Chapter Text
June 2019
Jeno decides that he rather enjoys bus rides. All the fun of traveling and sight-seeing without the headache of driving. He also knows that he could enjoy this particular bus trip so much more if the ride weren’t so bumpy. He can hear the old ceramic jar’s rattles in his knapsack and he fears the bus rolling over a bad enough pothole will crack it open and unleash hell. “A wooden box would have been a lot sturdier,” he mumbles to the young man pretending to take a nap in the seat beside him. “A wooden box would have been so much… safer.”
“A wooden box,” states Donghyuck, not bothering to open his eyes, “would have destroyed the aesthetic. It had to be an antique jar.”
“I don’t think imps care about what they get sealed up in.” Jeno sinks lower in the seat, spreading his long legs. He doesn’t mean to press his knee into Donghyuck’s thigh but he’s quietly happy that the prickly boy doesn’t pull away. He argues, “Just as long as it has a lid, it works. We could have used a cookie tin. A Scrabble box!” Jeno wears a black tank-top and leather pants, which aren’t the ideal clothing for three-hour hikes through the mountains, but he firmly believes in fashion over function so it’s okay. Jeno runs his index finger over the outlines of his tattoos or, as sorcerers call them, containment marks. The special ink on a sorcerer's skin keeps their magic in check. And based on the fact that both of Jeno’s arms are marked from shoulder to wrist, Jeno only assumes he has quite a bit of magic to keep contained. He never particularly thought to ask for his specific power level but he can cast better spells than Jaemin and that means a lot because the Na family is famous. “Hell, we could have used a cigarette pack. That would have been less obvious than some blatantly suspicious ancient pottery.”
“We summoned and trapped a low-level demon. We might as well go all out and seal it in a decent-looking vessel. Give it a nice new home.” Donghyuck has this quick, soft, hurried method of speaking like every word out of his mouth is a closely-guarded secret. “But if we get caught...” He goes quiet but Jeno knows the weight of a threat when he hears one.
“We’ll be fine,” Jeno says, running a hand through his dark and shaggy mullet. It is getting quite long again. It nearly touches his shoulders. “You put a pretty strong dampening spell on it. I don’t think that many people will sniff it out.”
The bus roars around a curve and takes them further out of the mountains. There aren’t too many other passengers on the bus, just a handful of outdoorsy couples finished with their hiking for the afternoon. It is a good day for hiking. The trees are the brightest emerald green Jeno’s ever seen, like something out of a fairy tale. The sky is clear and beautiful and the early evening sun catches the leaves just right and it’s like the whole world is glowing.
Such a landscape reminds him of his roommate. Jaemin’s specialty is earth magic: communicating with flowers and trees and healing even the worst wounds with just sunlight. Jeno always thought it rather ironic that such a gentle magic was practiced by the rudest, most ill-tempered boy he’s ever met.
“Thanks for coming with me, though,” Jeno says. “Demon summoning is a group project.”
Donghyuck keeps his eyes closed and his mouth in a slight frown but if you know him, you can hear the self-satisfaction in his voice when he rhetorically asks, “You’d think I’d stay in the dorm and miss out on the opportunity to show off?” And show off he did. Jeno has to admit that although he’d done the blood magic necessary to open the gates of hell and lure the imp through the summoning circle, Donghyuck had done all the work in terms of sealing it. He rolled through the long chain of binding spells in that hurried way he did everything before Jeno had even recovered from the blood loss. “So what are we going to do with the thing?” Donghyuck asks, finally opening his eyes and looking up at him.
Jeno thinks they are the prettiest shade of brown in the whole wide world but he’ll never work up the nerve to say it aloud. He looks away from them. “To be honest, I didn’t think that far ahead,” Jeno admits. “I just woke up with the urge to skip classes and catch a demon so that’s what I-- what we did.”
“So gung-ho,” Donghyuck muses but Jeno can’t tell if he’s serious or teasing.
“Look, I’ll probably put the jar on top of my dresser and forget what’s in it by graduation.”
“Okay, now that sounds dangerous,” Donghyuck folds his arms over his chest and shuts his eyes again. “You’ll reach for it thinking it’s full of candy and then you pop open the lid and there’s fire and brimstone everywhere.”
Jeno takes a moment to look at Donghyuck. His eyebrow piercing glints in the light, his leather jacket still smells new and his eyeliner is a tad smudged from their trek through the woods. The top of his containment mark - a rose - peeks out from beneath the collar of his pastel blue shirt and loops behind his ear. Donghyuck’s neck is long and smooth and tan and, sometimes, Jeno wants to place his hand there but he is afraid to touch it because a rose like that definitely has thorns and will definitely make him bleed, but he can’t stop himself from imagining that he is brave enough to do it. Brave enough to cross the boundary and hold Donghyuck. He tightens his hand into a fist so he won’t get any ideas. “Do you think Jaemin will mess with the jar,” he asks to keep the conversation going, to take his mind off things. “He’s the nosiest roommate that’s ever lived.”
“I hope he does,” Donghyuck mumbles. “If he gets possessed by the little demon, do you think he’ll be nicer?”
“I don’t think imps possess people,” Jeno says, pouting as he thinks it through. “Or do they? I didn’t pass that class.”
Donghyuck makes a noncommittal sound that Jeno assumes is the end of the conversation so he turns back to the window right as the bus crosses over a wooden bridge. The vehicle passes a river that’s wide and shallow and as clear as glass. Even from this height, Jeno sees the rocks that line the river bottom and catches a glimpse of darting silver streaks that must be fish. Or baby serpents, maybe? Creatures were never his strong suit.
It is getting close to sunset and the peaks of the mountains start to block the sun’s light and stretch deep, purple shadows across the road. There’s just something about being out here that fills Jeno with comfort and his magical affinity isn’t even with plants! It’s an entirely different world from the jungle of glass and steel and brick of the city. Even their school with its tall stone walls and sweeping staircases feels claustrophobic in comparison to all of this sky . Jeno wants to spend a week out in these mountains, camping and hiking. He wants to bring Donghyuck so that they can look at the stars together every night. Then he figures he would have to bring Jaemin or they’d eat the wrong berries or traipse through a patch of poison ivy or set up their tents on an anthill. But if he brings Jaemin, he may as well get Donghyuck to bring Renjun so they can more easily trade off listen-to-Jaemin-complain-about-his-girlfriend duties. “Do you want to go camping,” Jeno blurts out.
“Absolutely not,” Donghyuck says quickly.
“We can look at the stars,” Jeno says, then backpedals. “I mean… you can study them better out here. No obstructions.”
Donghyuck doesn’t immediately disagree so Jeno considers this a success. Just mention stars and Donghyuck, tough as he tries to appear with the shaved sides of his head, will usually cave. His specialty is star magic, after all. Fortune telling, navigating, cloaking things. He’s mastered all sorts of sparkly spells and, unlike Jaemin, Jeno thinks that kind of magic fits Donghyuck perfectly. Donghyuck speaks like he has a lot of secrets and secrets feel like a very nighttime thing.
“So is that a yes?” Jeno wonders, grinning from ear to ear. “You’ll go camping with me?”
“It’s not a no,” Donghyuck responds and Jeno decides that’s the closest he’s going to get so he accepts it and doesn’t press it so Donghyuck won’t have the chance to think twice and change his mind.
Thankfully, they don’t hit any massive potholes.
At the base of the mountains, the tiny road they are on merges with a highway and the bus engine roars louder and higher as they pick up speed. The mountains look different from this angle, less magical, and Jeno frowns as he spots the lights of the city on the horizon, the haze of smog hanging above the skyscrapers as visible as a curse. “You think anybody noticed we were gone today?” Jeno asks when they’ve been riding for a long while, listening to the hushed conversations of the other passengers.
Donghyuck sighs. “I doubt Renjun would have noticed. We don’t share any classes this quarter. Poor bastard’s still on student ambassador duty, too, babysitting those fellows from overseas.”
“Jaemin has probably thrown a fit,” Jeno huffs. “He keeps track of me like we’re dating.”
“Oh, you two aren’t together?” Donghyuck cracks open an eye and glances over at him with an unreadable expression. “Could have fooled me with that chemistry.” He closes his eye again.
Jeno stiffens. He isn’t sure if it’s another of Donghyuck’s scathing jokes or if the boy seriously thinks he and Jaemin are a thing . Instead of directly responding, he just says, “I probably have fifteen missed calls from him.”
The two of them made the deliberate decision to leave their cell phones in their dorms so that any kind of tracer spells wouldn’t point to way out here in the mountains... but Jaemin is nosy and Jeno won’t put it past his roommate to try something a little… brazen.
The high, rattling whine of the bus engine slows down considerably and both Donghyuck and Jeno lean forward to peer over the seat in front of them and out the bus’s front windshield. They still aren’t close to their school. Hell, they still aren’t close to the city limits. Traffic moving in the opposite direction, out of town, is moving as normal, but their side of the highway is backed up bumper to bumper and it is Donghyuck who spots the police lights up ahead.
“I don’t see a wreck,” he states. “No ambulances or fire trucks.”
The sun is setting properly now, the sky behind them a brilliant bouquet of yellows and pinks and purples. The piercing glow of all the brake lights makes it hard to see what’s up ahead but Jeno’s already got a feeling. “It’s a checkpoint,” he says as he recalls the news broadcast that morning. “The summer solstice is right around the corner so the authorities are cracking down on what artifacts are allowed into the city.”
Jeno and Donghyuck both eye Jeno’s knapsack warily.
Not only is the imp’s antique jar in there, but all of the objects needed for the sealing spell and the summoning ritual. Separately, the items are already questionable. Sealing spells could possibly slide in the month of October when spirits more frequently get stuck in the world of the living, but blood magic - and demon summoning in particular - has been banned since The Great 2016 Fire.
Sometimes Jeno hates his own spontaneity. “I just had to get a demon for a pet, didn’t I?”
The two sorcerers stare at each other under the bus’s buzzing fluorescent lights and Donghyuck echoes his earlier threat: “If we get caught…”
“Can you hide them?” Jeno whispers, lifting his knapsack.
“I’d have to cast a different cloaking spell for every individual item and even if we have the time for all of that, if they use dogs, the mutts will sniff it out.”
That’s the thing about magic. It has a smell. The stronger the spell the heavier the scent of it lingers in the air. Donghyuck’s star magic smells delicate and floral and homelike. Jeno's own smells like lit matches and burning plastic. “Let’s throw everything except the jar out of the window,” Jeno hastily, dumbly suggests. He starts to slide down the bus window, but--
“Do you hear yourself?” Donghyuck points past Jeno out the window where an SUV idles next to the bus in the neighboring lane. The child in the backseat stares up at the two of them curiously, at the boys who look more like rock band members than students.
They whisper-argue over smuggling methods as the bus moves closer and closer to the checkpoint. Officers swarm around the vehicles in the streets with their flashlights and magic-sniffing hounds, all in the name of public safety.
The two of them take too long to decide.
A pair of officers board the bus. One is a large-nosed woman with her blonde-streaked hair buzzed fashionably short. Her partner is a squarely-built guy with awkward features who doesn’t look much older than the sorcerers. The male leads a handsome, gray-furred boxer down the bus’s aisle and the dog sniffs at the floor, pauses, sniffs, pauses, sniffs… then raises its snout and looks straight at Jeno’s knapsack.
“Evening, gentleman,” the young officer says smoothly, aiming his flashlight in Donghyuck’s face and then Jeno’s, both of them squint and squirm beneath the light. “What do you have there?” The beam of light moves in a lazy circle around the knapsack.
“School supplies,” Jeno lies, but not only does he manage it with a straight face, he looks the officer right in the eye as he does it. The perks of being a delinquent.
Donghyuck silently applauds his moxy.
The officer gives the dog’s leash a gentle tug, as if that is all the explanation he needs and he is going to end it at that, but the dog remains stiff and lets out a low, disconcerting growl. The officer pins the flashlight beam on Jeno’s face again, who raises a hand to block the unnecessary light on the brightly-lit bus. The man demands, “Can you open the bag?”
Jeno figures he can keep the easy lies rolling. “I don’t see what the problem is, officer. We’re just trying to get back on campus before curfew. Don’t want our weekend privileges revoked.” As if skipping classes doesn’t already threaten such privileges.
Donghyuck pushes his knee against Jeno’s leg hard; a silent warning: don’t be a dick.
“But since you want me to open it, I’ll open it.” Jeno puts on his best smile and slowly moves his hands to the knapsack. He thinks it’s rather fashionable, all things considered; it's made of distressed denim and dark leather straps and gold zippers. All it is missing is a burned-on sigil and it’ll look like it belongs to a member of a biker gang. Jeno sits the bag on his lap and unhooks the main flap and tilts everything so that the officer can easily see its contents.
It’s all there, right in the open. The elements for the sealing spell, tiny mirrors and scraps of paper with power words scribbled on them; the knife and bowl and chalk and parchment and faintly glowing crystals for the demon summoning spell; and, right on top, the antique jar where a low-level demon (but still a demon) is now sealed. The only thing keeping the imp in the jar is a slight twist of the lid to the right and the officer’s flashlight beam is aimed right at it.
“What’s that?” The young officer tilts his head curiously. “Care to explain?”
His older partner notices the tension in the air and moves up behind the man to peer over his shoulder. Her hawk-like gaze scrapes over both of the boys as if committing their faces to memory. First Donghyuck and then Jeno. Her eyes linger on Jeno’s unorthodox number of containment marks and she visibly stiffens.
“It’s an antique,” Jeno pipes up, trying to remain carefree. “Just bought it at a thrift store.” That much was true if way earlier that morning can be considered ‘just.’ Then he remembers the word Donghyuck had used. “It’s aesthetic!”
Donghyuck’s knee digs into his leg again. Don’t be a dick.
“It is rather beautiful,” the female officer points out. “The painting style could be Joseon-era but I doubt the colors would be so vibrant after so long. If the seller told you it’s authentic, you may have been scammed.” Donghyuck lets out a snort. The officer says, “Regardless, we have reason to believe it could be dangerous.” She reaches for it.
“Don’t touch it,” Jeno exclaims, louder than he intends. The female officer startles at the sudden baritone of his voice. “It’s delicate,” he tries to smooth things over. “See? It’s thin like expensive porcelain.”
The officers share a look and Jeno slumps back in his seat because he knows he’s messed things up somehow.
Donghyuck turns in the seat. His knees are out in the aisle, but more importantly, they are no longer pressed against Jeno’s thighs.
It’s the younger, male officer that says, “Gentlemen, if you don’t mind, we will need to confiscate this bag. Please exit the bus so that we can ask you a few questions.”
Only then is Jeno made aware that all of the other passengers are staring at them. Their phones record them. Their fingers are pointed right at them. Their whispers are certainly about them. His cheeks go red from anger.
The female officer reaches for the knapsack, fingers curling around one of the bag’s leather straps. Jeno wants to yank it from her hands but he forces himself to sit still, to play it cool. She lifts it out of his grasp, but not gently enough, and Jeno feels the weight in the bag shift before the old jar slips out. It falls through the air slower than gravity should let it and Jeno realizes he can just grab it out of the air if he reaches for it, but... it’s too late.
The old clay jar hits the floor of the bus with a crash louder and deeper than something its size should have made. The sound is soul rattling. Donghyuck covers his ears and the dog leaps back and whines. The air in the bus goes super hot like it is the middle of the day during a heat wave and the entire bus shakes and rattles. Then, in a blink, all of the windows explode outward in a terrifying cascade of glass as the imp escapes its confines.
Jeno only sees the demons’s cinder-covered face for a moment, but he still thinks it looks a little like Jaemin.