Read Part One here first
Mom was waiting for me when I got home. “What is this?” Uh oh. She was leaning against the kitchen counter in her scrubs, holding a gallon sized ziploc bag full of money, which I’d hidden under my mattress. “I can explain,” I said, carefully setting my bag down so that she wouldn’t hear my cash box hit the floor. The last thing I needed was her seeing what I made in one day. “Don’t you dare try to explain,” she replied, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Drugs.”
Drugs? She thought I was selling drugs? “I don’t have any friends, Mom!” I couldn’t believe she thought I was a dealer. Dudes with manga collections don’t sell drugs. “Who would I sell drugs to?” She buried her head in her hands, and a string of inaudible Spanish curse words started streaming from her mouth. Never a good sign when Mom started speaking Spanish, that much I knew. “Mi hijo vende drogas,” she wailed. My son sells drugs. This was going too far. I had to tell her the truth.
“It’s magic, Mom.” The Spanish stopped, and she looked up, still clutching my earnings from the past few months in her arms like she was trying to smother them off the face of the earth. “Magic?” I started to explain, to ramble really, about my ability to do card tricks, and how much I could earn on the street, but she wasn’t listening. “Ah, Dios mío, ¿como puede ser que los dos hombres en mi vida se enamoraron de la magia?” I paused. “Mom.” I sat down at the table with her. “What did you say?”
“Dije que…” She hesitated, realizing I was staring blankly back at her. I had never properly learned her language. “I asked God why the only two men in my life both fell in love with magic.” Fell in love with magic? What the hell was she talking about? “Do you mean Dad?” Mom fell silent for what felt like minutes. Then she spoke. “Yes, your father. He was obsessed with it. Not simple tricks, like you’re doing, but more powerful stuff. It’s what got him killed.”
So Dad was killed. I had never once spoken to her about his death, and now here she was, laying it all out. I started to ask more, but Mom was crying too hard to talk about it, and I needed to think. I got up, grabbed my bag off the floor, and went to my room. I would have to get my sack of cash another time.
In my room, I couldn’t hold back my tears any longer. My father had been capable of doing magic, like me. He had been killed, not died on some construction site like I’d been told. Everything I knew about the man, his legacy, had been a lie.
I laid on my bed for hours, feeling numb. “It’s what got him killed.” Mom’s words replayed in my mind until the image of Dad’s death became all I could see. I had no idea what type of magic could get someone killed, but it wasn’t hard to imagine. Maybe something he’d been conjuring had exploded. A particularly evil spirit. Or maybe he’d been murdered, hit by a spell like Avada Kedavra. The killing curse from Harry Potter. My imagination was limited to the magic of pop culture, because until recently I hadn’t known that magic was real. I was being terrorized by the unknown.
At some point, I fell asleep, and my racing thoughts turned to nightmares. Me unable to pronounce the words of a healing spell while Dad lay dying on the street. Dad getting blasted in the chest by a flash of green light. By the time the sun started to rise, the nightmares had become lucid, and in each one I pleaded with myself to wake up. To escape the endless loop of my dad’s death.
Eventually, well past dinner, I swung myself off the bed and packed up my bag. I needed to know more about my dad’s past. And besides Mom, who had been sulking in her room just like me, the only person I knew who could tell me about him was the man from Times Square. That creep who had lured me down to the water. It was time to pay him a visit.
I rooted around in my backpack until I found the business card he’d handed me:
L. Mencken
Legion of Light
49 1/2 1st Avenue
New York, NY
In my rush to get away from him, I hadn’t really looked at it. L Mencken. What did the L stand for? And why wasn’t his first name on the business card? I didn’t feel great about going to find this guy again, but my choices were limited, and he’d known that my dad could do magic. So I slipped out of the apartment and headed in to Manhattan.
I found L Mencken in a Starbucks in the East Village. 49 1/2 1st Avenue. If the Legion of Light had a headquarters, this was it. “Here? Really?” I looked down at him, sitting at a table in the back, wearing the same duster jacket and Yankees hat from earlier. “What? They have free bathrooms, and let us sit in here as long as we want. The Legion’s dues don’t cover a headquarters.”
I was starting to suspect this guy was full of it. Sure, he could conjure a fireball from nothing, but sitting in a Starbucks all day? In that jacket? This guy was pathetic, I thought. If this was magic, I wanted no part of it.
I finally took a minute to look him over. He still had on the baseball cap, which was covering a head of greasy, unkempt blonde hair. His eyes were bloodshot, like he hadn’t slept in weeks, and his skin was ashen. He had a long, thin face, with a sharp, bird-like nose. Given his height, all of this made him look stretched, like a comic book villain. He gave me the creeps.
I got right to it. “Tell me about my dad. How do you know him?”
“Don’t you want to know anything about me first?”
“Sure,” I replied. “Who are you? How’d you make that fireball?”
He paused, as if his identity were some big secret, and glanced once or twice over his shoulder. “The name’s Lucas. That’s all you need to know. And I’ve been doing magic since I was your age. Picked it up one night in a bar, when I realized I could light people’s drinks on fire as a party trick. Almost got me killed, lit some meathead’s drink by accident and he put his fist through my face.” He sat back in his chair, feeling pretty good about his little origin story. “Anyways, I knew your Dad, Big Tony. He and I were part of the Legion of Light.” He paused, for dramatic effect, but the blank stare on my face disappointed him. “It’s a magician’s club here in the city.”
I frowned. I couldn’t make sense of a guy like my dad, Big Tony, being part of a magician’s club, particularly one with a name like the Legion of Light. My dad had worked construction – the guys I knew from his crew would never have let him live it down if they’d known about the Legion. Big Tonys don’t do magic.
Calling my dad Big Tony was an understatement. From the pictures I’d seen, and the few memories I had, he was huge. I’m over six feet, and weigh a little shy of 300 pounds on a good day, but my dad was six five, had almost fifty pounds on me, and whereas I carried all my weight in my stomach and legs, he carried it all in his chest and arms. He looked like a firefighter a few years off the force. Either that or the Hulk on a diet. I tried to picture a body like his performing dark magic, and I couldn’t. Kind of like me doing delicate card tricks. The men in my family didn’t look anything like magicians.
Lucas must have sensed me thinking about my father, because he spoke, bringing me back to reality. “He was a good man, your dad. Saved my life on multiple occasions. Even his final act, when he died, was saving yours.”
I felt a lump catch in my throat. More information about my father’s death.
“My dad saved my life?” Mom hadn’t said anything about this part. I wondered if she even knew.
“Absolutely. Put a protective spell on you, when the dark ones came, and he died in your place. Powerful stuff, those spells. Only way to make an effective one is to bind your life to it. A life for a life. Oh, sorry kid.” Lucas hadn’t noticed me crying, hearing about my dad’s heroics for the first time. I swallowed my tears and caught my breath. “I can’t believe he did that.”
“Of course. What else are Dads for?” Lucas attempted a comforting smile, but it came out more like a sneer. “Just be grateful you had one for as long as you did.”
That set me off. “As long as I did? He died when I was seven. Seven! I’ve lived without him, my mom has lived without him, for fifteen years! And now you’re telling me the reason he’s been gone is because of me. And stupid magic!” I was yelling now, and looked around to make sure I wasn’t being heard, but the late night crowd in the place hadn’t batted an eye. I wondered how often they heard people yelling about dead fathers and magical guilds in here. I stood to leave.
“Wait.” Lucas clearly did not want me to leave. “I need your help. The city needs your help.” He was pleading with me now. “Let me explain what’s going on.” I hesitated, unsure how much more of this I could take in one night, but the next thing Lucas said made my decision for me.
“You owe it to your father.”
I bent down, so that my eyes were back on his level, and took a deep breath. “Let me make one thing clear,” I said. “I don’t owe that man anything.” I left.
On the subway ride back home, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew what Lucas had been talking about. Even before I’d discovered my abilities, something about Dad’s death had stuck with me. A specific phrase. Translatio vita. It had been there, in the back of my mind, for years without me knowing where it had come from. But now it seemed to make sense. Translatio vita. Dad had said that to me, repeatedly, on the last night we’d been together.
I decided to look the phrase up on my phone. It sounded like Spanish, but according to Google it was Latin for transfer life. Seriously? If that was the all-powerful spell Lucas had been referring to, it had an incredibly lame incantation. I was starting to really regret ever getting involved with magic in the first place. It was seriously uncool.
The walk home from the Grand Ave station in Elmhurst was about ten minutes, but that night I had no interest in getting back quickly. Everyone had lied to me. My mother hadn’t told me my father was killed. She hadn’t told me about the magic. Neither had my father, all of those times I’d sat next to him on the couch, watching TV. I’d thought Big Tony was some deadbeat, a guy who watched Law & Order all night instead of doing anything with his life. Now it turns out he had magical powers, but may have still been a loser anyway, like me. What was this Legion of Light? Who were they fighting?
I was deep in thought when I rounded the corner into the alley behind my apartment building. Ever since I was little, this was where I came to be alone, and even after midnight I would sit on some empty milk crates for hours, just thinking about nothing. This night in particular, I turned into the alley and heard a pair of muffled voices, deep in conversation. I hesitated, and hid behind a dumpster right by the alley’s entrance, not wanting to be seen by whoever had disturbed my hiding place.
“He’s coming, he’s coming, don’t worry!” The voice was high pitched and hyper, like a kid ordering from an ice cream truck. “Oh boy, I can’t wait to get my hands around his fat little thro-!”
“Shh!” A much deeper second voice interrupted the first. “How about I get my hands around your throat, and you stop ruining every single one of my plans! He’ll hear us.”
I had watched too many movies to have any doubt about what was going on. There were two people outside my building, waiting to hurt me. You don’t meet strange men, see fireballs and learn your father was fighting dark forces, just to assume the two murderers waiting outside your building are there for someone else. I started to back away, figuring I’d be better off spending the night at Aunt Clara’s than being murdered in my sleep by two hitmen.
I had begun to turn around when I stopped. “But what about the mother?” It was the first voice again, and I felt my blood start to boil. “What about her? She’s not what we came here for.” I hesitated. What could they want with my mom? “Still!” The shrill hiss echoed throughout the alley. “We could eat her, I’m starving!” Eat her? I was beginning to think this was some kind of weird prank. I looked around for a weapon, but the alley was pretty empty, like usual. I was going to have to improvise.
The marbles from earlier were still in my pocket. I pulled one out, and lobbed it over the dumpster, towards the strange voices.
“Ow! What the… ? Did you feel that?”
“Feel what?” The deeper voice didn’t sound convinced.
“This! I just got hit with a freaking marble!”
“Oh please. That didn’t just fall from the sky. It’s a child’s toy.”
I conjured another marble and lobbed it over the dumpster. This time it was the deep voice that grunted.
“I just got hit by one!”
“See!” His partner shrieked. “We’re under attack!”
I was starting to think these guys might be kids, so I filled my pocket with marbles and stepped out from behind my hiding place, ready to fire. “Looking for me?”
The sight that met me on the other side of the dumpster made me freeze. My two attackers weren’t people. They were creatures. Small demons, really. One, the more menacing of the two, had a thick, human-like body, scaly red skin, and a long barbed tail. His partner was scrawnier, with a stubby tail and pale green skin. Neither could have been taller than a ten year old.
The sight of me standing there, silhouetted in the glow of a street light, snapped them out of their bickering. “There he is!” The green demon’s high-pitched voice echoed throughout the alley. I was feeling confident I could probably take them both, when they suddenly started to grow. Their backs arched, and their spines began to stretch out. Their dainty hands thickened and their spindly fingers expanded to the size of thick sausages. Worst of all, their mouths filled with huge, pointy teeth. Even in the dark I could see the saliva dripping from their tongues. Maybe they would eat me after all.
I turned to run, but, like all great heroes, tripped on an old mattress and fell to the ground. When I looked up the demons were standing over me. “He is fat – let’s eat him now!” The green one was practically clapping his hands together with glee. “Why should we have to wait? It’s not fair that all our hard work should go to Mar-“
“Quiet!” his partner hissed. “You’ve said enough.” He looked at me, flashing his sharp claws. “Are we going to have a problem?”
I’ll be honest. There wasn’t going to be a problem. There wasn’t even going to be a minor inconvenience. I was starting to feel the dampness in my pants and I realized I had wet myself sometime between encountering my first non-human species, and falling flat on my face during my escape. Maybe I deserved to be eaten. I shook my head.
I had started to pull myself up off the ground when the larger of the two demons was thrown backwards by a giant fireball. The green demon shrieked. I shrieked. The larger demon would have shrieked had the impact with Ms. Jordan’s living room wall not knocked him unconscious. I looked around for the source of the attack, but before I could find it, a second fireball knocked my other attacker against the wall. My neighbors were going to talk about this night for weeks.
At this point I figured cowering in place was the only solution, so I was on the ground, hands over my head, when I heard the voice. “What the hell are you doing? Let’s get out of here!” I looked up. It was Lucas. He had come back to save me from these monsters. He reached out a hand, which was still smoldering. “We gotta go, man. There could be more of them.” I shook my head. I needed to protect my mom. Lucas read my mind. “She’ll be fine, Tony. Safer if you’re nowhere near her.” He grabbed my collar and pulled me to my feet.
We ran ten blocks before I had to stop, gasping for air. “Where are we going?” I looked at Luke, and saw genuine fear in his eyes. “We just need to get you away from here. We can take you to our farm upstate, but for now we’ll go to my place,” he said. Farm upstate? I didn’t want to trust this guy, but I didn’t have much choice, and he had just saved me from a far worse fate.
“Why are you helping me?” I asked, and Luke winced, as though the question hurt him in some way. “You don’t get it yet, do you?” he replied. “You’re part of the Legion now. I don’t have a choice.”