by T. S. Mann
It had been a long week since the defeat of Lindsay Forrester and the disappearance of Doc and Mother Eagle. Bryce and Widget, now the co-leaders of the Boston Invisible College had insisted that all three Sullivans be put through an extensive battery of magical tests to determine whether there was any hint of the Beyond still attached to them.
All three had come up clean and free of chaos. Or more accurately, as clean and free as the average Stranger, since falling to the Beyond was an occupational hazard of all their kind.
The exam also clarified what attunements the boys had with the various Axioms now that Matt was no longer receiving an artificial boost from a chaos fragment. According to Widget, he now carried a level 3 attunement to the Paragon, along with a Level 2 attunement to both the Bodhisattva and the Runner.
Somewhat disdainfully, Bryce said he would have instead described Matt’s attunement as “Empyreal (Class 3), Psychic (Class 2), and Kinetic (Class 2).” Widget rolled her eyes in response. The young numenographer subscribed to the theory that the Axioms were at least quasi-sentient and thus deserving of proper names, a belief that had led to much good-natured arguing with her Doubting Thomas husband.
Matt no longer had any connection at all to the Dimensional Axiom, which he had only been able to access due to the former presence of the chaos fragment. Consequently, there would be no more casual hacking of sealed portals, or at least not until he learned how to do it the hard way via actual practice and study.
As for Luke, his only attunement was to the Reaper, but to everyone’s surprise (and mild concern), it was already at Level 4, identifying Luke as an “Adept Death-Mage.” However, Widget went on to explain that while such a high-level attunement gave Luke the power to do incredible things with death magic, it wasn’t the same thing as knowing how to do those things, let alone knowing whether it was a good idea to do them.
She also said that he should be extremely cautious at using the upper end of his powers and to put off pursuing mastery of chthonic magic for a few years at least, as it would be a bad thing to accidentally turn himself permanently into a vampire.
When Luke asked mildly about the possibility of intentionally turning himself into a vampire temporarily, none of those present had been the least bit amused.
Since then, the two boys had spent their time training in the safe and practical uses of magic and getting to know their father once more, all the while dancing around the question of what do we do next?
To help decide, John had brought them to Duffy’s so they would have a chance to see their mother and perhaps gain some closure on their former lives and their necessary separation from the woman who’d raised them. It was more emotional than they’d expected. And to add insult to injury, the Patriots were losing badly to the Browns! Across the room, Ellie yelled again at a Pats first down and then reached over to kiss her husband on the cheek. Matt frowned.
“So, who exactly is this Brad Collins asshole?” he asked somewhat petulantly.
“Be nice, Matt,” John replied. “When I was growing up, Brad was one of my best friends. He and I both dated your mother in high school. She went with him to the junior prom, and he got a little fresh with her, so I ended up punching in the face. After that, she and I ended up going steady until I proposed.”
Luke crooked an eyebrow. “That sounds suspiciously like the ending to Back to the Future.”
John thought about it. “Minus the time-travel, I suppose it was.”
Matt shook his head. “So, anyway, what you’re saying is that because we went strange, Mom is now married to an abusive jerk?”
His father just laughed. “Brad was never an ‘abusive jerk.’ He acted stupidly at a high school dance because of jealousy and spiked punch, and he got his clock cleaned for it. He later apologized to both Ellie and to me, and four years later, he was my Best Man at our wedding. If Ellie and I had decided to give either of you a godfather, it probably would have been him.”
“So why did we never hear about him growing up?” Luke said curiously.
“Well, he went into the Army after high school and was mostly stationed overseas. When I ‘died,’ he came back for the funeral and reconnected with Ellie. Later, he got wounded in Afghanistan, moved back to Boston permanently, and took disability retirement from the military. They got married about four years ago in the current timeline.”
“You’re okay with this?” Matt asked.
John exhaled sharply in exasperation. “It … it is what it is, Matt. There’s no way to undo strangeness, which means I can’t be a part of her life, and I don’t want to drag her into mine. All I can do is let her go and hope that she’s happy.”
“And is she?” Luke asked without taking his eyes off the married couple.
“I think so. I poked around in their heads. Brad’s a great guy, and he really cares deeply for your mother. She feels the same about him.”
He paused and smiled. “But just to be on the safe side, I may have made – cough – some adjustments to help insure their happiness now that the Unity Blade isn’t breathing down my neck anymore.”
“Adjustments?” both boys said simultaneously and with equal suspicion.
John took a sip of beer. “In about a week, Ellie will find out she’s pregnant with Brad’s child, even though she believes she can’t have children due to the miscarriage that she thinks killed the two of you.”
Matt was shocked. “You … you magically got our mother pregnant?”
“Yep. The child is Brad’s. I just helped it along by raising the odds of conception from less than 5% to around 95%. In about nine months, you two are going to have a baby half-sister.”
Luke looked over at his mother with concern. “Is it … safe for her to get pregnant at her age?”
John scoffed. “Ageism! Let me assure you both that the pregnancy will go off without a hitch, and the baby will be perfectly healthy.” He paused and smiled. “Not to mention well-off, since the day after Ellie finds out she’s pregnant, she’s going to win $1.7 million in the Massachusetts State Lottery.”
The two boys looked over at him in shock before bursting out into laughter.
“Oh! And speaking of gifts,” he continued. “That reminds me.”
He pulled out two thick envelopes from his pea coat and handed one to each of his sons. After a pair of mildly suspicious looks, Matt and Luke opened the envelopes to each find a driver’s license, a cell phone of an unknown brand, a platinum Visa, and a class ring. To their surprise, the licenses and credit cards identified them as Matt and Luke St. Angel, and the class rings marked them as 2011 graduates of Belmont Prep, the wealthy and prestigious private school that the late but still active Meredith Tucker had attended.
When the two boys put their rings on, they each gasped as their heads were suddenly filled with false memories about their years in private school, the friends they’d made, the classes and activities they’d excelled in … and enough academic knowledge to justify the stellar scores they’d both gotten on their SATs. They both realized that the memories were lies, but they were convincing and comprehensive enough to allow both brothers to fake being graduates of the school easily if it ever became necessary.
“What the hell?” Matt exclaimed at the rush of new knowledge flooding his brain.
“You both need a basic fiction cloak to conceal your True Names from anyone who might have picked them up and wants to use them against you. While you’re wearing those rings, the only people who know anything about pre-Insight Matt and Luke Sullivan are me, Electra, and the Caulfields.
“As far as the rest of the world is concerned, you're the St. Angel brothers and always have been. No one in the Unity Blade will remember any details about you that could be dangerous to us later. Anyway, you would have graduated this year but for your strangeness, and if I hadn’t gone strange in the first place, you’d have probably gone to Belmont, and your mother would have insisted that you do well. Consider this making up for lost time.”
He
then held up his own hand to show off a ring that identified him as a Belmont Prep alumnus (Class of 1987).
“Oh, and for future reference, your old man’s name is John St Angel. Johnny to my friends. My centuries-old pseudo-angelic fiction cloak may be gone, but nothing’s stopping me from constructing a new one along the same lines. Maybe if I pass it down for a few hundred years, it will be as powerful as the old one. Plus, I even get to use my real first name for a change.”
Meanwhile, Luke was examining his new driver’s license. “I don’t actually know how to drive. Will the license fix that too?”
“Naturally,” said the elder St. Angel. “Touch the license with your finger and put a little juice in it to download your Driver’s Ed. Training. Oh, and the date is auto-updating, so you’ll never have to get it renewed.”
Luke did as John said and then blinked at the peculiar sensation of suddenly knowing how to drive a car without having any memories of ever being behind the wheel. The license was thorough – he was pretty sure he knew how to drive stick-shift, to operate trucks that would normally require a CDL, and even how to ride a motorcycle.
“What do the cellphones do?” Matt asked.
“They let you make phone calls, silly,” John replied with a smirk. “Seriously, they have a few enchantments to keep people from listening in, to make them more durable, and to ensure they never lose service or run out of battery power. They’re also completely waterproof. But mainly they’re just cell phones. Also, the credit card is linked to one of my secondary fiction cloaks who happens to be filthy rich. Each card has a $10,000 limit.”
He fixed both boys with a firm paternal glare. “Use them responsibly.”
Luke nodded as he pocketed the phone before putting the credit card into his wallet. Then, he examined the driver’s license once more.
“I don’t suppose we can mod these things so that we’re over 21?” he asked.
“Sorry,” John said with a smirk. “I’m still your dad, so I’m not going to give you a fake ID to buy beer with. You’ll just have to keep doing whatever you did before you went strange for that.”
Matt took a deep breath. “Alright, we just magically graduated from high school? Now what? Off to Hogwarts?”
“Hey! That’s my line,” Luke said with a laugh.
“No Hogwarts, I’m afraid,” said their dad. “There’s not much formal education among Strangers. I’ll teach you both what I know. But honestly? What passes for formal instruction is mainly just knowledge passed down from one Stranger to another, either through apprentice-master relationships (which have their own drawbacks) or through one of the orders.”
“The Invisible College?” asked Matt. “The Unity Blade?”
“Among others. The Invisible College is the one most like a magical school, but it also insists you to look at magic from a scientific perspective. Usually, they won’t take people who don’t have some degree of college education.
“The Cult of Mammon is for Strangers who just want to be rich and powerful and don’t care much how they do it. I wouldn’t recommend them, but I won’t look down on you if you check ‘em out. Just always keep one hand on your wallet and never sign anything without reading it twice. The Church of the Unity Blade thinks that Strangers have an obligation to protect mundanes from monsters and magic and all the other bad things.
“Finally, there’s the Ministry of Continuity. I don’t think you’ve met any of them yet, which is a good thing considering everything that happened over the last week. They’re sort of the self-appointed police force for Strangers and anomalies. They clean up after us when we do things so stupidly obvious that it damages Reality. They also take it upon themselves to eliminate Strangers who are too reckless with their powers since open and obvious use of magic can cause problems for mundanes who witness them.”
“There are other, smaller orders, but most of them are localized. Like a voodoo cult in New Orleans or an alliance of magical hackers in Seattle, but those are the big four, the only orders that are international in scope.”
“Well, I think the Unity Blade is out,” Matt said firmly.
“Don’t judge them all according to the Boston congregation,” John replied. “For the most part, all the orders are broken up into cells, with each cell limited to a geographic area and organized according to the character and ideals of whoever is in charge. The Boston congregation was a paranoid fundamentalist cult because Mother Eagle ran it.”
“But in Denver, for example, the Unity Blade is run out of a martial arts dojo where the paladins are required to study relaxation techniques and learn to trim bonsai trees as a focus for their magic. Meanwhile, the one in Detroit consists of a half-dozen pacifist Muslim scholars who share work space with the local Invisible College cell. Every city is different, so if you move to a new area, try to keep an open mind.”
He reached back into his pocket and pulled out a final gift: a silver case for each of them that was engraved with a logo consisting of three winged angels standing together. Inside they found business cards that bore each of their names and phone numbers. And above them …
ST. ANGEL & SONS
WEIRDNESS INVESTIGATED
PROBLEMS SOLVED
“You’re a part of a new world now, boys,” he continued. “A strange and mostly hidden world full of vampires and werewolves, dragons and ghosts, and God knows what else. Possibly even Roswell aliens! It’s dangerous at times, but you wouldn’t be here right now if you’d chosen normality. And you also must live with the knowledge that this world could end any minute if there’s another event collapse. End and be replaced by something even weirder."
Johnny St. Angel, the Wizard of Fenway, raised his beer to offer up a toast.
“Welcome … to strangeness.”
Matt and Luke St. Angel looked at one another with some bemusement. Then, together, they raised their own glasses and clinked them against their father’s.
“To strangeness,” they said as one.
CHAPTER 21:
COMING ATTRACTIONS
11 November 2010 (11:00 p.m. local time)
Belsdorf Psychiatric Hospital
Potsdam, Germany
The man in the doctor’s lab coat strode confidently down the hallway of the “mental health facility.” The term annoyed him – he missed the classical elegance of the word “asylum.” It had so many connotations relevant to his line of work. While the name tag on his coat identified him “Dr. Josef Fischer,” that was a lie. He’d taken the coat and the name tag attached to it just moments earlier from the real Dr. Fischer.
More importantly, he’d also taken the contents of the good doctor’s skull, which the man had removed and quickly devoured as a prerequisite to assuming the good doctor’s identity. He hoped that no one would find the corpse sans brain until after he’d finished his mission. Bloody mutilated corpses caused people to scream and carry on, and he preferred to handle his affairs with a modicum of dignity.
The man stopped to make small talk with several nurses who the real Dr. Fischer had known, as well as some flirty conversation with one in particular with whom the late doctor had been having an extramarital affair. His cover secure, the man entered the room housing Dr. Edith Klein, late of the Liebnitz Institute for Astrophysics. Klein had been involuntarily committed after her recent mental breakdown and the subsequent psychotic rampage that followed it.
As the man entered, he was unsurprised to find the woman confined to her bed by heavy padded straps. In the few days since her incarceration began, she’d already bitten three fingers off an orderly. The man smiled at the thought. He remembered the first time he’d tasted human flesh.
“Good evening, Dr. Klein,” he said. “It’s so nice to finally meet you. May I call you Edith?”
She glared at him hatefully. “You’ve been my treating physician ever since I was brought in, Fischer. We’ve met several times, all of which I found unpleasant. And I’ve always told you to call me Dr. Klein!”
Th
e man laughed. “Ah, but you’re mistaken, Dr. Klein. You’ve met the late Dr. Fischer, but I’m not him. I’m just wearing his face for the moment. A little trick I learned a long time ago to ease my passage through the banalities of this tedious mundane world. I’m afraid most people find my true visage … disconcerting.”
With that, he closed Dr. Fischer’s eyelids for a few seconds. When he opened them again, Fischer’s kindly brown eyes were gone, replaced with an inky blackness so perfectly dark that for an instant, Klein felt as if she were being sucked into them.
“Who are you?!?” she whispered in a voice that hinted simultaneously at terror and arousal.
The man shook his head. “Names have power, Doctor. That’s why I sold mine a long time ago to the highest bidder. I’ve never regretted its loss.” He closed his stolen eyes again and restored them to normalcy.
“That’s rather why I’m here, Dr. Klein – to present you with a job opportunity.”
“… what do you mean?” Klein asked suspiciously.
“Something happened to you nine days ago at the Institute, didn’t it, Dr. Klein? Something strange and terrible and … beautiful. An exquisite nightmare you can just barely recall now that you’ve woken up from it. No one you’ve talked to since can begin to understand what you experienced. But I understand. And I want to help you.”
He moved closer and sat down on the bed next to the restrained woman. “I’m your way back to the dark, Dr. Klein,” he said in a silky voice that sent shivers down her spine. Her face lit up in rapture as she contemplated his offer.
“What do you want me to do?”
The man smiled broadly. If she felt any discomfort over how jagged and irregular his teeth were, she did not show it.
“Tell me, Doctor. Have you ever been to Texas?”
15 November 2010 (3:30 p.m. local time)
An interrogation room in a local police precinct
Mexico City, Mexico
Rafael Ortiz (no longer a Sergeant, apparently) sat alone in the interrogation room wearing an orange jumpsuit that he suspected was flea-ridden. He’d been detained for almost two weeks now without the Mexico City police charging him with anything.