High Steaks

by Daniel Potter

  And deep inside some of them, light glimmered and flickered. Were those...?

  A sharp pain flashed across my ear, and I spun to face the sudden attack, fangs bared, claws out.

  Nobody was there.

  "Focus!" Rudy barked in my ear. "Did your brain stay the size of a sunflower seed?"

  My left ear flicked, a stinging pain spreading through it along with the unpleasant sensation of something wet flowing into the ear canal. "Did you just bite me?"

  "We can put a ring through it later if it makes you feel better," Rudy said in a defensive tone. "You were gonna scry something! Honey roasted chipmunk poo! You're worse than a golden retriever. We don't got time for that. Make with vomiting."

  Grumbling, I conceded that Rudy was right. Concentrating, I set my body up to produce an epic hairball but shoved the contraction of my stomach in a direction that should not exist - that small piece of me that the dragon had rebuilt outside of three dimensions. A small space about the size of a bowling ball that no mortal magic could see or touch. My stomach churned as something hard forced its way up my throat.

  "HURK!"

  A clear hamster ball hit the tile in front of me, glowing with the crystallized white of a stasis spell. I rotated the ball and tore off the rune that we had placed on the top. The white winked out, and I heard a soft caw. I held the ball steady with two paws as Rudy jumped on top of it and twisted off the lid as if he'd done it a million times.

  Rudy yeeped and scrambled back out of the way as a sleek, heavyset crow, her eyes burning with the glow of forge-hot coals, leapt out of the ball. She squawked, and then the fire in her eyes spread through her body and grew into a conflagration of magic that quickly resolved itself into O'Meara, her wavy red locks shining with a blue heat. "That! That was the worst way to travel in the history of the world!" she spat, falling into a defensive crouch. "Aaaaand please tell me that isn't an alarm."

  I bonded her, our minds embraced briefly, and I shared how the infiltration went. Then, before her brain could overdose on internal cussing, I pushed her to observe her surroundings.

  Oh, blood and ashes. Her being flooded with flame as she grasped what was before her. She turned and looked at the chair. That is definitely a Tikoloshe skull. Together, we looked beyond the chair and its flickering crystals. Behind it were half a dozen circular iron birdcages, like the ones they used to sell except three feet wide, seven feet tall, and crafted of cold iron. At the bottom of each sat a pile of gray bones. As if all the flesh had vaporized in an instant and the bones had fallen into neat piles. Only the skulls were missing.

  "This is it?" Rudy cried. I turned my head sharply to look at the wall of the vault farthest from the vault door. Rudy stood on a pallet of casino chips - one of two – that shone with the gray of tass. Thousands of groat, enough to rip the fabric of reality and glue it back together dozens of times however you'd like. That is, if they weren't wrapped in a sort of dimensional plastic that rendered the tass inert until you let the chips dissolve in an acid for an hour. Death invented the process soon after opening his casino for magi, and the practice had become standard. Otherwise, no ward on earth could contain a thief once they penetrated the vault. Fortunately, useless for spell work was not the same as nonexplosive.

  "That will have to be enough. More than enough to make it look like the dragon came here," I snarled. At least enough to blow that contraption to kingdom come. Even if the worst happened, that would give me some solace.

  O'Meara advanced on a small rack of weapons beside the pallets of tass. "You're both right. It's enough for the plan, but there should be millions' worth of tass here. The council comes to Lansky for loans." O'Meara grimaced at the selection; there was no Inquisitorial sword. "Thomas, I need your eyes here."

  My own gaze had drifted to the vault doors. The golden wards were so bright they were painful to look at. According to Rudy, the entrance to the vault had been set up like an airlock. Two layers of wards. To get in, a defender had to disable the outer layer, step between the wards, then re-enable the outer ward before the inner ward could even begin to wind down. As I squinted against the lethal glare of the inner ward, movement beyond it caught my eye. The outward had begun to power down. That meant they knew something had gotten in. "They're coming. Rudy, you better get busy with that bomb." I turned to look at the rack of weapons, showing O'Meara the various magical flows and patterns within each one.

  Ooooh, a spell ripper. O'Meara pulled out a smooth, polished disk about the size of a serving platter. It contained several foci. O'Meara channeled and used our bond to twist a sort of handle in the magical structure; the entire disk unfolded in such a way that was impossible for me to describe as its blades extended in directions beyond three dimensions. A shiver went down my spine. There were elements of it that were similar to the dragon grinder. "Oh, very nice. Works even after all these years." She then snatched a sword out of a bucket of them. "And a force sword will do for the defense."

  "Got your toys? Good. Get on with the heisting!" Rudy called, back at the hamster ball. "You better not have melted any of my gear, O'Meara!" He dived in. After a few muffled grunts, the ball tipped over with the squirrel inside. "Little help here?"

  O'Meara scooped up the ball, squirrel and all. "It's the remains of the stasis spell. Nothing in that ball is going to want to move without a bit..." She pulled Rudy out of the way before grabbing an object within and gritting her teeth, “of force." With a pop, our two exit plans came out: the emergency teleport of my battle harness and a huge wad wrapped in black electrical tape with a fuse sticking out of it. Rudy referred to that one as Kingdom Kong.

  "Now let's get to work." O'Meara headed toward the pallets of tass with the bomb in hand and Rudy on her shoulder.

  For my part, I jumped back into the basket and started eating the only unsealed tass in the room, choking it down and shoving it sideways into my dimensional pocket. It tasted of tar and chalk. My own stomach threatened to rebel with each swallow. I ate until all fifty groat had disappeared down my throat. The majority of them went safely in the pocket, but a few made it to my stomach and attempted to start a riot.

  Popping my head up, I saw O'Meara had pulled the wrapping off one of the pallets of tass and was shoving boxes of chips into a big black bag. Meanwhile, Rudy had a rough circle traced on the ground next to the dental chair from hell. I glanced at the vault door. The golden wards had dimmed considerably but were still in the process of unlocking. We had maybe another minute, perhaps less, before we got rushed by a squad of Order of Hermes battle magi. We had to get gone.

  Still, there was one thing I needed to do before we left. I ran over to the shelves of black crystals and stumbled as something in my heart was violently jerked. A startled yowl leapt out of my throat as pieces of me fell away.

  Noise, Jet, Trevor. Each exploded in my heart like a new wound. I'd lost them all. Then a new set of wounds ripped open to the life I'd left behind when I woke up with a tail. A life I normally refused to think about.

  A scream pierced the air and my head. I slammed the link closed, shielding O'Meara from the tendrils of grief that were digging into my soul. My eyes useless, I focused on Noise. I had lost her, but she had not died; unlike Trevor or Jet, hope remained. Memories rose: the pine-and-musk smell of her clothes and fur, the firmness of her thigh beneath my head and sarcastic bite of her tongue. The fact that she had actively dragged me into this world, broken my already strained bonds with my family, seemed like such a small, distant thing now. But in her presence, it became a scab I'd never been able to stop picking at. The memories of it all washed over me. The feeling of my claws ripping open her cheek. The puppy-like eagerness for her to take me back after a week in a literal hell. That relationship was a lost cause for us both, a love that had truly been lost.

  And then I saw them: the thick limbs of grief burrowing in my mind, probing my memories for pain and sorrow. My mind reached for weapons. I found both claws and fangs. The tentacles probing the link to O'M
eara met my desire to protect her. I sliced at those wrapped around Noise with the memories of our mental link, the forgiveness we shared. A sense of duty had separated us, hers to her family and mine to my contract with Veronica, not some silly metaphor of scabs.

  The tentacles were in retreat now, pulling back through the holes they had punched through my psyche. Shock and surprise oozed from them.

  Not so fucking fast. My teeth sank down into one and it squealed as I hauled it back. It had come into my mind uninvited, and nobody was going to do that without paying a toll. Dredging up my childhood, I found the memories of my parents disturbingly faded, like yellowed photographs, but there in full color and high def were the catchiest fragments of sing-alongs led by a big purple dinosaur. Cackling madly, I gathered those up into a syringe and stabbed it into the invader.

  Something screeched in a distant reality. I let the thing go. Try getting those out of your head now, you bastard... thing.

  Thomas! O'Meara burst through the link. What the hell was that?

  A hunger plane.

  Ashes and fire, Thomas! We do not have time for you to be battling extradimensional entities! I found O'Meara's arm around my chest, hauling me to my feet. "Rudy, do you have exit plan A ready?"

  "Exit plan A is in the hole! It's time to blow this popsicle stand!" Rudy cried.

  "Wait! One more thing." I pulled out of O'Meara's arms and dashed over to the bookcase of crystals. No waves of grief assaulted me now. The dancing light within one fat crystal seemed familiar somehow, the way its bottom half flickered sideways as if munching on something. Jet. The thought hit me as my teeth closed on it. The crystal itself had a now-familiar chalky taste as I swallowed it down. Pure tass. Far denser in concentration than anything else in the room.

  "No time to think! We have to go, now!" O'Meara urged.

  "Dragon a-coming!" Rudy crowed. The snikt! sound of his Zippo echoed around the room, followed by the sizzling of a fuse. Giggling to himself, he pushed the duct-taped explosive into the center of the second pallet of tass. The one O'Meara hadn't touched.

  We ran over to a small circle outlined with a silver conductive sharpie, with a purple firecracker the size of my nose in the middle of it. Rudy bounded up and lit the fuse with a flash of the little red Zippo. "Here we go!" The fuse sparked to life, and he beat it to the edge, where the emergency-trip-to-Grantsville charm lay. O'Meara and I deliberately stepped on either side of it.

  The last of the wards on the door faded as the sparking fuse entered the cracker. Purple flame surged out of the explosive, hit the circle border, and roared up into a gout of flame. Nothing happened to the physical walls, but we all felt a shockwave sweep across our minds. The doors swung out. I caught sight of two figures, one standing on two legs, the other on four, both glammed with so many wards and spells that I couldn't see the actual people behind them.

  "LATERS!" Rudy cried out as the escape rune activated.

  Purple flooded my vision then cleared. We hadn't budged.

  "Aww, nuts," Rudy said.

  36

  Oops

  Lansky's face emerged from the neon glow of the magics as I dialed back my sensitivity.

  "Well, this is... not entirely unexpected, but I am impressed all the same." He drew a sword from his hip. Feather, standing next to him, glared at me like a betrayed mother. The sword twirled, blasting forth a wave of energy.

  With the electric whine of a table saw, O'Meara swung the spell ripper into the energy's path. Purple and white sparks filled my vision as the space between O'Meara and Lansky twisted, the light inverting. Feather and Lansky shone with darkness.

  Reality slammed back into place with a thunderclap. The sword clattered onto the floor, smoking.

  "Oh, ha ha HA!" Lansky's laugh grew with every syllable as he shook out his hand. "I forgot I had that down here! You—"

  "Five seconds! Plan B - Go!" Rudy called, cutting the magus off.

  O'Meara and I took a deliberate step into the inner circle in front of us, big enough to fit us both if I curled around O'Meara's legs. Together, we channeled the stasis plane into that circle; it spread through the runes to the outer circle, creating a network of channels designed not to stop a blast wave but to redirect it.

  "Four!"

  Confusion blossomed on Lansky's face. Feather displayed her shockingly white teeth.

  "Three!"

  Feather's eyes locked on the sizzling fuse. "Not the apparatus!" She lunged.

  "Two!" Rudy cried with joy.

  The world became light. Fingers dug into the skin of my neck, pulling me close. Silence roared against Rudy's cry of, "Booooooom, baby!"

  The spellwork of stasis channels grew too hot and too cold to hold on to. The wild magic rebelled against our redirection; an ocean of sand blasted down our dollhouse of a shelter. We retreated from the runes and poured ourselves into maintaining the circle. Pain blossomed in places that did not exist. My perception twisted away from my face, and I saw us, clinging to each other amid a sea of power. O'Meara screamed as frost began to spread along the inside of her skull, while I couldn't scream at all. My mouth refused to open, the fangs inside growing, fighting, grappling with each other. Agony became a mere note in the song that was my body boiling off to a gas. My tail had become a snake, slithering away. I had to pin it down with a paw that melted like wax to stop it from breaking the circle.

  Rudy laughed. He had a beard as long as O'Meara's hair, and a halo hung limply on a twisted set of horns. One of his eyes shone like a star, while the other consumed its light. O'Meara's body had become a battlefield of ice and fire, a dance of frost and flame over blackened skin. A crow’s head protruded from her chest, cawing, "Give me their eyes! I want their eyes to remember them by!"

  The circle cracked, a lightning bolt that stretched beyond our comprehension. I coughed up tass into my sealed mouth and spat it on the crack through my nose, tiny fingers sprouting around each nostril to weave the tass into a webwork of silver thread.

  It wasn't enough. Too much power, too little work done on our little circle. Reality would run like a river and wash us away at any moment.

  Darkness came suddenly, not with the dying of the light but in streams, shooting across my disembodied vision, curling around patches of light and ripping it away. A Chthonic shadow play surrounded us, the pressure ebbing on the ward around us. Reality - the one we knew - reclaimed our bodies, and we fell against each other, breathing once again.

  Icy prickles danced along my spine, a sensation I had not had since I came to Vegas. Different from the grief demon, the tendrils felt more like the thinnest of roots in my head, hard to notice but similar as it tried to pry into my memories. I brushed them away and then did the same for O'Meara without even thinking about it.

  The darkness parted in front of us, opening into a massive luminescent eye. Had it been a mouth, O'Meara could have stepped into it without brushing its sides. It had a golden iris in which swam thousands of pupils of various sizes and shapes that appeared and disappeared, as if the eye contained a multitude of creatures which were fighting each other to get a good look. I swallowed; there was no doubt where they were looking, either. Every single one focused on me.

  "Moldy cashews stirred in peanut butter, what is that?" Rudy asked.

  "The Veil," O'Meara breathed. "Thomas swatted it out of our heads somehow."

  "So that might have been a bad move on my part," I conceded, watching the multitude of eyes in front of me. According to the histories, the Veil had been sent to earth to prevent humanity from mucking with the metaverse by something we were not allowed to remember - a fey, a creature beyond the ken of even dragons. It sat near our reality, plucking and pulling on the strings of our world, keeping the others hidden from human eyes. Familiars were the loophole.

  And I had attracted its attention. I decided not to stick it in the eye and to stay very, very still.

  Rudy had other ideas. "Yeah, yeah, we made a little bit of a boom. I'll try to make the next
one a little softer. But just so you know, we got some big plans for some other light shows. Think of it as a bit of a tass cashout. You probably don't want all those magi having all that tass around here anyway, right? And technically, we can do what we want in Vegas, right? That was the deal: magi stay the hell out of New York..." Rudy continued to explain away the circumstances of the current moment.

  One of the irises began to move like a pair of lips, and words slithered between my ears.

  You are not my embryo. Behave. Something surrounded my skull, barbs pressing against my mind, communicating very effectively that it could pop me like a balloon should it choose.

  I babbled thought questions at it, asking it to clarify, but the pressure faded from my skull, and the great eye slowly closed into nothingness.

  Then, with the suddenness of flicking a light switch, the world came back. Sunlight shone directly overhead, illuminating the cavern in which we stood. We stood on a circle of concrete, perched on a pillar of earth. That was all that remained of the original vault - except for Lansky and Feather, who lay at the far edge of the cave, literally embedded in the rock. Their wards, sparking and flickering now, had still held underneath the magical onslaught we had released, whereas our ward - specifically designed to withstand the blast - would have buckled had the Veil not shown up.

  Lansky stirred under his failing wards. Peeling his head out of his magus-shaped indentation, he looked at us with a twisted smile before beginning to sing softly in a tone that a human ear would not have caught. "I love you... You love me." The eyes were filled with blackness.

  "Time to go!" O'Meara grabbed me as she channeled. We rose out of the cavern, into the tunnel the blast had carved all the way to the surface.

  Yet Lansky's voice followed me, snaking through the roar of O'Meara's rocket boots. "We're a... happy... family." The lyrics I had sent into the darkness only faded out once we rose above the street.