“I can see that. As you know, you’ve won the prize to come visit us at our headquarters here in Canada. I actually wanted to chat with you to see if you could come this weekend.”
“This weekend? That’s a little soon, isn’t it?” Did no one plan things in advance anymore?
“Do you have any plans that can’t be changed? The thing is, I really like to be the one to meet the winners myself, give you a nice tour of the campus, show you some exclusive work we’ve been doing on the new expansion pack. The weekends tend to work out well for these things because I’m able to pull some people in to give you a nice show without taking them away from their work.”
“That sounds amazing. I don’t know if I can. I have a lot of work for school. I’m already really far behind.” True, but I had also just spent all day on a quest, so the excuse didn’t hold much weight.
“That’s a shame. I’m traveling a lot and my schedule won’t work for several months. I was really hoping to meet you before I left.”
“A few months from now may actually work better for me, after graduation.”
The silence thickened in my headphones. Another once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I was bailing on because I was just that lame. I had no plans for the weekend. Maybe it was time to start seeing a counselor.
“Kat, I didn’t want to have to tell you this way, but I know who you are. I knew your mother.”
My entire body froze. How could he possibly have that information when I didn’t even have it twenty-four hours ago? Did Alex tell him somehow? Weakness seeped into my entire body. The entire situation was surreal. Nothing in my life made sense anymore. Maybe he meant my mom. “My mother?”
“Yes, I knew Meglana. I think it’s important that we meet.”
I tried to brush off the strangeness. “I don’t know why. I never knew her.”
“I think you may be in danger.”
My mind reeled. How had my life gotten so crazy in the space of just a couple of days? “I really can’t meet you this weekend.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sending you an in-game message now. If you change your mind, reply to it. I really do hope to meet you soon. And congratulations again on winning the quest.”
Casper disconnected from the chat, leaving me hollow and confused. His message appeared in my mail.
Congratulations on beating the quest. I hope to see you this weekend. I promise the tour of game headquarters alone will be worth it.
“So what did he have to say?” GreyMist asked in audio chat.
I hoped my voice wouldn’t betray my utter confusion. “Nothing much, just congratulated me for winning.”
“Was he as cool as he seems at all the conventions?”
“Yeah, he seemed nice.”
“So, when are we going?”
I had completely forgotten that I had promised GreyMist she could come with me. “I don’t know, it all has to be worked out.” I couldn’t keep up this conversation. Too many thoughts battled inside my mind, demanding my attention. “I’m sorry, I gotta go.”
“Are you all right? You sound weird.”
“Yeah, I’m fine, just a little overwhelmed.”
“If you say so. I’m here if you ever need to chat.”
“I know, thanks. See you online tomorrow.”
“Yeah, you’ll be strutting that new title around. Good night.”
“Night.” I logged out of the game and fiddled with my mother’s pendant. My mind finally caught up to what Casper had said. How on earth did my mother know one of the most famous computer game designers in the world? More importantly, how did Casper know I was her daughter? It made no sense. The game had my legal name, but nowhere was that name connected to my birth mother. If it had been, I would’ve discovered her identity long before now. One person might have the answers, and he was the only person I could talk to about any of this. I got my phone and re-dialed Alex’s number.
“We’re sorry, but the number you’re trying to reach has been disconnected.”
Dammit, he’d been serious when he said he would leave me alone. Great timing for him to choose to listen to me. In that moment, I felt more alone than I ever had in my entire life, even more so than when my parents had died. At least then I’d had neighbors and a support group to talk to if I had wanted it.
For the first time, therapy sounded like a good idea, but I couldn’t exactly walk into a counselor’s office and find the help I needed to cope with the fact that my mother apparently came from a magical dimension, was murdered, and left me with a magical necklace I had no idea how to control. Just holding it, knowing now what it was, filled me with an energy unlike anything I’d ever known before. This one relic was the only thing I had left of my mother.
Maybe I should try to find out about her. I was sure Alex could give me more information if I could only find a way to contact him. I tried calling again, even though I knew it wouldn’t work. The other option was to take Casper up on his offer. If he had known her, he could give me answers. But did I want them? Was I prepared for them? If I found out the truth and it turned out to be as fantastical as Alex had said, I wouldn’t be able to go back, and that thought scared me. For so long I’d been putting all my energy into just keeping my head above water, and I feared any waves of change. They could pull me under and drown me.
I made it an early night. Lying in bed, I stared at the picture of my parents, the loving faces so familiar and comforting. What would they want me to do? The only thing they had ever wanted was for me to be happy.
I clasped the amber stone with my hand and felt the energy surge through me. According to Alex, it was my mother’s power. It pulsed through my hand. Twice I’d been told I was in danger. My mother had sent me this talisman to protect me, but it hadn’t been strong enough to protect her. Was I strong enough to take hold of this new identity? The faces of my parents told me I had the strength to do anything. I wished I could believe them.
Chapter 5
With my eyes closed, I kicked off the covers. I must’ve accidentally tapped the thermostat too hard. My skin was slick with sweat. I rolled over and spread out my limbs, trying to cool down. No luck. I’d have to get up and adjust the temperature.
When my eyes opened, I screamed at the sight of a purple ball floating in my bedroom. My hand flew to the talisman, the source of the heat flowing through me. The mysterious glowing orb hovered suspended in the air. This had to be a dream. I closed my eyes, willing myself to wake up, but when I opened them again, I let out an even louder scream at the sight of two yellow eyes glowing in my bedroom doorway. A snarl erupted from the giant cat as it leapt into the air and caught the orb, pinning it to the ground.
I scrambled out of bed and ran for the living room, the pained shrieks of the giant cat following me. The fear of being attacked from behind urged me to turn around. The orb had followed, and the cat swiped at it with its claws out, releasing a scream as sparks flew from the ball. The purple of the orb glowed brighter and pulsed more intensely with each contact.
“Stop it, stop it!” I screamed as if that would have any effect. All the energy in my body seemed to focus around the talisman, and a stream of electric blue lightning burst out of it, striking the orb. Identical blue lightning shot from a wall socket and hit the orb at the same time. My computer popped, and the streetlamp that shone into my living room from the balcony extinguished. Not even the digital clock on my stove produced light. The only thing I could see was two yellow eyes shining at me, and then even those were gone.
“Shush!” A man’s voice. I hadn’t even realized I was still screaming. “Be quiet. You’ve probably already alerted the neighbors.” Alex grabbed my shoulders the way he had the other night. “We have to go. Whoever sent that tracker orb will be here soon, and you need to be gone when he arrives.”
“What? No, no I need to call the police.”
“The police can’t help you. They’ll have you committed if you tell them what happened. Now come on. Get dressed and
let’s get out of here.”
Before me stood the only person who could possibly help, and I couldn’t let him leave me again. I nodded and felt my way back into the bedroom. I grabbed my cell phone from the bedside table, next to the picture of my parents. The light from the screen illuminated the room enough to find a pair of jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and some shoes. I dressed quicker than I ever had in my life, completely not caring that Alex watched.
“All right, let’s go.” I had my car keys and cell phone. I should be fine until I could come back. On the way to the car, I threw my hair up into a ponytail. “So where are we going?”
“Right now we’re going to get you away from here, and we should probably get you something to eat. Doing that lightning magic had to take a lot out of you.”
Now that he mentioned it, the adrenaline that had kept me going receded, leaving hunger and exhaustion in its wake. “You’re right. Would you mind driving?”
We stopped next to my car, and I held out the keys to him. His doubtful eyes darted between the car and the keys. “I don’t know how to drive.”
“What?” I dropped my hand to my side.
“I can’t drive. Come on, we can talk all you want in the car.” He climbed into the passenger seat, and I took my spot behind the wheel.
I pulled out of the parking lot and headed to the freeway. I wanted an explanation, but I needed to eat first, so we rode in silence. At the freeway entrance, I pulled into a twenty-four-hour diner connected to a gas station.
“No.” Alex shook his head. “We should get a little farther away before we stop.”
“How far?”
“It just seems too risky to stop at the exit for the town you live in.”
He had a good point. I nodded and got onto the freeway headed north. The next three exits didn’t look promising, but the fourth had a restaurant with the lights on and seemed sufficiently far from my home. Even if it wasn’t, I’d already started nodding off, so it would have to do.
I snagged the credit card I kept in the compartment between the seats for gas and headed into the diner, shivering as I went. A bored-looking waitress showed us to a booth. Only one other table in the restaurant sat occupied.
“Can I start you off with anything?”
“I’ll just have water,” Alex said.
“I’ll take a coffee with cream and sugar.” I looked at my menu when the waitress left. “I can’t remember the last time I was this hungry. Do you know what you’re going to get?”
“Nope.”
Under the bright fluorescent lights, I finally got a good look at his hands. The palms were an angry red with a few blisters. “What’s wrong with your hands?”
He glanced at them and then back at the menu. “They’ll be fine.”
I reached across the table to turn one around so I could get a better look. “This is bad.” The blisters must have come from that orb.
“Trust me, it looks a lot worse than it is. My claws took the brunt of the damage. Shifting so quickly after a fight like that sometimes has strange consequences.”
I went back to looking at the menu, as if we were a typical couple just out for a bite. Alex appeared like a normal, good guy, and it was easy to forget that he wasn’t even from this world.
“Here you go.” The waitress set Alex’s water and my coffee down along with cream and sugar.
“What’ll you have?” she asked as she pulled a little notepad from her apron.
“I’ll have the ultimate breakfast.” Normally, that would be an insane amount of food, but I seriously doubted it would be enough to dampen my hunger.
“The steak and eggs,” Alex said when the waitress turned to him. “And can you make the steak as rare as possible?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks.”
We handed our menus to the waitress, and she left us alone. The coffee warmed me to my core, seeping into every part of my body. The copious amounts of sugar and cream leant it a sweet taste that made it difficult to not drink so fast that I’d burn my mouth.
“Is that helping?” Alex asked, his eyes peering at me with concern. I must look horrible.
“Yeah, it is. Thanks. What was that thing back there?” I cupped my hands around the coffee mug, leeching as much heat from it as I could.
“A tracker orb. A mage or sorcerer must’ve sent it. Someone’s looking for you; my guess is whoever killed your mother.”
“And how did you know to be there? How did you even get in?”
“I saw it go into your apartment. It can travel through walls. I jumped up to your balcony and got in through your sliding glass door. You should really keep it locked.”
My mom used to tell me the same thing, but I never thought someone would put forth the effort to climb onto a second floor balcony to break in. It didn’t seem logical. After tonight, I didn’t know how much of a role logic would be playing in my life anymore.
“I tried calling you, but your number was disconnected.”
“I don’t keep a phone. That one was just a cheap temporary one. You tried to call me?” Something between pleasure and intrigue danced in his eyes as the left side of his mouth lifted slightly.
The in-game events that had prompted my call felt like they’d occurred a lifetime ago. The adrenaline rush had probably skewed my sense of time. “Yeah, I had a weird experience. Someone contacted me saying they had known my mother.”
Alex’s eyebrows shot up and he leaned forward. “Who?”
“Casper Rothian, the creator of an online game I play. The whole thing was strange. I completed this quest and won a prize to come to the game’s headquarters. He came on and talked to me, congratulated me for winning, and asked me to come this weekend, as in today. When I told him I couldn’t do that, he said he had known my mother and that he thought I was in danger.” For the first time, it occurred to me that the whole quest line could have been a setup. Every encounter had passed too easily. No one got that lucky. “Do you think he could be connected with that orb thing?”
“It’s not likely. A tracker orb is used to find someone. If he was talking to you, he probably already knew where you were.”
“But how would my mother know a game designer?”
“I don’t know, but for him to have known her and to know that you are in danger, he has to either be a mage or sorcerer from Elustria. A mage more likely.”
The waitress interrupted our conversation with the delivery of our food. At the smell of hot pancakes on the side of eggs, hash browns, bacon, and sausage, all other thoughts left my mind. I didn’t even wait for her to finish setting down Alex’s plate before digging in. “Oh my god, this is delicious,” I said with a mouthful of pancakes.
“Take your time. There’s no use choking.” He ate his rare steak in a much more dignified manner, but I didn’t care. All I knew was that this was food, it was delicious, and I needed to get it inside of me as quickly as possible.
Once I’d taken the edge off my hunger, I slowed to a more respectable speed that allowed for conversation. “So you can eat human food too?”
Alex nearly choked on his eggs and took a drink of water. “Of course. When I’m human, I’m human. My senses are slightly better just because I’m more used to it in my panther form, but when I’m a panther, I’m a panther, and when I’m human, I’m human.”
“And what about your clothes? How come they’re not affected by shifting?”
“That’s courtesy of your mother. She gifted me with these clothes when my father started guarding her. They’re enchanted. They never need to be cleaned or repaired.”
Nice. I wish my mother had left me clothes like that. “So why can’t you drive?”
“Never had a reason to learn. I spend most of my time in my panther form. I can easily go years without shifting into a human.”
“Years? Doesn’t it get lonely?” The thought of spending all that time away from humans was incomprehensible.
“That’s how I like it. You’ll find a lot
of shifters are the same. I’m not a pack animal, so I don’t have much use for other people. Wolves and the like are a different story. A lot of us come here to stay in our animal forms or to escape all the crap that goes on in Elustria.”
Must’ve been something to do with the inherent selfish nature of human beings, but I hadn’t given much thought to the existence of other shifters living on Earth. A part of me had just assumed that Alex was the only one, that he’d come here to find me, and that was it. The thought seemed incredibly egotistical now that I ran it through my mind. “Other shifters are here? Are there a lot?”
“Oh yes. I don’t have an exact number, but there’s a large population of us. One of the royal families in Europe is made up entirely of wolf shifters.”
“Are you serious? Wouldn’t we know about that?”
“Like I said, when we’re in our human form, we’re basically human. Shifters are some of the most common people who come to Earth from Elustria, been doing it for hundreds of years now. The passages between our worlds are closely monitored. The sorcerers don’t want mages to reveal magic to humans, but they don’t have a problem with shifters coming through as long as they’re an animal that’s plausibly found on Earth, so no dragon shifters or the like.”
“There are dragon shifters? Like actual dragons?” For the first time since the attack, I smiled.
“No. There are dragons, and then there are dragon shifters. But yes, both do exist in Elustria.”
That I had to see. “If you wanted me to go to Elustria with you, you should’ve led with that.”
Alex grinned. “Really? You seem to have a hard enough time dealing with me. I hate to see how you’d react to a dragon shifter. Anyway, they’re pretty rare now.”
He may have had a point about my reaction to witnessing a dragon shifter, but I still wanted to see one. “Why are they rare?”
“Shifters all fall along a certain magical hierarchy if you will. In order to produce offspring that are the same type of shifter, a shifter must mate with their own kind or a person with equal or greater magic. Dragon shifters fall at the very top of the hierarchy. They can only mate with each other or with sorcerers. Too much inbreeding is a bad thing. Since their mating options are limited, their population has naturally shrunk. There are also a lot of superstitions based in ancient prophecies surrounding dragon shifters. It makes people wary of them.”
Magic Born Page 4