Maverick: A Supernatural Space Opera Novel (Witching on a Starship Book 1)

by J. A. Cipriano

  “Later, skaters,” I said, wrapping my arm around my new friend’s shoulders as I reached out with my left hand and tore open the space-time continuum. “I’d love to stay and chat, but I have a thing.”

  A scar of purple light ripped open in front of me as the air split like a ripe peach, and before any of them could even blink, I stepped through the portal and vanished from the stupid Los Angeles street.

  I stepped through the portal and reappeared outside my apartment in Portland, Oregon.

  “Home again, home again, jiggity-jig,” I mumbled as my stomach rumbled like I’d somehow eaten a very conversational whale. A sigh escaped me. All that work, and I hadn’t even gotten what I’d really wanted from LA. A Pink’s chili dog with extra onions.

  “Damn,” I muttered as a wave of depression threatened to swallow me. I’d just broken up with my girlfriend, and I wanted a fucking hot dog. Was that too much to ask on a day like today? I mean seriously.

  My hands curled into fists as I thought about whether or not I wanted to risk heading out again. Laying low for a few days was the smart thing, but Jesus, why couldn’t I have a hot dog?

  No. I was going back, and I was getting it, goddammit.

  As I started to pull the half-opened door closed so I could open another portal, the voice of Marty, my pet manticore, stopped me in my tracks.

  “You’re back early, Quinn. I didn’t expect you back until later, and I most definitely didn’t expect you to be so… sober,” Marty said from within my studio apartment. Sure, I could have afforded more, what with the bank robbing and all, but I’d learned something. The more you steal, the more likely people are to find you, and I absolutely didn’t want to be found. Not again.

  “These fucking guys fucked up my day. I barely got away with any cash.” I shook my nearly empty bag at the red-furred, purple-winged creature. His tail was curled around him like he was part cat, which I guess he was, being a lion, but unlike a normal cat, he had a scorpion tail the color of tar and covered with bristling hairs, so it was weird.

  Either way, part of me couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid as to have been about to go back to the city I’d just robbed for a fucking chili dog. What the fuck was wrong with me?

  Sure, Jen might be gone, but I had Marty to think about. I couldn’t risk getting my ass thrown into Azkaban or whatever the hell it was called where they put bad magical people. If that happened, there’d be no one to take care of him, and he didn’t exactly do well with wide open spaces or strangers.

  The studio was just small enough to make him feel like he was still in a cave back in Oz or wherever the fuck he was from, and since I was nothing if not amenable to mythological creatures, I decided to put up with him and rent this heap.

  Still, as I glared at the manticore, I was half-inclined to kick his ass out of the house. Why? Because Marty was laying on the leather couch watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for like the fiftieth time even though he wasn’t supposed to lay on the goddamned couch because his claws always tore that shit up. Seriously, I’d stolen so many couches over the past couple months, I was getting really tired of carrying them. Those fuckers were seriously heavy.

  “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles again?” I asked, glaring at him in the hopes he’d get off the new couch before his stupid claws shredded it. “I’ll never understand what you see in that flick.” I shook my head. “Why can’t you watch one of Michael Bay’s good movies? Like, I dunno, Bad Boys.”

  “Michael Bay is a god among men, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is his crowning achievement. Never before has such a rich, thorough world been built,” Marty replied, and as he tried to look up at me, something exploded on screen, stopping him mid-motion. I watched his eyes visibly glaze over while his half-open mouth froze in place.

  “I mean, I get that, but you’ve seen that movie literally ten thousand times, and as someone with powers of space and time, I do not use the word ‘literally’ lightly.” I crossed my arms over the Def Leppard T-shirt I’d stolen from my ex. “Watch something else. Anything else. Hell, even Bad Boys II would be better.”

  “You shut your goddamned mouth,” Marty snarled, moving over just enough for me to sit my scrawny ass on the couch. It was a tight fit because it only had two seats. I guess that made it more of a loveseat. “How’d your hotdog thing go? I’m guessing not very well since you’re supposed to be gone and leaving me to watch my movie in peace.” He reached out one clawed hand toward a wooden bowl filled with popcorn. “Can’t. Reach.”

  “Didn’t go so well this time.” I waved my hand dismissively. “There was this bank robbery, and like an idiot, I decided to help.” I shut my eyes, picturing the dudes wearing Richard Nixon masks about ready to go all Heat on the People’s Bank of the Republic. “Apparently when you stop a bank robbery of your own volition, the FBI wants to ask questions.” I shrugged, pushing the twelve-inch manticore onto the floor. Yeah, they were smaller in reality. “Then they’re all like ‘we have a few questions’ and ‘no, you can’t just take that stack of bills as a reward.’ It was total bullshit.” I snagged a handful of popcorn and shoved it into my mouth.

  “The savages,” Marty deadpanned, turning back to the television in a way that suggested he hadn’t even noticed I’d pushed him off the couch. Unfortunately, the claw marks on the leather told me the couch had noticed him. Plenty.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty lame of them,” I replied around a mouthful of popcorn because I was talking to a goddamned manticore. Talking to him when the television was on was sort of like talking to a brick wall, only a lot less satisfying. “I’m going to make a sandwich.”

  “Make me one too, Mallory,” Marty said, climbing into the popcorn bowl and settling himself on it like a dragon guarding his hoard.

  “Sure, peanut butter and avocado?” I asked, turning toward the kitchen. This felt normal, which was good. I could use a little normal after the events of this morning. As the wash of adrenaline and magic left me, I felt myself compartmentalizing the bank robbery and everything else that had happened. As long as I had things to do, I wouldn’t think about Jen and how she never did the goddamned dishes.

  “You’re a fucking heathen,” Marty responded, a surprising amount of annoyance in his voice. “You know I’m allergic to avocado. You want me to die or something?”

  “It’s one of my fondest dreams,” I replied, suddenly embarrassed that I’d totally forgotten about his made-up dietary concerns. Still, I wasn’t in the mood to apologize anymore today, so I moved into my tiny attached kitchenette and pulled a banana out of the fruit bowl. “The Elvis it is.”

  “You know, if you keep talking to me like that, I’m going to start thinking you don’t like me,” Marty replied, tearing his gaze from the Shredder’s rippling biceps and glaring at me with his two-toned purple and orange eyes. “And as someone who owes you a life-debt, that would just be balls.”

  “Whatever. You know I love you,” I said, smirking as I peeled the banana and took a bite on my way to the bread box. Yes, I have a bread box. It keeps the bread fresh forever, and that’s not just because I’d magically enchanted it to keep bread fresh forever. Well, actually, that was exactly why, but that wasn’t really why I’d kept it. No, it was because this particular bread box had belonged to my Grandma Sue and still had the She-Ra sticker I’d stuck on it when I was a kid. Let’s just say I’d totally wanted to be her (either She-Ra or my Grandma Sue, I wasn’t picky) when I was a kid.

  I pulled open the breadbox and grabbed a couple pieces of sliced Hawaiian bread, but before I could even put them on the counter, the doorbell rang, which was a bit odd because I’d put a charm on my front door that made people too uncomfortable to actually ring my doorbell.

  “Who is that?” I asked, glancing at Marty. “Did you order pizza again?”

  “No, but I damned well should have,” Marty replied, giving me a worried look. “And they always just leave the pizza and run away. They never actually ring the bell.”

  That w
as an excellent point. They did normally do that, which made for very cold, tip-free delivery half the time.

  Curiosity filled me, but because I wasn’t a cat and had no desire to be killed, I pulled my wand out of the drawer beside the fridge before I edged toward the door. My wand was about seven inches long and suffered no illusions about its size or prowess, which was likely because it was made of solid steel, had a leather wrapped handle, and was emblazoned with an image of Superman fist-fighting Goku.

  “You sure you don’t want to just run away? It could be someone trying to kill you. You did just rob a bank, after all,” Marty cautioned as he moved behind the edge of the couch to hide. Slowly his eyes appeared over the side of the black leather. “Or worse, it could be your mother.”

  “Mom’s in Idaho. She’s trying out that whole prepper thing because of that alien apocalypse she keeps talking about.” I rolled my eyes as the doorbell rang again, and this time it felt more urgent, though I couldn’t say why. “Honestly, whoever heard of Space Planet Maverick? Even if there were aliens, that’s a ridiculous name for a race of aliens.”

  “Seers,” Marty said as his skin color began to change like a chameleon. In moments, he’d match the surroundings so completely even I wouldn’t be able to see him. “Can’t live with ‘em, can’t listen to ‘em talk…”

  A smirk crossed my face. Seers weren’t the most fun to live around because they were all doom and gloom, but one who was your mom? That was lame with a capital L. Why? Well, let’s just say sneaking out unawares was nigh impossible, and because of that, my high school social life hadn’t been very awesome. Hell, I hadn’t even had a beer until I was in college, and even then, she’d shown up to stop me before I’d finished my first keg stand.

  “I’m coming,” I called as the doorbell rang a third time, which was three times too many. “Don’t get your panties in a twist.”

  The doorbell ceased, and as I stood there on the other side of my door, I wondered if maybe I should run. I mean, they probably couldn’t get through the warding I’d placed on the cheap fiberboard, but still. I could run, but at the same time, all my stuff was here, and while my collection of anime, crystal snowflakes, and pictures of James Marsters weren’t exactly high demand items, they were precious to me.

  “Woman up!” I mumbled to myself as I disengaged the locks, gripped the doorknob, and pulled the door open.

  “Miss Mallory Quinn?” the black as night FBI agent wearing dark shades, a cheap suit, and a plastic smile said right before he stepped through the threshold into my house like it wasn’t warded to keep people from doing just that. “I’m from a super-secret government agency, and I have a job for you.” He smiled, flashing his teeth at me as he crossed the room and sat down on the couch. Then his hand snaked out, and he rubbed the invisible to the naked eye Marty on the top of the head. “Tell me, what have you heard about Space Planet Maverick?”

  3

  “How in the blue hell did you walk in here?” I snarled, narrowing my eyes at the agent as I called upon my magic. I felt it rush over me like warm bathwater as I sucked in the energy from the electricity flowing through the walls with a mind to go Emperor Palpatine on his ass. “Because that’s not fucking possible.”

  “Present circumstance would indicate otherwise,” he replied, lifting one hand to nudge his dark shades down his nose so he could stare at me with his blood red cat eyes. My breath caught in my throat as I briefly made eye contact with the vampire, and my knees started to tremble.

  “Get out,” I squeaked, trying to keep it together because I really hated fighting vampires. Why? Because the motherfuckers were immune to magic. I could blast him ten ways from Sunday and not only would he shrug it off, but he’d probably absorb it and become stronger. Worse, if he was like the vampires I’d faced down in Morocco, I could literally throw him in a wood chipper, and he’d be able to come back out the other side just fine.

  “I’ll be happy to leave, Miss Quinn, but you must come with me. So, one way or another, we’ll both be leaving.” The corners of his lips quirked into a smile that revealed just a hint of fang. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

  “I’ve killed vampires twice as old as you with less effort than it takes me to do the goddamned laundry.” I took a deep breath and inhaled the smell of the city. Then I shut my eyes for a split second and visualized clouds forming above my building.

  “Sod off. I know for a fact Mrs. Chen downstairs does all your laundry,” the vampire replied, raising a shapely eyebrow at me as the clouds above my building started to darken and crackle with unspent lightning. “Probably strains that pea-sized brain of yours, what with having to separate the whites from the colors and what not. Have you ever thought to try one of those fancy new soaps that claims you don’t need to? I always separate, but I wonder if there might be something to it…” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

  To be totally honest, I didn’t know because he was right. I paid Mrs. Chen fifty bucks a month to do all my laundry. And yes, I’d sort of experimented with the whole Fantasia thing a couple times, and my magic is just not suited for that. I’d burned up so many tops trying to get that particular bit of magic to work, the local Kohl’s wouldn’t let me return stuff even with a receipt anymore.

  So now, at the start of the week Mrs. Chen picked up all my dirty clothes and delivered the freshly cleaned clothes from the week before all folded. Hell, she even put it away for me.

  We’d come to that agreement after she saw me trying to figure out how to use the damned washing machine in the basement when I’d moved in a couple years back. To be fair, I’d lit the thing on fire with an accidental blast of burning rage, but the machine had it coming because it ate my damned quarter.

  “I have no idea,” I snarled, narrowing my eyes as the first hint of rain filled the air. The vampire might be able to shrug off my attacks, but a storm cloud had just enough natural chutzpah behind it to turn him into a blackened smear on my floor. I think. I’d never actually done it before…

  So yeah, okay, it’d light the building on fire, but I could fix that. Probably. I mean, I’d never actually done that before either, but I could light a campfire with a snap of my fingers. That was nearly the same thing, right?

  “So, to bring this full circle, what you’re saying is killing me will prove rather difficult. Now pretend I’m Mrs. Chen and accept my offer,” the vampire said as he rose, one hand curling around Marty’s scruff and hauling the manticore into the air. “You can even take your pet, but we have to go. Now.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you, you Edward Cullen looking motherfucker,” I snarled even though he looked nothing like Edward Cullen. I mean, he was black, over six and a half feet tall and had a shiny bald head. “Get the fuck out of my house, or I will totally beat the fuck out of you.” I threw a jab through the air while clutching my wand tightly with my other hand. Just ten more seconds and the cloud would have built enough for me to strike him down, or so I hoped.

  “If you try to hit me with that thunder cloud, two things will happen. First, you’ll miss. Second, my team will be up here before you can blink away. You might be fast, Miss Quinn, but my people locked down the building the second you came home. The salt barrier will keep you from teleporting away.” He made a twirling motion with his hand as if indicating the premises.

  My heart sank into my toes. If what he said was true, I wouldn’t be able to escape via jumping through a portal, and worse, my lightning might just bounce off the roof. Even if it didn’t, the fact he knew what I was doing meant it’d be hard to actually hit him. Zeus might be really good at striking down dudes with bolts of lightning, but I was fairly certain hitting a guy indoors with lightning was probably a lot harder than it seemed like it’d be, and that was when they weren’t expecting it.

  “What will happen if she goes with you?” Marty squeaked as he dangled in the air like a limp cat, all four paws out in front of himself. It was weird because I’d never actually grabbed the
manticore like that, but evidently, it worked great. Man, I wished I’d known that before…

  “If Miss Quinn accompanies me to my state of the art facility outside of Portland, she’ll be treated to not one, but two pizzas, both Chicago and New York, and get paid a billion dollars. Tax-free.” He shrugged. “I know it’s not a hotdog, but come on, anyone would choose pizza over hot dogs.”

  “Wait, what?” I said, swallowing hard because all that information had almost shattered my mind. “A billion dollars?” I shook my head. “And how did you know I was getting a hot dog.”

  “Yes, a billion dollars,” the vampire replied, amusement filling his crimson eyes. “And I had my team monitoring you for a few weeks. Your files says you always get a Pink’s hotdog after a breakup.” He waved his hand as if to say, “Do I really need to go on?”

  “I don’t take checks,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest as I tried to ignore the fact he’d been spying on me. It pissed me off, but this was America, and he worked for the government, so I guess I couldn’t be that surprised. “It’d have to be in gold.”

  “Whatever you like,” the vampire replied, turning in a slow circle and taking in my tiny apartment. “I’m not sure where you’ll put it, though.”

  “I’ll stick it in a trans-dimensional void. Krugerrands are fine, but I’ll take both eagles and maple leaves too. I don’t want anything that can be printed up in the back room of an investment bank. That’s not a problem, is it?” I narrowed my eyes at him as I worked out the calculations for expanding my personal void to fit my newfound hoard. I’d definitely have to fortify the walls with a ritual to hold that much, and that meant I’d need some wolfsbane… and something to keep dragons out…

  “Not even slightly. I’ll have our alchemists get to work on it. You shall receive payment when we reach the facility,” the vampire said, striding toward me and putting Marty into my hands. The manticore immediately scrambled onto my shoulder, which was annoying because he sank his claws into my flesh. Normally, I’d have smacked him away, but then I’d show this vampire weakness. That was not happening, so I bit down and bore the pain.