Read Online Random Acts of Sorcery by Karen Mead - Free Book Online Page A

simple?
    Sam sipped his own tea and reached for the remote, turning off the show right when they were getting to the Holy Tower of Cupcakes challenge. There was silence for a few moments after the screen went dark. The light of the day had long since faded, and without the blue glow of the TV, there was very little light in the room.
    “You probably hate dumb reality shows like that,” she ventured finally. He was sitting on the other side of the couch from her, around an interior corner, so he was pretty much facing her. In the dim light, she could still see him, but the rest of the room had faded to black.
    “Less than you might think. Sometimes I leave them on in the background these days. The sheer stupidity of it is kind of comforting, in a strange way,” he said, not looking at her. He sipped his tea quietly.
    “Yeah, I know what you mean,” she said.
    Silence.
    Cassie flushed and looked at the floor. They were supposed to talk, that had to have been Sam’s intention when turning off the TV, but about what? They’d used up all the good Daily Grind-related topics over dinner.
    “Hey Sam, can I ask you something?” she ventured after the silence had grown intolerable.
    He gave her a tired smile. “You can ask—”
    “—anything I want, but whether or not you choose to answer is a different story, blah blah blah,” said Cassie dismissively. “I’m used to your whole literal-Nazi thing.”
    “Then go ahead.” He put his mostly empty mug down on the coffee table, stretched and leaned back into the couch, putting his arms behind his head. The fact that he finally looked comfortable lessened the awkwardness a little, Cassie thought.
    “Why do you work at The Daily Grind anyway? I mean, not DG specifically,” she said gesturing quickly with her hand, realizing he might misinterpret the question. “I mean, why do you only work minimum-wage jobs? You went to college, right?”
    Sam thought for a while before he answered, looking at the ceiling instead of her. “You’ve met my mother,” he said finally.
    “As if that explains everything.”
    “Doesn’t it?” Sam chuckled softly and took a deep breath. Cassie figured that he was gauging how much he cared to reveal. “Helen, I think she was always disappointed in the world…that she couldn’t have everything she wanted from it. I think she wanted to use me to fix that; to create someone who could have the world as their oyster,” he said. He squinted, as though trying to see through to the core of his mother’s soul in his memories.
    “She planned for me to have everything. That’s why she summoned a demon to father her child; just being human wasn’t enough for what she wanted for me. I think she wanted to make me King of the World, or as close as someone can be to that.”
    “That seems like something she would do.”
    “It was stifling,” he said, shifting in his seat. “I hated it. I just wanted to know why the other kids in town were scared and wouldn’t play with me, but she was too busy trying to mold me into this…this monument to perfection, that she didn’t care how I felt. She started teaching me calculus in the third grade,” he said, eyes glazed over with reminiscing. He took another deep breath. “I was so bored in school, but she wouldn’t let me stop going, because I still needed ‘proper socialization,’ as she said. The other kids resented me, started to bully me. I fought back once, and the kid nearly died, so the bullying stopped, but then they wouldn’t even talk to me.”
    Cassie exhaled, trying to imagine what the horror of a childhood like that was like. To her surprise, it hurt to hear it, not so much for Sam’s sake—although she did feel sorry for him—but because it made her think badly of Helen. She hadn’t consciously realized it, but she had seriously idolized the older witch. Cassie herself so often felt powerless, yet Helen ordered Lords of Hell around like it was no big deal, and even better, they