Smells Like Finn Spirit

by Randy Henderson

  “Oh for pizza’s sake,” Dawn said, frustration clear in her tone. But she grabbed me under one arm, lifted me up, and helped me move forward.

  “No!” I said, and pushed away from her. “I’m not dragging you in with me.”

  “Oh, shut up,” Dawn said. “Since when are you the only one who gets to save the world?”

  As we spoke, Silene flung a handful of small dark blobs at the dense enforcer attacking Father. She closed her eyes, and within seconds burr bushes began to grow sideways out of him. The roots of the insanely tenacious plants dug down into his dense flesh. The enforcer screamed, and tried to pull at the bushes despite the pain of touching those prickly branches and burr blossoms, but could not rip them free. I looked away as he fell to the ground.

  The robigot was severely damaged now, between Sal’s attack and the enforcer’s, but managed to limp forward and swing one arm at the next enforcer.

  Father stood a fighting chance of surviving now, at least.

  Mort joined us in the entrance to the leafy corridor, and placed a hand on my back. “You’re such a martyr,” he said. I felt a sudden jolt, like a surge of adrenaline mixed with winter sunlight. Mort had given me some of his life energy.

  “Thank you,” I said to him, then turned to Dawn. “Please, help get Mattie to safety.”

  “Oh, that’s not fair,” Dawn said.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied. “For everything.”

  I turned, and with the new surge of energy from Mort, I sprinted forward into the leafy corridor of interwoven blackberry vines. A stone ball crashed into the thorn wall on my right, punching partially through and nearly catching my shin, but the tangled vines halted it.

  The wall on my left smoldered and smoked, and bursts of flame began to punch through, like some dungeon trap on a video game except I couldn’t carefully time the flame bursts here, or roll against my dexterity to deactivate traps. One blast hit me squarely on the side. The vines caught the brunt of it, but my clothes were singed and my left hand burned. I shouted in pain and began to slow, the initial effects of Mort’s life boost wearing off.

  “Damn it, don’t kill Phinaeus!” I heard someone outside the wall shout. “We want him alive!”

  Deputy Dolph, Grandfather’s pet He-Man enforcer, beat down a section of the thorn wall to glare in at me, and continued tearing a passage through it. Not great for me, but at least that meant he wasn’t attacking Father or the others.

  My eyelids drooped. Gods, did a nap sound like a really wonderful thing right about then.

  Someone grabbed my arm, and I startled, but it was Dawn. Mort grabbed the other, and together they carried me forward in an awkward sprint along the corridor toward Grandfather. We passed within the ring of standing stones, their blue-gray tops peeking over the vine walls.

  “You … are in … serious trouble,” I said, every bounce sending waves of pain up from my abdomen.

  Dawn squeezed my arm. “You can spank me later.”

  “Really you two?” Mort said. “We’re about to die.”

  “Then I hope there’s spanking in the afterlife,” Dawn replied.

  “Jesus,” Mort groaned. “I just hope death means I don’t have to be tortured like this anymore.”

  Deputy Dolph broke through the thorn wall behind us, and charged. Mort and Dawn sped up, dragging me along. If we could just keep running, we might reach Grandfather before the enforcer reached us.

  An alarm went off in my head then, mostly because Grandfather didn’t seem to be paying any attention to us. Was he that lost in his spell, or—

  “Wait!” I said. “Stop, I think—”

  We slammed into an invisible wall, and fell back onto our butts in the dirt. Dust rose from our fall, spreading out in a light cloud only to break like a wave against an unseen cubicle around us.

  “—it’s a twap,” I moaned.

  36

  U CAN’T TOUCH THIS

  Grandfather glanced over, and frowned down at my stomach. “Don’t die,” he said. “I’ll need you when I’m done, especially if you freed Matilda.” Then he went back to his work.

  Goosebumps sprang up all over my body.

  The thudding steps of Deputy Dolph halted behind us. Gravel displaced by his feet hit my back and bounced off of the inside of the trap’s curved invisible wall, able to enter but not to leave. I glanced up behind me. The hulking blond enforcer stood just outside the barrier, glaring at us, standing guard against any move we might make against Grandfather despite the trap.

  Mort and Dawn scrambled to their feet, and helped me up. Which was a shame, because lying in the dirt had felt like a wonderful idea.

  “What now?” Mort asked.

  “I have no idea,” I murmured, struggling to not just close my eyes.

  “Damn it,” Mort muttered, and grabbed my hand. Another surge of life energy flowed into me, and I perked back up.

  An annoyingly arrogant expression spread across Dolph’s face, and he said, “Now you’ll all suffer the fate of traitors.”

  Dawn snorted, “As long as we don’t have to suffer your dumb threats.”

  The enforcer’s face went from haughty to red haught.

  I had an idea.

  “Hey, Mort,” I said loudly, “didn’t you say Grandfather was only bringing his expendable followers here, the real suckers, so it wouldn’t be a big deal if they all died?”

  If I could just provoke Dolph into attacking—

  “What?” Mort said, in his typically slow manner.

  Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea. At least, not relying on Mort’s acting skills. If he’d been in Troll 2, he would have made the other actors seem Oscar worthy. If he was the last man on Earth and auditioned for an amateur Pizza Boy porno, they would politely turn him away without even trying to explain why improvising “mushrooms and pineapple” was not an acceptable substitute for sausage in this particular case.

  Dawn was a natural performer, of course, but I didn’t want to put her in the line of fire. And Dolph wouldn’t attack me, not with Grandfather’s orders. But luckily, what Mort lacked in acting ability, he made up for in his ability to annoy the crap out of people.

  “So that makes this guy the big dumb muscle, right?” I continued. “But he can’t hit us because of the barrier. So I guess that just leaves big and dumb then?”

  “I’m not the one stuck in a trap,” Deputy Dolph said.

  “Oh, wow,” I replied. “Mort, I think we have a genius here. Why don’t you explain to him where wizard powers come from?”

  “Come from?” Mort asked.

  “Yeah, you know, explain about their tattoos, and how the first arcana were created,” I said.

  Mort frowned at me, obviously still confused as to where I was going with it all, especially since nobody really knew how the first arcana got their powers. But since he clearly had no better ideas he slowly began to take a stab at playing along. “Well, the ink comes from alchemists working with wizards, and—”

  “Remember,” I said, “this is a true arcana we’re talking to here, not some filthy feyblood lover. Don’t hold back the truth.”

  “Oookay. I—Oh! Right. Well, alchemists make the wizard ink from various feyblood creatures like waersquid or sasquatchtupi mixed with whatever the spell requires, and thaumaturges form the needles out of manticore or chupacabra quills or similar materials. In fact, even wands come from feyblood parts. I think wizards would basically be powerless if they didn’t steal from the feybloods.”

  The enforcer’s face got even redder, and he said to me in a low angry tone, “You know I can’t hurt you, but I’d tell your brother to shut up or I’ll show him exactly how powerless I’m not.”

  Dawn squeezed my arm. “Finn?” she asked, clearly not convinced I knew what I was doing. Probably because she knew me.

  I patted her hand, and said, “Mort, weren’t you going to explain where wizards came from in the first place?”

  Mort emphasized each word as he said through a clenche
d smile, “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “No. But it’s an idea.”

  Mort looked extremely annoyed, but took a deep breath and said, “Well, in the way back, some humans found their way into the Other Realm, and were, uh, possessed by Fey spirits. When they returned, they had children, and those children were the first arcana. Then—”

  “You goddamned Fey lover,” the enforcer said. “You’d love to screw a Fey, I’m sure.”

  “Well,” Mort said, “if your dad was an arcana, and arcana are descended from Fey spirits, then I guess technically your mom actually screwed a F—”

  The enforcer shouted an invocation, and a fireball burst from his outstretched hand through the wards at Mort.

  I’d been ready for it, but even so I barely managed to jump in front of the damn thing.

  My butt cheeks twitched, and the giant, ghostly Pac-Man with its tribal-style tattoo appeared in front of me and swallowed the fireball. I felt the energy coursing through me, being transformed by the magic of the tattoo, and I flung my own hand out to point back at the enforcer, channeling the energy along it.

  The enforcer’s eyes widened as a stream of dark crackling energy like liquid black light shot out from my hand, ate right through the ward barrier like acid, and splashed out onto the enforcer.

  I turned away as a large and messy hole appeared where his chest had been, and he began to topple backward. I heard the thud of him hitting the ground, and winced.

  Well, that would be haunting my dreams for a while.

  “What the hell was that?” Mort asked. I’d never seen fit to reveal Alynon’s tattoo to him, and now didn’t seem like the best time for explanations.

  So all I said was, “Lucky.” I turned back, and avoided looking at the fallen enforcer as I picked up some of the dry dirt and flung it in front of me. It spread like dust, and struck the barrier with a thousand small yellow sparks. So I hadn’t broken the wards entirely. But some of the dirt passed through what appeared to be a head-sized hole eaten away by the energy blast.

  “Well done, but pointless,” Grandfather said. I turned around, but he had already returned to his ritual.

  “He’s right,” I said. “None of us are getting out through that hole.”

  Mort grabbed my arm, and leaned close. “But we can extend our magic outside the barrier now.”

  “And that helps, how?” I asked.

  “You can Talk to that dead asshole, and figure out what Grandfather is doing? Maybe there’s a way we can stop it.”

  I looked back at dead Deputy Dolph. Great.

  I went to the edge of the barrier, and summoned up my magic, then reached out with my will toward the dead body. “Spirit, I summon you, and compel you to speak the truth.”

  The magic responded, and I felt a sudden tug and then slow trickle of my life energy and magic draining away, being drawn into the summoning.

  I had only a second to be elated at my magic actually working before the enforcer’s voice echoed out of his body, “What the hell just happened?”

  I was the only one able to hear the voice—Talking to the dead was a rare gift even among necromancers—and I didn’t feel like expending the extra effort or energy to make the voice heard by the others.

  The drain on my life energy wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, since there remained enough residual energy in the enforcer’s corpse to help pay the cost of the summoning, but I was already on borrowed energy as it was. I had none to spare, and no time to waste.

  “What is Grandfather doing?”

  I could feel the spirit resisting the compulsion to answer, but I pushed with my will, and he said in a rush, “Poisoning the well!”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Death to all Fey.”

  “Yeah, but how?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” the enforcer’s spirit replied smugly. Pride in ignorance, what a shocker.

  “What did he say?” Mort asked.

  “That Grandpa Poobah back there didn’t tell his evil water buffaloes anything useful.”

  I focused on the spirit again. “How can we stop it?”

  “You cannot. Only the Supreme Arcanite may stop it.”

  “Or we stop him,” I said.

  “You cannot,” the enforcer replied, definitely smug now.

  “Why not?” I asked, and could sense the smugness falter as the spirit realized it had given me important information freely. Once again he resisted answering, and I had to push to get the answer.

  “It … is an act of sacrifice, the ultimate choice, and once begun it can only be stopped by choice.”

  “Frak me,” I muttered.

  “What?” Mort asked.

  Dizziness washed over me, and I swayed. Dawn caught me, steadied me.

  “Spirit,” I said, “I release you. May you find what you deserve beyond the Veil.” It was bad luck to curse or threaten a spirit, but one could always hope that there was some justice in the afterlife.

  The drain on my own life force and magic cut off, and the spirit dissipated.

  “You okay?” Dawn asked, putting a hand to my cheek.

  “As okay as I can be,” I said, finding it suddenly hard to dredge up the energy even to talk.

  “So what did he say?” Mort asked.

  “He said Grandfather has to choose to stop,” I murmured.

  “So we’re basically screwed then,” Mort said.

  Another flash from the portal as Alynon attempted yet again to break through. He appeared on the verge of disappearing now. If Fey were made of memory, was he losing his memories as he faded, or just the life energy that they gave shape to?

  Despite my better judgment, I considered allowing him to rejoin with me to at least prevent him from dying. Well, at least until I died shortly thereafter, or Grandfather took over my—

  “Wait,” I said. I thought about it a second, then said, “I have an idea.”

  Mort groaned. “Whenever you say those words, it never works out well for me.”

  “Buck up, little camper,” I said. “You get to be the hero. But I need another boost.”

  “Of course.” Mort sighed, and placed a hand on my head, sending another surge of life energy through me.

  Revitalized, I called to Alynon, projecting my will toward him, hoping he could still hear me.

  His spirit flew down from the portal, and stopped just outside the barrier.

  *Well, this worked out well,* he projected into my mind. It felt different from having him actually in my head, like hearing a voice coming from down a long tunnel.

  “Already, I miss your positive attitude,” I responded. “I have an idea. But I’m not sure you’re going to like it.”

  “I already said I wouldn’t,” Mort said.

  *Fine, I’ll rejoin with you,* Alynon said. *It’s better to Finn out than to fade away.*

  Mort looked from me to the space above us where I stared. “Wait, what are you doing?” he asked.

  “Talking to Alynon. Hang on.” Actually, I projected back with an effort of will, I need you to join with my grandfather.

  *I’d ask if you are joking, but you’re not this funny.*

  Mort and I will perform the joining ritual and get you past Grandfather’s defenses.

  *I need to remind you that a changeling cannot inhabit a body inhabited by a human spirit.*

  We’ve already proven there are exceptions. And I think you especially can do this. Whether because of the way Alynon had been created, or his illegal experiences as a changeling, or his time bonded with me, or all of the above, Alynon’s spirit now felt like something between a human spirit and a true Fey spirit. And Grandfather’s own spirit was an invader in the body he now possessed, which might give Alynon the opening he needed. Your entire world needs you to do this.

  *La, is that all?* Lines of distortion rolled across Alynon, his form wavering.

  Remember, I said, fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come tru
e.

  *Bright, what an excellent Point,* Alynon said, then continued in a defeated tone, *It seems I am doomed whether I will or won’t, so I will just have to shall.*

  Get ready then. When I raise my hand, merge with Grandfather.

  *And then what? Have the body commit suicide?*

  No. We are going to make Grandfather see the madness of his choice. I hope. And if nothing else, being stuck in a body that Alynon controlled would be fitting punishment.

  “Okay,” I said to Mort, “now we—” the world spun, and I fell.

  “Finn!” Dawn said.

  I blinked up at her. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” At least, I think I said that. It came out rather slurred.

  “He’s dying,” Mort said, leaning down next to my head. “The Talking was too much a shock to his system.”

  “Well, help him!” Dawn snapped. Her voice sounded oddly distant. “Do that thing you do again.”

  “He basically needs an energy IV,” Mort replied. “A steady stream of life energy, not short bursts. And if my will is focused on keeping him alive, I can’t stop Grandfather at the same time.”

  “I need to help you with Grandfather,” I said. “We need to use Alynon—” The effort to speak suddenly felt like trying to lift words made of freight trains in Conjunction Junction.

  “What about me?” Dawn asked Mort. “Can’t you give Finn some of my energy or whatever?”

  “I could,” Mort said hesitantly. “But I’d still have to maintain the link, and have less chance against Grandfather. My will would still be split.”

  “But if we revive Finn, then he’d be able to help you fight your grandfather,” Dawn said. “You’d still have more will than alone, right?”

  “So … I help you help Finn so he can help me with his will?”

  “It takes a willage, dude,” Dawn replied.

  Mort sighed, and said, “Since I don’t know what Finn has planned anyway, not sure I have a lot of choice.”

  “There’s that brotherly love I was looking for,” Dawn said, slapping Mort on the arm.

  “Don’t get me started,” Mort replied as he sat down next to me, unbuttoning his fitted suit jacket with one hand. Dawn sat on my other side. Mort placed one hand on my head, and I felt him shift as he reached across me to take Dawn’s hand.