I was jolted awake by a fist hammering on my front door.
"Whuh—?" I mumbled, dragging myself out of bed and stumbling downstairs to find out who the hell was pounding on my door at eight o'clock on a Saturday morning.
"Yeah," I said, swinging it open, "what can I—"
"Hey, Nikki." Jonathan smirked at me from the porch. My older brother. "Out partying late again, I see."
"What do you want, John?"
"The package."
"What package?"
"Come on, man. I know we don't see eye to eye, but just make this easy, okay?"
There was something different in Jonathan's eyes. Hard. Determined. Almost desperate. It caught me off guard, and — I'll admit it — it scared me a little.
"Look, Johnny—" I drew the name out, because I knew it irritated him "—I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about." And I didn't. I honestly had no clue.
"Okay, smartass. Listen carefully." He put a hand flat against my chest and pushed, just enough to move me back a step. "There's a package coming. Probably to your place. When it shows up, you call me. All right?"
"Whatever, dude. I'm going back to bed." I shoved him out the door and shut it in his face.
Jonathan had always had a gift for getting under my skin. He was the firstborn, the golden child, and somewhere along the way he'd turned manipulative and mean with it. I didn't know what he was after this time. But I was dead certain it wasn't anything good.
I turned to head back upstairs — and that's when I saw it.
A package sat on the entry table. My housekeeper must have brought it in off the doorstep the day before, and after the night I'd had, I hadn't noticed. I laughed out loud at the thought: I'd accidentally lied to my brother. Not that I cared. I tore into my little mystery gift.
Inside the plain brown wrapping were a handful of small East Asian sculptures and a sealed wooden box with no obvious way to open it. I'd always been drawn to Asian art — the delicate, almost impossible intricacy of it, craftsmanship you could feel under your fingertips. But the box was something else entirely. It was carved with engravings, though none of them told me a thing about where it had come from.
Curiosity got the better of me. After a quick shower, a shave, and breakfast, I set out to learn what this box was and how it had found its way to my door. I wrapped it in a bath towel, tucked it into my motorcycle's saddlebag so it wouldn't get banged up, and spent the morning carrying it from one cramped antique shop to the next.
Nothing. No one had ever seen anything like it — not the dealers, not the gallery owners, not the old collectors who claimed to have seen everything.
I was stopping for lunch when my phone rang. Laura.
She said she'd had the sudden urge to check on me, and she never ignored her instincts. I told her I was fine — just chasing down the history of a strange little box I'd been sent — and that I was about to eat if she wanted to join me. She jumped at it. Twenty minutes later we were trading stories over sandwiches like nothing in the world was wrong.
Then she asked to see the box.
I unwrapped it on the table, and Laura slid back in her chair like it had bitten her. She'd gone a shade paler. She recognized some of the markings, she said — but they weren't Asian. They were something else. Metaphysical. She looked at me strangely, then said she knew someone who could tell us where the box had really come from.
She grabbed my spare helmet, climbed onto the back of the bike, and pointed me toward a quiet, out-of-the-way district and a small, almost hidden occult supply shop.
A bell chimed as we stepped inside. The old woman behind the counter looked up and smiled.
"Blessed be, child," she said.
"Blessed be," Laura answered.
The woman's gaze moved to me — careful, hesitant — before the smile returned.
"You have a very strong, positive aura, sir."
"Thanks. I think."
"What have you brought me?"
I set the box on the counter and folded back the towel. The woman recoiled, one hand rising to her mouth.
"Die Augen der Hölle," she breathed.
"Excuse me?"
"It translates as The Eyes of Hell." Her voice had dropped to a whisper. "But they were supposed to be a myth. A legend. Nothing more."
"Okay. I'm lost."
Laura, still pale, found her voice. "The Eyes of Hell are two small black jewels. Round, like marbles — about the size of a golf ball. The story says whoever holds them in his hands can see straight into a man's soul. His heart. His every desire."
I stared back at the old woman.
"A German nobleman in the late seventeen hundreds is said to have made them," she said. "He used dark magic to bind them, and he used the eyes to bend people to his will and seize power — until they devoured him from the inside out. They've passed from hand to hand ever since. No one has ever known where they were. Until, it seems, now."
"So how do I open the box? I want to see them."
"No." Her voice cracked across the shop. "Not in here. You need to leave. Now."
"Okay, okay — we're going. But can you at least tell me how it opens?"
She was already herding us toward the door. "It is said the box requires blood. What that means, I do not know. I can help you no further. Blessed be."
The lock turned behind us before we'd even reached the curb.
We secured the box and rode back toward the city, the old woman's words still settling over me like cold water.
Magical orbs that could see into a man's soul. That could let you manipulate people.
Manipulate.
That was it. That was the whole thing. That was what Jonathan wanted — the eyes, for himself, for power, for control. And the worst part wasn't the surprise of it. The worst part was the small, ugly thought that surfaced right behind it: imagine what you could do with them. I shook it off. Almost.
Was my own brother really that far gone? Corrupt enough, hungry enough, to gamble his own soul for it?
My answer arrived as Jonathan's Expedition came roaring up alongside the bike, swerving in to force us off the road.
"Pull over and give me the box, Nick!"
"What is wrong with you, Johnny?" I screamed over the wind. "You're going to get somebody killed!"
"Someone once said greatness requires sacrifice, Nick. Pull over."
"Okay! Hang on!"
I leaned back against Laura, who had her arms locked around me.
"Hold on tight," I told her. "This is about to get exciting."
"Oh, shit," she said — because she'd just understood what I already had. Jonathan could not be allowed to get the eyes.
I let the bike slow, watched the Expedition ease off the gas to match me — then cranked the throttle and shot forward, threading through traffic. Signs and pedestrians smeared into streaks of color as the speedometer climbed past a hundred and twenty. I just needed distance. I needed time to think.
We tore out of downtown toward the edge of the city, where the buildings gave way to vacant lots and stands of trees, and I finally pulled off into an empty gravel turnout to catch my breath.
I shoved the box into Laura's hands, then took it back. I told her to run — to get away from me. Jonathan wanted the box, and he wanted me. Not her. She hesitated, then bolted for the tree line and disappeared.
I stood alone in the gravel, the box sweating in my grip, as Jonathan's Expedition squealed in behind me.
He climbed out and crossed toward me, a small handgun loose in his hand.
"That was stupid, Nick. Why do you always do stupid things?"
"What the hell is wrong with you, Johnny?"
"Look, bro." His voice slid into something softer, warmer. Reasonable. "Just give me the box, and we forget this whole ugly thing ever happened."
"Save it, John. The manipulative-big-brother routine doesn't work on me."
My fingers, running over the box, found something I hadn't noticed before — two small indentations, one on each side. Strange. How had I missed them all day?
"Just hand it over, Nick."
"You'd really kill your own brother?"
"Like I said." The sarcasm crept back in. "Greatness requires sacrifice."
I pressed a fingertip into each indentation.
Pain lanced through both fingers — sharp, deliberate. The box had bitten me. I felt blood well up and run down its sides in thin red threads, and I gasped. Jonathan's eyes went wide.
The lid sprang open.
Inside, nestled in black velvet, lay two perfect obsidian orbs.
"This?" I said, almost laughing. "This is what all this is about?"
"Put the box down, Nick."
I set it on the hood of his truck. Then I reached in and took an orb in each hand — meaning, I swear, to hurl them both into the woods where no one would ever find them.
I never threw them.
The rush hit me like a wave. My head spun, the ground heaved beneath my boots, wind tore around me though the air was still. And suddenly I could see. I could see everything.
I saw Jonathan.
I saw his heart, his soul, laid open like a book. He had never meant for me to walk away from this. He'd needed someone — anyone — to bleed for the box and open it for him, and I'd been the easiest mark. A pawn. The same way he'd used everyone who'd ever made the mistake of loving him.
And something in me — something I'd kept quiet my whole life — woke up and liked the power in my hands.
His black heart blazed in front of me like a flashlight in a dark room. He had to pay. For me. For all of them. I reached into his mind, into the rotten center of him, and I made him feel every ounce of pain he'd ever inflicted on another living person.
Jonathan dropped to his knees, weeping, begging. The eyes hadn't just let me see into him — they let me reshape him. I asked him for the gun, and he pressed it into my hand like an offering, sobbing for my forgiveness.
"Everything's okay, Johnny," I said gently. "You're forgiven."
The trigger gave with the softest pressure, and a single shell punched a hole between his brows. He folded to the gravel in a quiet, almost reverent heap.
Laura screamed from the trees and came running, terror all over her face, desperate to know I was all right. I opened my arms and pulled her against me.
"It's okay," I murmured into her hair. "You're safe now."
I cupped her face in both hands, so tenderly, and turned her head.
Her body went limp the instant her neck snapped.
Laura could not be allowed to remember. She could not carry what she had seen. She could never tell anyone what I had become.
I have become the very thing I despised in my brother. Everything wrong with this world lives inside me now.
And from this day forward, every time I look into a mirror, I will see the Eyes of Hell staring back at me