by Daniel Ruth
He stared at me nonplussed. I stared at him. Because my humans liked helping people, I was usually willing to lend a hand as long as it wasn’t inconvenient. If you actually harmed one of my humans you should be grateful I don’t hunt you down and separate you from your spine.
“It was just a youthful indiscretion. In the shifter culture...”
“I don’t care,” I interrupted him. And I didn’t. Conrad and Mei were shifters. If it impacted them I would at least pretend to care. Ryder was not one of mine and he had acted against them.
“I... was warned this might happen,” Ryder began hesitantly, no longer self-assured. “The elders don’t know what you are but they know it’s not human or shifter.” Okay, this was just embarrassing. It’s a good thing I had given up seriously attempting a secret identity. “Grandpa gave me this to give to you in good faith.”
He reached behind him into the backpack he had slung over his shoulder. The young man slowly pulled out a package wrapped in protective oilskins. “We don’t have much contact with magic. From what I hear, Mei Ling is the closest we have to a magic expert. Before the magic community did their ritual and then went into hiding, we got this.”
Pulling the leather aside he revealed a tome of some sort. I reached over and examined it. It had some symbols of preservation and protection but it wasn’t warded. Arching an eyebrow, I opened it and leafed through the first few pages. An actual spell book, of the kind I had been searching for the last year. It was obviously an advanced spell, much more complex than they would teach in the academy. I wouldn’t have been able to hope to comprehend this in any reasonable time frame until I had the academy helpfully filled in my foundation. Even so, it would have to wait until after I had comprehended the basic spells I already had.
Flipping through the pages I snorted in amusement. It was actually a dimensional portal spell. I would have killed to have this a year ago. Now the worlds were chained up tight no one could use this spell. It also required a huge amount of energy. You might possibly get that much on a huge node of ley lines, especially if you cheated and used one of the several methods to accumulate energy. But the dimensional barriers were still up.
“Okay, you have my attention,” I nodded, feeling significantly less hostile. It may not be what I wanted, but I was still a powerful spell. Someday it would be useful again.
“Do I have your help,” he questioned hopefully.
“Fine. Strip down. I need to see the marks Vatapi left on you.”
“Who?”
“Jin.”
I waited as he undressed. Once he had removed his clothes I examined his skin. The sigils on his arm seemed to provide his air powers. It was similar to what I could do, though this one provided a different combination of air powers. I think that I could reproduce it, now that I had examined it.
However, that wasn’t what I was looking for. I saw it on his left buttocks. Not visible to normal vision, nevertheless I felt it. When I examined his aura I saw it had been mixed in an ugly way with demonic energies. I gazed thoughtfully at the tangle of energies. This was likely the method of detonation.
“Well, you’re lucky it’s not on your head,” I muttered.
“You found it?”
“Yes,” I smacked his ass. “Right here.”
“Can you get rid of it?” he had a hopeful expression as he looked over his shoulder at me. “Aside from the risk of blowing up randomly, it’s been a real pain not to be able to take showers. Sonic showers are excruciating for shifters.”
My heart bled for him. “It’s a bit problematic. The sigils on your arm and down there are similar in their methodology, if not their function. These things bond with your essence. Or soul if you want to go that route. They are exceedingly difficult to get rid of.”
“So no laser tattoo removal.”
“No, because it's bonded to your soul, you could remove the skin and when it grew back the sigils would reappear too. In order to remove it, you would need to remove the entire limb.”
“But...”
“Yes, that means you’d have to remove everything from your waist down,” I acknowledged.
His gaze became more fearful. “I knew Conrad survived having his legs destroyed...”
“You’d probably survive the initial shock. Shifters are pretty tough,” I said encouragingly. “I have a little something out back that could help you get back on your feet.” I paused and then chuckled at my unintentional slip. Ryder glared at me.
“I suppose it’s that or be a living bomb for the rest of my life,” he said as he took a steadying breath. “The second thing is... I heard Jin could mind control people. I don’t want to be a puppet.”
I frowned in thought. Hadn’t I told Conrad that in private? What kind of lousy security did AEGIS have? “There is a possibility that if you made an agreement with Vatapi he could command you in perpetuity. Or he may have just cast a geas on you. It wouldn’t be as easy to find as that mark.”
“Can you do anything about it?”
“I told Conrad I couldn’t do anything...” I stopped in thought. At the time, it had been true, I didn’t have the ability to do anything. Now, however...
“I might have something that can bind you to an oath,” I said slowly. “It should be able to overpower or at least interfere with a geas. If you gave him your soul, it would be tougher. The conflict may just kill you.”
“I would be willing to take an oath to you,” the young shifter quickly stated. I looked at him in chagrin. Why the heck would I want him? I suppose it would be ironic to have him guard Jeremy.
I might be able to have other people take oaths on the runed tooth, but there was no way it would be as binding as when I used it. If Ryder had a soul bond then he would need every bit of power a rune artifact could muster. I still think there was an excellent chance he might explode merely from the conflict of powers.
“I don’t have the item now,” I warned him. “The next time I stop by my house I should have it. You can... give me your oath then. When do you want to do the...” I made a cutting motion and pointed towards his waist.
“You have a method to help me recover,” he asked querulously.
“Yes, it will be much faster than Conrad’s recovery.”
“Let’s do it now,” he said bravely, with only a slight quiver in his voice. I grabbed a sheet from the closet.
“Follow me,” I said as I led him out to the regeneration circle. It was dark but the starlight cast a cold light on the surrounding. Most of the previously empty houses now were lit from inside with their new tenants. Frowning, I made an effort to avert attention. It was similar to what Beth used on Conrad on the trip to Paris. I excluded Ryder since he was following me.
“Are you ready?” I asked as we reached the circle. With a touch of power, I activated the spell inscribed on the ground.
“Sure, but aren’t you going to need something? Holy shit!” Ryder screamed as a six-foot-long blade of coherent psychic power congealed in my hand and I swung at his waist with my full strength. Ryder’s scream of pain was joined by another high-pitched shriek of panic. Looking towards the nearby house I saw the familiar face of young Erin Tonitis staring at the fallen shifter with horror etched on his face.
Ryder himself was looking pretty ghastly as almost the entire contents of his body, blood, intestines and organs slid onto the ground. I moved to kick his lower half out of the circle. The last thing we needed was a mindless clone laying around, grown from his other half.
The shifters upper half was beginning to see the effects of the circle. Organs and visceral fallen to the ground had taken a life of their own and seemed to crawl back toward the abdominal cavity. The spine quickly grew downward and branched into a white pelvis, then legs bones formed. As this was happening red muscles and white ligaments sprouted from the bones and fat and skin began to cover the interior and varying stages.
During this entire affair, twin screams rose through the night. A moment later Erin’s face di
sappeared only to be replaced by his father’s, Paul. He looked at the bloody scene and the shades closed with a rattle. I think I heard yells from inside as he reported to someone the gruesome murder outside his house.
While that was happening, Ryder had finished healing and had stopped screaming. I silently handed him the sheet to wrap around himself. I noted out of the corner of my eye that his lower half was now independently pulsing with magic. Snorting in disgust I bent down, grabbed a leg and threw it as far as I could down the street.
Briefly looking at all the spilled blood, I shook my head. A whispered spell mnemonic and the area was spotless. I really loved that spell. I half supported Ryder as we headed back to the house. We had just entered the house when the windows shook with an explosion.
“Was that..” Ryder questioned.
“Yes. You can give my bowl back to me now.”
“Oh god, that was horrible,” he said as he collapsed in a chair. I went into Jeremy’s room to rummage around for some spare pants. “Oh god the pain! If I had known it would be like that, I would have smuggled some narcotics out from the evidence room.”
I stopped in my tracks and muttered curses under my breath. I knew I had forgotten something. Shrugging, I grabbed a set of pants and headed back to the shifter.
Chapter 28
The next morning I wasn’t surprised to be awoken by someone at the door. However, it was slightly confusing since it was not anyone I knew.
“The ‘All Seeing Eye’ sent me,” said the slouching teenager, dark hair slicked back and wearing a beaten-up black leather jacket.
“I don’t think I know anyone named ‘All Seeing Eye’,” I said thoughtfully. It seemed a bit of a mouthful. “You are...?”
“Hey, we don’t do real names,” waved the young man with a shrug. “You can call me ‘The Knowing One’.”
“Right. Can I shorten that to ‘The One’,” I asked, nodding to myself. “It’s a bit of a mouthful otherwise.”
“Whatever floats your boat,” he said with another shrug. We stared at each other for a few awkward seconds. “It was about a rocket?”
“Oh, right,” I exclaimed. Beth really came through. She was like Jeremy, except faster. And she didn’t ask silly questions like ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘did you know that was against the law since it almost wiped out the human race last week?’. “Right this way.”
The hallway was short so it was just a matter of backing up. “Those boxes should have the parts. Hopefully Be...”
“We don’t do real names,” interrupted ‘The One’. Oh, that was disappointing. I was hoping human names had a fun side.
“Of course, ‘One’,” I agreed. “Hopefully ‘All Seeing Eye’ told you the details?”
“Yep,” he replied with a popping sound at the end. “I’ll have it set up by this afternoon. The controlling program will be on the terminal over there. ‘All Seeing Eye’ said she’ll tweak it from there.”
“That fantastic!”
“By the way, the fog machine is pretty cool. How do you keep it contained and swirling around the house like that?”
“Well I know a lady who filled it up almost every night,” I said with a smile. “The swirling effect is caused by the souls of tortured immortals trying to escape this mortal coil. And failing.”
“It looks pretty awesome. If you ever want to sell the plans, tell ‘All Seeing Eye’ I can get buyers.”
‘The One’ kept himself occupied in the living room. I checked my terminal and noted it was about the time I had decided to leave. There was not anything else I could really do here. I sent a message to Jeremy to get a file compiled on lore on a god named Lamia and went into my room. Keeping in mind Beth’s admonition, I put all the loose objects in there away. Then I spread out my senses, aligned them with the anchor rune that was in another dimension and synchronized my energies to it.
I may have screamed again. The pain was unchanged. If anything, it seemed worse. The sensation of the hook through the chest was the same. The feeling of being puréed and poured through an unimaginably small conceptual hole in the fabric of the multiverse seemed worse. Perhaps the smaller size of the anchor fragment meant a smaller concept. I wasn’t really thinking about anything at the time, except the agony.
Then, with a whimper, I was back in the academy apartment, sprawled in front of the fireplace.
“Ouch,” a trembling voice whined. I had to agree. Then I looked over towards the couches and noticed that one was askew and the second overstuffed chair had fallen backward. Small legs poke up from the other side, wavered a bit and fell back away from me with a thud. A moment of scrambling later and a very upset young girl poke her face around the fallen chair. She looked pretty angry.
“I told you to call ahead,” shouted Beth. “Do you have any idea what kind of explosion that creates?”
“Not really,” I admitted as I tried to get my breath back and forget the pain. As I expected my pain suppression hadn’t worked. It wasn’t a physical sensation. I tried to get to my feet but my legs still felt like spaghetti.
I felt terrible, but I still felt better compared to the time I had been forcibly teleported back to the anchor stone, way back before I redefined the parameter of the rune binding. I had tried to leave the city and been pulled back to the stone. The translocation effect was so violent that most of my skin and a good portion of my muscles had been vaporized. I had been fortunate enough to be unconscious until most of my muscle and skin had grown back in.
For a human, that wouldn’t take much energy but for me the force required to do that was immense. The energies involved now were even more immense, however, with the ley lines surging with energy, my body’s durability was on a completely different level than it was in a world with a scarcity of magic energy.
“Give me a few minutes to recover and I’ll pick up the trash and put the chair up,” I groaned.
“Of course you will,” she muttered under her breath. She took another look at me and her voice softened, “You don’t look good. Are you sure that teleporting is good for you?”
“Of course not,” I scoffed and followed it with a weak cough. “It’s terrible for me. But anything that doesn’t outright kill me is something I can walk off.” I grunted again as I made another failed attempt to get up. “Although this does take more of a toll than most. Help me get over to the couch.”
Having an eight-year-old attempting to support you to the couch turned out to be more of a hindrance than a help. I was feeling too beaten up to change back to my smaller student form.
“Not to be uncaring,” Beth started. “But my class is going to start soon. Can you start the suppression? I’d wait but did you know they whip you for being late?”
“I thought they didn’t take attendance and you just had to take a test at the end?”
“Pretty much in all the other classes they don’t care. However, the war wizard conditioning uses some pretty rare resources and there are some bad side effects if the rituals and potions aren’t timed right in the beginning. So, they have incentives...”
“I see,” I reached out and touched her forehead. Injecting a tiny amount of energy into her brain. “There you go. One hour of no pain. I envy you. So much…”
“Okay, heading out now. Your new robes are on the table over there. Something odd happened when Stella picked it up. I had her record a message on my terminal. I sent it over, take a look when you can.”
“Sure thing ‘All Seeing Eye’,” I acknowledged with a grimace. I still couldn’t manage a smile.
“Oh, you heard about that,” she replied in embarrassment. “What we’re doing is technically illegal, so we all use code names. You should know how that is Professor.”
After she left I lay there for an hour, slowly recovering from the mental and physical trauma. After my energies had recovered enough so I didn’t feel half dead I managed to raise my terminal and bring up Stella’s message. Her tiny image appeared above my wrist terminal. She looked worried.
“I picked up the robe you special ordered this morning. However, something odd happened. The store was closed when I came by. I would have come back later but the store owner saw me outside and ushered me inside. He seemed nervous. He handed me the package with the robes and when I mentioned the gold he hurriedly hushed me and sent me out.”
She held up a note. “This note was in the package with the robe.” She opened it and started to read. “The Dark Guild has stolen the horn. Their people have been asking about you and they are not taking ‘no’ for an answer. I am closing the shop until this dies down. I am a man of my word and will do what I can to make this up to you if we both survive the Guild’s attention.”
She tucked the note away. “I suggest we simply wait for the tooth to come back to you. It is part of you and will naturally manipulate events to bring it to you.”
“I can’t do that, Stella,” I said to her frozen image. “Turns out I need that thing more than I thought I did.” I groaned and swung my foot to the floor. “Looks like I’m heading into the city sooner than I thought.”
I assumed my child form just long enough to leave the school ground. With my new cloak, it was trivial to duck down any alley for a moment and come out with my older student identity and robes. Making my way to the business district, I asked around a bit to find a store that bought and sold gems.
A few hundred gems brought several million gold coins, or rather the larger gem encrusted platinum disks that were the country’s larger denomination. It also garnered looked of greed, however, this store was also located in a better part of the city so I doubted anything more would come of it. Then I headed to the magic shop.
When I got there, I saw that indeed, the shop was empty except or a strange burly middle-aged man in black. The shop placard said ‘back in an hour’. I had a feeling the original shopkeeper wasn’t going to be back anytime soon. I walked in.
Despite the sign, the man didn’t show any signs of wanting me to leave. In fact, his eyes widened in recognition. I saw his hand make a gesture and felt a tingle in the air.