by C. T. Phipps
“Get a room, you two,” the voice of my other closest friend (sort of) called from the parking lot.
I grumbled and pulled away before walking out into the parking lot and seeing a four-person group I didn’t expect to see together. It was Maria Gonzales, the aforementioned friend, who was standing there in a black sexy goth Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform with a black wig on, despite it being her natural hair color. Maria was my other best friend, a wereraven, and my brother’s girlfriend. They had an unconventional relationship I tried not to think about because, hey, brother, but mostly seemed to be built around a monogamous relationship that allowed them to sleep with other people.
Standing beside Maria was my older brother, Jeremy, who was a handsome (from a sisterly perspective) dark-haired man wearing a House Baratheon t-shirt underneath a leather jacket and ripped jeans. He’d gone through a bit of a growth spurt, which made him about a foot taller than me now.
Jeremy wasn’t a weredeer despite being the child of two, because shapeshifting was always hit-or-miss when passed down. He was, however, a pretty good mechanic and had taken up a semi-honest job working for one of Lucien’s legitimate businesses. The fact he still dealt drugs on the side made me want to smack the hell out of him even though his primary product was legal in Michigan.
The two other people present were Alice O’Henry and Jeanine Doe. They were dressed identically with red jackets and white pants meant to deliberately resemble fox-hunting costumes. Alice O’Henry was, in simple terms, so gorgeous you could probably describe her as looking like Nicole Kidman’s more-attractive sister. Jeanine had brown hair but, mimicking Alice, looked a great deal like her. That was probably genetics at work, since it turned out she was my half-sister by Emma’s adopted father, Christopher—it’s complicated—which meant she was also Alice’s niece despite being unrelated to Emma. Still, the revelation made Emma’s longstanding crush on her all the weirder.
The four of them were gathered in front of my car I’d dubbed the Millennium Falcon. It was a green 2001 Hummer my grandfather had owned and got roughly a mile to the gallon. Given I couldn’t afford a new car on my own and it was damn near indestructible, I’d come to appreciate my vehicle a lot more than I’d used to even if it wasn’t exactly eco- or finances-friendly. Lucien had, before I’d screwed up our relationship, also gotten the car enchanted with a few blessings that made it even harder for evil to get at me inside.
“Is this an intervention?” I asked, looking between everyone. “Because if it is, I’d like to state that Alice shouldn’t be here. I have enough bitch in my life with Emma.”
“Hey!” Emma said before pausing. “Oh, wait, that’s actually funny. Also, racist against female werewolves.”
“Only if you take it as a bad thing, which it is in Alice’s case,” I said. “She’s our town’s much prettier Cruella De Vil.”
Alice smiled. “My dear, I would very much love to make a deer-skin rug out of you, but I suspect Jeanine would object.”
“You would be right,” Jeanine said, frowning.
“Also Emma,” Alice said.
“Hey!” Emma said.
“You wouldn’t object?” Alice said, raising her eyebrow.
I looked around the parking lot, noticing there was a surprising lack of people present for such a disaster. Then again, the vast majority of them were back up at the crime scene. Still, it was unusual to see Alice O’Henry present without her army of cronies. I supposed Jeanine was enough of one for her.
“Listen, guys, I’ve already got the makings of a really crap day starting, so if we could cut to the chase it would be nice,” I said, unhappy to say the least. I would have loved to have my brother and sister show up on my doorstep normally. A year ago, I’d been incredibly close with Jeremy and friendly rivals with my sister. I’d barely talked to them since they’d almost been sacrificed, though, and didn’t think there was anything good coming from this conversation with Alice’s presence.
“Yes, you’ve created a real shit storm for us,” Alice said, putting her hands on her hips. “You didn’t think to call me or someone else before exposing our town’s dirty laundry to the media?”
I stared at her. “You mean, I didn’t think of calling someone other than the authorities when I found a bunch of dead newborns? No, I can’t say I thought of that.”
Alice stretched out her hands as if trying to resist the urge to strangle me. “This will be national news, Jane. We’re making progress as a species to get recognition as having equal rights with regular humans and protection against bigots. This has the potential to set us back to the beginning. Witch-burnings, internment camps, and hunters with the full support of the government.”
“Shapeshifters didn’t kill those children,” Emma said, blinking.
That wasn’t something I was sure about yet. They hadn’t done it because of instincts, but there were plenty of possibilities for shapeshifters wanting to leave fae-blooded children to die.
“It won’t matter,” Alice said, staring at her sister. “All that matters is the fact this was done on shapeshifter land.”
I rolled my eyes, not remotely convinced by her argument. “And the fact that this probably affects your plan to build a hotel on the area isn’t remotely affecting things. Hard to build a resort on the place where there was a murder pit, isn’t it?”
Alice’s face contorted and grew exaggerated canines as both her hands became covered in fur.
I pulled out the Merlin Gun, keeping it on the ground. “You don’t want to know if my gun thinks you’re an evildoer.”
“Whoa!” Jeremy said, stepping in between us. “Dial it down, you two.”
Alice growled at Jeremy, causing him to take a step back toward me.
“Please don’t kill my aunt, Jane,” Emma said.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I said, putting my gun away. “My family has been here every bit as long as you and I’ve seen gods, demons, and worse. It will take more than money and threats to scare me. I’m not a deer afraid of wolves.”
Alice pulled back her anger then looked around. “There’s a pecking order to this world, Jane. You should learn to respect where you are in it.”
“Yeah, I’m at the top of it,” I said, sighing. “But maybe you can tell me why the hell you’re here with my siblings.”
Jeanine had pulled away from Alice during her transformation, a look of fear and concern on her face I’d never seen before. My sister was a sorceress and shaman herself, but since taking the job as Alice’s personal assistant, she’d become diminished, and that worried me. What had happened to the person I’d grown up with? The girl I’d used to steal the makeup from and envy? What had happened to Jeremy that he was defending her boss?
“Wow, you’ve really become Wild West Jane,” Maria said cheerfully. “I like it.”
Jeremy looked at Maria in exasperation.
“Oh, by the way, if you need me to feather Alice, I’m totally cool with that,” Maria said, giving me two thumbs up.
Jeremy covered his face with his palm. “Oh God and Goddess.”
“We’re here to talk business,” Jeanine said, intervening. “Nothing more. It was something we had scheduled for today even before we discovered the tragedy.”
“Which we’ll be fixing,” Alice said, returning her features to normal. “I’ve put too much effort into the Shadow Pines Project to let some freakish West Coast hippie cult ruin it, Indian burial ground or not.”
“Oh, you are not going to state that this was something done by the First Nations,” I said, about ready to cast a hex on her.
Alice was about to say something nasty again.
Jeanine ended my focus on Alice with a single sentence. “Jane, we’ve decided to sell the Deerlightful Diner. We need you to sign off on it, though.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather. “What? You can’t sell Mom and Dad’s business!”
Emma covered her mouth with her hands, horrified. “We still eat there every d
ay!”
“Yeah and none of us are working there,” Jeremy said, shaking his head. “It’s not exactly a family business anymore and it’s barely making enough money to stay open. We managed to get in touch with Mom and Dad through the FBI. They’re okay with it.”
Witness Protection wasn’t nearly what it was supposed to be. Then again, there was the fact that you couldn’t exactly move shapeshifters to states where it was legal to shoot them either, and we’d declined moving. “That business is a part of our lives and belonged to Grandpa Jacob before it belonged to us.”
“We need the money, Jane,” Jeremy said, looking over at Maria. “Some of us have plans, and you aren’t exactly rolling in cash either. Alice has made a fair offer.”
“More than fair,” Jeanine said. “Enough that we can start focusing on moving our lives forward after last year’s tragedy.”
“You want to demolish the Deerlightful Diner so you can build another one of your crappy casinos, don’t you?” I said, disgusted.
Alice rolled her eyes. “Bright Falls has the potential to be more than a dying city and pitstop on the way to New Detroit. A greasy spoon in the middle of downtown doesn’t exactly contribute much to the city versus all the jobs new entertainment complexes can.”
“Will anybody be able to afford to live in your new Bright Falls?” I asked, disgusted.
“Don’t be a child, Jane,” Jeanine said, a lifetime of disdain crammed into five words.
“If you think I’m going to hand over our family—”
That was when I was knocked to my knees by an ear-piercing screech that shattered several car windows around the parking lot. Every other shapeshifter in the group, save Maria, also fell to their knees, as the enhanced hearing of both wolves as well as deer made it a crippling attack. Maria and my brother covered their ears but still managed to stand on their own two feet.
Looking up into the sky, I had to blink several times in order to make sure I wasn’t seeing an illusion since a Volkswagen-sized eagle was coming down toward us. It was the size of a J.R.R Tolkien member of that race, except there was something sickly wrong with it. A black disgusting tar was covering his wings and body, oozing and twisting around it like it had just come from bathing in an oil slick. The creature’s torso also surprised me too because it was feline and golden underneath the patches of oil. It took me a second to process the descending wholly organic stealth bomber was a frigging griffon.
Despite what you might think about this making me a hypocrite, I didn’t actually believe griffons existed until this moment. I mean, just about anything human beings could conceive existed in the Spirit World, but that was made of human dreams as much as the reverse, so that didn’t count. Things like car-sized eagle-lions were not things that existed in this world for obvious reasons.
By the time my mind adjusted to the fact I was in the face of the impossible, I saw it was diving toward Alice O’Henry and my siblings.
“Son of a pus bucket,” I said, grabbing Alice and turning into a deer in one single motion, bounding away from the Falcon in my new form. Alice was on my back, weighing more than I expected, and I hoped I’d made the right choice in rescuing the griffon’s target.
To my mixture of fear and relief, the griffon didn’t smash into the Falcon or go after my siblings but shifted position to go after a new pair of targets: us. Alice cursed at me in a mixture of three different languages before I came to a stop across the road. Turning back into a human, I barely managed to avoid having my head taken off as both Alice and I fell to the ground.
The griffon let forth another ear-splitting howl before flying over near us, landing with a thump, and assuming a leonine attack position.
I pulled out the Merlin Gun, dropping my staff, and aimed at my attacker. “Ten points from Gryffindor!”
Oh God and Goddess, that was terrible. Still, I fired, twice.
It barely reacted, gnashing at me and advancing.
Uh, why isn’t it dead? I asked my gun.
It is an animal. It is not evil.
Oh come on! I snapped.
I don’t make the rules.
Who does? I snapped.
God.
Ask a stupid question and get a stupid answer. Still, the Merlin Gun was still a real gun with a clip of enchanted steel-jacketed silver bullets. I took aim, steadied myself, and fired repeatedly at the creature’s face. Because it was a creature of magic, it didn’t die, but the creature did cover its face with its wings in pain.
Alice, who had spent most of her life in boardrooms rather than learning to fight like a “proper” werewolf, ruined her suit trying to climb to her feet but didn’t shift immediately. I suspected giant eagles were a new one for her too. The griffon then pulled its wings away and lifted up its claws to attack us both, only to have a six-foot-long wolf land on the griffon’s back before tearing into it with her claws.
Emma!
The attack continued with Maria flying up above in a hybrid form of crow and woman to throw glowing feathers onto its back. The griffon thrashed and roared even as the black goop covering it seemed to grow thicker, seeping into its wounds and causing the creature immense pain. The griffon’s cries grew erratic then it flopped over, thrashing like a wounded animal.
The spellbinding is poorly done and killing it, the Merlin Gun said.
“Can it be helped?” I spoke aloud, having only two bullets left.
It can be put down. I will help you do that.
“So you’ll help me mercy kill a griffon, but not kill it when it’s trying to kill someone?”
When that someone is evil, yes.
“You suck.”
Emma leapt off the wounded griffon’s back as I aimed the Merlin Gun and felt its power charge. I fired a single bullet into the creature’s heart. The creature glowed for a second as all of the black sludge burned off its body before it fell over dead. It was a majestic creature, one I felt bad about being unable to help.
“Someone sent that thing to kill Alice?” I asked.
Yes.
“Who are you talking to?” Alice asked, covered in mud and looking embarrassed.
“Mr. None of Your Damned Business,” I said, walking over to look at the creature. “Well, I’m not a detective or anything, but I think it’s very likely the work of Dr. Jones.”
Probably, the Merlin Gun said.
Alice’s face shifted as she stared at me then the creature. “That filthy mage thinks he can kill me? I’ll tear his cult down around his ears.”
“Uh…” I started to say. “I don’t think it’s a good thing to go after this guy. He’s hella powerful.”
“Shut up!” Alice growled, looking down at her ruined outfit. “I owe you a debt and it will be repaid, but don’t test me.”
“A debt enough not to buy the Deerlightful?” I asked.
“No,” Alice said, walking over to my siblings, who’d watched the whole thing from the sidelines. Both looked ashamed, and I wondered if they felt like they should have contributed. Jeanine had abandoned her shaman training for business school while Jeremy didn’t have any powers. I couldn’t help but feel disappointment in both of them, not for not helping, but for the fact that they were allied with someone like Alice in the first place.
And for money!
Emma and Maria both assumed their human forms.
“Need any more help?” Maria asked. “I mean, aside from killing this giant bird-lion?”
I looked over at it. “Well, I’m not getting rid of its body. You should call the forestry service or something.”
I couldn’t imagine that would help out Alice’s plans to develop the area. I imagined the media would be on the discovery of a “new” species like a griffon every bit as much as the murder pit. I hoped no one identified me as the person who killed the only probable griffon on Earth at this time. That would totally ruin me with the tourists.
“Gotcha,” Maria said, walking over and putting her hand on my shoulder. “You know, Jeremy didn’t
want to do this. He just wants to get out of drug dealing and live a normal life. Buy a house and so on.”
“Yeah, right,” I said, not believing that was in my brother’s plans at all. “If you’ll excuse me, Maria, I have a mage to go see.”
Emma just watched her aunt leave and I wondered what she’d thought about all this. Alice hadn’t even bothered to thank her.
What a bitch.
Chapter Five
It wasn’t a very long drive from Shadow Pines Park to Kim Su’s strip mall. It was not the sort of place where you expected an archmage to hide. Then again, that would be sort of the point of hiding wouldn’t it? If she had a big Isengard-style tower in the middle of Michigan it wouldn’t exactly be that hard for people like Dr. Jones to find her.
Still, I couldn’t help but a feel a bit disappointed every time I drove up to “Kim Su’s The Tower – For All Your Occult and Scented Candle Needs” right next to the liquor store and Lowcost Buy. The entire place was covered in magical glyphs and runes so no one but friendlies would be able to see it, but it didn’t have the kind of verve you’d associate with the world’s biggest do-gooder. The fact she was hiding and had been for the better part of the past few decades also hurt my respect for her.
Parking the Millennium Falcon across the street from her, I looked over at Emma. “So what do you think I should bring up first when I talk to her: the murder pit, the Ultralogists, or the fact that Mrs. Potter is trying to shut down the Deerlightful?”
Emma frowned. “You don’t think it’s a good idea to sell out?”
I stared at her. “Emma, how could you even think that?”
Emma blinked at me. “Because I know you’ve got a bunch of bills you’re barely able to pay off. You haven’t been able to go to Bright Community and Technical since taking up classes with Kim Su, either.”
“Learning how to be a wizard is more important than learning how to be a writer,” I said, making a somewhat painful admission. “There will be chances for that latter.”
“Will there?” Emma asked. “Also, have you even learned how to do any magic?”