling with thunder and twitching with lightning. Winged creatures—angels, they had to be—flew in the sky, brandishing something at a horde of… a horde of demons, yes, demons, keeping a distance but snarling and glaring at each other. I didn’t see any humans anywhere. If this was a hallucination, it was a remarkably consistent, realistic, and disturbing hallucination.

  What in the hell was this Devil’s Eye?!? No wonder people disappeared on it—I literally felt like I was in hell.

  “War is coming!” one of the demons screamed up at the angels, who remained far enough away that they could not do anything more than keep an eye on the demons. “Mundus has gained enough
strength to seize all of the spiritual realm!”

  Spiritual realm? Mundus? What the fuck?

  Wherever Brady was, he was completely right about going back to the hostel. But if what I was seeing wasn’t a hallucination, I had to dodge the demons and angels.

  I barely pushed open the door, which gently swung without any sound. The cries of the demons were louder now, more taunting. I half-expected war to break out before my eyes, but the two sides seemed content to posture before the other, like a SWAT team before protesters. I turned right and snuck back down the alleyway, remembering that if I took one more right, I would reach Durty Nelly’s after a few hundred meters. In other words, a few minutes of walking, a couple minutes of running, and a period of far too much time cautiously sneaking home.

  But as soon as I turned the corner, I heard dogs barking.

  Then I heard running.

  I held my guns out and saw… what the fuck? A three-headed dog the size of a small car sprinting at me? A Cerberus?

  I didn’t want to shoot. I wanted to be in the hostel, asleep. I’d go in a shootout with ISIS any day of the week. I didn’t shoot animals.

  But when the center head bared fangs a tiger would envy, and the other two dog heads barked at me with volume that would make German Shepherds jealous, I acted on instinct. I lined up Ebony and Ivory and fired, my reaction time somehow still as strong as when I was sober.

  But out of the chambers came not regular bullets, nor did the sound of a gun firing ring in my ears. Instead, strange, light blue beams of energy fired, and it sounded more like the discharge from a space cannon in a sci-fi movie than the pow-pow of an actual gun. The Cerberus howled and collapsed.

  I heard a great roar from above. I looked at the sky and saw what looked like a red serpent slithering through the air. I held my guns up, but as the creature got closer and I saw it had the size of a Navy Destroyer, I put my guns down and tried hiding in the shadows of the buildings.

  Unfortunately, I came to that decision at the same time the beast saw me.

  With a mighty roar, it plunged for me. I sprinted down the street, firing at it to keep it off my back. My M1911s must’ve done something as the monster never caught up to me, but every time I looked back, it seemed closer.