by C. T. Phipps
“Uh…huh,” I said, feeling deflated. I’d been suffering a crisis of faith since feeling the Goddess of the Forest’s viewpoint on her children.
This wasn’t helping.
“No, it’s groovy,” Dave said, waving his head around. “Whenever she wants to get busy, she turns me back into a human. Me and Andy are good friends about that.”
“Oh Lord,” Robyn said, feeling her head.
“Lovers are often jealous, but religion is an act where all can share in the same adoration,” Alex said. “That’s from The Bridge of Birds.”
“Never heard of it,” I said, looking at Dave. “So if you’re not busy grossing out Robyn, could you let us go see the Dryad?”
“Are you my father?” Robyn asked, sounding horrified.
Oh Goddess, I hadn’t even thought of that possibility.
“Possibly!” Dave replied, shrugging. “There used to be another guardian, but he got killed. Someone told a crazy cult leader about this place.”
“I see,” Robyn said, frowning. “Well, I’m the daughter of the Dryad and I want to see her.”
Dave looked between us. “Yeah, sorry, we’ve got a protocol for that.”
“A protocol?” I asked, feeling more ridiculous every second.
“Yeah,” Dave cleared his throat. “You must pass three tests in order to visit the Grove.”
“Are you fucking serious?” I asked, stunned we were really going through this. “I’m not about to tell you the air speed velocity of a swallow. African or otherwise.”
“Nope,” Dave replied. “Don’t worry, though, no one has ever passed the first.”
“Which is?” Alex said, clutching his staff tight as he started muttering protection spells.
“Me trying to kill you,” Dave said before charging.
I could see it now on my tombstone: “impaled with extreme prejudice.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
So I killed the unicorn. Yeah, that sentence doesn’t come off well no matter how you phrase it. I felt all of my magic disrupted by the creature’s alicorn (that is what you called the horn—I learned that from Dungeons and Dragons) while it charged directly at me with it. That resulted in me drawing my gun and aiming right at its head before pulling the trigger. If I’d been a human woman, then I would have been killed immediately, but I had weredeer reflexes that made us the fastest shapeshifters alive.
I didn’t use the Merlin Gun, though, but accidentally drew Ranger Taylor’s gun instead. You know, the one I’d confiscated from him while he was coughing up a lung. I don’t know if the Merlin Gun would have been any less lethal but I did know steel-jacketed rounds like the kind in his Desert Eagle XIX L6 had enough iron content to slay even a strong fairy creature.
Which it did. Specifically, the bullet went right into the head of Dave and the unicorn derailed in mid-charge to collapse right at my side. It took a few seconds to register what had happened, and then I leaned over to check to see if the Guardian was alive or dead. Seeing the big hole in its head and not knowing where a pulse was on a horse, I concluded, yes, I had killed a life-sized My Little Pony. Friendship was not magic.
“Oh crap,” I said, grimacing. “I am totally going to Hell for this.”
“You killed my father?” Robyn said, appalled. “I mean, my biological dad?”
“Your dad isn’t a unicorn!” I snapped, really not wanting to have done that. Then I turned to Alex. “He’s not, is he?”
“No,” Alex said, staring at the body. “Absolutely not.”
“How do you know?” Robyn said, staring down at the corpse.
It was a legend popularized by Hollywood that transformed people turn back into their original forms after they die. This wasn’t true, I’d learned from Kim Su, and made sense, as body modification via magic was as permanent as plastic surgery. Illusions disappeared when you killed the mage behind them, but this was clearly the form Dave Johnson would have to be buried in. You know, if unicorns were buried and if there was ground in the empty white void we were currently located in.
“I can use my Blood Sight to see you are unrelated,” Alex said, waving his hand. “Your actual father, Tom Parkins, is sadly deceased.”
“Oh,” Robyn said, calming down. “That’s good.”
Is there such a thing as Blood Sight? I asked Raguel.
No.
Is there a Tom Parkins? I asked.
It’s the name of an Anglo Hong Kong friend of Alex’s. He died saving Alex’s life.
Is Dave actually Robyn’s biological father? I asked.
Does it matter?
I decided not to press the matter further. “Yeah, well, I don’t think killing the Guardian was what we were meant to do.”
“No, we were meant to die,” Alex said, looking around the void around us. “Unfortunately, I suspect that’s not going to keep us from having to endure the other two tests.”
“Assuming Dave didn’t just make up those,” I said, still uncomfortable with the fact that I’d killed the man. Killing the man was hitting me a lot harder than the other people I’d taken down over the past couple of years. Maybe it was sympathy for a fellow sometimes two-legger, sometimes four-legger, or maybe it was all the memories of playing with my Twilight Sparkle doll growing up.
Yikes.
That was when the white void we were located in started to darken. I couldn’t see myself, Robyn, Alex, or anything else. Suddenly, without warning, I started fall into a dark and terrible abyss that consumed me whole. Then I was drowning.
I was once more in water and held my breath as I was overcome with terror. I didn’t even like to take baths and would not swim unless someone’s life depended on it. Because when I was a pre-teen, I’d taken my cousin Jill to Darkwater Lake and gotten her killed. The lake had been inhabited by a literal monster, a kelpie, who’d killed her as punishment for ignoring the “No Swimming” sign. Maybe.
To this day, I didn’t know if I could trust my own memories. Had she really drowned at the hands of the kelpie or had the kelpie been summoned by my own guilt? To give me a personification of my horror so i could kill it? I didn’t remember any kelpie for a decade after the event and only remembered fighting one after my shaman powers had awoken in a traumatic way last year.
In the darkness of the water that I couldn’t breathe or see in, I felt the presence of the long-dead kelpie around me. I’d destroyed it, but its disgusting weeds caressed my body, taunting me with its existence. I could hear my cousin’s screams echo through the water and wanted to swim toward her so I could rescue her. But I couldn’t. Not because she wasn’t there. This was the Spirit World, after all. No, I couldn’t because she was already dead.
I reached for the Merlin Gun, wanting some sort of comfort to provide a barrier against the darkness, but it wasn’t with me. No, I was naked in the water and even more vulnerable, as I’d been stripped of what little defense I had against the horrors within me. If this was the second test of the Dryad, it felt sadistic and evil.
“No,” I said, opening my mouth and letting the water pour down my throat. This was not real. It was not justice. I drank the water and turned it into magic within me then focused all of the power I’d used to exorcise Jones’ spirit from his daughter to blast away everything around me. I was in the Spirit World so I could control my environment. I was the god here, not the Dryad.
Obey! I mentally screamed.
Lights flickered on and I was no longer drowning in an immense blackness. Instead, I was in a teenage boy’s bedroom. Thankfully I was once more dressed and could feel the Merlin Gun in my pocket. I wasn’t even wet anymore. That was good, because I wanted as few reminders of Darkwater Lake as possible.
I could tell it was a teenage boy’s bedroom because there were discarded men’s t-shirts, jeans, and underwear on the floor. The walls were covered in posters of Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and the 2003 Daredevil movie with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. That explained a few things ab
out his choice in costumes for Halloween. There was a vague smell of pot in the air and I saw the CD player on the dresser beside the bed had stacks of punk music alongside, I kid you not, Linkin Park.
“God, this is Alex’s room as a teenager, isn’t it?” I said, looking around. “This is an immense opportunity for blackmail.”
I walked over and checked under the bed. Yep, there was a bunch of soft-core porn magazines underneath. I was tempted to look around for a journal or a computer to see if it was as full of emo-deep musings, but decided that would be an invasion of privacy. All of my good-natured snooping came to an end, though, with a young woman’s scream.
“Oh crap,” I said, realizing if I had been forced to relive my worst nightmare then this was probably Alex’s.
Running out the door, I found myself on a balcony overlooking a massive mansion’s entrance hall. I’d known Alex’s family was rich, but I hadn’t expected Hilton-rich. The place had a giant marble floor, chandelier, two grand staircases, and a frigging statue of Mars just down the hall to the right of me. The balcony on was covered in blood and I followed it to see the sight of two fallen figures next to a fourteen-year-old boy who was huddled in a fetal position by them. The first of the two was a beautiful black-haired girl about Alex’s age who looked a bit like Kim Su, while the other was an incredibly handsome well-built blond Eurasian man in a white suit who looked like he’d thrown up two gallons of blood.
Alex’s sister, Samantha, and his father, Phillip Tzu.
The boy was Alex.
He’d tried to save Samantha and ended up killing her with his powers.
Shit.
“I’m sorry,” I said, walking to Alex’s side. I didn’t know if the child was really him or if it was just a representation. He shuddered away from my touch.
“He needs to face this alone,” a voice spoke behind me.
I turned around to see Kim Su, wearing an all-white tracksuit and carrying a sheathed Chinese jian sword over her shoulder.
“Are you actually here?” I asked.
“Yes, unfortunately,” Kim Su said. “I sensed you two entering the Grove and decided to project myself. I was hoping you two would stay out of this but clearly I was mistaken.”
“Yeah, well, ignoring child murder isn’t really how I’m built,” I said.
“Part of why I like you,” Kim Su said, walking over to him.
“Yep,” Kim Su said. “If I’d known what Phillip was doing to his kids, I would have killed him myself. Child or not.”
“You’re Alex’s grandmother?” I asked, stunned. It made sense now that I thought about it. How else would Alex have sought out the world’s oldest, most reclusive wizard and found her when so many other sorcerers could not have?
That and he’s a quarter Chinese, Raguel said.
“How?” I asked, ignoring Raguel. “I mean, Alex’s father’s name is Tzu and…oh.”
Kim Su said, “It’s how you pronounce it since Chinese doesn’t have an alphabet. Mind you, I’ve had plenty of names over the years too. Phillip preferred giving himself the name of the Shang Dynasty’s rulers because he was always an egocentric little shit.”
I stared at her. “That explains a lot, I suppose. Do you have many kids?”
“None living,” Kim Su sighed. At that moment, despite looking younger than me, she seemed very old. “I stopped having them as soon as I could magic away my potential for pregnancy, but the urge to have them occasionally hit me once every few centuries. Usually it ends in pain and misery. Either they don’t get magical powers and get sucked into the regular world’s misery or they do get powers then die horribly trying to do the right thing.”
“Which was Phillip?” I asked.
“The latter, if you can believe it. His dad was a missionary who was my type, stupidly idealistic and an outsider. He died trying to talk to the people who came to kill him and his converts during the Boxer Rebellion. Not that I’m a fan of colonialism, mind you, but I exterminated every one of the son of a bitches involved. I raised Phillip by myself and that may have been a mistake since my millennia of cynicism rubbed off on him. As soon as he learned glamour from one of my fairy friends, he set out to fix the world. He became able to be anyone he wanted and influence the minds of others since he was one of those humans who viewed people as objects, rather than people. The world was his oyster and he guided it.”
“He’s done a crap job,” I said, looking over at Alex. “He’s also a terrible parent.”
Kim nodded. “Phillip killed every wizard who stepped between him and becoming leader of the Star Chamber as well as made J. Edgar Hoover his puppet. Why no one questioned why a huge racist like Hoover had a Eurasian secretary is a matter for the history books. Blackmail, money, and political ties got him more than spells ever did. Phillip brought down presidents and manipulated wars to bring about his idea of peace. I taught him the best way to do that was bash skulls and he took the lesson to heart. Still, I loved him and overlooked alliances with the Vampire Nation, Red Sky, and the Crowley-ists.”
“Why did he hurt Alex?” I asked, having to know. “He can’t have learned it from you.”
“No,” Kim Su said. “He learned it from experience when his first three magic-less families died of influenza, being cursed to death by a rival’s magic, and the Vietnam War. I taught him pain was the best way to awaken magic and he wanted children who could do sorcery, so he inflicted that on his children in hopes of awakening it.”
I stared at her. “Alex is really powerful. So…it worked?”
“Yes,” Kim Su said, her voice low. “He would have had it easier marrying a weredeer.”
“I’m glad he’s dead,” I said.
“Is he?” Kim Su asked.
I blinked. “You mean—”
“Jones was his student, one of many, and I doubt a sleazy former used-car salesman like him could have deduced how to become a body thief. I can’t prove it one way or another, but I think Alex just killed his current host. He didn’t take Alex’s body because he was too strong even then. Either that or he respected the act of patricide.”
“Great,” I said, taking a deep breath. “Alex can’t find out about this.”
“Too late,” Alex said, standing up. He was no longer a child but in his adult form with a depressed look on his face.
“Goddess dammit,” I muttered. “Listen—”
“I’m fine,” Alex said, looking down at his dead sister’s corpse before kneeling to close her eyes. “There’s nothing in this place I don’t relive every day anyway.”
I didn’t respond immediately. “Yeah, okay.”
Alex picked up his staff off the ground, looked at it, then broke it over his knee before tossing the pieces away. “I have spent too long making deals with other people for power. I must rely on my own strength now.”
That was a little weird. “Alex, about your dad—”
“I’ve known he’s been alive for a lot longer than either of you,” Alex said, his voice deep. “It’s why I studied to be a mage and went hunting with Lucien. I hoped to draw him out by tearing through the worst of the creatures of the night in hopes of finding him. It wasn’t until later that I discovered it was not in the shadows I’d find him, but the light.”
That sounded both awesome as well as irrelevant. “Focus, Alex, we need to find Robyn and get to the Dryad.”
“Yes,” Alex said, lowering his gaze. “Save the girl, save Bright Falls. Find Jones and beat him until he tells me where Phillip is.”
Okay, maybe Alex wasn’t entirely over what had happened to him here. Wait, that was a stupid observation; of course he wasn’t.
“We’ll deal with it,” I said, reaching over to put my hand on his shoulder. “There, there.”
Alex frowned. “That’s really condescending, Jane.”
“Sorry.”
Kim Su looked at Alex with a pitying voice in her face. “Revenge is not a path I recommend. It’s an old statement that when you seek it, you should dig tw
o graves.”
“I’m not interested in revenge,” Alex said, crossing his arms. “My father was a pathetic awful human being and probably still is. I seek him not because killing him will make me feel better, it won’t erase all the horrible things he did to me as well as Samantha, but because I worry he’s out there still doing it. What is the point of having all the power in the universe at your command if you can’t keep others with power from misusing theirs?”
“Safety,” Kim Su said without hesitation.
“Safety isn’t enough,” Alex said. “I have to make up for what I’ve done.”
“It was an accident,” I said, looking to Alex. “Your sister would understand.”
Alex got a bitter expression on his face. “I tried contacting her once. Part of the reason why I don’t talk to the dead anymore.”
I hesitated. “What did she say?”
“She could have survived my father’s actions and what I did to her was worse.”
Damn. “Remind me to punch her if I ever see her spirit.”
Kim Su looked horrified by my statement but also stunned into silence. There was also a sense of amusement she was trying to suppress.
“Yeah, I’m the master of crossing the line twice,” I said, not feeling any guilt for what I just said.
The mansion faded around us and we soon found ourselves back in the white void from before. Much to my surprise and relief, I found Robyn waiting for us. She had a sour expression on her face and looked deep in thought.
“Hey,” I said, raising my hand. “I hope your test wasn’t super traumatizing.”
Robyn looked up at me. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
I opened my mouth then closed it. “Fair enough.”
Robyn nodded then turned to Alex. “How are you, Agent Dreamy?”
“Ready to set fire to a tree,” Alex said. “Regardless of the consequences.”
His eyes were narrowed into deadly fury and I could tell the personal nature of the second test had broken something within him. Hopefully not permanently.