"If it wasn't the end of the goddam world, I would've busted him for it too,” Shine commented. “But, honestly, what's the freakin’ point?"
"What's ever the point?” Ben asked.
"Oh, no,” Cory interjected. “We're not getting started on this debate. Mir? Come on, Mir, talk to me."
"I don't understand what's going on,” she said, in between sobs muffled by her hands. She'd buried her face between her knees and pressed her palms against it.
"And that makes you different from the rest of us ... how?” Jason asked.
"If you guys don't knock it off and let me talk to her, you're going to piss me off,” Cory said, obviously exasperated now.
Amanda plucked a strand from the ether and gave the room an icy glare. By this time everyone had a good sense of what it meant when she snatched invisible things out of the air. As a threat it was remarkably subtle, yet no less effective for it. “Ben? Would you please take Julia and lay her down in one of the bedrooms? She's going to wake up in a few minutes and I'd rather she did it somewhere else."
He nodded and picked up the sleeping girl, carrying her off into the back of the house.
Amanda squatted down next to Mira. “You doing okay?"
She looked up, tears streaking her face. It was at that point Amanda realized that Mira wasn't wearing any makeup. That was surprising. Of course, when you're hiding in a house trying not to be noticed by the monsters, makeup just might be the last thing on your mind. This realization actually gave her a bit of hope for the two girls. Not complete twits, at least.
She slashed a glance across the three other vampires. “Why don't you guys go chase down a deer or something? This'll be much safer for everyone if I have as few distractions as possible."
"Are you up to it?” Cory asked, actually looking concerned.
She smiled. “What, in light of our little jumps to get the girls and bring them back? Yeah. I'm good. Teleporting is actually one of the easier tricks."
Jason, Gina, and Shine exchanged glances, then stood up and filed out without a word..
Amanda waited until they were gone and turned to Cory and his cousin. “All right. This is going to take a few minutes. I'm going to modify an existing spell."
He shrugged. “Whatever it takes."
She triggered her magesight. She reached up and snatched a sigil from the air around her head, three looped strands of gray energy she began to pick apart. She pulled the top loop off, focusing her will on it. It writhed between her fingers for a second, and then stiffened. She pried the other two loops of mana thread apart, gripping them firmly between her fingers as they lashed at one another.
She slid the rigid strand in between them, a snippet of a song ringing in her skull as she bent the two flailing strands into an assemblage of knots. A moment of white-hot light and then coolness as the spell settled into its new shape.
Snatched another passing thread and, without thought, thrust it into the middle of the sigil as it pulsed gently into her hand. Another flare of light, this one like a nuclear blast on the horizon, so bright she felt her eyes watering from the shock.
She let it drift a moment before snatching it up and hurling it point-blank into Cory's chest. It split on contact, sending a crackling bolt of power between him and Mira. The lights flickered; then the bulb in the overhead fixture exploded.
Another bolt of light flashed from the rune as it slowly melted into Cory's chest, stabbing deep behind her optic nerve. Images and mathematical formulae ticked through her brain so fast she couldn't begin to consciously apprehend it.
The fourth thread activated, the spell leaping from her hand and striking the sigil, blowing it into disintegrating shards. Cory shrieked, leaped to his feet, and promptly fell on his face.
* * * *
His head felt like it was going to explode. His eyes broiled in their sockets, his hands felt like they'd been carved from lead. A strange lassitude crept over him and he stretched out on the carpeted floor. “Is this what being stoned feels like?"
"Doubt it. So do you feel any different?"
Shrugging took too much effort. He grunted “no-comment” and forced himself to roll over onto his back. “This feels so strange."
"I need you to sit up and take a look around the room. If it worked you should start getting glimpses of the mana around us."
He had to force himself into a sitting position. That was odd. Usually he had only to think about doing something and his body obeyed. This almost felt like being mortal again. “Ugh. Whoa.” He rubbed at his eyes. Gray worms crawled across the scope of his vision, some as long as his arm, others no larger than the end of his pinky. He reached out tentatively and one of the threads wrapped around his hand. “Oh, wow."
"Looks like it worked,” she remarked, sounding pleased with herself.
She's entitled, I guess. “Yeah. I'd say it did.” His eyes tracked to her, and then were drawn to the pulsing symbols orbiting her head and shoulders. So that's what a spell looks like.
She pulled off her glasses and pinched the bridge of her nose. A moment later she lifted her head and met his gaze, eyes like pools of molten jade. “That was a good idea,” she told him, with a note of reluctance.
His lips creased into a sly smile. “Oh, I'm just getting started.” He was bragging, of course, but there was enough truth mixed in it that he didn't feel guilty. “So what kinds of things can I do with a single strand?” he asked, watching the thread crawling between his fingers like a tiny, featureless snake.
"Just about any single effect you can imagine.” She flicked a thread out of the air and sent one end flicking across the room to wrap around an old pop can. She twisted her wrist and the pop can vanished from the table at the end of the couch and re-appeared in her hand.
"Nice trick."
"Thanks. It's basically the same way I create a step portal, only ... well ... with a much shorter range. Only takes one thread. Which, by the way, should be the limit of your experimentation for now. Get an idea of what just a strand can do before you try to learn—or design—any spells."
He gave a shrug. “Sure.” He flicked the end of his thread outward, mentally guiding the other end down the hallway and into the kitchen. He couldn't precisely see where it was going, but his knowledge of the layout of the house, matched with the mana strand's responsiveness, send the end plunging directly into the fridge.
He made a decision and found himself holding an ice cold pop. The thread seemed to flash through several colors before slowly breaking apart, like an old plastic cord left in the sun too long. He shook the pop up nicely and tossed it to her. “Have a drink on me."
"On me, more likely. How did you do that? You shouldn't be able to ‘port things you can't see.” She frowned. “At least, that's how I was taught."
"Sounds like they need to rewrite the rule book,” he replied with a casual smirk. He glanced over at his cousin, who was sitting next to him in what looked like a nearly catatonic state, eyes wide and staring. “Mir?"
"What?” She let out a shuddering breath. Brow beetling, she reached down and ran her fingers across the carpet. “What the hell did you do to me? Everything looks so ... weird."
Cory shot Amanda a questioning look. “Her too?"
"Wasn't part of the plan, but ... sometimes spells don't do exactly what you think they will."
"Huh. Mir. Amanda just gave both of us the power to do magic. Real magic. Mir!"
She was still drifting, more spaced than even Ben at his most stoned. Her head turned slowly—very slowly—and she met his gaze warily.
"What are all these gray squiggly things?"
"Mana,” Amanda replied brusquely, standing and walking over to the girl. She squatted down in front of her. “Amazing. Two for the price of one. How're you feeling?"
"Sick to my stomach,” the girl answered. “What are these things floating around you?” She reached out as if to touch one of Amanda's spell sigils. The small woman's hand lashed out and grasped her wrist
firmly.
"Uh-uh. Don't ever touch another mage's spells. You have no way of knowing if they're booby-trapped or not. At least not yet."
Mira jerked her hand back. “Don't touch me."
"Fine,” Amanda snorted, standing and looking down at her. “I can't see this as a bad thing right now."
"You made me into a freak.” Her voice was a hiss with the merest hint of a whining tone at the end.
Like your parents? Cory thought, then cringed inwardly. She didn't know that. She thought her mother and father had died. She remembered them being sick—very sick—and had apparently rationalized their subsequent disappearance in her own head.
Her parents had been changed by one of the metaviruses. The metavirus—at least as far as the rest of the world was concerned. Transformed into meta-humans by the course of the disease, they'd decided she'd be safer if she were far away from them. And that sure as hell didn't turn out to be true, did it?
It wasn't a wound he or his mother had probed at much. On some level Cory was sure she knew what had happened to them. If they'd died, after all, there would have been a funeral. Instead there was only silence.
His mother hadn't shared a lot with him, but she'd at least told him that they'd joined one of those meta groups—the one in California, he recalled.
Enough of this bullshit. “I didn't think you were a bigot, Miranda.” He grabbed her chin and pulled her gaze in line with his. “I'm a double freak now.” He let his fangs extend and grinned at her with a vampire's smile.
She stiffened, and then let out a wail loud as an air-raid siren.
Rolling his eyes, he stood and stepped back a few feet. “I've never seen her like this,” he told Amanda.
"She'll be fine,” was her reply. “She's the first person besides you who didn't have to deal with the damn disease end of it. She should be happy. She could've ended up a ‘freak' anyway—just a matter of screwing the wrong guy. Easy enough to do.
"I'm not interested in babysitting her, regardless. If anything, that's your job.” She suddenly deflated, exhaustion written in bold strokes across her face.
Ben could almost see the black smudges growing beneath her eyes.
"I need to get some sleep."
"Go ahead. We've still got a while ‘til dawn. Looks like we're going to have a quiet night for a change."
She nodded. “I'll see you before dawn,” she told him. “Be careful."
He returned her nod. “I'll take care of her."
"Good idea.” She turned and walked unsteadily toward Gina's bedroom as Cory bent an unsympathetic eye on his cousin.
"You're being an ungrateful wretch,” he growled at her. “Most people would give their left arm for the gift you just got."
"What—like you? What are you, Cory? Some kind of vampire?” Her expression mingled both fear and curiosity, with more than a little anger thrown in for good measure. “A month ago everything around here was normal. Boring, but normal. Now ... I don't understand anything anymore."
"You're not alone in that,” said Ben, appearing in the doorway with Julia in tow. At first she looked nearly as dazed as Mira had been, but there was a gleam of something—calculation?—in her eyes as she met his gaze.
"I don't understand what's going on...” She sounded a little frightened, but managing better than Mira.
So he explained. Everything. He'd expected disbelief. What he got from Julia was casual acceptance. He could have told her that the President was a puppet of trans-dimensional alien invaders and she would've simply nodded at him.
A refreshing change from Mira's response, he decided.
"So both of you can do magic now?” she asked, looking between Cory and Mira.
Cory nodded; Mira looked a little sick.
"I want it too,” Julia said to Amanda, without a moment's hesitation.
She exchanged a glance with Cory. “What do you think?"
"Can't hurt,” he answered. Giving her the means to protect herself wasn't a bad idea at all. His only other choice was to turn her into a vamp, and he had no intention of increasing his number of Get. Especially if this bitch—Veronica—threatened to kill any he made.
But magic? He allowed himself a sly smile. “Let's see if we can surprise the bitch. We'll give it to everyone we can."
* * * *
Amanda had to laugh at that. From what I know about Loki, he'd love this move. “Okay. It'll take me a couple of days to get a good number of spells put together. It's a four-strander. First one I ever made.” She shook her head in disbelief. She hadn't planned on pulling that fourth strand there at the end, but it came to her as if she'd been directed by the mana itself, like someone, or something, else had guided her hand.
"Mysticism has no place in modern magic,” she muttered under her breath. That was one of Thoth's favorite sayings. Thoth—like most of his kind—was agnostic, if not actively atheistic. None of them had ever said anything good about religion as far as she'd heard.
Not that she traveled in those exalted circles. Most of what she knew about the immortals were little more than whispered rumors. All the “freaks” in Tacoma knew about them. Even knew a few by name or face. Athena Cross. Loki. Thoth. Stormchild. Who knew how many there were? Only the immortals themselves know.
Assuming another mind was behind anything they did was a trap, he said. “Your intent is the important part. Lose sight of that and you're screwed."
It was just my subconscious, she told herself.
Cory was looking at her oddly. “Not important,” she told him. “You'd better look at getting some blood tonight. I have a feeling if you don't, you'll be hitting the Thirst before dawn. Not a good idea with mortals in the house."
He nodded thoughtfully. “What can I say? You're right. How long will it take you to whip up those spells?"
"If I do it right, I can have half a dozen within the next few hours. Say, between three-thirty and four? Who do you want me to ... awaken?"
"Awaken?"
"Sure. The human race has been asleep to magic for about six hundred years. I'd say gaining the ability to see and touch mana is something of an awakening."
He didn't say anything until he'd stood and moved to the door. “Give them a course in the basics. I've got an errand to run."
He said that for the benefit of the girls, of course. He'd told them he was a vampire, but, of course, he didn't want to simply announce he was going out to find some blood to drink.
Amanda gave a swift nod and bent her attention to the Mira as he went out the door. “The easiest way to turn on your magesight is to close your eyes and rub them a little, then open them up halfway. You should start seeing threads of silver interweaving with the reality you're used to seeing."
Reluctantly, Mira did as she instructed. Julia watched interestedly as she frowned and started poking at the air. “They're alive!"
"I don't know about that, but they sure seem to be."
She dialed up her own magesight and watched as Mira allowed the thread to crawl between her fingers, wrapping around her index finger like a tiny snake. “So, what can I with this?"
Amanda showed her how to aport, first. It was about the easiest thing to learn. “A thread can perform any simple single action, for the most part. Aportation is the simplest function, but it can also cause specific physical effects. It can push or pull matter. Open or close a door, cause a gust of wind, plus any number of other effects. You catch that?"
Mira gave a single nod and shot a thread out, tying it around a lamp across the room. She stood, crossed the room, and unplugged the lamp. The room went dim, but the ghostly light that permeated the world when seen through magesight allowed Amanda to see her next move easily enough. She turned and threw the strand into an accessible power outlet.
The lamp flared back to life.
"Interesting,” Amanda murmured. “That's a new one. We didn't know mana could conduct electricity."
"Now you do,” Mira said. “I'm still not sure I should thank you f
or this."
"We'll see. This was just your first lesson.” Amanda couldn't quite get over the fact that both of them had come up with new things right off the bat. She really wondered what kind of thing Cory would dream up next.
Ben wandered out of the kitchen, shoving something else in his mouth. It's a wonder he was such a skinny little twerp, considering that every time she looked he was eating something else. “Got the munchies again?” she asked with false casualness. It bothered her that he was always operating in low gear.
He noticed something about her look and leaned against the kitchen doorframe, eyes narrowing. “It used to be that I got stoned just because I wanted to—now it helps me keep on an even keel—so I don't wolf out just because something annoys me a little."
She regarded him coldly. “What do you know—a convenient new excuse."
Rather than getting angry, he gave her a slight smile. “Very. But all I know is that the last time I let my wild side out, I tried to eat someone. Only your spell kept me from doing it. Can you blame me for whatever steps I take to avoid doing that again?"
She pursed her lips and said nothing. This whole werewolf thing was completely new to all of them. Oh, hell. She told him about what she'd found at the jail, what she'd found there.
"Shit!” It came out half-snarl. “And he's where now? Running amuck in town?"
"A more or less empty town,” she answered briskly. “Could be much worse."
"A much over-used phrase,” he snorted. “Could be much worse, all right, but it's bad enough now. What if he didn't stay in town? What if he ran—to Bend, to Madras, or even over the mountains to Springfield or Eugene?"
"Then he's their problem ... at least for now. We've got enough on our plate right now."
"Huh. Can't argue with that. Has Cory mentioned to you what happened to his dog patrol? If that lead dog of his bites anyone else ... chances are they'll get all lycanthrope, too."
"I know. He says he's shifted them out to the border regions looking for some sign of his mother. I think that's probably best. They're too damned unpredictable, from what I've heard. Just because they acknowledge him as the ultimate alpha doesn't mean they're going to obey every command."
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