City of Thorns by C.N. Crawford
Chapter 2
Isat on the bed in my basement apartment, sketching the gates of the City of Thorns.
After my shitty day, I’d gone for a long run. I’d pushed the pace hard, and my muscles still burned as I stretched them on the comforter. Running was the best way I had of dealing with stress, losing myself in physicality. It was also the one time I felt really good at something. The only problem was that sometimes, when my feet pounded the leaves in the woods, I’d have glimmers of flashbacks to the night Mom died. I’d hear her voice, telling me to run.
I shook my head, clearing my mind of the dark memory. Instead, I focused on trying to perfect the picture of the gate. This drawing served no purpose, but I’d become completely obsessed with the gate’s contours—the wrought iron entrance to the demon city, decorated with a skull in the center, strangely beautiful and forbidding at the same time. Maybe it wasn’t the healthiest obsession to draw the same thing repeatedly like a psycho, but at least I wasn’t thinking about Jack Corwin.
I exhaled as I shaded in the skull. Living here was all part of my plan to save money for grad school in the demon city. Down here, I was saving every dime I could, living in a cellar with six other broke students. Our rooms were divided by thin wooden walls, and we shared a bathroom and a kitchenette that was mostly a hot pot and kettle.
My phone buzzed—a call from Shai—and I swiped to answer. “Hey.”
“Oh! You actually answered instead of pretending you were busy and then texting two minutes later.”
I grinned. “Who talks on the phone anymore? It makes everyone nervous except you.”
“So what are we doing for your birthday? Because there’s this amazing Thai takeout place I want to try, and I could bring it to you with, like, a couple bottles of wine.”
I smiled. “My new place is a shabby basement with spiders. And compared to your fancy Belial University dorms, it’ll seem like a full-blown shithole.”
“Is it really that bad?”
“Hang on.” I snapped a few photos to get the point across, then emailed them to her. “Okay, check your mail. See, if we were texting like normal people, this would be going much more smoothly.”
After a moment, I heard her say, “Oh, okay. Well, yeah, it’s small. Nicely decorated, but small. I don’t love the idea of spiders…I wish I could have you here, but I think you could be legally murdered by demons if I sneaked you in.”
I nodded. “I’d like to avoid that. Maybe just a drink somewhere in Osborn?”
“Hang on…I’m zooming in on your photos to see if I can find anything embarrassing.”
“I’ve drawn thirty-two pictures of the City of Thorns gates, and most are taped to the wall,” I said, “so that’s fairly embarrassing.”
“Yeah, but I already knew you were a weirdo. I was hoping to find you were some kind of secret sex freak, too. For a second, I thought I saw giant red dildos by your bed, but now I can see they’re fire extinguishers.”
“What’s the opposite of a sex freak?” I asked. “That’s me.”
“Okay, but why do you have two fire extinguishers next to your bed?”
I sat up straighter, getting anxious just thinking about it. “There’s no way out of here, Shai. There’s a tiny window over the bed, but it doesn’t open. So if the house were on fire, I’d have to fight my way out from a far corner of a basement while the walls burned around me.”
She inhaled sharply. “Oh, shit. Can you find another place? That doesn’t sound safe even with the fire extinguishers. Is that even legal?”
“Probably not, but I installed fire alarms, too. And I stocked up with the stuff stuntmen used to get through flames.”
“Wait, what?” she cried.
I mentally reviewed what was under my bed. “Fire-retardant clothing and gels to stop my skin from burning, Hollywood-style. I could walk through flames if I had to. Oh! And I bought a gas mask in case I need to get through billowing smoke. I’m pretty much set with the fire stuff.”
“Of course. So you’re still kind of a prepper, I’m guessing?”
“Yes, so in the event of a demon apocalypse, come here. I’ve got several large bags of beans and rice and some fish antibiotics.”
“Nice,” she said. “Are we going to kill the demons with burritos and penicillin?”
“In case the shops and doctors’ offices close. And I’ve got a water purifier in case the reservoir is contaminated.”
What I didn’t mention was my weirdest prepper item: the fox urine, which was something hunters used to disguise their scent. If the demons rampaged around Osborne, hungry for blood, I’d drench myself in fox pee. They’d never find me. But Shai didn’t need to know that. Even with my best friend, I had a line of weirdness I didn’t cross.
“Okay,” said Shai. “Well, since there’s no apocalypse going on right now, let’s figure out somewhere for margaritas, okay?”
“I’m happy with wherever. It’ll just be fun to see you and get out of the basement. And I definitely need a drink. I gave an absolutely disastrous presentation today in my Abnormal Psych class.”
“Shit. Okay. Just give me a chance to call around and see if I can get us reservations, huh? I’ll text you in a few.”
She hung up, and I leaned back against my pillows. A flicker of movement caught my eye, and I glanced at a spider skittering over the floor. The scent of mildew and mold hung heavily in the air.
I pulled my drawing pad and pencil into my lap, then finishing the filagree on another image of the gates to the City of Thorns.
There were only two kinds of mortals allowed in the city: the servants born into their roles, and the students like Shai who could afford it. Every year, Belial University in the City of Thorns accepted around three hundred mortal applicants. At Belial, the demon university, they learned to suffuse their careers with the magical arts. Graduates like Shai always landed plum positions in whatever field they wanted.
But in my case, education wasn’t the real reason I wanted to get into the demon university.
I wanted revenge. I wanted to find the demon who killed my mom.
When the picture of the gate was finished, I flipped over the page and started jotting down some financial numbers. Right now, I owed seventy-five thousand in student loans, with seven percent interest. If I was going to pay that back, and also save up the hundred grand to get into Belial University on what would likely be poverty wages after graduating…
My stomach churned.
Whenever I started making these calculations, the weight of impossibility started pressing down on me. I’d done it a million times, but the numbers never added up. With my loan interest, I’d save up the hundred grand roughly…
Never.
I would never have a hundred thousand dollars to get in.
Increasingly, I was starting to think about plan B: break into the city, then find a way to blend in. There had to be a way. Even an ancient demon city would have a weakness.
As I started to mull over my more dangerous and unhinged plan, my phone buzzed with a message from Shai: Cirque de la Mer. Two for one cocktails tonight. Meet me there at 8:30 xo
Really, it was probably a good time for her to interrupt my breaking and entering schemes before I came up with something that could get me killed.
* * *
Sittingat the white marble countertop at Cirque de la Mer, my red hair drenched by the September rain, I sipped a Guinness and licked the foam off my lip. I still wore my black dress and boots, but I’d accessorized a bit with black nail polish, eyeliner, and silver rings. This was my look: ginger Goth Puritan.
Behind the bar, enormous windows overlooked the Atlantic Ocean, and the sea twinkled under the starlight. Dubstep boomed around me. I liked it here, with the loud music to drown out my own thoughts and a gorgeous view of the sea. Of course, this was probably the most expensive bar on the north shore of Massachusetts, but for tonight, I wasn’t going to worry about money. The loans were too ridiculous to worry about at this point, and I might as well owe a billion dollars.
When Shai sidled up next to me at the bar, she flashed me an enormous smile. Her dark hair fell in two long braids over a cream-colored dress. She wore vibrant red lipstick that perfectly complemented her tawny brown skin.
I’d really needed to see a friendly face.
She hugged me. “Hello, birthday girl. What are we drinking? Tequila shots?”
“I swore off them after the Harvard Square incident.”
She grimaced. “Oh, right. Okay, well, let’s eat and get cocktails so you don’t get messy.” She raised her hand, and the bartender immediately came over with a smile. Shai ordered us two mojitos and a butternut squash pizza.
With that accomplished, she turned back to me, eyebrows raised. “Okay, what was this about your nightmare of a day?”
I sighed. “Jack Corwin turned up in the middle of my class presentation and made orgasm faces when I was trying to focus, and then he claimed that I punched him in the eye. “
Her hand flew to her mouth for a moment. “First of all, fuck that guy. Second, has he lost his mind? Why would he think that people would believe that you punched him?”
I cleared my throat, cringing. “Well, about that part. I did actually punch him.”
“What?”
“After he tried to ram his tongue down my throat,” I said defensively.
“So he assaulted you first? You need to call the cops. He’s escalating things. He’s been stalking you for years now.”
The bartender slid our mojitos across the bar, and I grabbed mine instantly. I took a sip, letting the mint and lime roll over my tongue. “I reported it at Osborn State and to the police, but they decided a long time ago that I’m overreacting. Apparently, being a douchebag isn’t illegal, and I’m not sure they’d see what happened last night on my terms, either. His dad is a congressman or something, so…” I took another sip. “You know what? I’m sick of thinking about him. Please tell me about the City of Thorns. Let’s leave Jack out of tonight. I want to hear about the demons.”
“Where do I even begin?”
I raised my eyebrows. “Do you think demons can leave?”
She shook her head. “I think so, but not for long. As far as I know, there’s some kind of magical spell from hundreds of years ago that keeps them mostly tied to one demon city or another. But occasionally, they can travel between them. Why do you ask?”
“That night my mom was murdered—”
My sentence trailed off. I could already feel the air cooling, the atmosphere growing thorny as I raised the painful subject. There was no easy way to say, One night, a demon with a glowing star on his head hunted down my mom in the woods and burned her to death.And since the horror of that night felt raw even now, it was hard to talk about it without feeling like I was drowning in loss again.
Sometimes, I thought the only thing keeping me afloat was the certainty that I’d avenge her death. That I would get into the City of Thorns and find her killer.
But this was too dark and weird, wasn’t it? Worse than the fox pee beneath my bed.