by J. R. Rain
I considered my options, as I’d been considering them since the dream first occurred to me. A runaway big rig was going to end badly for someone, maybe a lot of someones.
But not my daughter. Not on this night.
My only conclusion, as the two vehicles inevitably converged upon the intersection, was to tackle one problem at a time.
And so I gained altitude and banked to port, coming up along Fourth Street, and behind the Honda Accord. At least, I would have expected her to somehow convince her friends to leave her behind at, say, an all-night Denny’s. But there she was, in the front seat, plain as day. I doubted she could read Talos’s mind, but then again, her remarkable abilities just might transcend alien species.
But here we all were. Dancing with fate.
Just how strong are you, Talos?
I guess we’re going to find out, came his words, if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking.
You would know better than most.
I flapped my wings hard, once, twice, and rocketed down—
***
I came up behind the speeding Honda, adjusted my wings this way and that until I was lined up over the roof. Had there been a sunroof, the passengers would have gotten quite the surprise.
As the big rig and the Accord converged upon the intersection, I reached out with Talos’s massive claws... and broke through the driver’s side and passenger’s side windows. Screams from within. I even heard Tammy screaming. Talons curled through the now-broken glass, I gripped the roof’s sheet metal, and now, I was lifting and flapping my wings as hard as I could, even while the speeding, out-of-control big rig bore down upon us from the right.
We were airborne, but I didn’t have time or space or strength to gain the altitude necessary for the truck to pass safely underneath. So, I did the next best thing.
I increased my speed, flapping faster and faster, and just as the truck roared behind me, clipping my own tail, we cleared the intersection.
***
A few hundred feet away, once I slowed down, I eased the car down along the side of the road. With the kids inside still screaming, I leaped up into the air, flapped my wings hard, gained some altitude, and turned back toward the runaway rig.
***
I banked to port, and raced down Haven, behind the speeding big rig.
The road curved ahead, just enough so that something—say a hurtling out-of-control big rig—would careen off the road and directly into whatever was in front of it.
And, in this case—big surprise—it was a Starbucks.
Hell, I would have been surprised if it wasn’t a Starbucks. I flapped hard, doing my best to catch up with the rig, itself going close to eighty miles an hour, maybe faster. I could just see the driver slumped against the window, his face pressed against the glass. Out cold or dead. He’d better hope he was dead, by the time I was done with him.
The good news: it was late and the Starbucks looked closed. The bad news: there was still a small crew inside. Through a side window, I could see one of them wiping down tables.
My options were rapidly running out—hell, I barely had time to catch up to the hurtling death trap, let alone formulate any kind of workable plan—I did the only thing I could think of.
I dropped down onto the rig’s cab and pulled off the roof. It tore away surprisingly easily, especially when you’re a hulking, twenty-foot monster with claws that could make a velociraptor envious.
Now, with the metal roof peeled free like a sardine can, I bid Talos adieu and summoned the single flame...
The transformation was instant, as it always was, and I went from straddling the roof cabin, to dropping down inside, naked as the day I was born. I pulled the slumped driver aside, leaped over him and jammed my bare foot down as hard as I could on the brake, certain I was going to smash the whole contraption down through the floorboards.
And now, the truck was slewing sideways, threatening to roll. I held the wheel firm and somehow righted the son-of-a-bitch. I rode the brake hard for the next few seconds as tree saplings were obliterated before my eyes.
Finally, finally, the whole damn thing came to a shuddering, skidding, screeching halt, just a foot or two away from the Starbucks side wall, which sported plenty of glass and now two frightened workers. With luck, Starbucks would be open in the morning, right on schedule. You’re welcome, world.
Next to me, the driver moaned. He was alive. My guess, judging by the dark spot in his aura over his chest, he’d had heart attack. There was a lightweight windbreaker on the passenger’s seat that looked like it might have been a 2X. I grabbed it, slipped it on, and leaped straight out of the roof. Before I landed, I had already donned the windbreaker, which fit me like a short dress.
The Starbucks employees had eased out of the coffee shop like two frightened kittens. I smiled and suggested they forget me. I didn’t see any security cameras, and so I dashed off to check on my daughter.
Chapter Sixty-five
I gave my daughter’s friends the collective false memory that they’d suffered the damage in a drive-thru accident. And because all the kids were high in the car—including my daughter—I let the driver believe he’d also knocked over a golden arch.
I next removed the memory that my daughter had been in the car at all. And because these new friends of hers were punks, I was tempted to remove the memory of their friendship altogether, except I didn’t want to overstep my boundaries. And my daughter would still remember, of course, and it would be terrible, I suppose, if her friends had forgotten her.
“Yes, it would be terrible,” said Tammy on the bus bench next to me. Allison had dashed off to the local Taco Bell for some drinks and food... and to also give me time alone with Tammy.
“You get no vote in the matter,” I said to her. “Zero. And I will work out any moral complexities on my own, thank you very much.”
I’d had the driver and his two friends—all older than Tammy, I might add—pull his car into a Jack-in-the-Box parking lot and call his parents, since he was still too high to drive. And while I was at it, I implanted within them all to never drink and drive again—or get high and drive again. For the rest of their lives. Period.
“Was that last part necessary, Mom?”
“It was, yes.”
“But you can’t control people.”
“I can when they nearly kill my daughter.”
“It wasn’t Derek’s fault. You know that better than anyone.”
“You’re high. You were all high—”
Tammy lay her hand on my wrist—her very warm hand. “I know you’re uncomfortable with this, Mom. I can see it and feel and hear it, like, oozing out of you. I can also see that you experimented with... marijuana... when you were eighteen. I get it. I’m young. But I’m also not like you, or like anyone. I’m old beyond my years.”
“Are you now?”
“I am, whether you like it or not.”
“Well, if I hadn’t swooped in tonight, you would have died at the ripe old age of fourteen.”
She opened her mouth to rebuff that, but had nothing.
I went on, “Yes, you can read minds. Yes, you have information available to you that few will ever have or dream of having. That does not mean you have lived enough years on this planet to make good choices.”
“But the accident wouldn’t have been our fault—”
“Was it a smart decision to let Derek drive high tonight?”
“I can hardly control him—he’s seventeen!”
“And aren’t you a little young to have friends who are two and three years older?”
“I like them. They like me.”
“Or do they like you because you, somehow, always know the right thing to say to them? Or, somehow, you just so happen to like exactly what they like, too? Or you, somehow, just happen to know what’s funny to them, or what they’re thinking?”
She shrugged, looked out the window. There were a half-dozen Ontario and Rancho Cucamonga police cruise
rs with flashing lights, parked willy-nilly around the big rig. An ambulance had come just a few minutes earlier. They had just extracted the driver carefully. From what I could gather, he seemed to have made it.
I said, “We don’t need to show off to win friends. We are pretty awesome in our own right, don’t you think?”
“Well, I am,” she said, looking at me sideways. “You’re kind of a dork.”
“An awesome dork,” I said.
“That’s an oxymoron.”
“Hey,” I said, “who are you calling an ox?”
“And who are you calling a moron?” she finished, an old joke, and we giggled and sat back on the bus bench.
After a few minutes, I said, “Do you think it might be a good idea to have friends more your age?”
“Maybe.”
“Growing up fast isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” I said. “What’s the rush? You’ll be a grownup your whole life. Why not have fun with kids your own age, and do fun things?”
“Really?’ she asked. “Roller skating?”
“I did,” I said, knowing she had picked up my errant thought. “It’s good, clean fun. Nothing wrong with roller skating and laughing and drinking a Coke and learning new skating tricks.”
“You are such a nerd.”
“Nerds are fun, too.”
She smiled and looked back at the still-steaming big rig. “How are they going to explain the roof being ripped off?”
“They’ll assume it was a tree or something.”
“And you really jumped in there and stopped the truck?”
“I did.”
“Maybe I should call you Super Nerd.”
“Call me anything you want, baby.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah, sweetie?”
“Why do you love us so much?”
“Because it’s the law,” I said.
She giggled and I pulled her in close, and we sat like that until Allison returned with some food. My kid, after all, had the munchies. I did, too.
Except, of course, I was high on life.
***
I called to tell my client, Roy Azul, the truth—the whole truth, so help me God—about everything creepy that lurked under the surface of Lake Elsinore. I unloaded on poor Roy every gory, frightening detail. He was amazed and shocked, elated and chagrined. And then, I made a reservation for my family to have a little vacation there, at half the usual price, which was the barter we’d agreed upon when he’d hired me to find evidence of the creature in the lake.
After he took my credit card and I had my reservation confirmation number, I only felt a little guilty when I removed Roy’s memory of having ever met me or hired me. Then, a little sadly, I also took away his memory of the monster’s fleeting shadow that he'd seen in Lake Elsinore.
When I arrived with my kids at Lake Elsinore for a much-needed getaway, we would be guests like any other guests of his fine establishment. And our lake vacation would be monster-free. Except for me.
Chapter Sixty-six
It was a week later, and I was in the Occult Reading Room.
I’d swung by with a few questions, but the Librarian said he had a surprise for me. He asked me to wait, which was what I was doing now, waiting and ignoring the slithery, oily whisperings from the darkest of the books.
During the past seven days, my daughter and I had, miracle of miracles, grown closer. After all, she wasn’t scheduled to like me again until, officially, five years from now, when she was nineteen and in college and missing her mom.
This was, I knew, unprecedented. After all, the ages of thirteen to nineteen were, officially, the dark ages. As in, parents were in the dark when it came to their teenagers.
Truthfully, I thought I’d lost her there for a while. The drinking, the smoking, and now the drugs. The older friends. Her snotty, piss-poor attitude. Yes, I saw a lot of myself in her. At least, at that age. I hadn’t exactly been a peach either. And, yes, I understood that kids—hell, everyone—had some rebellion in them. After all, who wants to be told what to do? Especially when you’re a fourteen-year-old mind reader who thinks she knows more than everyone else.
Of course, that had been before she’d gotten the fear of God put into her. I suspected she previously hadn’t taken my prophetic dreams very seriously. She had hinted as much. I think it didn’t get real until she saw the runaway truck coming for her. Nothing like a near-death experience to bring a mama and daughter together, especially when said mama had saved the day. In fact, there might even be a chance she now thought I was cool.
Okay, now I was pushing it.
Lichtenstein. Franklin had taken it upon himself to rid the castle of the most simple of the creatures—those with little, if any, reasoning faculties. How he’d gotten rid of them, I didn’t really want to know, but I was led to understand that a bonfire in the central court had been put liberally to use.
With that said, there remained about six Lichtenstein monsters who had been fairly advanced. All six now resided with Kingsley, and all were working for him in some capacity, especially Chef, as Kingsley now called Pierre. Apparently, the monsters had all taken to the big hairy oaf. Which was one reason I’d stayed away this week. I’d seen enough of Lichtenstein’s creations for a lifetime, thank you very much. With all this free labor and the adoring love of his subjects, I was beginning to think Kingsley’s own mansion in the Yorba Linda foothills was beginning to look suspiciously like the castle out at Lake Elsinore.
Speaking of which, Raul the brujo had taken it upon himself to burn the remains of the giant lake monster. I friended him on Facebook and thanked him in the messenger app for helping save my ass. He hadn’t responded yet. Maybe old brujos from a long and powerful magical lineage didn’t know how to use Facebook Messenger?
There were a few long-distance grainy images of what might have been a giant dragon fighting a giant earthworm circulating the internet. Then again, it could have been one giant blotch fighting another giant blotch, with bursts of fire here and there. Most people thought these images were photoshopped. God bless the cynics of the world. They kept people like me safely in the shadows.
There was the small matter of the intersection camera’s footage in Rancho Cucamonga. Luckily, I thought ahead, made a few inquiries, and, miracle of miracles, the digital footage had mysteriously been deleted. Probably for the best. I was fairly certain the world wasn’t ready to see a giant vampire bat swoop in and carry off a car full of teenagers.
Somewhere out there, trapped in a distant world, was a man named Edward Lichtenstein. He was immortal, which meant he would be trapped there for a very, very long time. Did he deserve it? I dunno, but he sure as hell deserved something. How many young alchemists had he killed for their magical blood I didn’t know, but I suspected many, if not dozens.
Yeah, he could just rot out there, wherever there was.
Meanwhile, I heard footsteps approaching from the shadowy hallway behind the Alchemist’s help desk. Two sets of footsteps, in fact. I looked up, already smiling.
With Maximus Archibald was, of course, little Luke.
Chapter Sixty-seven
Luke didn’t know me, and he seemed shyer than I’d expected. Then again, he’d spent the last seven days in a hospital having a blood transfusion and recovering from his ordeal. I wondered if such a transfusion would dilute his own magical blood.
“It doesn’t work that way, Sam,” said the master alchemist, reading my thoughts, exactly like the weirdo he was.
“Of course not,” I said. “How silly of me to think such nonsense.”
“Not silly, Sam. And certainly not nonsense. Much of what we do here—you and I, and others like us—is done without precedent. Meaning, nothing like us has ever existed in the history of the world. Everything is new. Everything is strange. Everything is open to us. Everything is evolving and expanding and taking on a life of its own. It is all we can do, sometimes, to keep up with this expansion. So, I am often learning, side by side with you,
even if I might have a few years of experience on you. In this case, I happen to know that the, ah, life force in young Luke can never be diluted. Indeed, if anything, it is stronger than ever.”
I appreciated that he used words like “life force” around the boy. No reason to freak the kid out more than we had to.
“Take a look for yourself, Sam.”
There it was. And the more I looked, the more it formed before me. The silver dragon. It wove slowly through Luke’s own brilliant aura. A few years ago, I had seen the exact opposite: a black serpentine creature weaving through the cursed Thurman family for generations.
Now, the silver dragon slithered purposefully, confidently, and continuously. Always moving, always weaving, always undulating. It could have been a sea snake gliding over the ocean floor, around coral and through drifting seaweed. The ghostly serpent’s face was often blurred, but sometimes, it coalesced into something frightening and beautiful. Sometimes, I saw a snout and teeth, and a sort of trailing, wispy, Fu-Man-Chu goatee. Once, it even seemed to pause and regard me, before continuing on, moving under his armpit and back around his shoulder, its graceful, thick, tubular body following behind, glowing, undulating.
“What am I seeing?” I asked.
“It is his mark, Sam. It is his bloodline.”
Luke watched us idly, but seemed more interested in the reading room itself, no doubt in the books that contained various levels of evil. In fact, I picked up his thought: he wanted desperately to take down a book on a high shelf that was calling out to him.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, slightly distracted.
“It is, Sam. And it’s also powerful.”
“But what, exactly, is it?”
“It is his animal totem, so to speak.”
“I don’t understand—”
“You have one, too, Sam. But in your case, his name is Talos.”