People and Places Unknown

Multitasking while inscribing candles wasn't easy, but it was a task too repetitive and boring for Daniel to do for too long a stretch without some kind of additional entertainment. He’d given the first five candles his full attention, but by the time he’d reached his sixth he’d had to pull out his laptop and find something to read while he worked.

He knew the patterns of the runes off by heart but couldn't quite inscribe them into the candle perfectly without making use of his eyes. He let out a huff of frustration as the knife slipped again, narrowly missing his finger.

Daniel rolled the stiffness out of his shoulders and sat up straighter on his bed. Frustration was a useless emotion. This was a mistake that could be easily fixed. Daniel positioned his fingers over the long scratch in the candle's surface and sent heat through his fingertips, softening the wax enough that he could smooth it. He found his place on the candle and his place in his ebook and continued working.

The front door slammed open and Daniel dug the knife into the candle so deep the candle nearly snapped in half.

Heart hammering in his chest, Daniel crept towards his bedroom door and placed his hand flat against the wood. He knew the sound his dad's boots made on the floorboards and was ready to make the door vanish at the slightest hint of anyone else approaching. The spell was already there, carved deep into the wood, ready to be activated at any time.

"Daniel!" his dad shouted from the living room, an edge of panic to his voice. Daniel threw the door open and ran out.

Daniel had never seen Harper before, not even a picture of him, but he knew instantly that was who the bloody body in his father's arms was. There was no other teenage boy his dad cared about enough to risk bringing here.

"What—" Daniel started to ask, but his dad interrupted him.

"Clear off the coffee table."

Their large glass coffee table was cluttered as usual, covered in breakfast dishes Daniel had yet to clean up, half finished projects, and other junk neither of them had bothered to put away. Daniel hurried over to the coffee table and began clearing things off, placing them on the floor underneath it, out of the way, or tossing them onto the sofa.

"Daniel! Clear off the fucking coffee table!"

His dad was right. Harper was in no state for time wasting, not to mention the fact that his dad's straining arms probably couldn't support him much longer. At eighteen, Harper was full grown and tall. Daniel swept an arm over the coffee table, knocking everything on it onto the floor. A bottle of ink cracked open and spilled its contents and beads skittered out of a jar and across the floor, but those things hardly mattered.

As soon as the coffee table was cleared, Daniel helped his dad ease Harper down onto it gently enough that they wouldn't crack the glass.

"Good," Daniel's dad said, calmer now. “There's a curse on him. Can you feel it?"

Daniel shut his eyes, extending his senses over Harper's body. He nodded. He could feel... tugging.

"It's trying to stop his heart," his dad said. "I've anchored his heartbeat to my own for now, but I can't do anything else for him while I'm focussing on that. I know you've never done this before, but I need you to take over."

Daniel looked over Harper’s body, pale and bloody and vulnerable. In that moment, he looked nothing like the strong, determined young man his dad had told him about. He had been twisted and broken. It was their job to fix him. Daniel gave a shaky nod of his head.

"Okay, keep your breathing steady and count slowly in your head. Shuffle over here and place your fingers on his neck. Good. Can you find his pulse?"

Daniel shifted his fingers around for a few seconds until he felt the throb of an artery, then nodded again. Harper’s skin felt too cold, too clammy.

"Now become aware of the beating of your own heart. Feel it, and his. Join the two, like you're one being connected by the pulse point in his neck. Your heart beats and it reverberates through him.”

Daniel shut his eyes and gnawed as his lip, doing his best to obey his dad’s instructions. It wasn’t easy when his own heart wouldn’t stop thundering in his chest. Relax. He needed to relax. Daniel took a deep breath in, let it out, and pretended this was just another one of his dad’s training exercises. No stakes, just another challenge. Daniel was good at challenges. He was good at a lot of things. He could do this.

Daniel’s heart slowed until it beat at a similar speed to Harper’s and then, with a twitch of a mental muscle, Daniel took hold of Harper’s pulse and matched it to his own. He marked each beat in his mind like the steady tick of a clock.

“I'm going to let go now,” his dad said. “You'll feel a drag as the curse tries to fight your hold on him, but just stay relaxed, stay rooted, and you'll be fine."

His dad's words were reassuring, but Daniel still almost buckled when the weight of the curse was released onto him. He rebalanced, calmed his breathing, and made himself into a passive, immovable force.

Daniel's eyes were shut, but he heard his dad move, heard his dad's voice. "Good. You're doing great. I need to get some things, but I'll be right back."

His dad was already on his way to the door, so Daniel’s nod was mostly for himself. He was fine. The curse was strong, but he was stronger.

By the time his dad returned to the room a few minutes later, Daniel felt confident enough in his grasp on Harper that he allowed himself to open his eyes. His dad laid his supplies on the floor and used his athame to help him tear open the front of Harper's shirt.

It was only then that the source of the bleeding became obvious. Across the muscled expanse of Harper's chest and stomach ancient symbols had been carved deep into his flesh.

"Keep your pulse steady," his dad warned, and Daniel realised he'd been letting panic take hold. He took a deep breath and relaxed his muscles, relaxed his mind. It just looked dramatic. Everything would be fine.

"It appears very physical and the blood's definitely real," Daniel's dad said as he used a cloth to wipe some of the blood out of the way, "but take the curse away and the cuts disappear too. Which I'm sure Harper here will be glad of when he wakes up. I don't think he'd appreciate having his chest scarred up like this. Spineless warlock did it with a wave of his hand, but I guess that's less unpleasant than the slower, more manual way."

"The child sacrifice warlock?"

"Mmm." His dad sorted through his pile of supplies and retrieved a permanent marker. "He was a match for me and he had defenses against man made weapons, so Harper and Kate were sitting ducks. Thankfully he was useless against fae magic, so Arlyn was able to take him down in the end. I was hoping the curse was tied to the warlock's lifeline, but when are things ever that tidy?"

As Daniel's dad talked, he began drawing on Harper and the glass tabletop around him, sketching out runes that would counter the markings carved into Harper's torso. To someone who didn't know him he might have appeared calm, but Daniel noticed the slight shake of his hand, the tension in his voice. They had the curse in stasis for now, but Harper was still bleeding.

As if he had read Daniel's mind, his dad said, "People can lose a lot of blood and be fine. You'd be surprised. This is nothing, really." Daniel's dad picked up a candle, lit it, and placed it on the glass next to Harper's head. "He won't enjoy the bed rest, but in a few days... he'll be fine."

"He's strong," Daniel said, because it seemed like his dad needed the reassurance.

Daniel's dad set another candle down on the opposite side of Harper’s head and murmured, "Stronger than he ever should have had to be."

Conversation stopped after that, its place taken over by the whisper of Daniel’s dad's voice as he chanted ancient, powerful words, protective and healing, his hand hovering over Harper's chest. Daniel could feel the curse squirm.

The curse broke away suddenly, seeking to flee Harper's no longer safe body but shrivelling up and falling apart as soon as it entered open air. Without the weight of it dragging him down, Daniel felt light. Gently, he released his hold on Harper's pulse.

Just as Daniel's dad had said, the cuts had vanished from Harper's body. The outline of them was still visible in the pattern of the blood that remained, but a swipe of a damp cloth cleared that away too.

Daniel grabbed a tissue from the box he’d tossed onto the sofa earlier and began drying the sweat from Harper’s brow with it. He wished he could tuck Harper up comfortably on the sofa with a blanket and then later, when Harper woke up, bring him dinner. It would have been nice to have someone to take care of for once who wasn’t his dad, to have someone else take care of him.

A quiet sound from the back of Harper's throat drew Daniel's attention back to reality. Harper's brow wrinkled and then, slowly, his eyes slid open. Chartreuse. They met Daniel's and Daniel's heart thudded painfully in his chest. He'd felt less panicked by the sight of Harper's blood than he did by Harper's eyes on him. He wanted Harper’s company, yes, but there were reasons he couldn’t have it.

Daniel's dad placed a hand over Harper's eyes, whispered a word, and Harper relaxed into sleep. "I'll tell him he hallucinated it."

Daniel shrunk back away from the coffee table and wrapped his arms around his knees. "Will he believe that?"

His dad hesitated. "You don't look much like me. He can believe me or not, but I don't think he could guess at enough to put you at risk. Don't worry about it."

Daniel would have worried less if it weren't for the tension in his dad's voice, but he accepted it with a nod. He helped his dad clean Harper's sleeping body up and put one of his dad's shirts on him, then held the front door open while his dad carried Harper out.

Daniel turned back to the coffee table and took in the blood and marker squiggles covering its surface, the haphazardly tossed aside items lying around it on the floor. He took in a deep breath. Time to clean up.