by Rain Oxford
“Shhh. Darwin said I have to wake you up, so just pretend I said to get up.” He was already most of the way back to sleep.”
“Tell him to send Rocky.”
“Can’t. Too asleep.”
After a few minutes, I got up and left the room. Darwin was pacing the living room. “What is it?” I asked.
“We’re okay right now. You have one, but then in a few hours, you’re going to have to choose between four simultaneous attacks.”
“Where do I need to be right now?”
He showed me a mental picture of her and, a few minutes later, I was standing in someone’s motel room. It was clean, but not fancy. I had just enough time to wonder why I appeared in an empty room before the door opened. The woman I was here to save entered with a young girl right behind her. She froze when she saw me.
“How do you people keep finding us?” She shut the door, keeping the child behind her. “You’re not taking my daughter.” She was stealthy about it, but I caught the motion as she let go of her daughter’s hand and reached for some kind of weapon.
“I’m not here to hurt you!” I said quickly, not wanting to scare her when I was supposed to protect her.
“As long as I hand her over, right? Not happening.” She pulled out a small gun and aimed it at me. Before I could even stop her, shadows formed a dark mass right between us. Her bullet hit the shadow and went right through it, grazing me in the arm.
I pulled my penlight from my pocket, clicked it on, visualized the light spreading further and brighter from the tip of my small flashlight, and pushed magic into the light like fuel for a fire.
The light on the tip of the penlight began to spread until it was too bright to look at and flooded the room. Right before I had to close my eyes, I saw the shadow disperse, almost like it was being ripped apart. When I could open my eyes again and try to blink the spots out, the light had faded and my penlight was dead.
“You killed it,” the woman said. “I thought you were one of them.”
“No, I’m here to help you. You’re on their kill list, which I was able to get ahold of. How many times have you seen them?”
“They first tried to take my daughter a month ago. We haven’t been in the same place for more than three days since.”
“These guys don’t care about where you are; if they know your face, they can find you.”
“The same way you found us?”
“Yes.”
“So you are one of them?”
“No. I’m…” I glanced at my palm. “Okay, say they’re demons. They want to use your daughter for her magic.”
“Magic? Like what you just used?”
“Yes. I’m a wizard with normal wizard magic, but I found you because I also have demon magic.” I showed her my palm, where the faint lines of my symbol were barely visible. “I know a place where you can stay that will be safe.”
“I’m not going with you.”
“The only thing that can protect you from magic is more magic.”
“I’ll go somewhere where there’s magic, but I’m not going with you or any other wizard or demon.”
“So you’d let a human take you?”
“Yes.”
I sighed and pulled out my phone and Drake’s business card. “Did you change your mind?” he asked by way of greeting.
“I will agree to work at the club for four days a week throughout June and July only in exchange for a---”
“Thursday through Sunday,” he interrupted.
“Fine.”
“Deal. What do you need?”
I lowered the phone. “What’s the address to this place?” I asked the woman. She grabbed the notepad that was next to the phone, which had the address. “I need you to meet a woman and her daughter at a motel and take her to Quintessence. Get something to write the address of the motel down.”
“I don’t know where Quintessence is,” he said.
“Shit.” I should have expected that. Drake was human and although everyone and their mom seemed to know my name and number these days, the paranormal university was still a well-kept secret.
“Oh, it’s okay,” Drake said. “Kevin knows where it is. His brothers are apparently heading there for some reason I’m not supposed to understand.”
“That’s Quintessence for you; don’t look, don’t ask, don’t tell.” I gave him the address and he said he would be on the next flight out. “Do you want me to stay?” I asked the woman when I hung up with Drake.
“I’ve been able to protect myself and my daughter for a month; I’m sure I can last three more hours.”
I returned home a few minutes later to find Darwin sitting on the couch with my laptop while Scott watched cartoons and Henry cooked breakfast. “Want to give me a job where I’m actually useful?” I asked.
“Huh?” Darwin asked. I explained the first and second run. “I have no idea ahead of time how it’s going to turn out. You should be happy you’re not fighting to the death.”
“I didn’t have a vision before either of them, so maybe that means something.
“You did help the woman. Where are the bandages?”
“In the bathroom.” I went into the kitchen, where Henry immediately handed me a mug of coffee.
Darwin came in a moment later with my first aid kit and a pair of gloves on. “What is it you said about preferring bullets to magic?”
“Magic lightning attacks, yeah.”
“Anyway, the bullet didn’t do any real damage and I’m pretty sure you’ve had worse,” he said after a few minutes of examining it.
“I figured as much when I didn’t bleed out and die.”
He cleaned the wound and bandaged it just as Henry set plates on the table.
* * *
After eating, we discussed the “big attack” that was coming up at sunset. Rocky was still protecting my mother, so I didn’t want to send him out again in case a shadow walker was setting a trap. It didn’t take a genius to know who was important to me. Unfortunately, getting my mother to the university wasn’t a matter of transportation; she was human. If I had a chance of defeating the shadow walkers without relying on Quintessence, I had to try.
At sunset, there would be four attacks simultaneously. There was no way we could save all four people at once and I couldn’t make a choice on faces alone. I put my vision ring on and told Darwin to give me the images slowly.
The first vision was surprising, because I recognized both the people there and the place. Becky Adams, a friend of mine from Quintessence, Grayson Adams, her father and one of the members of the former wizard council, and Becky’s mother were sitting in Grayson’s living room. Grayson was on the couch with an expression as if he was in time out, while Becky and her mother sat on the couch with matching scowls.
“You’re just going to try to worm your way on top again,” Becky said.
Grayson glared at her. “I raised you better than to talk to me that way.”
“Shut up, Gray,” Becky’s mother snapped before Becky could respond. Right behind the couch, the shadows on the walls and floor darkened and stretched to form a figure.
I was torn away from the vision as a new one took its place. This time, I saw a man on a subway train, nodding off in his seat, when the train suddenly lurched to a stop, most of the people hit the floor, including him. People didn’t really start panicking, however, until the lights went out.
The third vision was of a man sitting outside in his yard with his huge black dog. They were out in the forest, probably very far from the city. The dog suddenly started growling at something in the trees.
The next vision was of a man and woman leaving a bar together. Although the man looked wasted, the woman was clearly not. She had a very sinister aura as she pushed him against the door of his truck and kissed him. After a few minutes, she pulled away. “You’re going to love the power he gives you.”
“Is it really necessary? I have enough magic,” he slurred.
“Not if you wa
nt me.”
I was expelled from the vision forcefully enough that it took me a few minutes for the world to stop spinning before I realized I was back in my apartment.
“Did you see anything helpful?” Darwin asked.
“Yes. I saw that we need more help.”
“Did you see a way of setting a trap?”
“How much time do we have?”
“Six hours.”
“That should be plenty of time. We don’t have to worry about paradoxes or anything now that I’ve had the visions, right?” Vincent had told me when he first started teaching me divination that everyone had an infinite amount of possible futures. This makes accurately reading the future a game of chance and numbers.
Each of those paths is created by our decisions, and each is weighed in their potential. For example, there is a possibility that I would forget to replace my penlight and there is also a possibility that I could win the lottery. Since it was much more likely that I would forget to grab a working penlight, there was more potential in whatever paths were created from my absentmindedness. However, once I grabbed a new light, all those paths are destroyed and all that potential is lost.
The trouble with divination goes even deeper than that. There are different kinds of potential. The fact that I have not yet one the lottery does not mean I have less of a chance in the future. Although my potential futures of how I use my lottery winnings will diminish in number, they will never diminish in potential until I either alter the chances or die. Thus, if I suddenly stopped buying lotto tickets, the potential of those futures occurring would decrease.
Alas, I had never bought a lotto ticket in my life, so my chances weren’t great.
“Soothsaying isn’t my area of genius,” Darwin said. “If it weren’t for the fact that I know you’re level-headed, I would say it’s codswallop.”
“Okay. Well, let’s assume then, that we won’t destroy the Earth by preventing my visions from coming to be.”
To change a future that I saw in a vision is not always simple; it means fighting against the potential of all those possible futures created by the event like gravity. Unfortunately, according to Vincent, there was a price in shaping the future just as there was in using any other magic. Sometimes we can predict the consequences, and sometimes not. Divination is basically used to see the consequences of our actions ahead of time, but they never give us the whole picture or all of the other paths that can result. No mortal mind could handle that.
* * *
Henry drew sketches of the female shadow walker who would try to seduce the wizard at the bar while Darwin looked up the name of the bar and found its location. Since it was in Nevada, we had to add a few extra steps to the plan. First, Darwin went to the library to scan the sketches to his flashdrive and sent copies to Masere. Once that was done, we called Maseré and had his pack police get ahold of the police in Nevada. They were supposed to tell the police this person was wanted for multiple accounts of murder and that she would be at the bar.
Leaving it in their hands for the moment, I used the shadow pass to take Henry and me to Becky’s house. She didn’t live with her parents, and I was a little curious to see what her house actually looked like.
Becky was a bisexual feminist, an activist, a tree-hugger, and anti-government, but she was shy about her magic. She seemed to think she only got into Quintessence because her father was a member of the former wizard council. I didn’t agree. Although I learned something new about her every semester, there was nothing about her that was weak.
I knew so many people who were stunning on the outside and spewed hateful trash every time they opened their mouth. Regina was one such person. Becky, on the other hand, was the kind of woman who someone could overlook until she spoke up. I knew she could shut an entire room up with one sentence that cut through all the bullshit.
If I wasn’t nearly ten years older than her, I probably would have been trying to push her boyfriend out of the picture. Instead, I was content with her being one of my most sensible friends.
Her house was… exactly as I had predicted. It was an efficiency apartment with a living/bed area, a kitchenette, and a beaded curtain that led to a bathroom. It smelled like dirt and plants, probably because both windows were open and potted plants were balanced on the sills. The couch was dark brown with tears in it, the coffee table was unpainted, and the kitchen was cluttered with vegetable plants and ceramic dishes. There wasn’t even a little television.
I wasn’t surprised to see Becky on her couch, which I assumed served as her bed. I was, however, surprised to see her asleep in Brian’s arms. Brian was a hyena shifter who (for some reason) considered me his alpha. After a lifetime of abuse from his sisters, his mother kicked him out with nothing but the shirt on his back and a strong fear of females. Becky was apparently helping him to get over it.
He was also awake, and watching me expectantly. “I need to talk to her,” I whispered.
“She just got to sleep after a big fight with her father and she’s supposed to talk with him again this evening. You can wait.” His voice was soft and soothing so that Becky wouldn’t wake, but also completely confident. That was a new side to the normally timid shifter.
“Not if she wants to be alive tomorrow,” I said.
He narrowed his eyes and Henry growled at him. His eyes widened as if he was surprised. “I know you wouldn’t hurt her, but that sounded like a threat.”
“It is, just not from me. I had a vision of her getting attacked tonight and we can stop it from happening if we act now.”
That got him moving. He woke Becky, but only after brewing a cup of tea and fixing her some kind of stuffed omelet with peanut butter and jelly. When he woke her up and she happily devoured it before acknowledging mine or Henry’s presence, I gagged. Henry elbowed me in the side.
“Sorry to interrupt your… feast… but we need to worry about saving your life tonight.” She just looked at me expectantly, so I went on. “Tonight, when you and your parents are sitting in the living room, a very powerful wizard will appear and either try to convince you to serve his master, or kill you.”
“How powerful?”
“More powerful than Hunt or the entire wizard council put together. Remember Felicity?”
“The skank who tried to help my father destroy Quintessence with me in it? Yeah.”
“Well, she wasn’t even from Earth, and neither is the one who’s going to attack tonight. Now, stopping him will be difficult because he can appear wherever you are. The only way to know for sure when and where he’ll show up is to make sure it happens just like in my vision. The problem is that this guy is nearly undefeatable.”
“Okay, so it’s a bit sticky. What’s the plan?”
“Do you think your father has any good books on trapping powerful beings?”
“Oh, I’m sure of it. You three get in the car; I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Shouldn’t we wait in case---”
“No, definitely not,” Brian interrupted, pushing me towards the door.
* * *
Half an hour later, we arrived at Grayson’s huge, light blue New England Colonial house. “I see the council members got paid a lot,” I commented as we drove up the long driveway in Becky’s red Mini Cooper.
She rolled her eyes. “They weren’t a non-profit organization, no. I couldn’t wait to get away, especially when my father said he wouldn’t pay for it.” Brian reached over and took her hand. She smiled at him.
We went inside and she first showed me to her father’s library. It had high ceilings, fancy light fixtures, and top quality furniture that looked like it was there for appearance rather than use. All the walls were painted white. I wasn’t surprised to find that, while the library was a bibliophile’s dream, it looked like no one had ever been in it. Obviously, that wasn’t the case, because it only took Becky ten minutes to find the sizable books she was looking for.
Then she led us to a basement, which was set up for magi
c. Like in Zeb’s occult room, this room had magic symbols all over the floor and an altar in the middle. Unlike in Zeb’s room, this room was rectangular and had bookshelves of esoteric paraphernalia. “We really have to be in the same room?”
“Anything we change can ruin our element of surprise.”
She nodded, grabbed a cloth sack, dumped the contents out onto the floor, and began gathering everything we needed into it. When she was done, we headed back upstairs and she showed us to the room she and her parents normally met for “conferences” in. It was definitely the right room.
All of us got to work. We moved the couch so we could lift up the antique rug. Then Brian and I set candles and incense where Becky indicated and Henry drew sigils on the floor with salt and chalk.
“So, how is this going to go down?” she asked.
“Well, you and your mother are sitting on the couch. I’m not sure what you guys have said up to the point of attack, except that it happens right after your father says, ‘I raised you better than to talk to me that way’ and your mother says, ‘Shut up, Gray.’ At that point, you have about five seconds before the wizard appears.”
“And you’ll be hiding somewhere, waiting?” she asked.
“No. Sorry, but I have to… catch a train.”
“Seriously?”
“Afraid so. There are more of these powerful wizards and they’re out to cause trouble.”
“Will this be enough?” Henry asked, standing and checking out his work.
“That will stop anything,” Becky said. “All we have to do is activate it when someone is standing in that circle and they’re not going to have enough magic to charm a mouse. Even if I can’t activate it, my father can. We’ll be fine.” She then hugged me, which she had never done before. “Thank you for helping us.” We moved the rug and couch back carefully. Just as I grabbed Henry’s arm, she said, “You know, if the wizard is coming here because he wants to kill other powerful wizards, it’s going to be my father, not me. Did you think of that?”