Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series

by Virginia McClain

  Of course, when I’d asked her how she’d created them, her reply had just reaffirmed my assumption that she was decidedly lacking in sanity.

  “Vic, darling, a goddess can do whatever she wants.”

  Goddess, right. Sure… I mean, hey, who am I to judge? I just started turning into a snow leopard yesterday… maybe she was a goddess.

  She sure seemed delusional though.

  Trev, when we get back home I need to find some normal friends.

  Why do you continue to talk to ssssomeone who isssss not ressssponding? replied a voice that was decidedly not Trevor’s.

  OH SHIT.

  Ummm… hello? I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was broadcasting this to everyone.

  Could anyone else do this? I had honestly thought this was just a twin thing.

  I doubt there issss anyone elsssse who can hear bessssidessss me, but that issss only becausssse no one elsssse issss here.

  Well, that was weird. According to Sol, there were close to two thousand people in this facility, and a number of them were supposedly in these very dungeons.

  I must have accidentally broadcast some of that thought, because the other voice replied again.

  No one who matterssss. There wassss one before you, but he… left.

  Well, that sounded ominous.

  Have you been here long? I asked, unsure what else to say.

  Not long by my people’ssss sssstandardssss, but much longer than I would like.

  Well, that told me precisely nothing.

  What are you in for? I asked, wondering if my tone would be conveyed properly via telepathy.

  I killed a handful of MOME agentssss who went where they should not have, the voice replied, in a tone that suggested that this was the obvious and rational response to such a scenario. And you?

  Um… I resisted arrest, I suppose. I doubted that whoever I was talking to was on MOME’s side, especially considering why she was here, but I didn’t think I should just go revealing our master plan to anyone who could communicate telepathically with me. Besides, if she had heard me when I didn’t mean for her to, who knew who else could be listening in to our conversation?

  You are unssssure? the voice asked.

  It’s complicated, I replied.

  Either you ressssissssted arresssst or you did not.

  Well, I guess that depends on your perspective. I don’t think I resisted arrest. I didn’t think anyone was even trying to arrest me, but tell that to the MOME agent who claims that she was arresting me and that I ran away from her and then fought her off when she tackled me to the ground. I didn’t know she was trying to arrest me, I just thought she was some crazy woman attacking me. She claims she shouted that I was under arrest and to hold still, but I never heard her.

  The story was a bit far-fetched, I had to admit, but it amused me, and I was bored, and what the hell else was I going to do down here?

  So you both ressssissssted arresssst and did not? the voice asked.

  Yep. It was like Schrödinger’s arrest. I was both under arrest and not. I chuckled to myself. It was actually a pretty poor Schrödinger analogy, but it still made me laugh.

  Sssschrödinger?

  Maybe she had been in here a looong time.

  Schrödinger was a scientist. He’s famous for devising a thought experiment to point out a problem that he saw with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. He said that if you have a cat in a box and you cannot see or hear it, the cat is both alive and dead until you open the box, and then it is only one or the other.

  And that was an oversimplification of Schrödinger’s paradox, but it was enough to explain most of the internet memes on the subject.

  Interessssting, the voice said. Sssso, you were both under arresssst and not under arresssst until ssssomeone elsssse looked at the ssssituation and decsssided.

  Yeah. More or less.

  Like I said, it wasn’t the best analogy for this scenario.

  And the people here decssssided you were under arresssst.

  So it would seem, I admitted.

  Doessss that make you the living cat, or the dead cat? the voice asked.

  Hmm… if we take the analogy to its full extent, I guess I’m the dead cat, if one is fond of cats, but I prefer to think of myself as the live cat.

  That issss undersssstandable, the voice said.

  I was about to make a joke about people who don’t like cats, when the door to my cell burst into flames and showered me in fiery shards.

  “WHAT THE FUCK, Trev!?” I said, brushing the cinders off of myself.

  “Sorry. These doors tend to be soundproof, so yelling was pointless, and I tried to warn you to stand back, but it seemed like you couldn’t hear me. The rock must be messing with our connection.”

  I snickered again.

  “The Rock will layeth the smacketh down upon our telepathy!”

  Trev laughed loudly, and I wrapped him in a hug. As disconcerting as it was to see him with pasty white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, he still felt exactly right.

  “Thanks for showing up. Where to?” I asked.

  “Down,” he said, gesturing towards a dark stone corridor lined with flickering torches that angled gently towards the center of the earth. The hallway carried the same scent of moss and damp stone that permeated my small chamber, but with the added flavor of burning pitch.

  “Well, that’s not ominous,” I said, repressing a shudder even as we started down the corridor. “What’s with the thirteenth-century dungeon look?”

  Trev shrugged.

  “Probably original. MOME is pretty old, and why update the dungeon?”

  “Isn’t it a little sketchy that a modern governing body still has a dungeon?”

  “Don’t get me started,” Trev grumbled.

  I laughed, but dropped the subject anyway. Trev had made his distaste for MOME quite clear already. He’d done one full tirade about tyranny and the oppression of the magically different during the planning stage of this mission, and we probably needed to focus on the task at hand.

  It took much longer than I expected before we reached the next large wooden door in the corridor. I was mainly surprised by just how much solid rock separated each tiny six-foot by six-foot chamber.

  Then I was extra surprised when Trev just grabbed the locked metal bolt that secured said door and held the assembly in his hand until it melted.

  The door began a slow swing open, and Trev shouted, “Happy Hunting!” before we both booked it farther down the decidedly downward-sloping hall.

  “What the hell, Trev?!” I asked, as we hurried farther down into the dungeon.

  “What? That was a selkie. She’ll have a grand time finding MOME agents and delivering a bit of payback.”

  “No. I mean the door! What’s up with just melting the bolt off? Why did you have to explode mine into a bajillion pieces and shower me with its flaming ruins if you could just melt the bolt?”

  “Oh, that. Your door was reinforced with a few spells I didn’t recognize. Blowing it up was the best I could come up with on short notice. What did you do to piss them off, by the way?”

  “Well, I didn’t think it would be convincing if I went down without a fight. You should have seen the giant troll thing they set on me when they found me snooping around Sol’s department. It was the size of an elephant.”

  “Probably Niko,” Trev suggested. “Is he ok?”

  “Who knows? He probably has a wicked headache. How prone are trolls to concussions?”

  “Not very.”

  “Then he’s probably fine. Friend of yours?” I asked.

  “Kind of. Certainly not a bad guy. Trolls tend to get roped into doing MOME's dirty work pretty easily. The alternatives that MOME offers aren’t terribly pleasant, so I can’t blame them, really.”

  “Fair enough. Well, I tried to avoid permanent damage, but it didn’t seem like he was extending me the same courtesy, so I’m not sure how concerned I am, in all honesty.”


  “Did you find what you were looking for, at least?” Trev asked, clearly ready to change the subject.

  I nodded. “Yep. Just where you said it would be. Didn’t have time to look at it before handing it off, though.”

  “Guess we’ll have to trust Sol at some point,” Trev said.

  “True enough. If she were going to screw us over, she probably would've done it by now.”

  We finally reached another wooden door, and Trev did the same handle-melting trick as before.

  “Seriously? What kind of mega-criminal do they think I am?” I asked, when the door popped open as soon as the bolt and handle disappeared.

  Trev smiled.

  “Trolls aren’t easy to subdue,” was all he said, before we turned and headed farther into the mountain.

  “Dude, how many of these are we going to open? I didn’t think they were going to be this far apart.”

  “My intel shows that the next one is the last occupied room in this part of the dungeon. One more selkie. That last one was a fire sprite.”

  I took a deep breath. Forty-eight hours ago, I had thought that magic was just something I enjoyed reading about on the weekends. The idea that we were releasing fire sprites and selkies from imprisonment, or that I had fought a troll earlier… it was still a bit much. I took a long look at Trev and suddenly felt a strange pang of longing.

  “What’s that look for?” he asked, even as we both kept up a light jog down the corridor.

  “Just… none of this is new to you. I mean, Mom and Dad never told us about this stuff when we were little and then you were gone, my memory was wiped, and… I feel like a total outsider in this world, but you’re sitting there smirking about how your sister brought down a troll, because you know about things like that.”

  “I’m not sitting, thank you very much, my legs are moving just as fast as yours.”

  “You know what I mean, Trev. This is your world. You fit in here.”

  Trev grabbed both my shoulders and pulled us both to a stop.

  “Vic, you fit in here just as much as I do, you’re just not used to it yet. The strangeness will fade pretty quickly, just wait, and… besides, I’m not really sure you get to complain about being the one who wasn’t kidnapped and separated from your family for ten years.”

  I smacked my forehead against his shoulder, and then did it again for good measure.

  “I’m so sorry, Trev. Of course I don’t. What the fuck is wrong with me? I just… I guess I just haven’t felt like myself in a long while and you seem pretty… together.”

  Trev wrapped me in a firm hug and when I felt his shoulders shake slightly, I looked up to catch his gaze.

  Nope. Definitely not together. Trev’s eyes were closed, but his breath was shaky and there was definitely moisture pooling at the corners of his eyes. I hugged him back even more fiercely than he’d hugged me.

  “I’m sorry, Trev. Pity party over. I love you. I missed you. And I’m here for you any time you need to talk about it.”

  He smiled, stepping back, and we held hands as we started up our jog again.

  The final door was just as easily dispatched as the others.

  We were just about to turn around and follow the final selkie (a glorious, blue-skinned, green-haired, nymph-like creature whose webbed fingers and toes were visible in the fashionable jeans, tank-top, and flip-flop ensemble she was sporting) when a voice brought us to a standstill.

  And what of me, Living Cat?

  I turned and looked at Trev, who appeared so startled that I could only assume he’d heard it too.

  “She’s down here?” he muttered, taking me from zero to confused in no time flat.

  “Do you know… her?”

  “I didn’t know she was in this part of the dungeon. She said… damn it!”

  “What is it, Trev?”

  “Come on, Vic. We can’t leave her here.”

  “Do we have time to—”

  Trev grabbed my hand and started sprinting down the corridor before I could finish speaking, leading us deeper into the mountain once more, this time at full speed.

  OF COURSE THERE was another troll guarding this door.

  Of course there was.

  We had raced past another ten doors like the one that I had been locked behind after releasing the last selkie, but they had all been empty, according to Trev. Now, we reached one that was clearly occupied, even though Trev’s reconnaissance had told him otherwise. Either that, or the giant creature that looked more like a swift-moving boulder was just here for his smoke break.

  As we neared the door, I shifted to a fighting stance, getting ready to take this troll by surprise. I hoped I could cause enough of a distraction to give Trev time to pull whatever door trick was needed to get to whoever it was we were rescuing.

  I was so focused on the rock-like behemoth before me that I almost didn’t notice the tiny winged creature that launched itself from his shoulder until it was too late.

  That was probably how she got most of her opponents.

  Luckily, I saw the brief glint of steel in torchlight out of the corner of my eye just before she reached me, and I shifted to snow leopard just in time to send the tiny, sparkly, winged whatever-she-was flying past my head. If I was going to distract two opponents, especially ones as complementary as a troll and a pixie, for any length of time, I needed maximum reaction speed, and my human self had nothin’ on my snow leopard.

  Do not hurt them, Living Cat, they are only here under duresssss.

  Well, shit.

  That would have been more helpful to know before I’d provoked the flying warrior into trying to stab my eyes out, because now that she was at it, she was going to be rather difficult to discourage without doing some damage.

  The pixie issss more ressssilient than the troll, Living Cat.

  Oops. I must be projecting again. I really needed to work on that. I also needed to look into how many people could pick up on those projected thoughts, but now was not the time to worry about that. Now was the time to lay the smack down on the fierce-ass tiny warrior who was getting far too close to spearing my head with her six-inch sword for my liking.

  The tricky thing was that I was batting her out of the air (or trying to) all while weaving in and out of the troll’s legs, in order to make it as difficult as possible for the troll to grab me. The troll was delightfully slow, but if he (curious how I know it was a he? Go ahead, ask! I dare you. No? I’ll give you a hint: I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t been dancing between his legs looking up occasionally to keep tabs on a damnably fast pixie—and I would’ve been quite happy to live out my life with the mystery unsolved, let me tell you) grabbed me I was going to be one squished kitty.

  The flying warrior dove at me again, at the same time that the troll shifted his weight to try to step on me, and I barely slipped between them without losing an ear. I hissed in frustration while turning around as quickly as I could to resume the fight, and was delighted to find that the winged fighter woman had embedded her tiny sword into the troll’s skin and couldn’t seem to dislodge it.

  I roared in triumph, but before I could leap forward to make a pixie tattoo on the troll’s leg, Trev let out his own whoop of victory, and I saw him slip inside the room beyond.

  A moment later, he emerged from the dungeon cell with the most startlingly beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Her skin and hair were the color of midnight, covered in a faint iridescent sheen, and her irises were bright yellow, with slitted pupils like a snake’s.

  “Do not attack the Living Cat, Ssssylvesssstra. She meanssss you no harm.”

  It was odd to hear that voice coming from the woman standing before me instead of inside my head, but when tallied up with everything else that had happened to me this week, it really didn’t rank very high on the Bizarre-O-Meter.

  “Vic, this is Rhelia. Rhelia, this is my sister Victoria. We need to go before anyone realizes what we’re up to. Especially now.”

  “Why especially now?�
� I asked, after shifting back to human.

  “Because of Rhelia,” he replied, as though that explained everything.

  But Trev wasn’t joking about being in a hurry. He turned and started sprinting up the corridor, Rhelia following close on his heels for a moment before she did… something that sped her past Trev and out of my line of sight. Having resumed my human shape, I started wrestling with my jeans so that I could follow them as soon as possible.

  “Well, that was rude,” came a voice from behind me.

  I turned and saw the small winged warrior holding her sword over her small armor-plated shoulder and tapping one foot on the shoulder of the troll.

  “Sorry,” I said, as I pulled my sports bra and shirt back into place. “We have a whole escape plan thing we have to keep up with. If you guys need a distraction to get out of here, now might be a good time.”

  It surprised me that the troll and the winged fighter had listened to Rhelia at all, but I wasn’t about to look a gift… whatever Rhelia was, she didn’t seem much like a horse… in the mouth.

  “I’d better catch up to them,” I said, tugging my boots on, thankful that they were zip-ups instead of lace-ups, and then turning on my heel and taking off before they could rethink our truce.

  By the time I caught up with Trevor, we were back in the standard institutional halls of the upper levels of MOME and Rhelia was nowhere in sight. I was about to ask him where she’d disappeared to, when all of a sudden he was no longer running beside me.

  Instead he was lying on the floor a few yards ahead of me, scrambling to fight off a crazed, sparkle-fanged moron.