Opening scene: Introduces protagonist, hints at emotional wounds to be revealed later, begins to lay groundwork for the fantastical world the story inhabits, provides inciting incident and hints at core conflict to emerge.
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New Jersey can sometimes be hell but I didn’t expect it to be so literal. If I had known what was in store for me when I went to work, I would have called out sick that day, and every day for the next seventeen years. Unfortunately for me, precognition was not one of my magical abilities.
Blissfully unaware of the horrors that lie ahead, I elbowed my way into Integritas Services, tucked in a tiny strip mall by the Jersey Shore, careful not to spill the coffee I precariously balanced on a wobbly cardboard tray, the low morning sun shining over my shoulder.
Just past the small waiting area was the front desk, the Integritas logo blazing across it. Underneath the logo, in smaller letters: "Private investigations, bar spotting, police consulting, and more!" Along the top of the desk were pamphlets that went into our services and offerings in greater detail -- think your husband's cheating on you and trying to hide his cash? Here, have a brochure for our private eye and forensic accountant services. Own a bar and want to make sure your employees aren't lousy, good-for-nothing grifters? Hire one of our spotters. Franchise a chain of retail stores? We’ve got mystery shoppers for you.
I even had a brochure all to myself, as the resident employee with magical abilities. Need a Mesmer to track down someone? Monitor your business? Maybe indulge in a bit of corporate espionage? Here's the guy for you, Oliver Parker.
Premium pricing only, of course.
Yeah, if a magical operation in Jersey surprises you, clearly you haven’t been to Seaside Heights after dark.
The office was small, a former nursery transformed into a mostly open room with desks scattered under fluorescent lights. Along the back wall was the office that belonged to the owner, a storage closet, and a pair of meeting rooms.
"Hey Gertie," I said as I approached the front desk. She was an older lady, already riffling through the paperwork for the day. She's been here longer than most of us. Longer than the current owner, even. I took out one of the coffee cups. "Extra cream and sugar for my favorite queen."
"Bless you," she said, taking the cup and giving it a big sip. She closed her eyes and sighed. As I made my way deeper into the office, she asked, "We all set for this weekend?"
I nodded. "I still have a copy of your key from the last time. Can't wait to spend some time with Buddy."
She gave me a concerned look. "If you're not up for it..."
I brought a finger to my necklace, touching my pet's tags, trying not to think too hard about my recently departed tabby cat. "Of course I'm up for it. I'm looking forward to spending time with him."
"You just like watching him because he helps you meet cute gentlemen at the beach," she said.
I flashed her a grin. "I can't help if he's such a good boy. He likes being the center of attention."
"Don't spoil him too much. The vet says he needs to watch his diet," she added with a warning glare.
"Your dog will be just fine, now stop worrying and start thinking about all the slots you’ll be playing at Vegas. You realize Atlantic City is closer and cheaper, right?"
"Atlantic City doesn't have Rod Stewart, honey.” I had to concede that point. “Oh, Pete wants to see you. Watch out, Hurricane Jane is here.” She gave me a knowing look.
Pete and Jane would be Pete Logan, the owner, and Jane Hall, his girlfriend. Pete took over Integritas a few years ago, inheriting the business from his mom. Jane didn’t work here, but she was very good at spending Pete’s money and being a general nuisance at the office. I looked at my watch. “What’s she doing up so early? She usually doesn’t get up til the crack of noon.”
Gertie gave me a heck-if-I-know roll of her eyes and went back to her coffee and paperwork.
I shrugged to myself, then dropped off everyone else’s coffee before going to Pete’s office. The door was open, so I peered in. Pete was in his mid-fifties, wearing boating shoes and khakis, a polo and a deep tan. His teeth were unnaturally white, and a key float hung out of his pocket in the shape of a buoy. He was talking to an old man, who was short and wrinkled, with liver spots all over his head. Next to him was Jane Hall, a young forty-something with big hair and bigger nails. She wore a ridiculous bright pink puffer vest, bright pink sweatpants, and a hideous yellow sweatshirt underneath.
“Ollie, finally,” Pete said, rising from his desk, a grim look on his face. “We need your help.”
This was unexpected. Most of the time, when Pete needed my help, it was usually because he had trouble watching some boat racing video on the internet — being in my mid-thirties apparently meant that I was the natural go-to for computer problems, despite all my protests that I couldn’t figure out technology to save my life. But he actually seemed serious for once. Like this was a real issue.
“Uh,” I said eloquently.
Pete gestured to the older man. “This is Sid Greene, he’s been a friend of my family since forever. Sid, this is Oliver Parker, the Mesmer I was telling you about. Ollie, Sid’s daughter Sandy’s gone missing.”
I understood. Missing people wasn’t usually my thing; for that, people tended to go to the police or some other actual authority. But I was very good at finding lost objects, my bread and butter for Integritas. You wouldn’t believe how many people lose their wedding rings at the beach.
“Where was she last seen?” I asked.
“Her house,” Sid said, his voice papery thin. But there was a catch to his voice that made me lean forward, prompting him. He hesitated, then went on, “She has cameras at her house. Her neighbors, too. We watched the footage. She went in the house on Sunday, but she never left.”
It was Friday. I frowned. “She’s not in there?”
“I looked.” He gestured to Jane next to him. “We looked. Multiple times.”
“So where the hell is she?” I demanded. At Pete and Jane’s look, I swallowed. Right. That’s what I’m here for. Trying to cover up my dumb question, I asked, “Do you have anything of hers?”
“Pete said you’d need this,” Sid said, handing over a little baggy. I took the paper towel out from it. When I unfolded it, it revealed a gold necklace. “It was her mother’s. She wore it almost every day.”
I wrapped my fingers over it and immediately felt a faint thrum. This would do. “I can perform a ritual spell to find her. Let’s go to the other room.”
As I went to one of the conference rooms, Pete came up to my side and whispered, “I’ve known Sandy since we were kids. She’s the one who introduced me to Jane. You’ve got to find her.” The look on his face was one of raw desperation.
I swallowed. “I’ll do what I can.”
The four of us shuffled into a small conference room, which had a table large enough to seat half a dozen. Off to the side was a cheap low bookshelf that held a bunch of atlases, and above it on the wall, a world map. I bade the others to be seated while I went to work. I went to the bookshelf and pulled out a velvet cloth runner and a pair of candles, setting them atop the bookshelf. I lit the candles, then turned the dimmer to the room down, leaving the room in a gentle golden light, the small flames making the shadows flicker and dance. The cloth and candles didn’t actually do anything, but when it came to doing magic, people expected a show. They tend not to take me seriously unless I puff up the proceedings with some schlocky mumbo-jumbo.
I spread the necklace on the cloth, the gold glittering in the candlelight, nestled against the dark velvet. When finding people or objects, I needed to handle something that had a close connection with whatever it was I’m looking for. In this case, a part of Sandy’s soul was imbued in this necklace. All I needed to do was find the strand that was Sandy within this necklace, and use it to trace her whereabouts.
“This ritual will take a few steps,” I said, using what I called my hetero-register, a lower, more serious variation of my voice. Sid and Jane looked at me intently, sensing that I was about to conjure some powerful magics. Little did they know I could do this one-handed, scarfing down a bag of chips with the other. But they needed to see something reverential, almost holy, to believe me when it worked. “First I’ll locate her on this map.” I gestured to the wall behind me. “Once I know what region she’s in, I’ll pull up one of these atlases and narrow down her location.”
They looked at the bookshelf crammed with cheap atlas books and maps of all places around the world. Once, when I was hired to serve someone papers, I had to chase them down all the way to Australia. All of them were meticulously labeled; the only one that wasn’t was a thin, leather-bound booklet that I got at the end of my training at Fort Dix a decade ago.
“I’ll begin the ritual,” I announced solemnly, turning back to the bookshelf. “Do not disturb me.”
I placed a finger on Sandy’s necklace, closed my eyes, and concentrated. Almost immediately, my blood began to sing, like it was charged with an electrical current. A whirling maelstrom of light and color flooded my mind's eye, until, there, shimmering and golden, a pinprick of light.
I opened my eyes and looked at the world map, expecting it to settle on a particular location. Instead, the pinprick of light jumped this way and that, bouncing from country to country, ocean to desert, from the north to the south, Mali to Bali, Friesland, Flanders, Portugal, Poland, Uluru, Denali, Botswana and back.
What the hell, I thought. This spell never did that. It always homed in on the whereabouts of the person or object I was looking for, none of this dancing around. I grit my teeth and focused, closing my eyes again. This time, the light dropped to the bottom of my mind’s eye, dragging my head down with it, until it finally steadied on a fixed position. When I opened my eyes, I expected to see it having alit on one of the atlases I kept there.
It was on the leather-bound book.
With a creeping sense of dread, I pulled it out and carefully set it atop the bookshelf. No sooner had I placed it there did the book noisily flip open on its own power, racing past a dozen pages until it landed on a hand-drawn map. That never happened to me before, either.
I looked at the map. It was like no map that existed of this world. This was one of the realms that belonged to the Other Side. I stared in horror as the pinprick of light zoomed into a particular location, and began pulsing rapidly. I gulped. When finding people, I could reach out through my connection, chasing the strand of their soul and briefly speak to them in their mind, but I had never done so while crossing over to the Other Side.
Hell, I’d never even been to the Other Side. I’d heard of it, sure, every magical person has, just like everybody’s heard of Broadway. But there’s a hell of a difference between singing in the shower versus belting out a tune in the footlights before a thousand people. The Other Side wasn’t just some alternate dimension; it was a place of unfathomable power and danger, where only the most skilled mages, witches, Scions, Soul Hunters dared tread. I may be many things, but “power” and “skill” were not words used to describe one Oliver Parker.
Do I dare reach out to Sandy through the Other Side? If I was caught, then Amicus, the Warden of the Unseen Walls, a literal god made flesh, could find me and punish me. I wasn’t keen on discovering what that would be like. But then I remembered the desperation in Pete’s voice, the raw grief on Sid’s face. If I backed out now, how could I possibly explain that I had the chance to find Sandy but wasn’t brave enough to even try?
I had no choice.
Steeling my resolve, I followed that golden pinprick of light back to its source, my consciousness racing along the thread like some kind of spiritual telegram wire.
Sandy? I probed with my mind. But suddenly, a sharp, stabbing pain lanced through my head. I cried out and grabbed my temples. My nose filled with the stench of rot and pus coming from the magic that penetrated me. It smelled like corpses.
WHO DARES DEFILE MY PRESENCE a loud voice boomed in my head. YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE.
Agony washed over me as I fell back and bumped into the conference table. Jane and Pete were screaming something but I didn’t know what, I couldn’t focus. My vision swam. I only barely managed to catch a glimpse of the candlelight now roaring three feet in the air, a jet of flame, all heat and light, scorching the map and ceiling.
I WILL SACRIFICE YOU ON BEHALF OF MY MASTER, the voice went on, awful and relentless. An invisible hand grabbed me by the throat and threw me against the back wall of the office. My back and my head slammed against the sheetrock, stars swam in my vision. I couldn’t breathe, whatever this demon was doing to me was cutting off all air. My legs and arms flailed out uselessly as I thrashed on the wall. Pete tried to dislodge me, but he might as well have been pulling down a skyscraper for all the good it did.
I was going to die, I was going to be killed by a demon from the Other Side. I had never even ventured beyond the Unseen Walls but something eldritch seized me and wasn’t letting me go.
As my vision darkened, some blessed synapse in my brain made the right connection, fired the right thought. The Unseen Walls had a guardian, the lord of the crossing.
Divine Amicus, I beseech you, I prayed, calling out into the world of magic as loudly as I could.
THAT FOOL WON’T SAVE YOU, YOU WEAK BAG OF FLESH, the demon said, his voice sneering and dripping with sludge.
But I didn’t need Amicus to save me. I needed this demon to think that Amicus would save me. Drawing into my reserves of magic, I conjured an image of an avenging archangel descending from the heavens, golden spear in hand, trumpets blaring. I made the vision of Amicus an auric comet hurtling towards my invisible foe. Groping in the dark, I found the strand that the demon used to connect him to me. It was rotten, like flesh weeping with pus. I flooded the line with the image of Amicus ready to smite this demon. He growled with surprise and suddenly, I fell to the ground. The mysterious hand that grabbed my throat vanished. I found myself back in the conference room, softly suffused with dim candlelight, the roaring flame gone, my face pressed against the cheap, plasticky carpet on the ground. Gratefully, I gulped in heaving breaths of air. Pete and Jane were at my side, making noises I couldn’t quite make out.
It took me a few seconds to realize they were calling my name and asking if I was okay. Eventually, I was able to nod and say, “I’m all right.” I slowly pushed myself to my feet. The two of them looked at me with concern — Pete’s hand was on my shoulder, Jane’s on my arm. Somehow, Jane’s joltingly pink vest brought me back more firmly to reality. It felt so out of place compared to what I just went through. “Really, I’m okay.” I took a few more steadying breaths, and looked over at the table.
Sid was standing, staring at the wall map, his face ashen. I turned to see what he was looking at when my stomach clenched with anxiety. Dread filled me from head to toe. Written on the world map in blood, leaving dark red streaks as it dripped, were the words DADDY HELP ME.
