by Drew Hayes
The dodge had kept us alive, well, in a manner of speaking. Yet I could hear more churning pudding from behind me, so we were far from in the clear. There was another issue, as well; the wide splash zone had separated Albert and Neil from me. We were now running at a right angle, growing steadily further apart. I tried to alter my course, but the next volley of acid wads forced me to scramble in a zigzag line to keep from becoming a vampire-accountant puddle. If you’re wondering how I was so adept at this, given my usual track record of efficiency, let me just say that while I am not skilled in many things, I am a twentieth-degree black belt in running away.
The mushmen had split up to follow both of us. I had two on my tail, which meant that wherever Albert was, he was running from three. I worked to push that thought out of my mind, not out of lack of concern, but rather because there was nothing I could do aside from trust him. Besides, I still had pressing matters of my own barreling down on me. Vampire speed mixed with an inability to feel fatigue meant that there were very few things I couldn’t outrun. However, their enormous size, stride, and similar endurance seemed to register these creatures in that category. The only blessing I had was that they took time between acid blasts, presumably meaning there was some sort of recharging process. I used the grace period to double down on my speed, pushing with all I had to place some distance between us.
The gap between the mushmen and me was widening slowly. I probably didn’t have much time left before they could fire again. I leapt over a particularly large fallen log, misjudging its height and barely clearing the top, and landed in a sprint. It was a few steps away when I heard something that was tremendously confusing. Silence. No great crashing feet wrecking their way in pursuit of me. I risked a glance over my shoulder to see something truly surprising, and by this point in the night, that was not an easy bar to reach.
Both mushmen had stopped at the log. They were milling about, looking at me with what I would guess was hate or frustration, though given the inhuman composition of their faces, that is obviously a guess. What was certain was that they’d hit some sort of barrier. Each was careful not to so much as brush against the log, keeping away from it with the same careful fear I’d shown in avoiding their acid. Eventually they turned back and lumbered slowly away, twisting their heads around occasionally to see if I would leave my area of protection. They were in for quite a disappointment.
Without the focus-narrowing stimulation of eminent destruction, I found my mind wandering about what my next move should be. Bubba and Richard should be safe. With us leading the mushmen away, they could have time to regenerate. Albert might still be getting chased. If the constructs had one area limit, it stood to reason they had more. Perhaps the enchantments that sustained them were bound to a particular region. I was seemingly safe; however, that was likely a temporary status. We still had a kidnapper loose, skilled with magic and fond of setting traps. I couldn’t very well go back. I knew the mushmen to be beyond my ability to deal with. At least the next challenge might be something more my speed. Like a turtle, or a three-legged frog.
Walking away from my savior log, I realized that though it had seemed silent with the sudden ceasing of the mushmen’s stomping, there was still a sound pricking at my ears. It was a strange combination of hoots, chirps, whistles, and brush rustling. And it was close.
Moving with as much care and silence as I could, I crept through the trees and over the shrubbery. The noise grew louder, and somehow stranger. These weren’t just random wilderness noises. There was a pattern to them, one that was somehow familiar and unfamiliar all at once. About a quarter of a mile from the log, the ground sloped down, creating a divot in the forest, like a grassy bowl. Sitting in the center of it was a woman in her mid-thirties, brown hair tied in a series of complicated braids that had come out halfway, and clothed in a flowing dress that had been stained with grass and mud. She sat on a rock, swaying quietly as the various animals and plants around her continued their odd serenade. Her eyes were open, but I had no idea what their natural color was. That was because there was no visible iris or pupil. Instead, a rainbow of shifting colors moved along her eyeball, obscuring whatever lay beneath. It reminded me of looking at an oil sheen in sunlight. I might not know a lot about magic, but even I could deduce the woman to be under some sort of spell. Even alone that would have been enough, but my nose was giving me additional confirmation as to this woman’s identity.
I had found Amy Wells. Now I just had to get her out of here before her kidnapper came back. I leapt into the clearing, the noise growing disproportionately larger despite my small amount of movement. Amy didn’t react, so I touched her shoulder gently.
“Miss Wells, my name is Fred. I’m a friend of Neil’s, and I’m here to help you.”
“Neil . . . yeah.” Her voice was distant, ungrounded. No wonder she hadn’t had the sense to run away. This guy had cast a doozy of a spell on her.
“That’s right—Neil. He got us to come save you. We need to hurry, though. I don’t know when your abductor will be back.”
“Conductor? I’m the . . . conductor.” To illustrate, she raised her hands, and the forest exploded with noise. Only after she lowered them did it return to its strange series of sounds. Okay, that was weird. Weirder still was there was something about the noises that was nagging at me. It was as though I knew it somehow, like a song lyric you are certain you’ve heard but you still can’t recall.
“No, Miss Wells, your abductor. The person who took you from your lab. I need to get you out of here.” I reached to pick her up, and the small girl placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Buzz off, narc.” I can’t tell you the next word she said because it was gibberish to me. What I can tell you is that I found myself hurled by some unseen force through the air, my head smashing into a tree with enough force to kill me, had I been human. It still rung my bell quite nicely. I had to sit on the ground while my brain swam and tried to recover. In my addled state, the nature sounds somehow seemed to grow more cohesive, and suddenly I was struck by a memory from my college days.
I’d had a roommate in my freshman year at the dorms. Everyone did despite their not being adequate room for one person, let alone two. We hadn’t gotten along terribly well. I liked to study, and he would consistently blast music on his side of the room. I didn’t particularly enjoy it. Then again, I’ve always been a fan of classics and opera, and I didn’t understand what the appeal of it was. Until one day, when I’d come home from a particularly grueling exam to find he’d gone to the communal kitchen and whipped up brownies. As I’ve said before, I used to have a bit of a weight problem, so I accepted his offer without a second thought. That night, sitting in our dorm, I finally saw why he enjoyed this music so much. In fact, I couldn’t get enough of it. The memory was buried down under a combination of time and chemical influences, but now that it had surfaced, everything made a bizarre sort of sense.
“This is Pink Floyd,” I announced, more to myself than anyone else.
“Shhhhh,” Amy said. “We’re at the good part.”
My cellphone chirped loudly, earning me a dirty look from the girl with the rainbow eyes, and I flipped it open to an unfamiliar number.
“Fred,” Bubba’s voice came out low and rough. There was a tremor of relief too, as though he’d been fearful I’d be unable to pick up. Clearly, he was under a lot of stress. “Are you okay? Did you guys get away from those things?”
“I did, though I’m not certain about Albert,” I said. “Did you two recover?”
“Yeah, took a few minutes, but we’re more or less fine now. We found a payphone in the parking lot after our cellphones got melted. Have you run into anymore trouble?”
“Somewhat, though in this case, ‘trouble’ was our missing mage.”
“You found Amy? What about whoever took her?”
“No one took her.” I sighed. “We’ve been wrong the whole time.”
“What do you mean?”
“She isn’t kidn
apped. She’s just really, really high.”
8.
Three hours later, the six of us sat around a table at Taco Bell, watching a woman who couldn’t weigh more than a hundred thirty pounds work her way through a small mountain of Cheesey Gordita Crunches. It had taken that long for Amy to come down enough to effectively communicate, and though her eyes were largely back to normal, I still caught the occasional swirl of color along the edges. She’d explained on the way to the fast food eatery, which she had been insistent we go to, about what had happened.
Amy, it seemed, was more than just a talented magic user. She was an accomplished alchemist. She’d been working on a new kind of drug for a very powerful client and had decided to test it on herself. It had worked. Only since the drug had been calibrated for one much stronger than herself, she’d lost all sense of reality and wandered off into the night. The mosster, the mushmen, and the music had all been her doing, though she only remembered the last one clearly. When asked why on earth she would conjure things like that, her response had been a shrug and the words, “I was suuuuuper messed up.”
Neil sat next to her, the fact that she’d never been in any real danger clearly not factoring into his sense of relief or hero worship. She was a pretty woman, but she had over a decade on him, and I was pretty certain his crush was a one-sided affair. Still, she’d managed to turn the kid from an aspiring murderer to a devoted and caring apprentice in a few weeks, so who was I to argue with results?
Bubba and Richard were putting a serious dent in some food of their own. Both of them were wearing clothes that were closer to scrap cloth than actual attire, the acid having eaten holes in all the available garments. Red splotches of skin still decorated their bodies, the only remaining sign of the eroded flesh that they’d suffered, and even that was fading away rapidly. Evidently, healing worked up an appetite, though, since they’d each ordered twenty-dollars worth of food, no small feat at this establishment.
Albert and I were in relatively good shape, a few small holes in our clothing where we hadn’t noticed acid splash in our hurried escape. I was streaked in dirt thanks to Amy blasting me into a tree, and my sweater vest was shredded beyond repair on its back.
I’d thought we might get refused service due to our rough appearance, but, shockingly, we were not the most wrecked group in the Taco Bell that night. Hell, we barely made third place.
“Ohhh man, is that better,” Amy said. Usually these words accompanied the cessation of eating. In her case, they merely came between finishing one taco and unwrapping the next. “Super sorry for all the trouble guys, but I appreciate the ride over.”
“I still don’t get it,” I said, since evidently I was the only one in the dark. “Why would you make something like that in the first place?”
“Fred,” Richard said, his tone surprisingly careful for a man of his station. “People of our . . . type are still people. We still have the same desires. We get hungry, we grow tired, we laugh, we love, we hurt. And sometimes, like many other people, there are those among us who yearn the occasional escape from those feelings.”
“Even parahumans want to get high,” Amy summed up, swirling down some sugary soda in a few rapid straw sips. “Problem is, most of the usual stuff doesn’t work on them. You know how much booze it takes for a therian to get drunk?”
I glanced around nervously. Talking in the open about supernatural things was supposed to be strictly taboo. None of the other patrons seemed to be paying attention to us, and since one cluster was debating the viability of robot designs in science fiction worlds while another argued if Lincoln was a time-traveler, I didn’t imagine our conversation would stand out too much.
“A lot,” Bubba answered before I could guess. “Goes with the regeneration. I can down an entire bottle of moonshine and only get a light buzz that lasts half an hour.”
“Right, exactly, and that’s just one hurdle for one type of consumer,” Amy said cheerfully. “Zees and Vees and all the other UnDees have their own physical limitations toward tasting sweet release. Through alchemic augmentation, I can create stuff that gets them where they want to go.”
“She is brilliant, the best in her field.” Yeah, that was obviously Neil.
“I guess that makes sense, but it still kind of seems wrong somehow,” I said.
“You drink wine,” Albert pointed out.
“But because I like the bouquet of flavor.”
“Oh. Does that mean you never drank it back before your change?”
Damn. Outfoxed by Albert. If that didn’t prove I was in the wrong, nothing would.
“Right, same thing,” Amy said. “I provide various means for various people of means. I even comply with all the regulations from the ATF.”
“Why do I have a feeling that doesn’t stand for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms?”
“Cause you’re right. Alchemy, Thamataulogy, and Freshness.”
“Freshness?”
“Yeah, I’m not sure that last one wasn’t just out of convenience. The other ATF was founded first, and they figured it would be easier to be covert if they worked under a title regular people already knew. Plus, it saved on stationery and uniforms. It is still the government, after all.”
“This is giving me a headache.” I went to set my forehead on the table, then realized exactly where I was and thought better of it.
“I have some stuff back at the lab that can make you forget all about it,” Amy offered. “No charge, as apology for all the trouble.”
“I’ll pass. I’m sorry if I came off as judgmental. I guess I just didn’t expect a mage who was mentoring a kid to have gotten involved in something like that.”
“Other way around,” Amy said, opening the wrapper on her final piece of food. “I got into magic because I got into alchemy. Which I got into because I was into chemistry, which I was learning about because I wanted to get better with botany, which I had taken up studying in an effort to grow some killer weed.”
“She really is a prodigy,” Richard interjected, having finally finished wolfing down (It’s not offensive to use that term. I checked.) a series of Double Decker Tacos. “She got a late start and is still considered more accomplished than mages twice her age. Neil is lucky to have such a teacher.”
“Turns out I’m lucky to have such a dedicated apprentice,” Amy said, ruffling Neil’s hair with the hand that wasn’t cramming food in her face. He still got taco sauce streaked on his forehead, but it could have been actual human feces and he wouldn’t have cared.
“I guess that’s it then,” I said. “Everyone is safe, so we can all go home.”
“Totally with you there. If I don’t whip up a batch of hangover cure, I’m going to be regretting it in the morning. Plus, it sounds like I messed some stuff up while I was tripping.”
“On that note, why were there burn marks, blood, and melted glass along with a destroyed lab?” I asked.
“The drug used a lot of fire magic, and before it was done I had a little accident. As for the rest, I have no idea. Maybe I cast a tornado to cool down. Shouldn’t take too long to fix, but, Richard, will you tell Gideon I need a few more days on his order?”
“He will expect adequate compensation for the delay,” Richard reminded her.
“Of course he will. Fucking dragons. Tell him I’ll add in three extra doses to the order, and to the one after that. If he bitches, you can offer extra on the next one too, no more than that though. A girl’s got to eat.” Amy illustrated this point by polishing off the last of her food. Neil set a bag of Cinnamon Twists in front of her, which she immediately went to work on.
“That should do it. He’ll like the symmetry of the three-by-three offer.”
“I’m sorry, are we talking about the Gideon I met tonight? Looks like he’s around seven years old?”
“You got it,” Amy said. “He’s a pain in the ass about the details, but there are worse clients to have than The King of The West.”
“The what now?”
>
“King of The West,” Richard said. “He is the highest parahuman authority in our part of the country, answerable only to The Agency. Various types of our kind will appoint their own regional leaders, people with positions like my own. However, they must all be confirmed by Gideon.”
“Because he’s a dragon?”
“Because he is incredibly powerful, and he is an excellent negotiator. All three dragons that assisted in our rebellion demanded vast lands of territory for their aid.”
“Our rebel . . . ” I stopped as my memory flared up. Krystal had told me something about this over Thanksgiving. America was different from other countries because parahumans had been instrumental in its founding, so much so that they were afforded rights and consideration under the laws. Which meant there was only one plausible rebellion Gideon could have helped with where he would have been able to negotiate such power. “You’re saying he was there for the Revolutionary War.”
“Very much so. He led a battalion of warriors in some of the key victories, and he is often fond of telling the story of them over and over,” Richard explained, clearly a little weary of the tales. I could surmise a dragon with insane power and innumerable years of experience could make a tiring houseguest.