by Harry Nix
Alex wisely kept his mouth shut.
After they’d finished off their breakfast, Alex examined yet another wrinkle that had appeared: Nia had called Julius.
He’d left in such a rush from the village that he hadn't given the coordinates to the location of the missing alpha and witch. Nia had now taken them down and sketched a rough map on a piece of paper showing the packs of wild and vicious werewolves that surrounded the central area. Alex knew it was a long shot and dangerous but he also felt there must be some information in his past, something that explained why it seemed every mage in the world wanted to kill him. Despite the danger, he wanted to go there, to seek out answers. But when was the right time to go?
They were just finishing up their breakfast when Ruby got home, walking into the kitchen carrying a bag in one hand and a glass jar full of ash in the other. She put it down in the center of the kitchen table.
“Where’s Stephen?” Alex asked.
“In the jar. The kid was a security risk,” Ruby said.
Alex was starting to get the feeling that witches just screwed with people on general principles, but he couldn't find a single hint of a joke in Ruby's face.
“No, seriously where is he?” he said.
“She just said, he’s right there,” Juno said. Then Stephen came into the kitchen loaded down with grocery bags. Alex assumed that Ruby or someone else had given the kid a dose of April's potion because he didn’t look hungover or tired at all. He put the bags of groceries onto the bench.
“There, he's fine,” Ruby said, waving an arm at the kid. Then she turned to look at her kitchen wall. “Look at my poor kitchen. And my back fence. Juno what are you going to do about that?” Ruby said.
“I'm going to get some paint today,” she said.
“We must have had way too much to drink. I don’t remember you doing that, either,” Ruby said.
Alex met Stephen's look and they both remained straight-faced but a message passed between them to keep silent.
Before anyone could say anything that threw him into a world of trouble, Alex gave both April and Nia a kiss.
“I need to work with Stephen,” he said.
“Road trip buying spree!” Nia said.
“Hey, I got these for you,” Ruby said. She went over to the grocery bags and rummaged inside before pulling out a small paper bag that she dropped on the table in front of Alex. He opened it, discovering it was full of cheap, simple rings.
“Stephen, come with me,” Alex said. They left the kitchen and went downstairs to the basement room where the wards were.
“So, Juno thinks she burned the fence,” Stephen said.
Alex put his finger over his lips. “Werewolves have really sensitive hearing so keep that to yourself,” he whispered.
Now they were downstairs, Alex was aware of that strange feeling again. He was technically Stephen's captor, but the kid was now relaxed, practically treated as part of the family. It’d only been another night, but already the memory of the silver drifting down over the village was fading in severity. It was now becoming a story that almost happened to someone else.
Alex had told Stephen last night that he was going to let him go, and his vague plan had been to send him with a message, hoping he could speak to Henry again, but he also wanted addresses, Xavo locations, so if he didn't get what he wanted—for them to back off—he could go on the attack, bloody their nose, and extract a cost so they would leave him alone.
That had been the vague plan at least but after making a fireball spell while being incredibly drunk simply by working together, Alex wanted to come up with new plans, first and foremost around enchanting rings.
Alex sat down on the cushions cross-legged and Stephen copied him. Even though working on the spells was first and foremost on his mind, there was something else he had to get out of the way.
“So, I told you last night that we would let go and I meant it. I understand that you were raised in an enclave, told to obey, and you get sent on missions where you often don't know what's going on. I know you were commanded to fly a drone. I also understand your choices were to leave Xavo permanently or do what you were told. So as of now you're not a prisoner. If you want to walk out, you can, and I'll let you go. But first, I hope you'll stay a little while and work with me on some magic like we did last night. Then I want to talk about what you tell your enclave when you go back because if they don't stop they’re either going to kill me and my mates or I’ll be forced to kill them. I need your help to stop that,” Alex said.
Stephen took a deep breath and then looked at the floor.
“I know that I was your prisoner. But honestly… being a prisoner was almost better than being in my enclave. Just the magic you showed me last night—that never happens. They hide so much of it away and you’ve gotta go through all this time and sucking up, stupid games just trying to get fragments of it. There’s all this favoritism and violence, bullying. I honestly don't want to go back. But then I don't know what else I’m meant to do.”
It had occurred to Alex that Stephen might be feeling the way he was and in some other circumstance he would have been happy to have the kid stay with them but the simple fact was, he’d participated in an attack, and no matter how much Alex could let it go, a werewolf had died, others had been injured, and parts of the village were polluted, perhaps permanently. Alex perhaps could stomp it in as alpha, but he could never be sure that Stephen would be safe, especially around the rest of the werewolves. Even Nia, Juno, and April had somewhat softened towards Stephen while still holding a lot of anger towards him and his enclave. So, Alex couldn't offer to have the kid stay but on the other side of things, he was a little worried about what would happen if he let him go. Would he just end up two months down the line in the midst of battle and find Stephen facing him, now holding a wand?
“What happens to you if you don't go back to your enclave?” Alex asked.
“I have to go back just to declare that I don't want to be there anymore. They’ll let me go but it can still be dangerous. Although on the surface all enclaves will let mages go, so perhaps they can join another one or go off on their own, it’s still dangerous. When someone leaves an enclave, it's like they're cut off, they vanish from people's minds. Everyone simply decides they don’t exist anymore, so if after that point they happen to get killed in some kind of so-called accident, most times people don't even know about it.”
Alex felt a heavy weight settling in his stomach. Should he encourage Stephen to go back and join his enclave—don't leave them at all—knowing that it was a place of violence and sadness and Stephen might end up on the other end of a gun pointed at Alex? There didn't seem to be any good solution. Even if he had a wad of cash to offer the kid, would fleeing Baxter and trying to start a new life somewhere else work out for him?
Alex decided to push these questions away for now. The kid wanted to help with magic and perhaps with a little time they could figure out an answer to what to do next.
Alex opened the paper bag that Ruby had given him and pulled out one of the rings.
“Maybe we can talk about all that later. For now, do you want to help me try to enchant some rings? Every time I've done it before, they just explode,” Alex said.
“I've never enchanted a ring though so I’m not sure how much use I can be.”
“We managed to make a viable spell when both of us were so drunk we could hardly walk so I’m willing to try.”
“Let's do it!”
Alex smiled at the kid’s grin. There was something so similar between him and Jacob, that excitableness of teenagers, their willingness to give things a go.
“Just one moment, and I'll be right back,” Alex said and raced upstairs to the kitchen where Ruby and Juno were examining a bunch of jars filled with various ingredients.
“This seems like a lot of pecans,” Juno was saying as Alex went into the kitchen.
“Well, it's a lot of money,” Ruby said. Without stopping to ask them wha
t they were discussing and figuring that asking forgiveness was easier than seeking permission, Alex quickly rummaged in one of the kitchen cupboards until he found a metal mixing bowl. There was only one though, but it would have to do in case the rings exploded. Neither of the witches even gave him a glance as he grabbed it and ran back downstairs again.
“In case there’s an explosion,” Alex explained to Stephen, who’d taken some of the rings out of the bag and was examining them.
“Tell me what you see,” Alex said. He cleared a space on the floor and had the metal mixing bowl sitting nearby. He brought up the spell he’d used to expand the amount the amount of code he could dump onto a ring, and touched Stephen on the shoulder. It took a few minutes for him to copy the spell, Alex feeling it as a gentle tickling in his mind.
“Watch what happens,” Alex said
He went through the usual steps, opening the small code window on the ring and then casting this new spell. It compiled and worked perfectly, expanding the amount of code he could dump onto the ring. The moment he did it, though, Stephen took the ring off him and shoved it under the metallic bowl before shuffling back.
“No, that's wrong. That's definitely going to explode,” Stephen said, a hint of panic in his voice.
“What did you see?”
“A lumberjack woman kicking the walls of a room to expand it. The rooms gets bigger but she just keeps kicking. Eventually the whole thing will just explode.”
With perfect comedic timing there was an explosion from underneath the mixing bowl, shooting it off the ground and almost hitting Alex in the head. A small puff of smoke rose to the ceiling and dissipated.
“See!” Stephen said. The ring was nothing more than twisted bits of metal now.
“How can we fix that? She needs to make the room bigger but it needs to be strong, too.”
“Give me a few minutes,” Stephen said. Alex sat back and watched the spell screen above Stephen’s head. It was weird to think the kid saw comic book pages while Alex saw code. Stephen was also making gestures in the air like using his fingers like a pair of scissors and motions that looked like he was tearing and stretching and then screwing up bits of paper. At one point it appeared he was using invisible sticky tape. Because they were no longer touching, the connection wasn't as strong.
Eventually, Stephen shared with him the remade spell. Alex carefully copied it over, realizing that he would soon have to delete something otherwise he’d run out of space.
The spell that Stephen given him was still mostly Alex's although there were some key changes in it that Alex had to read through a few times to get a hint of what they were doing. Comparing his original spell to the rewritten one side-by-side, he could almost see where he’d gone wrong although it still felt as though true understanding was just on the tip of his tongue, slightly out of reach.
He could see the code in the original spell that he guessed was the cause of the lumberjack kicking until the room exploded, and therefore the ring. To Alex it looked like that part of it had stuck into a loop and each time it went around it weakened what was around it, but he couldn't be entirely sure.
Although Stephen had helped him alter the healing flame spell and now had also helped him write a fireball spell, Alex still felt a slight nervousness. The kid could easily dump something in there that could kill him, and Alex wouldn’t know. He pushed those thoughts aside as he picked up a new ring and cast the spell. He either had to trust the kid or not, and he'd already made his decision.
The spell compiled, pulling on the mana and then the window for the code expanded. It felt the same as before and Alex sat there holding the ring, suddenly realizing he hadn’t thought this far ahead. He’d been working on the other spells he knew he needed, like the one that drained a small amount of mana from the wearer to recharge the ring, but his initial idea had been simply to enchant a ring with a simple spell that once exhausted, could not be recharged. Alex quickly looked through his spells and then grabbed the shortest one of all, Know Thyself. He quickly copied the code over into the open window and then hit the execute button before throwing the ring down and covering it with the mixing bowl.
Stephen shuffled back a few more feet while Alex sat there holding his hand on top of the bowl.
“I think this might work,” Stephen said.
“So long as it doesn't detonate my hand off,” Alex said.
They sat there for a few minutes waiting until Alex eventually lifted the bowl off the ring and quickly cast Analyze on it. It showed a single spell and the charge to cast it. As Alex watched, the amount of mana in it was dropping like water dripping from a faucet.
“You need the battery storage now,” Stephen said, looking at the ring.
Alex put the ring on and then triggered it. The spell consumed what remained of the mana and cast Know Thyself on him. His spell screen opened up, showing his stats and information and only held for a moment before the spell exhausted. Alex then slipped the ring off and cast Analyze on it again and found it was just a plain ring again, just like the others.
They were getting there.
“That worked. I have an idea for the battery storage too. Can mages rewrite each other’s spells as easy as we are?” Alex said. His mind was starting to spin with just how easy it was. Juno and April hadn’t mentioned anything like this and it seemed too incredible to be true.
Stephen grinned.
“Sympatico magic. I’ve heard of it but it’s rare. Some mages Lennon and McCartney it. Can imagine how much money there is to be made enchanting rings and selling them?”
Sudden visions of setting up an enchanting factory with Stephen began to swim in Alex's mind. Him and the kid worked together so well that maybe there was a whole world of spells out there they could lock to a ring. Together they could make entirely new ones…
Then Alex remembered the silver cloud and the drones.
“You set up a shop or something. Magic defense rings go for a massive amount of money,” Stephen said, waving his hands around.
“I know, I bought one.” Alex didn’t add that it had been near-useless for him. The spells on it were too complicated for him to learn anything useful. He wasn’t going to be making his own for a long time.
Alex smiled back, half getting caught up in the excitement but he could also feel the leaden weight in his stomach. Long-term the kid had to go.
“Let me show you the battery code,” Alex said.
“Battery comic, you mean.”
Stephen put his hand on Alex's shoulder and they continued on.
13
“I see what you mean by that whole pulling avocados out of his butt thing,” Ruby said, examining one of the enchanted rings.
Juno choked on her food. Alex had to thump her on the back a few times before she could breathe properly.
“Handkerchiefs. It was handkerchiefs out of his butt. I knew you weren't listening,” she said.
“Hmm, yes, I see,” Ruby murmured, obviously not listening again.
Dinner tonight was steak, a small side salad, and a few roasted vegetables. Everyone was digging in except for Ruby who was examining the enchanted rings Alex had brought upstairs.
“I couldn’t have done without Stephen,” Alex said and cut off an enormous piece of steak. Sure, the city still didn’t smell great but when there was steak covered in salt, maybe he could come to live with it.
“This is really good work. Well done,” Ruby said to Stephen, slipping the ring onto her finger. It was a healing flame ring. She activated it then touched her burning finger against her palm. As she was uninjured, nothing happened.
“Have you considered making one of these where a damaging flame travels from the part you touch to the greatest injury? Like a fireball going down their nerves?” Ruby asked Alex.
“Can a flame travel inside someone's body?” Alex asked.
“Not usually, but then you are doing unusual things,” Ruby said.
Alex shared a glance with Stephen who was grin
ning like a mad fool. Him and the kid had broken through multiple barriers in just a single day. Unusual didn’t begin to cover it. Together they’d constructed a battery spell to hold mana and then refined Alex’s spell to slowly drain mana from the wearer, to charge the ring over time.
There had been a few explosions along the way but now it appeared the enchanted rings were stable.
There were still limitations of course. The rings could only hold spells of a certain size and complexity. But that was just an iteration problem. Work it long enough and Alex knew him and the kid could improve the coding.
“You say you can rewrite his code by changing the comics you see?” Ruby asked Stephen, tapping her fork on the ring.
The teenager blushed, focused on his plate, and mumbled something.
“Speak up now. If the two of you cracked this in a single day… this is life-changing work. I mean it.”
“It’s no big thing. He writes the original code and then I work on the pictures to get it flowing. We pass it back and forth until it works is all.”
Alex chewed his steak, enjoying the feeling that something was going right for once. Being able to enchant his own rings meant money, which was sorely needed but more than that it meant being able to equip his entire pack. The next time necromancers came calling, things would turn out very differently.
“No, you should be really proud of yourself. This is incredible work,” Ruby insisted.
“Leave the kid alone, he’s embarrassed,” Juno said.
“The only one that should be embarrassed here is the drunken witch who burned my fence and doesn't remember it,” Ruby snapped.
“How do we know it wasn’t you?” Juno protested.
“If I’d thrown a fireball at that fence there would be no fence. Come on, stop being silly,” Ruby said.
There was a moment of awkward silence before April cleared her throat. “So Nia and I are all packed and will be ready to go in the morning,” she said.
Everyone continued eating and chatting about shallow topics. Alex could tell the girls didn't want to say what they were doing with Stephen there. Even though there was a feeling that they'd relaxed around him they still couldn’t forget that he was a mage from an enemy enclave that had attacked them. It wasn't long before dinner was done and Alex grabbed Stephen again, heading back downstairs.