by JD Cole
Derek’s Olympic-level fitness was amplified by the fact that his motor control and so-called “muscle memory” were all but perfect. Professional sports teams couldn’t muster the amount of skill he possessed. But he was unable to forget the old adage, don’t give up what you want most for what you want at the moment. What he wanted most was to be left alone, unbothered by the attention that came with status and celebrity. Even if he wasn’t the Hood, it would have remained prudent to keep his skills low-key.
Derek had researched his abilities, trying to find (a) records of similar occurrences in other people, and (b) chemical, radiological, or any-other-ical differences between himself and a normal person. Neither search had turned up any answers for the origin of his gifts, they simply revealed that his mind and body performed closer to their full potential than anyone else’s. Derek had never considered himself “flawless”, but he concluded that he was the closest thing to biological perfection humanity had ever seen. His memory was much more efficient than the “photographic” kind many other people enjoyed. His mind appended, catalogued, indexed, and cross-referenced every bit of information in his brain, be it visual, aural, tactile, olfactive, or gustative. The source of his brilliance was found in this ability to lay each of his memories atop one another simultaneously as he calculated solutions to any given problem. Likewise, his muscles, digestive and immune systems operated at peak efficiencies, even when his nutritional intake should have dictated otherwise.
The superior traits were not universal; his hearing and his sight weren’t much better than average, and there were lots of normal people, men and women, physically stronger than him. Advanced as his mind was, he was not telepathic like Kelli, and-
“Derek.”
Derek looked up to see James Gregory, the amiable old man who owned the junkyard and ran the recycling business here. Derek had a unique bond with James; the old man had found himself drowning in debt, and Derek had bailed him out in return for a small warehouse to use as a lab for his research. Derek was in a hurry to check his lab for the Hood’s vehicle and gear, but he couldn’t seem overly distracted in front of anyone. “James, how are you doing today?”
“I’m just fine, bit worried about the poor folk up in the city. Been watching lotsa news on that Hood fella helping them out. He’s been quiet the last few days, I bet they’re anxious to see him again.”
There was silence for several moments. He knows.
James cleared his throat, and started to turn away before speaking again. “Ain’t none of my business, son. But when you ask me for the shell of an old, conspicuous car and it shows up on the evening news speeding through the streets of Boston… I figured you were smarter than that.”
Derek had considered that point when building the car, but time had not been on his side, and the car had been nowhere near complete when he was forced to take it into the city. He had even concocted perfectly legitimate excuses that might still work with James.
Instead, he respected the man’s common sense. “I guess saying ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ would be pretty insulting, huh?”
“Like I said, none of my business. Just found it curious, was all.”
“Did you see the Hood come back? With his car?”
“Nope. I was tempted to peek inside your lab once I figured things out, but you’ve never done anything bad that I can think of. All your fussing about having a workshop here finally makes sense. You wanna keep helping people, that’s alright by me. Just do me a favor and don’t go leading reporters and police into my scrapyard.” With that, James walked back to the office trailer.
Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Some genius. In his rush to join Kelli’s fight against the Chek’than, Derek hadn’t bothered to worry about James’ knowledge about the Toyota Celica, an automobile from the end of the twentieth century that had been dumped here to be scrapped. The vehicle was completely alien next to the cars driven in 2026. He had designed body-modifications to further customize the car’s appearance, a-la the Batmobile, but he’d never gotten around to fabricating them.
The damage was done. He would worry about James later; the old man seemed willing to keep the secret for now. The real question was, is my identity still a secret to everybody else? Entering his lab, a warehouse virtually buried under piles of scrap metal and old-tech refuse, Derek discovered that the roadster was indeed parked here, covered with a drab olive tarp. He pulled the cover away, revealing that the car was still as damaged as he remembered it being. The right side was scratched and dented where the car had collided with the war drones and a brick wall. The camber and frontal alignment were horrific, the car having been lifted by an explosion and dropped down on its stock shock absorbers. Derek gripped the handle on the modified door/roof, sliding it open so he could climb into the driver’s seat.
The Celica GT had no windows; he’d welded them over with steel plates. In replacement, he had installed several cameras around the vehicle that fed the thin LCD screens lining the interior of the cabin. But all of those cameras had been destroyed or knocked offline during the battle. The only way he could have driven this home was with the door wide open and his head hanging out the side. Not the most effective getaway strategy.
Further, with the front wheels in the condition they were, he could not have driven at any kind of respectable speed… certainly not the three hundred miles an hour the turbine was capable of pushing. He poked his head under the car, checking the alignment more closely, and decided the vehicle would have had to practically crawl home to maintain even minimal control, assuming the axel joints and gearbox wouldn’t have just come apart as soon as the wheels started turning. Just how the heck had this thing gotten here in one piece without anybody noticing and following?
Irritated, and more than a little frightened, he got up and walked to the secret locker hidden in the floor on the far side of the lab. Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to find his armor and nanomesh uniform neatly stowed in their compartments. He closed it up, and began pacing the floor. This part of the lab was wide open to James and Derek’s parents. The roadster was usually kept locked up in the garage, an area converted from an old office space on northern side of the warehouse. Prior to the roadster’s conversion, he’d made a fiberglass mold of the Toyota to keep out in the open as a ruse.
While this lab was stocked with impressive computers and equipment for his research, the really impressive gear, the things he would never be able to explain owning, were locked away in the rear of the building, behind a wall made to look like the actual back wall. If one were able to look at the entire warehouse from outside with the benefit of less trash heaps, one might notice that the interior ended lengthwise before it should have.
If the Hood’s secret was exposed, Derek decided he was already under surveillance and screwed. A retinal scanner on the wall, disguised as an electrical outlet, verified his identity and opened the hidden door to his real lab, and he closed it behind him. His heart nearly stopped at the sight that greeted him.
Stabbed into the concrete floor was a sword, a magic talisman Derek had seen, and held, during the Lifishi’un trial he had been forced into with Devon and Kim.
Excalibur.
King Uther Pendragon, no mythical figure, had wielded this weapon in his failed quest to conquer England. Through conversation with Sorvir Moniscii, Derek had learned that Excalibur was really a sprite weapon, called Veylsa. Not much else had been forthcoming about its nature, but from Lifishi’un dream memories, Derek deduced a few things. Somehow, Veylsa had once fallen into human hands. The wizard Mehdlin, obviously the basis for the legendary Merlin, had a hand in it all. But Excalibur had been at the center of some horrific fighting.
Even that was not entirely clear to Derek, though. The Lifishi’un dream, while based on historical events, was by its nature altered by the presence of Derek and the others, as well as subtle manipulations by the sprite spellcasters who oversaw the trial. How much of that medieval war had actually happened,
and how much of it was just part of the dream?
While Derek had been subdued by the sprite influence on his mind, he had still been able to grasp that the Lifishi’un world was not real. In his attempt to break free of their spell, Derek had stolen the dream-world Excalibur and destroyed it, in the process nearly destroying the sprites’ hold on Kelli and the others. That prompted the sprites to pull him out of the trial completely by waking him. Derek closed his eyes and concentrated. Unless the sprites had learned new tricks from their experience with him, this was not another Lifishi’un spell. This was the real world. And the real Excalibur was stuck in the ground in his lab.
He paced around the faery weapon, which seemed to have been placed precisely at the center of his lab, a priceless artifact in the midst of a quarter billion dollars’ worth of scientific and industrial equipment. The sword was larger than the dream version had been. This version looked more suitable for a sprite to swing around. The double-edged blade was six inches wide and over four feet in length, though a bit more than a foot of that was hidden in the ground according to his memory of the weapon’s proportions. The hilt was another foot and a half added to that, thick enough that Derek would barely be able to grip it with any firmness. The cross guards were a pair of ornate, silvery blue wings spreading outward, intricately detailed down to the barbs and barbules on each individual feather. Each wing held an expertly carved sapphire gem in its center, giving the sword the appearance of eyes.
There was nothing human about the craftsmanship. This was beauty unrealized in the human world. Looking at the impossibly sharp blade from different angles revealed every color imaginable, dancing just below the surface of the metal, as if you could see the magic contained within. The nearest comparison Derek could make was a hologram, but even that failed to describe the beauty of this sword. It was only now that Derek realized there were tiny gems of various colors embedded in the blade itself… a moment later he recognized their patterns as resembling various astronomical constellations. They weren’t quite exact, but then there was no reason sprites would have used Greek legends to paint pictures in the night sky-
“King…” Derek froze as a whisper touched his mind, then another: “Lord, ruler…”
Something was enticing him to grab the hilt… he knew he was being influenced, and tried to fight it, but… the voice was so sweet, and he wanted so desperately to claim this sword for his own…
“The world can be yours… everything will be yours… you could rule it all…”
Derek blinked, free of the spell, and stepped back. The voice, seeming to realize its error, began seeking a more suitable temptation.
“Her love… her love can be yours…”
Derek’s eyes narrowed at the sword, its twin sapphires staring at him. An image of the Sprite Queen filled his mind then, clad in lingerie that promised endless pleasures as she gestured him to join her in her bed…
“Kelli can be yours… simply take the sword and call it your own, and Kelli will belong to you-”
“You had me up until the part where you suggested Kelli belongs to anybody. Wanna try for door number three?” Derek moved to a nearby cutting station, grabbing a partial beam of industrial steel that he used in the creation of small components. More than five of its nine feet of length had been consumed by his various projects, leaving it a formidable bludgeon.
But it simply bounced off Excalibur’s hilt as Derek struck it.
The blade hadn’t budged a micrometer in the concrete; it had not even caused a harmonic vibration. Derek’s hands didn’t appreciate the effort, however, and he dropped the metal club to squeeze at his throbbing knuckles, which was then aggravated by the reverberating clang of the steel rod hitting concrete floor. Angry now, he kicked at the sword’s hilt. Still, it would not budge.
“I’ve read this story,” he growled at the weapon, kicking it again. “Every knight in the land failed to pull you out of the stone, then along came little old Arthur and drags you free with one hand while picking his nose with the other.”
“Not quite. But that is a very amusing telling of the tale.”
“Who are you?” Derek heeled the flat of the blade with resigned frustration, and stepped back. “What are you doing in my lab?”
“Offering you the world.”
“I don’t want the world.”
“So I see. Most of the men I’ve met have wanted it. Most men would also be happy to take a beautiful girl like Kelli for their own.”
“I’m not like ‘most men’ you’ve met.”
The disembodied voice laughed, and Derek could not help his attraction to it; she sounded like the mermaids he had met with Kelli, but the innocence of their melodic voices was replaced here by something… sultry, suggestive.
“No, no you are not, Derek Hawkins. You are not like them at all. It is just as well, for the Sprite Queen is not a prize I could actually present to you. The world itself would be easier to acquire.”
“So what’s your deal? What are you selling for, my soul? First born child? The patent on my tractor beam technology?”
“Selling? You misunderstand, young man. Like Arthur Pendragon before you, I wanted to at least give you an illusion of choice.”
“Choice of what?”
“To accept me freely, to receive my gifts.”
“Declined. Now what’s the small print?”
“Small print? Ah, yes, I understand.” Derek assumed she was reading his mind as well as speaking directly into it. There was no sense in demanding she stop; he didn’t think he’d be able to tell if she stopped stealing his private thoughts or not. “The small print, as you say, is that you really don’t have a choice. We are already one. I just hoped we could start this relationship in a friendly manner. I would grant you whatever is within my power to make you happy with our partnership. I even brought you safely home from that city, hidden from prying eyes, preserving your secrets for you.”
“I don’t know what your game is, but I-”
“This is no game!” The voice had shed its sexiness for irritation, now. “This is my freedom!” The blade began to shimmer then, and a watery sprite took form above the sword, her lower half a cloud of faint mist wrapped about Excalibur. Her hair looked like finely combed strands of fog, waving weightlessly in the air. “I am Undine, and you are mine, my lord.”
The sprite’s long, slender arms lunged for Derek’s shoulders, pulling him close faster than he could dodge. Her right arm then wrapped around Derek, squeezing against his struggles, while her left hand gently caressed his cheek. He shuddered at her cold, wet touch, and condensation from her hair rolled over his brow. Undine’s face gently brushed against his, her lips hovering beside his ear.
“My sweet, beautiful master. You saved me, and I am now yours as much as you are mine. Sleep now, while I finish learning about your world. When you wake again, we will talk, and all of your questions will be answered.”
The last thing Derek would remember from this day was the clear liquid creature passing through his skin… into his body. The rest was blackness.
« CHAPTER 3 »
Opening Moves
Kelli took a slow sip of the herbal elixir, letting its steam fill her nostrils. Thankfully it wasn’t tea; she hated tea. This stuff looked like a liquefied apple pie, and tasted even better. But boy, was it hot.
“Careful, there,” Sorvir smiled.
Kelli returned a grin. “Why are you serving me, Sorvir? You’re supposed to be recovering, too.”
It had been almost a week since the battle in Boston, and Kelli was still bed-ridden. Sorvir had been up and about for a couple of days now, however, and seemed to be strengthening in leaps and bounds ahead of her. She found that slightly irritating. Now, Devon was sprawled on the bed Sorvir had vacated, lying half on his stomach with his head propped up in one hand. Kim sat near one of his wide-spread legs.
“I don’t like to lie around,” Sorvir replied, putting the serving tray on the table beside the bed. �
��Besides, I am still your personal attendant here until your formal coronation.”
“I dunno why you complaining, Kel,” Devon said. “Nobody is serving me, I would be happy if I was you.”
“Um,” Kim frowned, “you’re not the queen of all you survey.”
“I not da queen of anything! I’m da king!” Devon shapeshifted a Burger King crown on his head. Kim shook her head as Kelli smiled. Devon was still keeping his nightmares to himself, and Kim took his humor as an attempt to bury them until he was ready to face down whatever it was he’d seen. Still, his joking made things almost feel like they were getting back to normal… normal being a relative term.
Kelli’s face suddenly became stern. “You do know you’re in big trouble, right?” Sorvir raised a confused eyebrow as he noticed she was looking at him. “You didn’t tell me that you and the others would be suffering by helping me.”
He shrugged. “It did not matter.”
“It does to me! Look, I know I’m new to this queen stuff, but I think I have a right to know when my decisions are going to affect people, especially on that level.”
“You are quite right,” came a voice from the door way. Everyone looked over to see Dufangen entering the room, dressed in a fresh robe and leaning lightly on her crooked, wooden staff. Sprites, such as Sorvir and Kelli, could understand and be understood by anyone regardless of language barriers; Dufangen, speaking elvish Vomelri, sounded like gibberish to Devon and Kim as she continued.