Changeling Justice

by Frank Hurt

  “Are you sure you don’t remember anything from your time in the fog at Mandaree?” Ember asked cheerfully between bites.

  Alarik was wolfing his breakfast down like a hungry coyote. He stopped chewing long enough to raise an eyebrow at Ember. The eyebrow reached higher when Nick Hershel responded.

  “Huh. You know…I said I didn’t remember anything about it but…but now I feel like it’s all coming back to me.”

  Katrina blinked and looked at her husband as memories surfaced. “Wow, me, too. I’m getting a serious case of déjà vu here.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Hershel continued looking at one another, an unspoken message passing between them.

  “I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” Nick murmured.

  Ember steepled her fingers. She rested her elbows on either side of her plate and leaned forward. “A good place to begin would be the beginning. When did you first come into contact with that fog?”

  Nick shook his head slowly. He turned from his wife and settled his gaze on Ember. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

  “You’d be surprised. Try me.” As she talked, Ember began gently willing the two NonDruws to relax. It was a skill she learned from apprenticing with The Legend himself, an ability exclusive to practitioners of the Investigator Track of magic. It wasn’t a spell so much as a refined interrogation technique. Wallace had explained it to her: “Think of it as a coin. One side is a carrot, the other side is a stick.” The carrot was so much more pleasant to use than the stick—for everyone involved.

  The gentle nudge must have worked because Nick sighed and leaned back in his chair. “It was just before Christmas, 2000. We were drilling on the reservation, south of Mandaree and just north of the Little Missouri. Kat and I were mudlogging, and she was on tour when the drill bit ran into…something. It was in the Three Forks formation, I think.”

  “Middle Bakken, wasn’t it?” Katrina tilted her head. She, too, had stopped eating.

  “Yeah, I think you’re right. Bakken formation. Anyway, we hit something that resembled metal. Bronze or something.” Nick shook his head and looked from Alarik to Ember. “Not something that was supposed to be down there.”

  Ember continued willing the Hershels to relax, to feel comfortable sharing their story with her. “So, what was it?”

  “This is where things really started to get weird,” Katrina said. She slid her hand over Nick’s and weaved her fingers between his.

  The man squeezed his wife’s hand. He swallowed and met Ember’s gaze in an effort to show his sincerity. “You won’t believe it, but we drilled into this thing that shouldn’t exist in the real world. But it’s very much real. It’s a sort of…pipeline that carries energy. Magic energy. It’s called a Ley Line. We ruptured it, and brought Hell to Earth.”

  34

  Ley Line Magnet

  “What do you mean, Hell came to Earth?” Ember showed no reaction to the mention of a Ley Line, though with that one new clue, gears in the Investigator’s mind slipped into place.

  “It wasn’t literally Hell,” Katrina offered an apologetic shrug on behalf of her husband. “At least, not after we found out what had happened.”

  “Which was…” Ember let her voice trail off in expectation of an answer.

  “Well, it’s like this: the magic pipeline—that Ley Line, as it’s called—has a casing around it. That casing is made of a bronze-like metal—”

  “The Ley Line Shell,” Katrina interrupted her husband.

  “Right, the Ley Line Shell. That’s the stuff our drill bit broke into. When that happened, it made things go all kinds of catawampus.” Nick inhaled slowly until the words could find their way to his lips. “I know all of this is going to sound like we’re crazy, but I’m telling you the truth.”

  He was. They were. Ember sensed the sincerity, not just in their body language and voices, but in the way their unblemished auras moved. NonDruws such as these two people had faint auras compared to Malverns and changelings, but the colors and movement of their auras reacted to lies and deception in ways that Ember easily recognized. Nick and Katrina were telling the truth. “I believe you. Please, continue. When did the toxic cloud come into this?”

  “Not long after we drilled into the Ley Line, I guess. The rig’s pumps were still circulating for a couple of hours to clean out the hole. My guess is that it took time for enough drilling fluid to bring the energy from the Ley Line to the surface.” Nick looked at Katrina for confirmation. “It might’ve been that when enough hydrostatic pressure accumulated, that energy reached a tipping point.”

  “I don’t think there’s a proper formula we could use to calculate that, but it makes sense, I agree. It wasn’t a toxic cloud, though.” Katrina ran her fingertip along the edge of her pink coffee cup. “It had a taste to it—metallic, like copper maybe—but it wasn’t poisonous.”

  “The buzzing, too,” Nick added, using the index finger on his right hand to gesture at his ear. “I’ve got tinnitus, but the fog made a buzzing noise. Kat heard it, too.”

  “That’s right, I’d forgotten about that.” Katrina nodded as she stared at her coffee. “The hellish part was that everyone disappeared. Everyone but us, I guess.”

  Ember gripped her coffee cup in both hands. Though its contents were hot, she felt a chill run through her. “What do you mean, everyone disappeared?”

  “Disappeared, disappeared. I mean Nick and I were the only humans left. All the equipment was dead, vehicles wouldn’t start, anything electrical—even flashlights—all dead. And every single soul was missing, without any footprints to show them walking away. Nothing.”

  Nick squeezed his wife’s hand, whose fingers were still weaved together in his left hand. “Animals were left behind. Wildlife, cattle, dogs. And monsters.”

  Ember glanced at Alarik, who was leaning forward just as she was. Neither of them said anything.

  Katrina looked at the guests sitting across the table. “He’s telling the truth. Giants, from another dimension. Another planet or something. They stalked us, chased us. Two of them cornered us, and almost killed us. We barely got out of there alive.”

  “But you did get out alive,” Ember stated the obvious. “How?”

  Nick chuckled, though there wasn’t any mirth in his tone. “We just walked out. We kept walking until we got out of the fog.”

  Katrina pulled her hand back from Nick’s, slowly. She reached for the coffee pot and refilled everyone’s mugs. “That’s when we found out that three months had passed, although to us it only felt like three days. We were questioned by some government goons, told not to talk to one another, and sent home.”

  Nick winked at his wife. “Neither of us are very good at taking orders, though. We talked, and we decided to go back into the fog.”

  “Why? Why would you go back in when you barely made it out alive, as you said?” Ember continued holding her coffee mug without sampling from it.

  Katrina and Nick looked at one another. Another of those unspoken messages passed between them, as only happens in relationships tempered by fire. Katrina answered, “neither of us could sleep. We both had the worst nightmares when we did sleep. It was the same thing, too: we dreamed of the people who disappeared. They were stuck in the ground, calling at us for help, but we couldn’t get to them.” She stared directly at Ember, her blue eyes cold with fear. “Nick and I had the exact same nightmares. Only, they weren’t just dreams. It was real.”

  Alarik and Ember exchanged startled glances. His mouth was open, and Ember realized hers was, too.

  Nick shifted in his seat and took a long draw from his mug. “We both knew we had to go back. We had to try to help them, somehow. So, we went back into the fog.”

  “Déjà vu again,” Katrina said. “I remember telling all this to someone, years ago. Two someones. A couple of Federal agents.”

  “Oh yeah!” Nick nodded as the memory surfaced. “I forgot about that, too. I didn’t like those guys. Especially the one agent, the
older man. He didn’t say much, but he had an arrogant way about him. I’ve worked in the oilfield my whole life, so oversized egos are nothing new to me, but that guy, he was just a dick. He smiled a lot, but you could tell he was full of shit.”

  “Elton.” Katrina tapped a finger to her lip as she called on the memory. “That was his name, Elton. I remember he had a blue gemstone tie pin. It just seemed out of place for someone who worked for the government. The other agent, the one who asked most of the questions, his name was Duncan. I remember he had a buzz cut like you see on soldiers. I can’t believe I forgot about them.”

  Ember saw Alarik glance at her again, but she kept watching the couple. The Deference Spell repressed their memories for nine years, but with it lifted their memories were rushing back. She subconsciously reached for the coyote pendant, touching the carved face between her fingers. “How do you know all this, about the Ley Line. Why were you two the only people who could come and go into the fog without disappearing?”

  “You’d better do the explaining, Honey.” Katrina squeezed her husband’s forearm.

  “His name was Tresden,” Nick sighed, swallowed another gulp of coffee before continuing. “He was another one of those…monsters, I guess. But a good guy, it turned out. That pipeline we’d drilled into—the Ley Line—well, it was somehow connected to this other dimension. Aedynar, they call it.”

  “So, when the atmosphere of Aedynar mixed with the atmosphere of Earth, it caused some sort of reaction. It had something to do with the magic of the two worlds. He had a name for it, I can’t remember what it was.”

  “Mana,” Katrina offered.

  “Right, mana. Well, when the mana from Earth met the mana of Aedynar, it caused the fog that the media kept calling a ‘toxic gas cloud.’ It wasn’t toxic, but it did make everyone who entered it, well…it made them disappear.”

  Katrina murmured, “but not us.”

  “Right, not us. Tresden said it was because we were the only two who touched the Ley Line Shell itself. Being mudloggers, we handled the drill cuttings that circulated up the wellbore. Those tiny pieces of bronze, well we were the only humans to ever touch them. So, when the fog settled in—I mean really settled in—then we were the only ones who weren’t trapped. Everyone else was trapped between dimensions—not on Earth, not on Aedynar.”

  “Trapped between dimensions,” Ember repeated. Another gear in her mind slipped into place.

  “Yeah, I know how strange it all sounds.” Nick shook his head. “It’s all so fucked up. Or it was, anyway. Tresden was able to get the Ley Line repaired, with our help. He was able to get it repaired and returned things to how they were, more or less. The creatures from Aedynar went back to where they came from, and all the people from Earth became unstuck. None of them remembered being gone though. Kat and I were the only ones who remembered a damn thing.”

  Katrina slapped her palm on the table. Ember was so engrossed in her thoughts, that the sound made her flinch. Katrina slid her chair back and stood up. “We know how crazy this all sounds, but we have proof.”

  Nick frowned. “We do, Honey?”

  “Yeah, we do. I’ll be right back.” Katrina left the kitchen for a few minutes. When she returned, she was carrying a cardboard box. She began shuffling through its contents at the table. “I can’t believe that we haven’t even talked about this for, what, a decade almost? I even forgot we had…this.”

  Katrina pulled out an off-white, unbleached cotton bag closed with a drawstring. The bag was no more than six inches long and had an unmarked yellow tag sewn into the seam. Something heavy was in the bag.

  The hairs on the back of Ember’s neck stood on end. She tasted the energy before the bag was opened, before she saw what was inside. It was powerful, alien, and had the same oleaginous mana that she had felt living within Kenny’s aura, in place of his animal subform. It was the same mana that the little girl in the park exuded when she brought the squirrel back to life.

  The object Katrina pulled out of the mudlogging sample bag looked like it was made of brass. It was shaped like a leaf, hollow in the middle and with five small spheres attached along one side. The relic was infused with an impossibly strong mana that glowed so brightly, it hurt Ember’s eyes.

  She squinted and looked away, but noticed that Alarik continued studying it. He can’t see the mana. None of them can.

  “Tresden had a name for it, but we called it a Ley Line Magnet.” Nick accepted the heavy object from Katrina. He handled it before passing it over to Alarik. “I forgot we even had this. I think he accidentally left it with us.”

  “No beads, no brazing marks. It’s like this was cast whole, somehow.” Alarik held the magnet close to his face as he admired the shape. “What was it used for?”

  “He made it to help us find the pieces of the Ley Line Shell.” Nick drank the last of his coffee in one gulp. “When we drilled into it, it shattered the casing around the Ley Line into dozens of tiny pieces. We used this like a magnet to fish those pieces out of the reserve pit. It was a pretty tedious process, but in the end, we got enough for Tresden to work his mojo, to put it all back together again.”

  “And the nightmares went away. The real ones and the dream ones.” Katrina smiled and squeezed her husband’s hand.

  Alarik handed the leaf-shaped metal to Ember. She reached instead for the cotton sample bag and gave it to him.

  “You didn’t tell those agents about this magnet?”

  Nick and Katrina both shook their heads. The curved scar on Nick’s cheek flexed as he clenched his jaw. Katrina was the one who answered. “No, we didn’t. Those two men made our skins crawl. I guess we just felt like they didn’t need to know about this part of the story.”

  “But you trust us.” Ember picked up the bagged relic from the table. Even through the fabric, she could feel the oily mana, as though the forged brass was coated with thick grease only she could see or feel. “I think this may be helpful for our friends. Unlike you, unlike everyone else, they continue to suffer from those nightmares. I think there might be a way to use this magnet to help treat them.”

  “If you think it could help them, somehow,” Nick looked at his wife, who nodded. “Then by all means, please borrow it. Only just…only if you promise not to tell anyone where you got this from.”

  Katrina walked over to the patio door to watch her daughters playing in the yard outside. There was an edge to her voice when she said, “our little family is happy and safe. Please don’t do anything that might change that.”

  35

  Fisherman’s Dream

  After breakfast, they exchanged phone numbers with the Hershels. As frosty as Nick’s reception was just two hours earlier, he and Katrina now treated Ember and Alarik like old friends.

  When he shook their hands, Nick told them, “I hope this helps your friends. I wouldn’t wish those nightmares onto my worst enemy. And they’ve been living with it since 2001? That’s brutal, just brutal.”

  To Ember’s surprise, Katrina gave her a hug before they got into the pickup and left. They left the gravel road for pavement and drove north on what Alarik referred to as the Enchanted Highway.

  “Rik, did we just make new friends?”

  “I think we might have.” He pointed at the cotton bag riding on the center console between them. “Do you really think that thing can help my brother?”

  “I think it could, yeah. We’ll need to find a competent Healer who can figure out how to tap into this magnet’s mana. Its energy feels just like what was tormenting Kenny. Just like the sort of magic that the little girl in the park was using.” Ember glanced at the sample bag and sensed its strange energy. She didn’t fear the talisman, but the memory of Kenneth Newman’s damaged aura made her shudder.

  Alarik said nothing for some time. He gestured with his chin as they drove. “Up ahead to the left, is that tin man I told you about. A farmer, his wife, and their child.”

  He slowed down as they approached the giant steel sculptur
es to the west of the road. The 30-foot-tall woman stood closest to the highway, holding a blue basket of flowers in front of her. She wore a buff-colored dress with a matching hat, all made of steel. Her hair was black and looked to consist of a tangled mess of cables, also painted black. Her face was cheerful, with a cartoonish smile shaped like a wide, red-lipped “U.” The farmer stood next to her, holding a pitchfork in his right hand. His body was built out of a large cylinder, painted to look like blue bib overalls with a red shirt beneath. Their fifteen-foot-tall child stood nearby, facing the road and licking a huge pink lollipop.

  “Wanna stop in and say ‘hi’ to them?”

  “Um…no, that’s fine, thanks anyway.” Ember chuckled nervously. “They’re impressive, but honestly, kind of creep me out a little. What if they come to life and stomp on us?”

  Alarik grinned and applied pressure to the accelerator. The Ford responded with a guttural burst of horsepower. “The next one, then. You’ll like this one.”

  He wasn’t wrong. “Fisherman’s Dream” it was called, and it consisted of seven massive fish, painted to look true-to-life. A life-sized person sat in a boat, with a fishing pole cast in the water. Before him, a towering monster burst from the waterline, snapping at the tail of a six-foot-long dragonfly.

  “Northern pike,” Alarik pointed at the elongated fish as he parked the pickup on the scoria byway. “And those over there are walleye and catfish.”

  “That’s beautiful.” Ember gaped from the passenger seat. “The artist who made these put a lot of time into it. I can’t even imagine how many hours. Do you think we could walk around here for a few minutes?”

  “Of course.”

  The grounds were well-maintained, with no litter to be found and the prairie grass trimmed neatly around the base of the sculptures. Lake-bottom plants reached for the sky, their steel leaves painted in natural shades of ochre and aquamarine.