by Drew Hayes
“For getting a classic lesson in ass-stompage? No worries.”
“For running in the way you did to help us. Even you had to have noticed there were more people than you could have possibly handled, but you still ran in full force. That was sweet.”
“Nah, you’re my girl-bros. They go for you, they gotta deal with the Thunder.”
April snorted a laugh in spite of herself. “I keep meaning to ask: the first day you said we could call you Thunder for short. What’s your full name?”
“Fuckin’ Sexual Thunder.”
“I… okay, I actually meant your full real name, not your nickname, but wow, now I want to know the story behind that.”
Thunder shifted his icepack again. “Well, the realio dealio nameio is buried in the brain vault, but I would be glad to tell you the story of how Fuckin’ Sexual Thunder shattered onto the world and began to wreck it with awesomeness.”
April started to object then realized it was either this or going back to pacing the floors. Though Thunder might be a strange and curious person, he was able to take her mind off the worrying. That was something very few things had ever done for April and she wasn’t inclined to get off this odd ride just yet.
“I’d like that. Go ahead.”
* * *
The mood in the waiting room was considerably less cheerful. Sprinkles sat on a green plastic seat, licking his paws to try and get the foreign dirt out of his fur. He’d been making solid progress toward his target: in fact, he was almost positive he’d nearly reached it, but the ripple that spread through the city had purged the ethereal trail into nothingness, leaving nothing to rely on but sheer intuition. Sprinkles’ gut had told him it was time to regroup, so he’d forsaken the search and waited for the humans to come back together. They hadn’t taken long; his subject used the hand phone to call the others, and they met in a place that smelled of disinfectant and fear. Sprinkles was not partial to either of these scents; however, he waited patiently while the loud one was ushered behind some doors and the dark one went with him. These people had incurred wounds while on a grand quest for the Kingdom of Kenowai; Sprinkles could show such injuries the proper deference while they were treated.
“That sounds pretty amazing; I wish I could have seen it,” Mano said. Falcon had just described the bit of magic Clint had pulled in the alleyway, perhaps adding some additional flair for story-telling purposes.
“It was pretty spectacular,” Falcon agreed. “I just wish it hadn’t come with such a hefty price.”
“It is strange to think we’ve come so far in the past day only to lose the trail completely. Now what do we do?” Mano seemed to be losing his accent more and more the longer he hung out with the group.
“I don’t know. Hopefully Clint and Kodi will come up with something,” Falcon said.
The duo that was a solo had been sitting off in a corner by themselves for the past several minutes. Clint didn’t seem to be talking much, his face remaining uncharacteristically pinched in concern. Whether it was worry over Thunder or fear that he had lost his only path to freedom, Falcon could have never guessed. In fact, both were weighing on his mind, but there was something more prevalent causing his facial anomaly.
“I don’t know how to explain it, something just feels different,” Clint muttered under his breath. He realized anyone looking at him would assume he had arrived (too late) for mental treatment. He didn’t really care at this particular moment. “Like, if the entirety of who I am was a written paragraph, and someone took that paragraph and ran it through an Internet translator into Russian, then ran it through again to make it English. Things would more or less still add up, but there would be parts that were off, not the same as they used to be.”
I warned you there would be risks.
“I know. Just, can you help me understand why I suddenly feel like, I don’t know, like bits of me are askew?”
It was impossible to put into words no matter how he tried. Physically, Clint felt the same; mentally, he was still intact; and emotionally, he seemed about as stable as always. Yet somewhere in the core of his being he knew some part of him had shifted a bit in one direction: a single hair out of place on the head of his metaphorical soul.
Humans aren’t meant to touch that kind of power; they have their own sources for magic. There’s a reason only those with divine heritage can utilize it. I don’t really know what the side effects are, or what they might be long term. No one has ever done this before. Kodiwandae was actually surprised that Clint had noticed such a subtle difference so quickly. This guy had a very strong sense of self.
“So it might be nothing?”
Right. Maybe it’s just a metaphysical electrical shock. Instead of feeling all twitchy you feel like this.
“I think I’m going to choose to believe that.” It was the best approach, really. Why worry about some nagging feeling that even a god couldn’t explain when he had no way of fixing it? Besides, even if it was something that would unravel his very being, it was on him. Kodi had adamantly warned him that something like this was dangerous, but he’d accepted that responsibility to help the others. He’d do it again, too.
Probably for the best.
“Right. So, now that that’s been put aside, what do we do about you?”
No idea.
“Still set against calling on another god for help?”
Kodi hesitated before answering. The longer he spent in this brain, the more he was beginning to care about the person connected to it. He didn’t know if he could just flippantly write off the fact that he’d be robbing this young man of privacy for the rest of his years, to say nothing of what prolonged exposure to the divine energies could do to him.
I don’t think it would help. Nature might listen to their calls, but she might not. The only reason she’ll come to me is because of the deal. Constants aren’t exactly at our beck and whim.
“We could keep looking around. We know it’s on the island.”
We know it was on the island. Anything beyond that is pure speculation.
“Maybe I’ll get another premonition?”
I doubt it; those things are unreliable even on the best day. They’re like a mote of dust in the corner of your eye: the minute you begin looking for them, they disappear.
“So we’re just screwed?”
Unless Fate or someone else up there intervenes, yeah, I don’t see any shot of us finding that pear today.
“Clint? What are you doing here?”
Clint looked up to see Dr. Kaia Hale standing over him, a small length of cloth wrapped around her wrist. She looked disheveled to say the least: a night of drinking, a day of studying, and an afternoon of assault can take its toll on a girl. “I see Falcon over there, too. Shouldn’t you all still be vacationing on Kenowai?”
Clint stared up at the woman’s pleasant curved face. He had to fight back a series of insane giggles. It was just so bizarre to see someone who had existed before all this, before the gods talking to him and the cats that were kings and the wild chase for a pear. She had existed when this was all just fluff and ceremony in a world completely alien from one he currently occupied. She looked down with confusion and concern as his mouth twisted between a chuckle, a smile, and a sob.
“It’s a long, impossible story,” Clint said at last. “One I don’t think you’d believe anyway.”
“Try me.” Kaia felt something, a tickle of hope in the gaping hole left behind when the pear was ripped away. She’d nearly forgotten about the rest of the legend. Maybe her only thread to something bigger hadn’t been severed entirely; maybe there was still a frayed strand that could support her weight.
“Okay.” Why not? At this point, one more person thinking he was off the deep end was so low on his list of concerns that Clint may as well give her the truth. “It all started after that ceremony. You see, for some reason it actually worked and Kodi was-”
“Cody?”
“Kodiwandae got too cumbersome to keep saying,
so he let us use a nickname.”
“The god of Kenowai told you to use a nickname?”
“Told you that you wouldn’t believe me. Anyway, I wake up and he starts talking to me about finishing the ceremony and how he needs to get reunited with his realm. So after we get past the initial shock, he says he needs to go get the pear from the ceremony because it’s the only way he- Ooof.”
The “Ooof” in this circumstance was an exhalation of both surprise and pleasure as Dr. Kaia Hale surged forward onto Clint with a forceful kiss. It was quite proper (no tongue), but there was a ferocity in it Clint wouldn’t have suspected the good doctor was concealing.
“I’m not crazy,” Kaia muttered as she rose from the depths of the embrace. “I knew I wasn’t crazy. I knew it wasn’t just an electrical storm. I knew something bigger was going on.”
“Uh bu wha?” Clint was not exactly the fastest man at recovering his mental faculties after such assaults. Across the room, Falcon and Mano were staring unabashedly at the curious sight. They watched with some humor as Clint shook his head to steady himself then finally located coherent words. “You knew?”
“I didn’t know – not Know know - but I suspected, of course. It was just too strange, the way the storm popped up, the way the electronics were wrecked, and of course, the pear’s strange coloration.”
“You saw the pear?”
It was Kaia’s turn to leap in surprise as a wholly different voice exited Clint’s mouth. She was faster at acclimation than he, though, so she didn’t stumble on her thoughts as this new information was assimilated.
“I did; it was glowing a strange golden color. That’s why I took it from the altar in the first place.”
“You’ve got the pear!?!” Clint leapt from his own seat and swallowed Kaia in a lung-crushing hug. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. We’ve chased the pear here and then we lost the trail and now we were sure we’d never get it back but you have it so we can go to Denilale and I can finally go back to normal and thank you!”
Kaia laid her hand gently on Clint’s narrow back. “Had.”
“Beg pardon?”
“I had the pear. Past tense. Justin Goodwin stole it from me half an hour ago. That’s how my wrist got sprained.”
“But… how… why… how… no…” Clint’s body slumped against Kaia, the power in his muscles replaced by despair. Just like that, he was no long hugging her in joy; she was now embracing him in a vain attempt at comfort.
“I don’t know. Someone hired them to get it away from me. That’s all I’ve got.”
“So that’s it then. That’s really it. No trail, no idea where they went, only certainty that they’ll be turning it over to some mystery person that we don’t have any information on. It’s over.”
“Not quite, bro,” Thunder said, tufts of hair poking through the bandages of his newly-wrapped head. April was at his side, looking profoundly more relaxed than she had when screaming at the doctors that she wasn’t letting him out of her sight until she knew he was okay.
“Thunder, you okay?” Clint realized the others had gathered close during his conversation with Kaia, apparently quite interested in this new development.
“He’s fine. The doctor said he’s got an unnaturally thick skull that helped him absorb the blow,” April answered for him.
“Gift from Pop’s side,” Thunder said, presumably to explain. “But dudsey, there’s still a way to get back the pear.”
“What?”
“Well, this whole day the wind’s been blowing like a hooker trying to finance a house. Guessing that means slap-choppy seas and waves that make a surfer hard.”
“So what?” Clint still wasn’t getting the connection.
“So, we’re on an island,” Kaia said, realization dawning. “An island with only one port for local vessels. An island they might not have gotten off of yet.”
“Bingo Dingo,” Thunder said with a thumbs-up.
“We’ve still got a chance,” Clint said slowly.
We do if we hurry!
“Okay then, let’s go!”
“You know, some of us are here because we’re feeling very ill and don’t appreciate all the jumping, kissing, yelling, and antics,” an old woman three chairs over from them remarked.
“Um, right. Very sorry, ma’am. We’ll get out of here right away,” Clint apologized.
The group vacated the hospital waiting room immediately, leaving only the old woman who had complained, a carpenter who had drilled a nail through his hand, and pair of teens who were worried they had overdosed on mushrooms. The last pair was consequently not paying much attention to what was going on in this vein of reality.
“Honestly,” the old woman remarked to the carpenter. “Kids today.” The carpenter nodded to keep from crying out in pain.
17.
“I don’t give a damn about the weather, we’ll take our chances!” Dustin yelled at the harbormaster, an older man with skin the sea had weathered and beaten without mercy. His dark eyes sparkled through the scowl on his face; despite the public nature of his job, he took a curious joy in telling land-lovers who thought they knew more than he did right where they could shove it.
The Goodwin brothers were in the harbormaster’s office, a small room near the edge of the docks that was filled with filing cabinets and sun-stained yellow papers. It was hot in here; of course, it was hot everywhere in this region, but in these walls the heat seemed malicious, like it knew you had to stand here and take this small wrinkly man’s bullshit and it wanted to get in its own licks as well. They’d intended to skip right past his office and set sail immediately, but the industrial-sized metal lock on a thick metal chain securing their boat to one of the piers had forced a significant change in plans.
“Look, the winds are too rough right now for me to let you leave. Even if they weren’t, it wouldn’t change anything.” The harbormaster hoisted out a thick ledger and dropped it onto his desk with an audible “thunk.” He strolled through the pages, arriving at one in the middle of the book. He flipped it around and stuck his pointed thumb on a line near the top of the page. “See? Captain Johannes docked that boat with me, and only Captain Johannes is going to get back the key to the lock placed on it.” The harbormaster had taken to locking up boats that came in for safety. The thing being kept safe just happened to be the port fees that many sailors felt they were entitled to skip out on for one reason or another. Funny how after he latched their vessels to the docks revenue for the port had increased by two hundred percent.
The other brother stepped up to the table now, his face merely pinched while the other’s was red in fury. Then again, it might be red in something else; they both looked like they had some nasty swelling around their eyes.
“We paid that man a handsome sum of money to bring us here and back to Kenowai,” Justin said, his eyes wandering across the page’s entries. “Now that we’re ready to return, he has become conspicuously absent.”
The harbormaster wasn’t exactly surprised by this. It was a fool who paid for a return trip in advance, especially when dealing with Captain “One-More-Round-Of-Whiskey” Johannes. “So what would you have me do? Let you steal his boat because you’re having trouble finding him?”
“We can leave money for it,” Dustin offered. They’d barely tapped into the considerable operating budget Lawrence had provided them.
The harbormaster licked his lips, lips that had been stained forever-salty and chapped by his years serving the mighty blue seas. It was rare that one had the opportunity to make the profit from selling a boat without incurring any of its initial costs. Johannes was insured, as were all the ships that lasted more than one storm season here, so two foreigners making off with his vessel could play out well for the both of them.
“I won’t be letting you take advantage of him. If you want his boat, I’ll make sure you pay a fair amount for it. I plan to treat it like it was my own boat I was selling to you.”
Justin nodded his head under
standingly. “I wouldn’t have expected anything less.”
* * *
Lawrence trekked along the rain-soaked road, the last village he’d passed fading steadily into the distance. Thankfully, the showers had ceased before he arrived, but he had an umbrella strapped to his back just in case. This region was known for unpredictable weather; some said it was retribution for a joke Felbren had played on a cloud god many centuries ago. Of course, most of the downfalls of the islands were heaped on Felbren’s shoulders through one story or another. Lawrence had read through all of them that morning, poring over every detail with exceptional care, looking for a few specific pieces of information. He’d gotten what he needed, though in the process he’d also begun to suspect that Felbren was less of a trickster god than a scapegoat god. Even if he was as precocious as the legends told, the idea that he could never become savvier in his methods to avoid retribution was ridiculous.
Lawrence paused to check the map he’d copied from one of the books that morning. It looked as though he were on the right path, but who could tell with the way the rain washed and redefined the roads? Fleetingly, he wondered if he should have hired a guide, then realized how insane such an inclination was. What would he have done, taken the poor boy with him then let him watch as Lawrence met with a god? No, his only options at that point would have been… well, they would have been time-consuming to do properly, and Lawrence was running on a tight schedule. He decided he would trust his navigating skills and the old map’s information to guide him forward. Lawrence was excellent at finding his way through foreign terrain, a skill he’d picked up along with many others during his time in the public sector. That had been some time ago, but he was confident the skills hadn’t atrophied beyond all usefulness.
A quick adjustment of his backpack and Lawrence was plodding away once again. The grey clouds gathered overhead, threatening to soak him but never quite following through. Perhaps they got the same vibe that most people got from Lawrence, that the stretched, thin smile was the tip of an iceberg no being wanted to see the depths of. Or perhaps it was just the way the wind was blowing. Either way, Lawrence would make it most of the way to the temple before the first cloud mustered up the gumption to begin releasing its load.