by Quinn Loftis
“Jax!” He heard a hint of trepidation in her voice.
The golem picked up its pace.
“Jax,” Zuri screamed again, and the hint of trepidation turned into full-blown panic.
The golem was upon her now. It raised its clunky fists high, preparing to pulverize the woman. Then a pumpkin-sized stone exploded across its back.
“Hey, blockhead,” Jax hollered. “I didn’t say you could be excused.”
It turned and faced Jax again. A look of confusion crossed the rock monster’s face. The two figures ran at one another, meeting with a crash of rock upon rock. Jax fell as the golem barreled over him. He toppled back and brought his legs upward, using his momentum to catapult the creature backward over his head. Before the thing had a chance to right itself and face him, Jax was on his feet. He jumped on the creature’s back, calling out spells, drawing strength from the creature itself. The golem was made completely of earth, after all, and that’s where Jax drew his power from. Jax’s fists shimmered and morphed into an iron-like substance. He began pummeling the golem on top of its rocky head. The beast wailed and threw its weight forward and ducked, flipping Jax over his shoulder in a judo-like maneuver.
“When did they start training the blockheads in martial arts?” Jax muttered. He regained his feet and faced the monster. The two of them squared off like a couple of prizefighters. They exchanged blows, neither able to incapacitate the other. Eventually, the boxing match became a wrestling match as they locked up and fell to the ground.
“As much as I love wrestling statues, Zuri, I could use a little help here.”
“I'm trying,” she yelled back from where she still sat with her palm in the dirt. “This little bugger is faster than I thought.” Jax knew she was concentrating. He could see her eyes squeezed shut as she searched the earth beneath, manipulating the soil to her will, boxing the earth spirit in, dragging him into her trap. “I've just about got him.”
“Good, ’cuz I don't know how much longer I'll be able to hold off Frankenboulder here.”
All of a sudden, about ten yards to Jax’s left, the earth began to quake and rumble. Then, with a rending sound, the ground itself split open, and the gnome came flying out of the earth covered in mud and dirt and rock. He shot up into the air, muttering and sputtering and cursing all things good in the world as earthen mullock sprayed out from the ground around him.
In the blink of an eye, Zuri was beneath him. She held her dagger ready as the gnome descended. The wavy obsidian weapon caught the sunlight, and glints of blue could be seen running the length of the blade. The gnome flailed his small arms and legs in all directions while he fell. It did no good. There was no stopping his descent. Just as he was about to reach her, Zuri thrust her blade upward, plunging the blade directly into the gnome’s chest. There was a gurgling sound as the small creature thrashed, impaled on the end of Zuri’s arm, the knife buried all the way up to the hilt. She grabbed the creature by its head and yanked backward as she pulled her arm in the opposite direction. The gnome fell to the ground, shattering into a thousand tiny stone pieces when it landed.
The stone golem had used Jax’s momentary diverted attention on Zuri to get the upper hand. He had Jax pinned on his back. It sat astride the man, raining down clubbing blows on his face. Jax blocked them as best as he could but had little success. Suddenly, when the life left the gnome, his stone golem disintegrated as well, its master’s magic no longer sustaining it. Jax’s eyes widened as the golem crumbled, and a cascade of rocks avalanched down on him.
“Dammit,” he yelled from under the pile of rubble where his voice came out muffled.
“Calm down, I’m coming.” Zuri walked over and held out her hands. With a few words, the rocks began to shake and then roll off Jax, piling themselves neatly next to him in a cairn-like structure.
“Took long enough,” Jax said, rising and dusting himself off.
“Sorry, some of us have real magic to do,” said Zuri. “I don’t have time to roll around in the dirt playing with my friends like you.”
“Playing? Did you see the size of that thing? I swear these gnomes are getting stronger.”
“Oh, did baby get a little dirty?” mocked Zuri. “Was that big, mean golem picking on Momma’s wittle Jaxy-waxy?”
Jax grinned. “Maybe you can take me home and get me all cleaned up. A nice hot bath should do the trick … Momma.” He waggled his eyebrows at her.
Zuri rolled her eyes. “Yeah, I’ll get right on that, as soon as pigs fly and people in hell start ice skating on the frozen lake of fire.” She turned on her heel and started marching back up the hill. “You can stand there and fantasize about your imaginary bath or you can get a move on. I’ve got things to do.”
“Wait up. I’ve got to get my hammer.” He walked over to where the weapon lay on the ground, its head showing fresh cracks in the stone. “I’m going to have to get Rolt to make me another one when we get back.”
“I’m sure he will appreciate the extra work,” said Zuri.
“I just hope he does a better job than he did with this one. This thing was crap, total crap. If I can't take down a simple earth golem, then what good is it?”
“If you would have let Ciro infuse a little water magic into it like he did my dagger, then you wouldn’t have that problem,” said Zuri as she flipped her blade into the air. It spun, end over end, the sun catching the glint of blue as it came down. In one deft motion, she caught the weapon and re-sheathed it.
“I don't need any water magic to take out a simple earth spirit.” Jax grumbled, completely aware that he sounded a bit like a petulant child. “I’ve killed hundreds … no … thousands before without the aid of water, and I'm not going to start taking their help now.
“And you’re humble, too.” She laughed. “Fine, be a stubborn old fool. I swear sometimes your head is as hard as the golems you fight.”
“Anyway, another job well done,” said Jax as he flung the hammer over his shoulder. “Let’s get back to the academy. I’ve had enough hunting for one day.”
Zuri sighed. “Finally, one thing we can agree on.”
And Jax needed to figure out what in Mother Earth’s name was going on in Buffalo, Kentucky. If Tara was in trouble, he needed to make sure to protect her until she could get to the academy and be safe within its walls.
Jax’s heavy footfalls echoed in the stone corridor. “You ready?” Elias asked.
Jax didn’t slow his pace. He merely grunted at the younger man and strode past. Elias was unfazed. Jax heard him scramble to catch up. “Whoa,” said Elias. “What’s crawled up your crevice? I thought you and Zuri just scored a kill.”
“Yeah, so what?” The pair came to a high stone arch covered in runes that pulsed with the faint glowing light of many different colors. Two giant golems stood silently on either side of the arch, each one well over seven feet tall. They seemed to stare directly down the corridor, appearing as statutes carved right out of the stone walls themselves.
“So what?” said Elias with raised eyebrows. “So … you’re always happy after a kill. That’s what so what.”
Jax shrugged. As they passed the golems, without pausing, he reached out a hand to the one on his left and touched it, whispering something under his breath as he did so.
“Hmm, don’t want to talk about it, eh?” asked Elias. His British accent got on Jax’s nerves at the best of times, mostly because girls fawned all over Elias simply because he had it, but now Jax wanted to strangle the kid.
“Nope.” They passed through the arch and entered a cavernous room illuminated by lights that seemed to come from within large stones set along the round walls. Within the room, set in concentric circles, were no less than a hundred free-standing stone archways.
“Right. Then I guess I should just drop it, yeah?”
“Yep.” They walked further into the room, passing the archways on either side. Jax glanced left and right, reading the runes on the supporting columns as they went.
<
br /> Elias rubbed his chin. “Hmm, the big guy comes back from a kill, he’s all bloody and dirty and beat up, which always makes him giddy because he’s a psychopath. He’s got his girlfriend on his arm—”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Jax snapped.
“And therein lies the problem, doesn’t it, Stonehenge? She shot you down again, didn’t she? Doesn’t surprise me. Zuri is waaaaaayyyyyyy too hot for you. I mean, she’s all…” Elias held his hands up and ran them down through the air in an hourglass shape. “And you’re all…” He put his arms out in a wide O shape gesture around his body, then waddled back and forth in an imitation of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
Jax couldn’t help but chuckle. Though he sometimes wanted to throttle Elias, the young man was still his charge, and all Jax’s charges held a special place in his heart … though he would never admit it to any of them. Some of the other trainers didn’t feel the same way. They refused to become attached. Jax knew that was probably the best strategy. After all, the mortality rate among Natura Venatori was so high, it didn’t pay to let feelings run too deep. But Jax refused to be so guarded. As hard as he was on the outside, he was equal parts soft on the inside. Not to mention, Elias rarely acted playful. He was usually very stoic and serious. It was unusual to see this side of him. “You know that Zuri and I used to date,” Jax said.
“I do. And I know she came to her senses and dropped you like crap through a goose.”
“She didn’t drop—” Jax growled and cut himself off. “It’s complicated. It was … mutual … sort of…”
Now, it was Elias’s turn to chuckle. “Mutual … right. Sorry, mate. No one believes that. You don’t mutually break it off with a woman like Zuri. When she says it’s done, it’s done. Otherwise, you stay wrapped around her little finger until she decides to unwind you.”
Jax glowered. “That’s truer than you know, boy.” He walked around and amongst the arches, reading the runes running along the pillars of each arch.
“Stop calling me boy,” said Elias. “I’m twenty. Legally an adult, even in this country.”
“Psh, twenty. Call me when you’re two hundred and twenty.” Jax stopped in front of one of the arches. “Ah, here we are. Buffalo, Kentucky.”
“How does it feel to be older than dirt, Jax? I mean, you basically are dirt at this point.”
“And so will you be one day, if you don’t get killed first.”
“Isn’t your job to make sure I stay alive?”
“I’ve only lost one student in three hundred years of service to this school. I don’t think one more little blemish would hurt my performance evaluation too much. Now, are we going to stand here in the gate room all day, or are you going to perform the spell to open this portal?”
Elias reached out and touched the gate. He bowed his head and chanted, tapping into the magic within himself and within the earth below. The open space inside the gate popped and fizzled. A light shone within the gate for a second then blinked out. Elias growled. He chanted harder and faster, but the portal remained silent and closed.
Jax laughed. “Looks like you’ve still got a bit to learn there, rookie.”
Elias huffed and then turned to Jax. “You know geospatial travel is one of my worst subjects.”
“And if you start being nicer to me, I’ll teach you what you’re doing wrong on the return journey.” Jax held up a hand and snapped his fingers. The portal flared to life, a swirling vortex of light between the stone pillars of the archway.
Elias’s mouth fell open and he pointed to the gate. “How did you…”
“And by the way,” said Jax, “the reason I’m upset today has nothing to do with Zuri and everything to do with where we are going.”
“Why is that?”
“Now is not the time. C’mon.” He grabbed Elias and shoved him unceremoniously through the archway where he disappeared from under the giant mountain located in the remote Asian country of Bhutan and reappeared in a forest in Buffalo, Kentucky.
Chapter 7
Hey, loose-woman-who-spreads-her-legs-indiscriminately.” Shelly’s voice chirped through the speaker on Tara’s phone.
Tara sighed. “Never thought I’d say this, but just call me a whore already. Woman-of-the-night, corner-standing-body-seller? Seriously? You’re making me want to smother you in your sleep just so I don’t have to hear what you’ll come up with next.”
“You forgot seller-of-genital-epidermis. That’s one of my faves. How could you leave that one out? Whatever, just focus. We have some things to discuss. First, has anything changed since we talked? You still can’t be hurt? Any new powers emerged? Have you figured out if you have some sort of weakness, like Superman and that green stuff?”
Tara tried really hard not to roll her eyes. She did it so much around Shelly she was beginning to think it was becoming a tick. “You do realize I’m not a superhero in a comic book, right?”
“How do you know? I don’t mean the comic book part. Obviously, you’re a real person. But you very well could be a superhero. Maybe you’re supposed to save mankind from some terrible fate. Maybe there’s some secret society of superheroes that you’re supposed to join. Do you honestly believe it’s just some fluke mutation and nothing more?”
Tara had thought of some of those things, at least the ones that didn’t sound completely implausible. Okay, so maybe she’d really only considered one of those things. Was she just a fluke mutation, or was there something more? Had this happened to her for a reason? “I honestly wish I had those answers, Shelly. But I don’t, and I don’t know how to find them. So, for now, could we just be normal teenagers, complaining about normal things and waiting to get out of high school?”
“You do realize normal sucks, right?” Shelly asked.
“Sometimes,” Tara agreed. “And sometimes it’s underrated.” It was time to redirect her BFF, or Shelly would just argue with her about the whole superhero thing until hell froze over or she died. Whichever came first. “I thought you said we had ‘things,’ plural, to talk about. What was the other thing besides my mutation?”
Shelly huffed and said, “Fine, be a female-dog-face-with-denial-issues.”
“You sound ridiculous.”
“I sound like I have the ability to form thoughts and not just foul curse words, but, alas, we have more important things to talk about than my brilliant linguistic insults. ”
“I’d rather you just curse. It would hurt my head less,” Tara argued. She flipped through the shirts in her closet as she waited to hear what Shelly’s idea of important was. Knowing her friend, it could be something as ridiculous as making sure Tara stood at her locker at just the right angle to hide Shelly so the girl could drool over some guy walking down the hall at that exact moment. And yes, they had discussed Shelly’s stalking tendencies. Shelly admitted she had them but refused to change. Her friend’s personality was something Tara was working on, but she wasn’t holding her breath.
“Today’s the college-and-career fair thingy,” Shelly said, pulling Tara from her musings. “We need to look smart but sexy. We need to look smexy.”
“Shelly, we’ve talked about the whole combining words thing,” Tara reminded.
“Smexy works. I can admit that when I combined the words freaky and humping and got the word frekumping, that didn’t work,” she said, sounding forlorn.
Tara snorted. “That was definite word vomit, and the fact that you said it in front of your parents only made it better.”
“T, focus,” her friend growled. “Smexy. Find something in your tomboy wardrobe that fits the bill. I’m bringing something with me for you to wear if I don’t approve,” she threatened.
Tara cringed at the thought of what Shelly might bring for her. It would probably involve pink and be low cut to show enough cleavage that she might as well sell tickets for a show. Yep, not going to happen. Tara pushed deeper into her closet, past her normal wardrobe to the clothes Carol bought her. Her foster mom had good taste in clothes
, but Tara just preferred jeans and a T-shirt, or sweatshirt if it was winter. Tara wasn’t concerned with her looks. What was the point? It wasn’t like there was someone she wanted to look good for. But Shelly’s threat was enough to make her relent and try to put some effort into her appearance. “Fine, I’ll do my best to try and meet your requirements for smexy,” Tara paused and then asked. “What the crap does smexy look like exactly?”
“It’s a look that says, ‘I can rock your world while reciting the periodic table, and I’ll make you like it,” Shelly said. Tara didn’t hear a bit of jest in her friend’s voice.
“That doesn’t help, you whacked-out heifer. I’m now picturing myself in a schoolgirl uniform, glasses, and thigh-high socks while I hold a ruler and bend slightly at the waist for no reason whatsoever. Thank you so much for giving me that mental picture. Really, thank you,” Tara said.
Her friend let out a low whistle. “I knew somewhere deep down in your dark soul there was a sex kitten that wanted to come out and play.”
“Okay, I’m hanging up now,” Tara said as she reached for her phone.
“Wait,” Shelly shouted. “At least send me a pic once you’re dressed so I can approve it. You’re just looking for a quick visual tease, not a full-on floozy smorgasbord.”
Tara bit her lip to keep from telling her BFF to take her visual tease and jump off a cliff and instead said, “Fine. I’ll send you a pic. Bye.”
She clicked End just as Shelly shouted, “Find your inner slut but make her a genius!”
Tara’s eyes nearly rolled up into her head as she snorted at the parting words. The girl was outrageous, and yet Tara envied her friend’s ability to just be. Shelly was so comfortable in her own skin, and Tara longed to feel completely at home in her own flesh.
Finally, after fifteen minutes of searching, she settled on a pair of jeans she knew hugged every curve and a waist-length, tapered blazer over a tank top that had lace across the top and gave a hint at a modest amount of cleavage. That was smexy, right? Bloody hell, what did it matter? She shrugged and quickly went about getting ready. Tara even took the time to curl her natural waves into controlled curls so they didn’t look like she’d walked through a humid forest where tree branches had snagged the strands pulling them in all different directions. Shelly wasn’t going to be able to gripe and moan that Tara hadn’t attempted to look attractive, which is what the girl was actually asking for with all her nonsensical words.