Eye of the Tempest (Jane True)

by Nicole Peeler

  “Those ‘somethings’ are important,” she said, squeezing me gently with the arm she’d wrapped around me. I nestled closer, instinctively, before remembering I wasn’t supposed to trust her.

  She’s either a master con artist or she is trustworthy, I thought.

  We sat for a few moments, looking at where Jason’s house used to stand. I was grateful for Blondie’s silence, and for her being there. I still believed she was up to something, but I had to admit I felt I could trust her, deep in my bones. Meanwhile, her sitting with me right then, so patiently, made me want to believe that instinct rather than question it.

  “Well,” I said, after scrubbing my hands over my face, “it looks like I’ll have to find me a new ‘something.’ In the meantime, we need to find out what happened.” And with that, I pushed gently away from Blondie and got out of the car. I didn’t regret losing it like that, it was bound to happen with anything involving Jason, but the clock was ticking.

  Blondie got out with me and together we walked forward to where Caleb was questioning Sheila and Herbert Gray. As we got closer, we could see that the house was still there, sort of. It had just fallen through the ground into what appeared to be an absolutely enormous sinkhole.

  I didn’t think they came that big in nature, I thought, grimly. At least not around here.

  Sinkholes were common around Rockabill, but nothing so large it would swallow a house whole.

  As for the Grays, they’d been responding eagerly to the satyr’s questions. Undoubtedly Caleb had glamoured them to believe he was a journalist or a policeman, but when they saw me they clammed up. A look like she was sniffing vinegar passed over Sheila’s face.

  “I bet you’re pleased to see this,” said Sheila. I rocked back on my heels, unable to believe either her words or the spite with which she spoke them.

  “What are you talking about?” I replied. “Why on earth would I…”

  “You always hated us taking over the Black and White. You hated what we did to it. We know you told tourists at that bookstore not to stay with us.”

  I did no such thing, I thought as I stood there, mouth gaping. Sheila used my shocked silence to wind up for one last swing.

  “Well, now it’s in the ground, with your precious Jason.”

  At those words, Blondie’s hand shot out and smacked Sheila across the face. Her head whipped around, the crack of Blondie’s hand on Sheila’s face like that of a firecracker.

  Herbert Gray took a few discreet steps back, obviously unwilling to come to his wife’s aid. To be honest, upon thinking about it, I’d never actually seen him speak unless spoken to.

  But Sheila still had her defenders. Iris had led Stuart away from his parents, undoubtedly using a sprinkling of succubus magics to lure him where she wanted. But he came charging back at the sight of his mother getting slapped, bellowing like a bull.

  Caleb reached out a hoof and tripped Stu, who fell flat on his face, still hollering the whole way down.

  “We don’t have time for this,” I snapped. “Thank you for sticking up for me,” I said to the fuming Original at my side. “I appreciate it. But right now we need to know what happened. So… undo all this and let’s start from the beginning.”

  Even I was a little shocked at the authority in my voice, but everyone snapped to pretty quickly. Caleb hauled Stu up, Iris steered Mr. Gray toward us by the scruff of the neck, and Blondie reached forward to manhandle Mrs. Gray into cooperating.

  Then I felt Blondie’s power wash over the humans. She whispered to them that we’d only just arrived, they wanted to cooperate with us, and that they really, really wanted to be nice to Jane.

  I smiled at that last bit, as Blondie used another surge of power to keep the Grays’ in place. Then we rearranged ourselves together opposite them to appear as innocent as Girl Scouts selling delicious cookies door-to-door.

  When Blondie drew back her magic, Mr. and Mrs. Gray were smiling, absurdly happy for two people whose house had been gobbled up by the earth. Only Stu looked like he wasn’t sold on Blondie’s glamouring. He’d always had an odd resistance to magic, which explained why my “be nice to Jane” that had worked great on Linda never quite stuck with Stu.

  “Like we were just telling the nice men from the insurance company,” Mrs. Gray gushed, “we have no idea how this could have happened! Right, honey?” Mrs. Gray then turned to her husband, who looked almost as happy as she did that they weren’t sure how their house had disappeared.

  “No, sweetheart! I have no idea how this could have happened! In fact, we were at dinner when it did!” Mr. Gray was equally excited. I could practically see the exclamation marks bubbling from his lips.

  “Wait, wait, back up,” I said. “What nice men from the insurance agency?” While the supes I was with probably had never dealt with human insurance companies, I knew damned well there was no way any agency could get someone out to Rockabill that quickly.

  “The nice men! Who came right away! They were fast!” Mrs. Gray was practically singing her responses at this point.

  “What did they look like, these agents?” Caleb asked.

  “They were so kind! And so professional! And so kind!” Mrs. Gray went ahead and sang.

  “They were weird,” Stuart said, his never-pleasant voice gone particularly petulant. “Despite what my mom says, they weren’t professional. They were weird.”

  I elbowed Blondie. I knew if I asked a question, Stu would react badly, glamour or no glamour.

  “Um, weird how?” the Original asked, taking the hint.

  “The one dude was huge, first of all. Like circus-freak huge. And the second guy was creepy. And they didn’t help us at all. They just talked to my parents for like four seconds and then jumped into the hole and came out again like fifteen minutes later. They were fucking weird.”

  “Lang-uage!” Mrs. Gray sang. Stuart rolled his eyes.

  “Whatever, mom. Seriously, they weren’t right.” Stuart stopped talking, and then eyed my friends for a second, blinking as if he couldn’t quite focus his vision. “Kinda like you guys…”

  “All right then,” Caleb said, hastily. “You three should head into town. Check yourself into a hotel.” He paused when I gave him a Look, realizing the B & B was the hotel. “Um, check yourself into those cabins Mr. Allen owns. Make your calls from there. Call your insurance agents… I know they were just here, but you’ll want to call them again.”

  I smiled at the satyr’s kind use of his magic. I would have let the Grays sit, thinking their insurance claims were being processed. But I was a bitch and Caleb was just the sort of goat-man you wanted to bring home to mama.

  The Grays shuffled away, Stuart less pleased about leaving but not wanting to let his parents wander off alone. Once they were gone, we all turned to the ginormous hole through which the very roof of the Grays’ house still peeped. I knew what was coming next.

  So much spelunking… so little time.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I dangled above Blondie while she made rude comments about my ass. Caleb and Iris were staying aboveground, well out of the way. If we tripped another Alfar booby trap, something that took us out like the other had Nell and Anyan, they were supposed to call Ryu.

  So once again, I found myself descending into the earth, a position I wasn’t entirely comfortable with on a number of levels. Not least because of the one-woman peanut gallery below me.

  “It’s like a gumdrop, but an ass,” the Original was saying. “I’ve always been more of a breast girl, but now I get it. You’re a woman and yet you offer all the comforts of a recliner.”

  “Will you just help me down,” I chided, having had enough of Blondie’s flirtatious yammerings. I wasn’t sure if the Original was serious, but I did know most of the older supes were switch-hitters. Yet right now we needed to be applying our brains and our bodies to solving the mysteries cropping up around Rockabill, not seducing one another.

  Not to mention, even my libido couldn’t rouse its
elf at the sight of my last real link to Jason, sunk into the earth.

  “All work and no play makes Jane a dull girl, gumdrop ass and all,” Blondie muttered, helping me land beside her but insisting on pinching said ass at the same time. I meeped, pulling away.

  “That hurt. And I’m not exactly in the mood for games,” I said, pointedly staring at where Jason’s former home leaned precariously next to us.

  The sinkhole it had fallen into was enormous, big enough that there was room for Blondie and me to walk abreast of each other around the entire house. Meanwhile, the B & B looked almost entirely intact, even though it was leaning alarmingly. Part of me wanted to climb into that house and act like none of this had ever happened, starting with Jason’s death and moving onward.

  But that’s not an option, I thought, straightening my shoulders and looking away from what had been one of my last surviving connections to Jason.

  “Where should we start?” I asked. “What are we looking for?”

  “Beats me. Let’s just hope that what we’re looking for isn’t in the house.”

  “Or that it didn’t fall on top of it,” I added.

  We both grimaced at each other, and then started walking around the perimeter of the sinkhole. We’d gone only a little way around the house before we came across a few tunnels in the wall.

  “I don’t suppose you know if we should take one of these?” I asked, eyeing the three holes I could see from our current position next to the Grays’ now-sagging front porch.

  “Hmmm,” she said. “This is gonna require some investigation,” and with that, she began to strip off her clothes. Her body was as lithe and muscular as I remembered, every inch covered with tattoos that ranged from the very primitive to more traditional tribal tats, from pirate tats to sailor tats, and finally a smattering of more refined, modern-looking tattoos. A crazy mixture of ink splashed along her skin almost as if her flesh embodied the history of the tattoo. It should have looked a mess, but somehow it didn’t.

  And besides, I realized, she’s lived so long she probably does embody the history of the tattoo.

  But the wink she gave me when she handed me her clothes was anything but antiquarian, and I felt my cheeks flush in response.

  She reminds me of Ryu, my libido purred. Always ready for pleasure.

  Pleasure we don’t have time for, my virtue chastised, trying to figure out where to stash the Original’s clothing. I finally laid the little bundle on the Grays’ front porch, hoping the house didn’t collapse on it. When I turned back to Blondie, she had her eyes shut as if she were concentrating.

  “What we need is something with a keen sense of smell… but more than that… something that can sense—”

  And with that, and a terrific outpouring of magic, the Original was gone and a large moth fluttered where her head had been. I walked forward, my hand extended toward the marvel. The moth landed on my fingers, its wings of brown and dun—with splashes of white, red, and indigo—brushing my fingers as it found purchase on my skin.

  “How can you do that?” I asked, wondering again at the constant violation of every physical law I’d grown up with that was my new supernatural existence.

  As if fluttering away my questions, the moth alighted from my hand to sky-amble lazily toward one of the openings. There it hovered, for a handful of seconds, before making its way to the other tunnel, and then the other. Finally, it returned to the middle tunnel, fluttering its way a few feet inward. Then with another wash of magic, a nekkid lady crouched, shivering, in place of the moth.

  After grabbing Blondie’s clothes, I rushed them over to her. She was shaking so hard, however, that I had to help her.

  “Flying’s h-h-hard,” she said through chattering teeth, as I pulled her shirt over her head, carefully avoiding touching her naked frame. I swear her nipple rings winked at me in the darkness.

  “I bet,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I just need a moment…” And with that, I felt a tremendous surge of power as Blondie drew strength from… somewhere. With others of my kind—the Alfar-derived, I guess you’d call us—I could feel their elements answering them as water answered to me. But with Blondie, there was that four-elemental surge that said “Alfar,” but there was more… a bit like the surge I felt around Nell or Terk, Capitola’s little brownie, who both used old magic.

  But that’s not quite it, either, I thought, my senses unable to pin down exactly what I’d just felt. Whatever it is, though, it’s strong.

  Blondie, meanwhile, looked decidedly healthier. She stretched her lithe form—and I felt the twinge of jealousy I always feel when already-long people make themselves even longer—then looked at me.

  “C’mon, babydoll. There’s something down this way that’s calling to me.”

  “Calling to you?”

  “Well, I actually felt something that’s warning me away. But in this case—”

  “We’ll consider that an invite,” I said, drily, wondering when I’d become that white person in Eddie Murphy’s stand-up routine who goes inside the obviously haunted house—despite the house whispering, “Stay out! Stay out!”

  Together, we set off down the winding tunnel. Luckily, the ceiling was high and I didn’t feel very hemmed in. But as we continued, the floor began to slope downward, as if the ceiling was struggling to meet it. Soon enough we were stooping, the tunnel continually narrowing as we pushed forward.

  “Keep breathing, Jane,” Blondie warned. “This is just the first test.”

  “Test?” I asked, admittedly rather breathless from feeling the weight of the walls around me.

  “Yep. This is the first thing that makes you want to give up and go home. It’s just a tunnel. We’ll get through it.”

  There was wisdom in her words, but they didn’t make me feel less hemmed in or nervous. Which only got worse when the tunnel suddenly grew even narrower and we had to crawl. The dirt beneath my hands, though, felt soft and cool and clean, and I focused on that feeling rather than the darkness behind me or the walls at my flanks.

  Until, that is, something skittered out from underneath my right palm as I set my weight on it.

  Shuddering, I meeped, and then began a series of “ews.”

  “Almost there,” Blondie soothed. “I can feel the air changing…”

  And sure enough, soon we were pushing through a ridiculously narrow hole into a larger cavern. As I pushed my shoulders through, wriggling to extricate myself, I knew how a newborn baby must feel.

  I have been reborn, I thought as I got my shoulders through the hole, but I got caught on my bottom half. And I shall henceforth be known as Hips-Got-Stuck.

  Blondie grabbed me underneath the armpits and helped pull me through, dusting me off a little too thoroughly when she had me upright. I was so distracted by the cavern we were in that I let her manhandle me as I unleashed a series of softly lit mage lights to float around the dark space.

  Unlike the crystal cave from earlier, this one was made up of unadorned rock. But it was no less impressive: naturally vaulted ceilings of variously hued granite arched above us, jutting craggily, as if carved by rough hands.

  Or rough magic, I thought, peering around the cavern for evidence of anything untoward.

  “There,” Blondie hissed, nudging me in the ribs with her elbow and pointing with her chin. Sure enough, embedded in the stone to our very far left, we could see in the wavering light of our mage balls just the outer edge of a mirror thingy similar to the one under Gus’s rock. I gestured, and one of my closer mage lights moved just enough to reveal the mirror’s smooth surface.

  Just like the one I’d found before, this mirror held some sort of ancient Alfar sigil. But instead of full glimpses of different sigils popping in and out, this one snaked. A serpentlike dark line traced around sinuously to create new forms, never stopping long enough to identify what—if anything—it read.

  Blondie and I approached the mirrored surface slowly, our magics pushed out enough to
sense anything lurking but not enough, hopefully, to trip any booby traps. When we were finally standing in front of it, I was confronted with the exact same mystery from the crystal cavern, only this time I knew how dangerous our fiddling could be.

  “Well, obviously we shouldn’t blast at it,” I said.

  “No. That ended badly,” Blondie replied, wryly.

  “To be honest, I don’t even want to touch it with magic,” I said.

  My own words made me pause. “Maybe that’s it,” I said, after a few moments. “Maybe it’s not about magic at all. Maybe it’s like in a mystery… There’s always a knothole in the tree, or a special book in the bookcase…”

  And with that, I began groping around my side of the mirror. Blondie watched me cup, pull, fondle, and basically harass the rock face it was housed in, before she interrupted me.

  “What on earth are you doing? Why would the Alfar use a physical trigger when they had all that magic?”

  Because it works in Clue! I wanted to snap, but I didn’t.

  “Think about it,” I said. “It sorta makes sense. If they’re living before the other species evolved, then all their cohorts are really powerful: they’re other ancient Alfar, Originals like you, and first-magic creatures like Brownies. So why would you use magic to defend something when everyone has powerful magic? It’s a good defense now, cuz there’s not as many creatures with that much juice. But back then?”

  Blondie frowned, and then pulled up her shirt sleeves to well above her elbows as if getting ready to duke it out. I hope she wasn’t planning on duking it out with me—she’d win.

  “It’s good logic, Jane. But it’s wrong. This is a glyph,” she said, as if that should mean something to me.

  “I know,” I said, remembering what Nell had told me. “An ancient Alfar hieroglyph.”

  “No, it’s a glyph,” Blondie said. Obviously dropping the “hiero” meant something to her, but it meant diddly-squat to me.