Lying Liars Who Don't Tell The Truth

Chapter One

The sun beamed hot on the July afternoon Amar brought me to his favorite ice cream parlor in New York City — he absolutely insisted on calling it a parlor. He said it was a decent hangover cure, though just the act of leaving his apartment on the Lower West Side and emerging onto the impossibly noisy city streets seemed to aggravate my headache to a degree that even cold vanilla ice cream couldn't solve.

"I told you we should have gotten napkins," I said to Amar as we exited the air-conditioned parlor onto the muggy sidewalk. Dribbles of sticky white ice cream were already beginning to drip from my cone — Amar had also insisted I get a cone — as I desperately tried to lick faster than the ninety-degree heat could melt.

"Napkins are for the faint of heart," said Amar, always the poet. He seemed to be struggling just as mightily with his own chocolate cone, though the rapid melting appeared to bother him a lot less.

I opened my mouth to snidely mention that he was going to get chocolate all over his white tee-shirt when he gently nudged me to the side of the sidewalk, out of the way of the oncoming foot traffic. He took his clean hand and wrapped it around my vanilla-stained one, squishing the cold creme into my skin. A few moments later, when he released my hand, it was completely clean. With another wave of his hand above the top of my cone, the glassy outer layer of the ice cream re-froze in an instant.

I looked at Amar, whose face was beaming like it always did when he got to perform any kind of Magick, and shook my head. "Pardon me, I didn't realize ice cream drippings were such a common problem for Demons that they would need an entire incantation to deal with them."

Amar's grin only widened as he nodded for us to continue walking. "Incantations are for Witches, Lucicoria," he said matter of factly, his eyes flicking to me so he could watch my reaction to him using my full name.

"If you call me Lucicoria again I'm going to hex you," I said, and Amar laughed because he knew I didn't know the first thing about hexing. I had heard him use the word the other day and thought his usage coupled with my pop-culture knowledge would suffice.

"I could teach you how to hex, you know," Amar said as he ran his tongue along his ice cream. I was a little disappointed when he spelled his cone as such that there was no possibility of him having to change his shirt again.

I had only known Amar for a little more than four days then and I had already come to expect an offer for him to personally teach me everything a Demon or Witch could know about Magick every half-hour or so.

Feeling more patient than usual — was the ice cream really working? — I let him on for a little while longer. "I thought if I was a Demon," I said pensively, watching his face light up as he realized he was about to get the chance to talk to me more about Magick, "than I wouldn't need to learn how to do anything. I thought all of the Power was inside of me."

Per usual, my cynicism did nothing to deter Amar's enthusiasm. "It is," he explained happily, "but you still have to know how to use it. Witches draw their Power from spells, incantations — decorative crystals — but Demons don't need to draw their Power from anywhere because they inherently possess it."

I considered this momentarily. "How do you know I'm not drawing Power from a decorative lava lamp?"

"Because I can tell," said Amar as he led us around a corner. I was used to being led around the city by now so I knew not to question his direction (even if I was fairly certain we had gotten lost at least once). "It comes with knowing you're a Demon for longer than fifteen minutes."

Amar could never talk enough about my parents. "I must have missed the 'Am I A Demon?' day at Mormon Sunday school," I said, immediately launching Amar into a fit of laughter.