by Jim Johnson
I flushed, and was grateful it was dark because I doubted he’d be able to see it. “I, ah…” I stammered, then stopped and took a deep breath. I didn’t have anything to be ashamed of.
I focused squarely on him, tapping into an inner confidence I had only just recently figured out I possessed. “My job is part-time at best, so I’ve been able to spent three to four hours a day practicing some element of the ley grid and ley threads. Some of that time is with Miss Chin, but she has her own things to do as a Warden that she doesn’t always have time for me. So most of it is independent study and experimentation.”
He nodded. “Still, you have way more time on your hands to practice with this stuff than I do.”
I wrinkled my nose, not really caring if he saw that or not. “Well, I’m sure your job certainly pays better than mine, anyway.” Not that I knew what he did—I hadn’t thought to ask him yet and wasn’t sure I even wanted to know the answer.
“You work retail part-time, right? Maybe a hundred a week?”
I shook my head. “Maybe on a great week if Bonita has the extra hours to give me. But yeah, call it about that.”
“I make that in a day of hard work. And that’s not bragging. It’s just hard, back-breaking work.” He chuckled. “Now, if I could figure out how to make these ley threads move furniture, I’d be in a much better place.”
I stared at him. “You move furniture for a living?” I guess I had expected something more exotic or exciting.
He snorted. “Hardly for a living. It’s a job, though, you know? My brother runs his own moving business and I drive a truck and move stuff for him. It’s not my dream job by any means, but it puts green in my pocket and allows me to afford the stuff I want to have. On a good week full of clients, I can make maybe a grand or two, not including gas and food.”
I stifled a feeling of jealousy, then shot him a smile I barely felt. “That much? Jeez, maybe I should get out of retail.”
He chuckled. “Any time you wanna wake up at five in the morning and get in my truck, I’ll bring you along. I pay the day workers I hire ten dollars an hour. I’d start you at that and then work you up from there as you gain experience.”
I continued to stare at him, trying to determine if he was being serious. I inclined my head. “You’re putting me on.”
He grinned at me in the growing darkness. “Maybe a little, but… Really. If you want to move furniture and boxes all day long, text me and let me know. It’s basically manual labor, but the pay’s good. Put in ten hours of hard work and pocket an easy hundred bucks.”
I gnawed the inside of my mouth, working the math in my head. Five days a week of that sort of hard work would earn me two thousand dollars a month—that was unheard-of money for me. That plus the five hundred stipend from my brother would be life-changing.
“I…I don’t know what to say, Malcolm. If you’re serious, could I try it out part-time? Maybe do one day and see how it goes?”
“Sure. Like I said, I hire day workers anyway. Adding you to the mix would just be adding another body for the day. Don’t mean to sound impersonal, but that’s pretty much how it works.” He nodded toward me. “How’s your Spanish?”
I shook my head. “Lousy. Does that matter?”
“Nah. The day workers aren’t much for conversation, usually. They keep to themselves but work their asses off. I have a small crew that I trust and they really appreciate how much I pay them. A lot of them can’t get work at that rate anywhere else.”
He sighed and then glanced at the glowing ward dome. “Anyway, all that aside, did you think about my idea about approaching Detective Bello?”
Crap, I had totally forgotten. “Yeah, some.” I lied. “Remember I told you I ran into Bello the other day? He told me some strange stuff and then suggested I check out the Lincoln Memorial.”
“Sounds pretty weird. What did you do?”
“I went there the other night, and used a couple ley threads to help power up my inner Sight, and I used it to check out the Memorial. The whole place is plugged into the grid, Malcolm.”
He shook his head. “I don’t follow.”
“It was all glowy, like the whole thing had been built with ley threads woven into the marble of the statue and the walls. There were arcs of blue energy all over the place, the walls, the floor, even the statue.”
“That’s pretty cool, but how could Bello tip you off to that? Is he like us?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea. But that wasn’t all I found. In the marble behind old Abe’s seat was a ragged cut into the Veil, lined in orange and red lighting.”
He frowned. “There’s a break in the Veil…in the Lincoln Memorial?”
I nodded. “Crazy, huh?”
He shook his head, “That’s off the wall, Rachel. Not to mention that maybe Detective Bello knows about it.”
A sudden memory sprang to mind. “Oh! And while I was there I ran into that guy who helped us track down Buster Jay and your sister. Cubes.”
Malcolm’s eyes got wide at that. “Cubes? Damn. How the hell is he? I thought he was, you know…a homeless drug addict.”
I nodded. “I think he’s still homeless, but he told me he had gotten off the drugs. He was still as weird as ever and going on about his old lady, though.”
“Crazy stuff. Good to hear he’s still around. Did he say anything special?”
I recalled the conversation, and nodded. “I think he’s somehow tied into the etherics. He said he could see me glow and I suspected he knew something about what was happening at the Lincoln Memorial.”
“Huh. We’ll have to go check out the memorial. Maybe I can help close that rift.”
I frowned, but grabbed hold of the comment. “Sure, that’d be great. And speaking of the etherics…maybe we should get on with our training.” I smiled at him to soften the request, but what I really wanted to do was rush through the training session and get home. I was starting to feel overwhelmed with everything piling onto my plate.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
MALCOLM SAT UP STRAIGHTER ON HIS side of the circle. Through my Sight, I could see that he took a stronger grip of the ley thread. “I’m about as ready as I’m gonna be, Rachel. Let’s do this.”
I sighed inwardly, ready to get this over with. I suspected that I was being unfair to Malcolm, but I really just wanted to get home and get away from the challenges I was dealing with.
I nodded and then closed my eyes. “The warding dome around us is secure, so we should be safe here to practice away from any possible prying eyes.” I flexed the ley threads to double-check the stability of the warding dome once more, and was satisfied that it was intact and strong.
I focused on him with my Sight. “First, the warm-up basics. Use the ley thread under your control and create a small sphere of light, say about the size of a baseball.”
In my mind’s Eye, I saw Malcolm frown. I knew he hated this particular exercise, but it was a really good one, useful for developing finer manipulation of ley threads.
Malcolm hesitated, but then started to lazily compress the energies coming off the ley thread into a ball shape.
“This was one of my least favorite exercises too, but it really does work. I encourage you to work on this one when you have time. Start with a baseball, but experiment with other sizes of spheres. Once you get more comfortable with changing the shape of the energies into a sphere, you can move on to other geometric shapes.”
Malcolm sighed. “I just don’t see why I need to waste my time with this. What use is an energy sphere ever going to have?”
I wasn’t about to tell him that I had asked Miss Chin the exact same question the first time she had me do this exercise. Instead, I said, “Think back on that encounter we had outside that drug den. What did you do to the guy who was guarding the entrance?”
He frowned, but, surprisingly enough, retained control of the mostly-spherical energy shape floating in front of him. “If I recall correctly, I launched a double-fist of fl
ame in his direction.”
I nodded. “And were they controlled, focused bursts?”
He shook his head. “Not exactly, but they did hit their intended target.”
I inclined my head. “I acknowledge that they did, but that might have well just have been luck or happy circumstance. Trust me, Malcolm. You’ll be better off with the practice in forming spheres and other shapes. Once you can control the ley energies enough to do that, you’ll be that much more comfortable with the energies and will be able to do other things with it as well.”
He started to shift the energy sphere back and forth, hopping it in a little arc from palm to palm. “Like what?”
“Well, I think I told you that I figured out how to adjust the ley threads so that I could hold one and make it give off a little heat to keep me warmer when it’s cold out. I’m not sure if I can get one to make me colder when it’s hot out, but for now, I’ll take the free heat.”
He nodded. “A portable heater I can take anywhere might prove useful. What else?” He started to bounce the sphere more rapidly on his palms. His control was getting better, at least.
I gestured toward the warding dome. “You’ll be able to craft warding domes, and search for things and people, perhaps even open rifts through the Veil.”
His energy sphere stopped bouncing. He clenched his virtual hand around it. “Why would I want to open the Veil? I thought that was your thing.”
I shrugged. “Well, I don’t think I have a lock on opening or closing rifts. Miss Chin has the ability too.”
“All right. What should I do with this sphere?”
“Dissipate it. We’ll move on to something else.”
He nodded and then let the sphere drop to the ground, where it slowly lost its shape and seemed to melt into the ground. The etheric energies he had used to build it would eventually find their way back to the ley grid far below.
I said, “Now, gather a few threads. Let’s see if you can manipulate an object at a distance.”
I heard his sigh across the circle, but he focused his mind on the task. I sensed him reach out and gather several threads, which was encouraging. He then sort of bunched them up in one virtual hand.
“What do you want me to do with these?”
“First, rather than holding them all bunched up, try blending them together into one stronger thread, as if you were taking several pieces of string and weaving them together into a thicker, more solid rope.”
“I wasn’t much of a Boy Scout, but I’ll give it a try.”
I snorted. “I thought you told me you spent a lot of time at scout camp over the summer.”
He nodded. “Yeah, at the rifle and shotgun range. Not at a craft table making rope out of string.”
I shook my head and nodded toward him. “Just give it a try. Let me see an etheric rope made out of those threads.”
He sighed again, but hunkered down to the task I presented him. I shifted into a passive observing mode, still feeling tired and impatient and wishing I was anywhere but here.
As I watched Malcolm struggle to manipulate more than one thread at a time, it struck me that maybe this was how Miss Chin felt when she was training me.
Malcolm continued to dither with the threads, making a real hash out of trying to combine them together. I focused on Miss Chin and my newfound realization. If she was even half as frustrated as I felt now, no wonder I was feeling challenged by her every step of the way.
It was an interesting insight, but one I was reluctant to hold onto and embrace, because, really, I just wasn’t feeling it right at the moment.
I must have been picking up on Malcolm’s frustration. I focused anew on him, noting the thick, frayed ley thread in his hand. It was about three times the normal size and had bits of energy flickering off it.
“Well,” he said, “What do you think?”
I studied the rope in his mental grip. “A good start.” Knowing that Miss Chin wasn’t one to heap praise on me, I tried a softer touch with Malcolm. The last thing I wanted to do was totally discourage him—he’d likely never come to another training session. “I see you combined at least three threads together. That’s a good start.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had combined an even dozen threads my first time at this task—it was totally unfair of me to compare him to my progress.
He nodded. “Can I drop it now?”
I shook my head. “No. Creating the rope was just half the task.” I gestured toward a small white pine just inside the radius of our warding dome. “Now, I want you to use your ley rope and send it toward that tree and flick the lower branches enough that it moves.”
He muttered under his breath, just quietly enough that I wasn’t able to make it out. He cleared his throat and said, “And when are we going to need to tickle trees with our powers?”
I groaned inwardly. Christ, this was like pulling teeth with chopsticks. “During training sessions where we’re trying to learn how to more effectively manipulate ley threads.” I tried to inject some sternness into my voice. “Now focus, and make that damn branch move.”
I sensed a wave of frustration off him, but he managed to check it and then pushed his ley rope toward the tree. In fits and starts, the rope spooled out. He managed to flick it a couple times toward the branch, and, on the third try, cracked his rope like a whip. It hit one of the smaller branches. There was an audible ‘crack’. The little branch spun off the tree and landed in the grass nearby.
I pursed my lips, but nodded. “That was well done, Malcolm, but note that with practice, your control will get better so that you are able to just move the branch rather than knock it off the tree completely.”
He tossed the ley rope aside. “Well, dammit, what do you want me to do?” He reached into his pants pocket and produced a dollar bill, and in the moment he did, I knew what he had in hand.
I said, “I don’t think we’re ready to try…”
He glared at me and then focused on the money in his hand, which was actually a ten-dollar bill. “I’ll break that damn tree for you.”
He closed his eyes and focused on the ten. Somehow he grabbed onto several ley threads and focused them into the bill in the space of a heart beat. I saw a dark cloud of etheric smoke rise up, and then that horrible tiger-like creature leapt out of the ten and streaked toward the white pine.
I managed to create a quick barrier between me and Malcolm and the poltergeist just before the ‘geist tore into the hapless tree with etheric claws and fangs.
In a matter of moments, the tree had been slashed in several places, and pine needles and bits of branches were falling to the ground here and there. Faint sounds like a buzz saw sounded in the air and then tapered off as the ‘geist slowed and then stopped ravaging the tree.
Malcolm, his brow beaded with sweat, had the ten clenched in one hand and his other hand stretched out toward the ‘geist’s form.
“Christ, Malcolm. Tell me you have that thing under control.”
Without taking his eyes off the ‘geist, he nodded. “I’ve got it.”
“Well, call it back and make it go back into the ten. I think you made your point.”
He glared at me, a thin runnel of sweat crawling down his cheek. “I’ll put it back, but while I do…mind keeping that shield up, just in case?”
I frowned, but nodded. I wasn’t eager to get shredded by a runaway ‘geist any more than he was. I held the shield in place as he used a ley thread to reel in the ‘geist, and then return it to the matrix contained within the ten-dollar bill.
Malcolm sighed as the thing disappeared from our mind’s eyes. I sighed as well, and then focused on him. “You showed pretty good control with the ‘geist, Malcolm, but none at all in wanting to even call it forth. Moving the tree branch could have been accomplished with just your mind and the threads you had at hand. Using the ‘geist was both unnecessary and dangerous.”
“Sorry. I’ll try to do better.” I wasn’t confident I heard any sincerity in his apology.
“All right. Look, I think that’s enough practice for today. Let’s close this off.” I was tired, and wasn’t about to start fighting with him. I reached out into the ley threads under my control and dispelled the warding dome with a thought and a flexing of my will. The dome collapsed around us.
I pushed myself to my feet and then gave Malcolm a weary smile as he got to his as well. “I don’t know if you see it, but you are improving, Malcolm.” I stepped over to him and rested a tentative hand on his arm. “But, really. For your safety and mine, practice as much as you can.”
He focused on me as he straightened out his Ravens jacket. “Energy spheres and flicking tree branches?”
I gave him a weary smile I barely felt and then nodded. “That’s the humble road to greater power.”
He sighed. “Man. That sucks.”
I remember feeling something similar when I had started training with Miss Chin. I managed a grin for him. “Speaking of roads, would you mind giving me a lift, either to the nearest Metro station or to the bus stop?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
AFTER MALCOLM DROPPED ME OFF AT the bus stop, I took my time walking home. I had a lot to think about and, for once, it wasn’t all that late anyway. A glance at my smartphone showed me that it was just past seven, so I probably wouldn’t even be home late for dinner with Abbie and any of the other housemates who might be around.
On the one hand, I was pleased that I had been in a place to lend a hand to Malcolm and keep him from making things worse. On the other, I was a little dismayed at how much farther along I was in my abilities compared to him. I had been training a lot over the last few weeks, and it seemed like Malcolm hadn’t done much independent practice outside our training sessions.
He barely had control of the ley threads, and his ability to draw power out of them consciously was tentative, at best. I mean, not that I really knew what I was talking about, but I did have a sense of what I was capable of, and for every five ley threads I was able to gather and harness, he was barely managing one.