I HAVE ASKED TO BE WHERE NO STORMS COME by Gwendolyn N. Nix
The facts of Domino Bluepoint’s afterlife are simple: he’s a half-breed witch from a people without a name, and no one wants to be stuck in Hell with witch blood. When a demon bounty-hunter comes calling, Domino pairs up with his mother, who died too young and carries the witch lineage in her veins, to survive. Soon the two of them are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid running from whatever torture awaits them and whoever wants to harvest their magic. Yet, Domino doesn’t know that his brother, Wicasah, is behind this and is desperate to resurrect Domino out of long-lasting guilt and a sensation of belonging to no place and no one.
As Wicasah dives deeper into darker magic that ends in an ill-made deal, Domino must overcome addiction, depression, and hone his own brand of witch-magic to help save his brother—and the world—from an ancient god of lighting and thunder.
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SYNOPSIS
The facts of Domino Bluepoint's life are simple: he's a half-breed witch from a people without a name, living out a cursed Butch Cassidy afterlife, and no one wants to be stuck in Hell with witch blood. When he discovers bounty hunters are on his trail, he dodges monsters until caught… and learns his own brother, who wields insurmountable power, is behind it all.
Revenge and guilt have eaten at Wicasah Bluepoint ever since he murdered his father at a young age and ushered in powerful magic linked to his lineage. Yet, when he learns his brother, Domino, has been killed by his enemies and now resides in hell, he is determined to resurrect him. But doing so means rolling the dice and rubbing shoulders with monsters and demons full of ulterior motives, ultimately leaving him crafting an ill-fated deal with his sanity at stake.
Bound to an ancient entity of thunder and lightning, he finds himself enslaved and transforming hell in ways unimagined.
As the two fight through hell to find each other again, they discover an even darker power behind their cursed lineage, one that lies deep under the earth and who will use Wicasah’s power to seek freedom.
Desperate to escape their own dark destiny, the two must decide if they will save the world… or let it burn.
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PART I: HELL
CHAPTER 1
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
"Heaven-Haven" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Domino learned he had to be adaptable.
He may have died sometime in the twentieth century, but the world still spun on above. New-fangled ideas, technology, and culture leaked into Hell’s subterranean world. He’d noticed it before: the women sporting blue jeans, the short leather jackets, the abandoned pickit signs with painted mantras calling to burn the bra alongsidefrack the Bloody, but it didn’t truly hit him until he found a contained black box of glass. Something from the Brightside—the East-side. Nothing so fancy would be found in the West, on his side of the Dark and Bloody, no matter how much time passed.
That was the problem with adaptability. If you didn’t do it, refused to, you ended up stranded in your own time. Locked in a whirlwind of denial, because life had moved on without you and you weren’t ready to be forgotten.
It fractured his heart when he found people like that, like the young thing before him, sitting crossed-legged in the desert with her fleshless fingers curled in boned zen. His throat cracked as he called out to her, too long silent on this never-ending peregrination. Her long bleached hair swept across a face blistered and peeling from the sun. He snapped his fingers bare inches from her nose, but she didn’t blink. Didn’t move. Returned to dust.
He eyed her ripped jeans, her canvas tennis shoes worn through the soles, and the square black metal brick balanced on her bent knee. He took it, steadily working through the mechanics of a touch screen. Hellish burble cooed through the earpiece, but he ignored it. This was damnation, after all. What did you expect? This was how you survived in Hell. Stealing, hijacking, and fast-talking just to get what you needed.
His face remained passive as applications opened up bright colored hieroglyphic bubbles. He sat, hoping this wasn’t a laid trap, and mimicked her crossed legs. Their kneecaps brushed.
It might’ve been minutes or a whole year that he sat next to her, figuring out the black box. Time had conditioned him to approach things with childish glee, instead of like a frustrated fogey. Puzzles kept him sane. Taught him to accept new appliances that were only science fiction pulp in his time.
He tapped the glass with his fingernail and scrolled through her pictures: three smiling friends, a chocolate colored puppy, and a rainbow cutting through the gray from far away. He stared at the picture until the screen blacked out. He thought about centuries of black skies full of peace, like the good book said. He thought about a horizon that wasn’t red-lit with hellfire. He looked up. No rainbows here.
Pocketing the device, he patted the girl gently on her shoulder and wished her well on her journey.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gwendolyn N. Nix is a professional editor and author, penning the Celestial Scripts series (The Falling Dawn, and Seams of Shadow), Sharks of the Wasteland (Cataclysm Cycle), and the new release from Crystal Lake Publishing, I Have Asked To Be Where No Storms Come.She is also the editor of the Marvel Xavier's Institute: School of X anthology. A member of SFWA and Horror Writer's Association, her short fiction has appeared in a variety of anthologies, such as Pileaus Symphony No. 1, Where the Veil Is Thin, and Apex: Worlds of Dinosaurs.
She lives in Montana with her husband, young son, and wild gray Labrador.
Find her online at gwendolynnix.com, on Twitter at @gwendolynnix or Instagram at @gwendolyn.nix.
