by J. B. Garner
It took some considerable measure of willpower not to laugh, and from the look in Ms. Rat’s gleaming red eyes, I wasn’t alone. Mr. Rat did wisely follow Bunny’s advice, divesting her of her jacket before gesturing her into the back seat. Ms. Rat did the same for me before glancing through the back at her partner.
“I will ride shotgun with the captain, Mr. Grey,” she said. “You ride with our guests.” To accentuate her order, she closed the door next to me.
Grey made a sort of strangled squeal but relented. “Very well.” He pointed his gun at Bunny. “Slide over and be quick about it.”
Mr. Talky, the leader of the trio, was already behind the driver’s seat and took that moment to close the door. “Come on now! We have a ways to go and rush hour will start soon. We must go to ground before then.”
He wasn’t wrong. The local traffic cops would have a field day with a car driven by naked rat people. I decided not to point out the obvious and play it cool. Bunny gave me a quick sidelong glance that I responded to with a brief wink. That seemed to content her, and she too played along for now, sliding over to let Mr. Grey get in.
A moment later, we were all settled in, and Mr. Talky had us going on our way. “I am glad you are so agreeable about this situation,” he began to chatter in a surprisingly affable tone. “I will say you owed us that much after almost getting all five of us killed. To think, the ultra-professional Huntress Reba Kincaid taken unawares because she was having a spat with a friend? We were surprised, weren’t we, friends?”
Bunny shrugged beside me. “No one is perfect and to be fair, how could I have expected some of … let me guess … Frizzoli’s pack to break into my automobile?”
“Ah-ah-ah, Huntress,” Talky taunted. “That would be telling.” He glanced into the rear-view mirror back at us. “Grey, give Brown our guest’s jacket and let her see what there is to see.” Focusing back on the road, Talky put the pedal to the metal as we exited onto the highway. “The clock is literally ticking.”
With that dangling in the air, I had to say something. As Grey tossed the jacket to Ms. Brown, I cleared my throat and said, “Maybe we can cut to the quick of this affair. We know about the blue moon.”
No one said a word, and that alone was something of a tell. Grey, having raised his rat legs into the seat either for comfort or to hide his embarrassing erection, did scratch at his whiskers, his shotgun settled on one knee, but his eyes didn’t betray anything. The silence was broken a few moments later by Talky.
“Check the jacket and the bag, Brown.” The Kia sped up a bit more, riding that dangerous line between ‘too fast for the cops’ and ‘not fast enough for the cops to give a crap’. “We’re only ten minutes out from Master White’s meeting place, and I want more to deliver than just these two.”
“Of course, captain,” Brown said, her head bobbing in the rearview.
I closed my eyes and ran my fingers through my beard. Anticipation was making my adrenaline spike again; I was right behind Brown so I couldn’t tell when she was going to try to open my bag and start the fireworks. Glancing out the window, I was at least comforted a little that we had a stretch of open road. No one else would get in trouble during what was about to happen.
Deliberately and slowly as I turned back to the front of the car, I reached up and buckled my seat belt. Grey’s whiskers twitched, and I shrugged faintly at him. “With all the firearms, I forgot to buckle up. We are driving rather fast.”
Bunny gave me a look then, and I just replied with the faintest of nods. She made a very soft oh and buckled her belt as well. “Lady Stone has an excellent point.”
Talky’s red eyes were narrowing as he stared back at us through the mirror. “We don’t have any trouble back there, do we?”
Brown made some faint squeak of frustration as she flung something down towards the floorboards. I couldn’t see what but it had to be the jacket. At least I hoped it was.
Bunny and I both gave our best innocent looks. I’d had to look that part plenty of times in the old carnival days, so I was pretty darn good at it. As for Bunny, well, you don’t become a great bounty hunter in either the human or Figment worlds without being able to lie like a demon. Grey looked at us then towards the front.
“The ladies were simply being safety conscious, captain,” he said. “No trouble at all.”
Captain, as I thought of him now, let out a chittering laugh as he shook his head. “You know, I did not expect this to go quite this way when we crawled into the back. I expected you to be a much more dangerous collar, Huntress.” He glanced into the mirror, eyes on Grey. “I mean no offense by this, Grey, but I was sure that she would kill you before we subdued her.”
Grey stiffened and blanched under his fur. He stared toward the front for a moment then back at Bunny. “You would only have taken me into custody, right? That is how it works: Hunters collar you and take you in, not kill you.”
She gave him a grim smile in return. “Ideally but things can get out of control … especially when three Garou Souris threaten me with shotguns.” Shaking her head slowly, she added, “You’re in a dangerous line of work, friend. Maybe you should reconsider it.”
Up front, I heard claws tapping on leather and metal. “At least this one doesn’t have a magic pocket,” Brown muttered. “I should have something for you in a moment, captain.”
I closed my eyes and grabbed hold of my shoulder belt. My heart beat double-time as I felt the energy in the runeword on my bag surge and I swore I heard every little sound as Brown pulled on the zipper.
That’s when everything really started to go crazy.
Now, I’ve been through some rough moments in my life and have my fair share of spills and crashes. I’ve even been within moments of dying (like when a certain Drake was about to laser my head off, beard and all). Still, all that sad experience didn’t quite compare to the violence of what happened next, something I couldn’t ignore even though I kept my eyes firmly shut and my grip tightly locked onto my seat belt when the runeword went off.
What happened wasn’t what I had in mind when I first stamped the runeword into the leather of the inside flap of the messenger bag. Oh, I certainly wanted to make the bag secure from prying eyes or thieves, not with ancestral Dwarven secrets contained within, so my original intention when I tried to think of the right word to place here was something like a taser. You know, one nice zap to put a potential rogue down and out without lethal force. Heck, if said thug happened to have a few YouTube-worthy spasms and wet their pants in the process, so much the better.
It turns out that distilling such a modern concept into the pictographic language of the millennia-old, tradition-bound Dwarven people wasn’t so easy. The magical law of intention was in full force, after all, and rune magic found its intention through those ancient whispers of the past generation. When I wrote a runeword, one with power, I had to interpret it through those memories and whispers, so the only real common point I could find between a modern taser and that was in the concept of lightning itself.
With that in mind, lightning was what I trapped in that runeword, hoping that when I finally had the need to activate it, I could control the power invested it, keep it down to something that wouldn’t vaporize whoever triggered it and the immediate area. The problem with that was, well, these rats were threatening us with shotguns, kidnapping us, right after Bunny and I had almost killed ourselves in the middle of an argument.
Control was the last thing on my mind when I had turned on the juice.
The moment Brown clicked the zipper past the first tooth, my hair started to stand up, and the world lit up a brilliant white, even through my eyelids. The heat from the intense electrical discharge heated my face, and I was honestly surprised my beard didn’t singe or catch on fire in the process. The sound was right on the heels of the lightning flash, filling the tiny space of the Kia with an ear-splitting thunderclap and the shockwave came right along with it, pressing me into the upholstery. My teeth were chatter
ing and my bones jittering as the rumble passed through my body. Somehow, despite the multiple shocks to my system (non-electrical, thank the ancestors), I managed to cling to consciousness. Judging from the horrible screams combined with the sickening scent of burning rat fur and the worse smell of charring flesh, I wasn’t the only one.
Between the burning heat, the terrible noise, and the horrid smell, I was already in a near-panic before the wild screeching of tires as the entire vehicle swung around. I risked opening my eyes a hair to view the carnage right before things went totally to hell.
Yes, I may indeed have overdone it a bit.
The windscreen had been completely blown out by the boom of thunder, wind tearing through the Kia, and the first thing I picked out was the blackened form of the Captain slumped over the front wheel, still jittering every few seconds from the lingering shocks through his muscles. Still, he was mercifully unconscious (at least I hoped he was).
Brown wasn’t so lucky. She was still thrashing and screaming despite Zeus dropping the proverbial and literal thunderbolt in her lap, her brown fur mostly gone and … it was gruesome. That’s the extent to which I really want to recall it. Even as the Kia slid and began to roll, I was struck by the fact that, somehow, I distinctly remember seeing my bag, perfectly untouched, starting to fly out of the poor ratwere’s lap.
Out of the corner of my eye, as the boxy car started to tip from the violent meeting of inner force, hard skid, and Michigan winds, Bunny shifted, her growing form testing the seat belt to its limits. Speaking of seat belts, Mr. Grey’s face was filled with shock and fear as momentum, gravity, and all those other forces of physics started to lift him off his seat, shotgun and all. It was only sheer luck that he didn’t pull the trigger in his panic, his focus more wisely being on trying to reach for the Jesus handle to keep himself in the car.
That’s when we rolled, a death spiral for the ages. I bet it was like something straight out of an action movie. I don’t know myself because the first flip was enough, on top of everything else, to make me black out.
8
I didn’t want to wake up because somewhere deep down I knew that doing so would be a lot more painful than sleeping it off. Call it survival instincts for my nervous system or whatever you like. Unfortunately, there was someone else who didn’t agree with that sentiment, badgering at the edges of my subconscious awareness with a constant, stressed whisper, that kind of sound you make when you want to yell, but you should keep quiet at the same time.
“Mary, come on,” the voice urged. “Wake up. We’ve got to go.”
As much as I dreamt that it was Mr. Genovo rousing us after a late night’s debauchery, getting us going before a bunch of rubes knocked down the trailer doors, I knew it was Bunny. For a few timeless moments, I tried to figure out how she had gotten into the carnival too. Was she going to be the Amazing Rabbit Girl or something?
Strangely, it was that fevered thought which brought me back to full consciousness. The separation of my old life and my new one had been broken, and something about that shocked my brain to life. My eyes fluttered open all the way, and the aches and pains rushed in along with the scene.
To some small surprise, I wasn’t laid out on the highway next to Bunny’s crashed car or still trapped in the twisted wreckage of it. Instead, I was in the shadow of an on-ramp, back and head resting against the soothing coolness of a stone support. Even though it was made by human hands, it still sung in my ears and that helped clear my head a little more.
Kneeling in front of me, fuzzy paw on one of my shoulders, was Bunny in her full rabbity glory. She looked none the worse for wear other than a few red and black smudges in her fur and her clothes. Heck, she had even recovered her rather abused jacket, though it had its fair share of stains as well. It only took an extra second for my brain to process the red for blood and the black for oil and grease.
“There we go.” She breathed a sigh of relief. “How bad do you feel? Is anything broken?”
I blinked slowly as I worked through the cotton in my head. My chest and right collarbone were aching like crazy, my neck wanted Aelfie’s magic fingers to do their work on it (let me tell you, that Elf brought new meaning to the word ‘massage’), but everything seemed like it was in one piece. There was a warm wetness over my left eye that was worrisome, probably blood from a cut or something, but my vision was clear so it couldn’t be a gusher. More likely Bunny had already bandaged it up.
“No,” I murmured, my voice sounding distant and distorted in my skull. “Nothing broken. Seat belt did a number on me, but I’ll live.” My left hand found its way to my bruised sternum as I focused on the giant rabbit in front of me. “How about you? Are you okay?”
She let out a chuff, one of her ears flopping over her right eye. “It takes more than a car wreck to take me out.” What I thought was a smile cracked over her muzzle. “I’m just happy you’re okay, considering I dragged you into this.”
As I started to get my wits, I took in more of where we were now. City lights combined with the nearly-full moon overhead to paint a clear picture of our little hiding spot. We had somehow made it to the other side of the river but just barely. I could swear I could see the riverfront through a nearby alley. Next to Bunny, sprawled on the ground, was a huge, grey wharf rat. We’re talking New York City sewer rat huge. Oddly enough, it was surprisingly clean and well-groomed outside of a few stains like the ones in Bunny’s fur. It only took me a moment to make the connection.
That rat was probably Mr. Grey. Bunny had called them Garou Souris, which meant that being an animal was their natural state. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it made a bit of sense that a Garou might revert to their natural form if they got knocked out, depending on how they worked the magic. Considering how young Grey seemed, he might not have the knowledge or practice to set up the spell to last beyond his conscious intention. I had to wonder if the crash knocked him out or did Bunny?
That really wasn’t important. What was probably more important was the wailing of sirens up above us on the highway. I had to have been out for a bit if emergency services had shown up already.
“Hey, I could have refused the job,” I grunted. Considering moving for a moment, I tried to sit up a bit but my body gave me a resolute ‘no, ma’am, we are not moving’.
Bunny’s paw on my shoulder held firm, backing up my body’s assessment of things. “We’ve got a few more minutes before we need to hop. Rest a bit.”
I wasn’t going to argue that one. Resting against the lovely, lovely stone behind me and one hand against the pavement, my free hand checked out my head. Yep, there was the gauze and bandage on my forehead. I bet Bunny had a whole first aid kit stuffed into her magic pockets.
I glanced at the occasionally twitching rat. “He seems okay. What about the others?” I know I was frowning and not from the pain of my injuries. “Did they …?”
Bunny let go of my shoulder as she leaned back on her haunches, looking even more like a giant rabbit than usual. “Huh? Oh, they’ll be fine.” She waved a paw dismissively. “You really overdid it with the lightning, but they’ll regenerate given some time.” Frowning, her attention cocked upwards towards the flashing lights and screeching tires, the wailing ceasing. “I’ll have to check with Sinclair later and try to get this cleared up with the mundanes. Probably going to be a lot of questions over an empty car crash that looks like it was struck by lightning on a clear night.”
“Empty?” I answered my question before I had even finished uttering the word. “Oh, right. They went back to being rats like Grey here.”
“Badly burnt and horribly hurt rats, but yeah.” Bunny rose up and arched her back as if she was popping her spine. I finally noticed that she had my work bag hung over a shoulder. Thank the ancestors for that! “I got them off the road and ditched them, let them heal in safety. I snatched the kid here because he’s both the least hurt and the one most likely to spill.” She glanced around. “We need a place to hole up b
efore the cops decide to start looking for their missing victims.”
My brain was firing up again, despite the thudding headache I had and the horrid crick in my neck. Another scan of the area confirmed the hazy idea of where we were in my mind and from there, I had an idea.
“I know where we can go.” I forced myself to stand, using the pillar behind me for support. “It’s close, and there should be people there this time of the morning.”
Between the time driving and that spent at Mother’s, it was creeping towards the wee hours of the morning. They would have to be there, I was sure of it. It was just a bit of a toss-up as to if they would actually be helpful or not. Still, I had to have faith. It’s not like we had another choice, not as I saw it.
“And the fact that you aren’t immediately telling me where we’re going means I won’t particularly like it.” I expected Bunny to growl or chuff or wag a finger. Instead, she let out a laugh. “At this point, I don’t even care. We’re getting near rock bottom on this collar, so anything has got to be an improvement.”
Dwarves are tough, as tough as the mountains that birthed them if you believed the hype I’ve been told, but even so, it was all I could do to stay standing. It’s incredible just how much you can hurt and still not have a single broken bone. At least my luxurious beard was seemingly intact, not even a speck of schmutz in those scarlet locks.
Glancing up towards Bunny, I was about to ask for a hand, but she cut me off with a wave. “Hold on a second, I’ve got you. Let me just stow our new friend, and all you’ll have to do is give directions.”
“You’re not going to carry me around like a wee baby, are you?” Not that I was in any shape to really object, mind you, but still, it seemed a little, well, more bizarre than usual.
Bunny gently tucked Grey into an outer pocket, one that didn’t magically expand, before half-kneeling in front of me. “It’s either that or a fireman’s carry. You’re both in no condition to run and way too slow to keep up with me.” I know she was smirking, rabbit head or not. “No offense.”