by Ren Ryder
I stewed in the tension, listening, waiting.
“Hey, if you die, can I have your blood and bones?” Bell asked cheerily from right in front of my face.
I snarled in response.
“So stingy. It’s not like you’ll need it when you’re dead,” Bell grumbled.
I didn’t put much stock in my odds if stayed on the defensive, so I pushed off the wall and picked a spot to take my stand. Nearest the end of the row of crates I’d so recently vacated, I took up a stance that would reduce my profile and shifted my weight to the balls of my feet.
No time to think. Just act.
All my senses were committed to timing my exit from cover. Everything sharpened. Sound became more pronounced. The chalky taste of concrete, dust, and grit invaded my mouth. My muscles rippled and tensed. Blood pulsed through my body in time with my wildly beating heart. My vision lightened except around the edges, where the most stubborn shadows persisted.
I covered with my left, fiery lances of pain coiling down and around my arm as I charged into a chain attack. I tugged at the length of cold, rough metal links entrapping me and hopped-stepped-ran down the chain to its wielder. Without bothering to aim I flicked my wrist in a violent arc to fling my best and only weapon at the suddenly less smug face of my enemy.
I raised my fist and brought a hammer-fist down on the man’s sharply jutting nose with all my strength. Boss-man released his end of the chain and it hit the floor with a clink and clatter. He spluttered as he snorted blood and groaned in pain, but he came back swinging and with rage in his eyes.
I ducked a right cross and got inside his guard as he fell off balance. I didn’t give him the time he needed to recover, pummeling him in critical spots one after the other. Throat, solar plexus, kidneys. I took him down with a firm sidekick to the back of his right knee. After a good windup with my dominant leg, I finished him off with a good kick to the balls.
“That oughtta teach you to go after holy men and kids,” I spat in disgust. “And if it doesn’t, I’ll be seeing you again.”
All I got in response was a whimper and a groan. Letting a guy like that live was more than he was worth, but finishing him off would bring down worse repercussions on mine and Sammie’s heads.
After all, New London’s slavers and kidnappers, like the ones I’d just finished giving a good thrashing, were oftentimes part of a larger criminal organization. That held especially true in a city known for its dark underbelly.
I happened to recognize the tattoo adoring the boss’s inner forearm: a serpent eating its own tail, all done up in black-and-red. Bad news. Ouroboros was comprised of a psychotic bunch of raving lunatics that had everything to do with all the crimes of magic in New London. Boss-man must have climbed to the very lowest rung of their totem pole, and I was likely standing in one of their safe houses.
With Ouroboros’s resources, I didn’t doubt Father Gregory’s murder and my subsequent actions would be connected. It was only a matter of time before it happened. But that didn’t matter. I planned to have made tracks and left this city behind before that happened.
I frisked the boss and pocketed his change, too. With the way things were going, Sammie and I were going to need every bit of it. I held my hand in front of his mouth while I was down there to make sure the guy was still breathing. He was.
I felt a brief flutter of relief, but it was so overshadowed by a rising wave of anxiety and a nameless dread that I wasn’t sure the reason I felt it. Was I relieved in knowing that the burden of my sins was lighter, or that I hadn’t killed an Ouroboros member? I didn’t know.
“Well, that was fun!” Bell chimed in.
“You’re a mean-spirited person, you know that?”
I snorted, shaking out my aching left arm. It didn’t help. That was going to leave one heck of a bruise come morning. At least it wasn’t broken.
I felt a tiny, playful bat to my shoulder. It still hurt. “Oh, stop it, you,” Bell giggled and hid her face behind her hands, acting all bashful.
I sighed and shook my head.
I went to recover the switchblade, which had disappeared into the cloying shadows of the warehouse. Following a vague sense of direction based on the throw’s trajectory, I walked by the rickety table. I picked up the portable lantern resting atop the tabletop as I passed.
The good news was, I found Sammie right away, and she was alive. Although she looked a bit worse for wear and her hair was matted with blood, I had no doubts she would be fine. The bad news? The really, really bad news? Well…
I about fell on my ass when hit by the revelation of what I’d walked into. “Oh, shit. This isn’t a safe house… what am I going to do?”
Arrayed in a horrifically grand, multi-tiered design were stacked rows of cages— from what little I could tell, every one of them housed some sort of magical beast, sentient creature, or monster.
Chapter Five
“Sammie, hey.” I gave her pudgy cheek a light poke.
Bell buzzed about, but I swatted her advances away the same way I would an errant fly.
“Oh, come on!” Bell flew on top Sammie’s vacated cage. She crossed her legs and struck up a good pout.
I made a makeshift rag of my tunic and did the best I could to clean up Sammie’s face. There wasn’t much I could do for the blood in her hair, that would have to wait.
Sammie moaned softly and stretched as if merely waking up from an afternoon nap. She looked around nonchalantly from where she was cradled in my arms. Her eyes shivered at the sight of the fallen boss; they lingered especially long on the cages.
“Is this the bad mens place?”
I nodded and shifted her weight so it rested more heavily upon my good arm. “Yeah, that’s right.”
Sammie’s face was set in a mask of concentration. “What happens now, Kal?”
I’m at a loss myself.
On the surface, the choice seemed simple enough. The excited, hopeful noises of dozens of fantastical creatures made it hard to think. I bit my lip. Freeing these prisoners was the right choice, the moral choice.
But, is it the correct choice?
That the might of Ouroboros would land on my, our heads, was the unavoidable consequence of freeing these imperiled entities. It was a choice I was loathe to make at Sammie’s expense. Everything I did, including what I had done tonight, had been in service of her future. Would guaranteeing the future of these others come at the cost of her own?
I just don’t know.
“What do you think we should do?” I asked Sammie.
Sammie cocked her head to one side, as if she didn’t understand the nature of the question. “We’re leaving after we save everybody, aren’t we?”
Samantha said it like it was the most natural, most obvious thing in the world. And maybe it was. I set Sammie down in a chair that faced the inside of the warehouse, so she’d have a clear view of me while I worked.
“Right— you’re right, of course.”
I made sure to leave the greedy, darkly amused, blood-hungry little sylph with a bold, blatant threat to its existence. “You touch her and you’re dead.”
“You’d think a reasonable person would show more gratitude for helping them get this far,” Bell huffed, clearly seeking some kind of payment.
I stopped, pivoted, and turned.
I unhooked the switchblade and flipped it open, then sliced into the soft flesh of the underside of my wrist. Blood welled freely from the cut, and I let the bloody waterfall drip and flow. No more than three thick globules of plasma were wasted before Bell was drawn to the offering like a bee to honey.
“Are you insane?! Don’t waste it!”
Bell lapped at my slit wrist contentedly as I thought absently about the task ahead of me. A warm tingling enveloped my wrist as she did, the closest physical equivalent would have been sitting in front of a warm hearth on a chill night.
Faeries were obsessively insistent when it came to upholding their bargains, promises, as well as giving
and receiving payment in appropriate measure. With good reason, few were known to have crossed or cheated the Fair Folk out of a deal.
My own motivations in this instance were more simple than that, though. I just didn’t want to owe this particular sylph anything.
I bent down to tear off a strip of cloth from my defeated foe and tied it around my wrist with a double knot. I kicked and stepped on him on my return trip, careful to hide the actions behind more casual gestures so Sammie wouldn’t catch on.
“Wait a minute mister, I wasn’t done with you!” Bell chirruped.
She was a belligerent drunk. Her flight patterns had a strange new swerving aspect to them as she flew to catch up to me. I plucked her from the air and stuffed her into my tunic pocket, then threw the flap closed on top of her for good measure.
“Well, ‘bout time I got crackin’ then.” I rolled my shoulders and stretched my body.
Half dazed, I worked through the night and into the early hours of the morning without pause for rest. The cages were locked and warded, but with a discarded sledgehammer and the discovery that I could use my aural cloak like a crowbar against wards, the process went smoother than I’d expected it to.
I’m sure I was spoken to, even stopped and thanked, but I was in an unprecedented fugue state until I was done. If I weren’t only half-conscious, I might’ve been terrified and felt trapped by the mental shift, but I was, so the point was moot.
I’ll do a single roundup because I don’t have the clearest memory of the details of what went down over that long span of hours.
There was a trio of multi-hued elementals, a half-dead ogre and a troll bundled into a single huge cage, a kelpie, nixie, two merrow (merpeople), a naiad in a bath of murky water, three dirty kobolds, an incubi-succubi pair whose actions didn’t bear describing, a birdcage full of pixies, four dwarfs with ragged features and scraggly beards, an indeterminate number of bumbling will-o-wisps, a sad little garden gnome, a wood nymph whose tree was beginning to wither, a quietly crying and beautiful banshee girl, an imp with an ear missing cooped up with a very irritated harpy, one very aggravated boggart, a playful and mischievous looking puck with a bucktoothed grin despite its captivity, a few captive lesser spirits trapped in an up-side down enclosure… the last mythical creature I freed was a djinn (not a genie, so, no, there were no shiny lamps involved).
I stopped, confused, when at the end I was confronted with a massive hunk of disgusting-colored metal. Whatever it looked like, the cage was obviously structurally sound, because the mix of people trapped inside hadn’t gotten loose.
The magical warding was so complex that the matrix of intertwining lines of magic were visible to the naked eye. I gaped stupidly at the massive display of power and skill for a good, long moment before I came back to my senses.
I called into the shuffling, excited mass of people pressed into the bars on the side of the cage nearest me. “Does anyone in there know anything about magic and warding? I’ll do my best but… I’m… really, really sorry to have to say this, but… there’s just no way I can get you out of there at my current skill level… not without some kind of miracle.”
“A miracle he says!” Bell’s tinkling laughter invaded my ears, but I shrugged it off.
A scholarly-looking fellow with thick wire-rimmed glasses and a floppy top hat adjusted the frames on his nose before addressing me. “Uhm, with your magical capacity and with your sylph’s assistance… breaking open this cage shouldn’t be impossible. Have you not already formed a spirit familiar contract with the creature? I assumed…” he trailed off, head cocked to one side as he looked at me.
A wave of incomprehensible nausea swept over me, and my stomach began doing flip-flops. My laugh, when it came, was dredged up from the bottom of my soul with all the effort in my being, and it was weak, pitiful even. “Ahaha— Bell, my familiar, you say… ha-ha,” I laughed dully, deadpan.
I glanced distastefully at my pocket, where, as expected, Bell was staring up at me with a haughty, self-satisfied expression. Her wide smile morphed into a wicked grin as our lines of sight crossed. She was, more than likely, positively full of glee at the opportunity to see me beg and plead for her help.
Like that would ever happen. No way, no how. Nuh-uh. Never, not doing it— it’s not happenin’ I tell ya!
“There has to be another way— I’m sure of it,” I said, feigning confidence that I felt not a bit of.
A young girl of no more than fourteen years with disheveled clothes and sparkling eyes broke into tears. “Please, please sir, don’t leave us here, the stories they tell—”
I stood stock still, trapped between a rock and a hard place. I rubbernecked left and right, looking for the remnants of the horde of other monsters that had once inhabited this dreary place. There were none. I found neither hide nor hair that could save me from my plight.
Pacing back and forth indecisively, I renewed a search of the warehouse to see if I might happen upon any caged monster I might have missed by chance.
Bell still wore that infuriating grin. She was patient, like a cat playing with a mouse, or a psycho killer who liked tearing the wings off of flies and watching them squirm. I kicked at the ground, scuffing the soft leather of my boots up as a result.
“Ugh!” I wanted to punch something, so I did; the cage wasn’t having it and cared not a whit for my temper tantrum. “Ow!”
“Son, needs must.”
A fatherly figure with salt-and-pepper hair cropped close to hushed and steel-gray eyes pinned me in place with as serious a stare as I had ever seen. He pointed at the window to the storehouse, through which the first rays of dawn could be seen. I grimaced at the sight and shifted uncomfortably, as if the light would burn me once it reached my skin.
I heaved a sigh then took a deep, deep breath. “Bell…” I began.
“Yes, whatever might you need from me?” Bell asked, cool as a cucumber. Her horns took on a devilish aspect in my mind.
I groaned. “About this… familiar contract thingy…”
“Hmm… familiar contracts… not ringing any bells at the moment…?” Bell said, her eyebrows raised and her tone suggestive.
My lips formed the words, but I choked. “Erk—”
Bell batted her eyelashes, practically sparkling with innocence and charm. “I’m sorry, what was that? I couldn’t quite hear you.”
I coughed. “This contract… will you—”
It was easy to see Bell was overflowing with glee. And yet, she persisted in silence, her smile radiant as the sun. The air twinkled around her like some sick, cosmic joke. I felt part of my soul wither and fall away. The feeling of complete, utter defeat welled up within me.
My face twitched. “Will you, be my... ugh, familiar?”
“YES!”
“Yes?” I asked.
Bell swatted me, which had all the oomph of a feather duster. “Why of course silly, I’ve been waiting for you to ask since the moment we met!”
Now I was completely bewildered. “What— since we met?”
“Your magic is delicious! Just being around you is enough to set my heart aflutter~”
Bell batted her eyelashes at me again, this time with a decided and utter lack of innocence. Gross. I tried not to puke as I shook my head in mute shock.
For that bizarre and inane reason? Ugh, what did I even expect. After all, this is Bell we’re talking about.
My shoulders drooped. “Fine… whatever. It doesn’t matter. Let’s just get this over with so we can get safely out of here. What do we need to do?”
At the end, I turned to the scholarly-looking fellow that had initially spotted the sylph and wondered at our connection. The first time you trusted faeries to make a fair deal was the first time you got robbed blind and left for dead. Who knew what schemes and ploys Bell would come up with and insert into the fine print of our deal.
No way was I falling for that honeytrap. I would rather a third party, especially as he was about to become indebted to
me, do the explaining and outlining of how the process was normally meant to go.
“Can you give me the short version?"
He obliged my prodding with gusto. “There’s a runic symbol that is oft used to bind wind spirits… but trusting a simple rune to bind a sylph would be a dubious gesture, if not outright laughable… yes yes, your intended familiar’s personal sigil will be best. Those are imbued with inherent meaning and power— it must be drawn in the sylph’s ichor and the circle must be closed and empowered by you personally.”
I was practically bursting out of my skin with impatience at this point. My foot tapped out a staccato rhythm on the concrete.
“Does it matter where she puts it?”
“Why of course! The location of a sigil or rune upon the body almost always has an effect, whether it be the strength or intended purpose—”
I kept glancing back to the rising sun throughout his explanation.
We really don’t have all the time in the world, I’ll have to cut him off.
“Over the heart then!”
The learned man tipped his head and fingered his floppy hat. “A wise choice for contracting with a sylph, I imagine— spirits of their caliber and intelligence can be a little… how do you say… difficult,” Mr. Floppy Hat spoke lightly.
“Fine. That’s fine, right Bell?” I continued speaking before Bell could answer me verbally, but after I had received a tiny nod in return. "Anything else?”
“You’ll need to hash out the details of your contract during the drawing of the sigil, naturally.”
“Naturally!” Bell giggled, rolling her eyes.
I huffed as I pulled up my tunic to reveal bare skin. “Let’s get this done.”
“Let’s!” Bell clapped gleefully.
Bell bit into her index finger with her razor-sharp incisors and began drawing upon my bare chest.“If you die, I get your blood, bones, body, your entire being— everything!” Bell said, her gold eyes gleaming with a feral inner light.