by James Hunter
“Used to be I was one of the five, the junior member. Officially, I still am, even though I gave them my notice of resignation years ago. They appointed a temporary stand-in for me, but I still have the title. Hand of the Fist. They use to call me The Fixer, ‘cause I got called out to fix the worst cases … Most of the Elder Council still thinks I’ll come back eventually, thinks that with enough time I’ll get my head on straight. Magi live a long time, so a few years isn’t so much to these folks. They think it’s just the “hot-headedness of youth.” But I’m not going back. Never. Whole Guild can go fuck themselves sideways.”
The firelight flickered, casting shadows that danced against the ring of sage surrounding us.
“They recruited me after I got out of the Marine Corps,” I said. “I served in Nam, you know.”
“You were a Marine?” She sounded like she was about to raise the bullshit flag right to the top of the pole. “In Nam? How old are you?”
“Sixty-six.”
“Sixty-six.” She looked at me with appraising eyes, weighing and measuring, parceling me away. “You seem spry for an old guy.”
“Hey, what can I say, one of the perks of being a mage—we age well, just like good Scotch. Like good Scotch, we also get more potent with time.” I arched an eyebrow at her, which earned me a scowl in return.
“I never would’ve guessed you were more than thirty-five,” she said after a moment. “Forty, maybe. And it’s not just your looks.” Her lips compressed into a thin line. “You seem …” She paused—the long kind of pause folks use when they’re looking for the most tactful way to say something brutally honest and usually mean. “Less emotionally mature,” she finally finished.
“What, you think that just because I qualify for retirement that I should be some sage old man smoking a corncob pipe and dispensing wisdom from my rocking chair?”
“Just an observation—I wasn’t trying to be offensive.”
I snorted, a little piece of gelatinous meat slipped through my teeth and I sucked it back in. “It’s fine, I’m just giving you a hard time. That’s what the rest of my vanilla friends think too—at least the ones who know about what I am and how long I’ve been around. My buddy Greg—he and I go back a long way, served in the Corps together, though he’s a regular mortal like you—even has a theory: since practitioners don’t age properly, he thinks the increase in longevity stunts ‘emotional maturity.’” I air quoted the words.
The flat look on her face told me right away that she wasn’t buying it. “That what you think?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Maybe there’s something too it. As you get older, feel older, see the road getting shorter, I think it changes your perspective a bit. But me? I don’t look old, I don’t feel old, and I’ve got lots of time left … well, theoretically at least.” I held for a beat, thinking.
“Heck, I guess it might be true,” I continued. “I mean I’ve met fae beings a couple of thousand years old and they’re like capricious, teenage shitheads. They get older, more powerful, more cunning, and dangerous. But they don’t really change. They just become more of what they are with time. Maybe using the Vis makes magi the same way to some extent. Shit, I’ve run across a lot of other magi like me—well, no one’s like me, exactly. What I mean is, I’ve met other mages that seem ‘stuck’ in the past. I dunno. Could be.”
I stared at the fire while I pushed the question around in the old noggin. “Mostly, though, I think maturity is more a state of mind than an age. I’ve met thirty-year-old mothers and fathers who are more mature than folks twice their age. I’ve also run into tons of geriatric, shit-caked hobos living out of cardboard boxes who have the emotional maturity of toddlers. Personally, I think I just fall on the shit-caked hobo end of the spectrum. I’m just an old man who never grew up.” I grinned, though I didn’t really feel like it.
“For Pete’s sake,” I said after a second, “I live out of an El Camino. I travel from bar to bar playing music. I gamble for a living. I drink a lot. I smoke like a chimney. These are not things mature adults do. The way I figure it, I’ve spent most of my life doin’ shit I didn’t really want to do—working for people who were all too happy to kick my ass to the curb when I was done being useful. I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to whittle away my life jumping through flaming-hoops like someone’s trained monkey. I’ve been there, done that. Way I figure, I’ve got one life to live—regardless of how long I live—and I don’t want to waste it trying to be something I’m not.”
I fell quiet, my cheeks burning a little—talking about the real me was uncomfortable. Felt awkward as running with two left feet. Don’t get me wrong, I love being around people, I love shootin’ the shit, and I can smoke and joke with the best of ‘em, but few people know my history. It made me itch a little to just lay it out there for Ferraro.
It was quiet for a while, both of us just eating while little night bugs chirped around us. “I served too,” Ferraro said eventually. “I was a logistics officer with the fifteenth MEU, out of Pendleton. Ran a truck company during OIF. Did two tours in Iraq.”
“Get outta here?” I shouldn’t have been surprised, not really. Although I didn’t know much about Ferraro, there was something familiar about her. Her mannerisms. Her attitude. Her unflinching dedication to duty. It made sense that she’d been a Jarhead too, I could just see her standing in front of a platoon of Motor-T drivers, handing out safety briefs or convoy lineups. “Well Semper Fi, Devil. Semper Fi,” I said. “I should’ve guessed, the way you stared down that metus in the hallway.”
She didn’t respond. Maybe she felt uncomfortable talking about herself too—there was a thought. “So,” she said after a long pause, “you said the Guild recruited you after the Corps? Why?”
She was probing, asking a lot of leading questions, the kind of thing a cop does with a suspect. But I let it go; probably this was just the way she was. Sometimes if you do a thing for long enough—like interrogate criminals—it just gets into you and becomes second nature.
I poked the fire some more, watching it spit up more tongues of flame. “There are three types of people,” I said by way of an introduction. “There are folks who won’t ever be able to touch the Vis, the energy undergirding all of Creation. The vast majority of humanity falls into that category. Then there are a few who have the right bent”—I canted one hand—“the right inclination. Folks who can learn through study and practice to touch the Vis. People who can learn, range in ability from those who can barely light a candle to full-fledged magi on the Guild. Heck, most of the magi in the Guild learned. They weren’t born with the talent.”
I set the stick down, pushed more pot roast out of its plastic sleeve, and took off another mouthful while I thought. Ferraro seemed to pick up my unease and didn’t push, but rather took a bite of her own meal. Giving me some space.
“A few people are inborn with the ability to use the Vis. They will use it at some point—it’s in their blood. Most people with the gift come from the union of two serious practitioners, but once in a while … someone is born with the gift, and grows up without ever training. Without ever learning. I was like that. While I was in Nam … well, something happened that triggered my gift. But that’s a whole other story and one not worth talking about—some things are like that, you understand?”
She nodded, her eyes were unfocused and far away, like maybe she was seeing her own unpleasant memories. She’d been in the Corps, had been to an active combat zone, so maybe she did understand.
“And then?” she asked.
I shrugged. “After that, the Guild tracked me down. I had military training, was naturally gifted, and powerful … Put two and two together. They convinced me to abandon my family—I had a wife and a pair of boys. They convinced me to leave ‘em behind. Said they’d be better off without me. Told me I was dangerous to them. And I was. Without proper training, I could’ve accidentally burned my whole house down while I was asleep. They trained me and after a few
years offered me a spot with the Fist. The rest is history.”
“They made you leave your family?” Her voice was soft, not filled with anger or outrage. Pity, maybe, which was worse.
“No,” I said shaking my head. “They’re a bunch of shit-covered chickens, but I can’t lay that at their feet. Not entirely. They gave me a helluva sales pitch, but I made that choice. There was a part of me that wanted to go. I was afraid to be a dad, to be a husband. I spent most of my marriage in the Corps. Was gone a lot. It was easy being an absentee husband and dad. But after the Marine Corps was over?” I paused for a minute, not sure how to continue, or even if I wanted to continue.
“I was scared,” I said eventually. “Everything changed. I had all these new responsibilities that I wasn’t ready for. On top of that, my body was going through a change I didn’t understand and I was just getting back from a bad tour. The perfect shitstorm. The Guild offered me a way out. Even offered to set my family up. Provide them with a fat check every month, look in on them to make sure my boys didn’t have the gift. The Guild took advantage of me—I was young, inexperienced, and in a bad place. And they took advantage of me. But at the end of the day I made the choice to go. Me, not them.”
“Is that why you hate the Guild—why you left?” she asked.
“No.” I scrunched my lips into a grimace. “No, this was all years before I left the Guild. Leaving my family is why I hate myself. I have issues with the Guild for another reason.” We were quiet for a time. I shuffled over a few feet, grabbed some more brush and twigs, and feed the whole lot of ‘em to the flames. The crackling and popping of the fire filled up the air with its noise.
“I was married, once,” she offered, “to a Navy lieutenant. This was back in my Marine Corps days. My marriage didn’t outlive the Marine Corps either. Once I left for the FBI things just fell apart. He deployed a lot, and when he wasn’t gone, I was—either training or on assignment. It wasn’t sustainable.”
We finished our respective meals in silence. Afterward, we packed up the trash and tossed the remains into the fire, watching it smoke, burn, then smolder in turn.
“Why didn’t you ever go back to your family?” she asked after maybe ten or fifteen minutes. “I mean after everything. After you left the Guild.”
“I dunno.” I sat for a while, the silence stretching between us, pushing us apart.
“At first,” I finally said, “I planned on going back. I planned on seeing them more. But the longer I waited the harder it was and the more depressed I felt about it. The guiltier I felt, the less I wanted to deal with it—so I’d push it off. Volunteered for Guild assignments, did just anything not to think about it. After a while … I started to think I didn’t deserve to be in their lives. Like I’d given up the right to try and fix things with them. It’s a cycle, you know? Guilt, depression, self-loathing, all that shit. One big, nasty cycle. After four or five years, Lauren married someone else. Seemed like a nice guy, good dad—not like me at all. That kinda put the nail in the coffin.”
I pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and held the pack out to Ferraro as a peace offering. She just shook her head no, so I shook a smoke free from the pack for myself. I leaned over and lit the smoke off the fire. “Enough of this bullshit,” I said, before taking a long drag. “You’re probably tired of hearing me bitch and whine. I’m sure tired of doing it.”
She didn’t say anything, but nodded as if to say she understood.
We ended up talking for another couple of hours despite the fact that we should’ve slept, but not about anything serious. Not about the Guild, or monsters, or my life. Still, though, we talked, and it was kinda fun, actually. It’d been a damn long time since I’d opened up to someone new. We talked Marine Corps—she’d been an officer, while I’d been enlisted—so we talked shit to each other about the brass and enlisted, respectively. We compared notes about tours of duty and joked about boot camp. We told stories about the worst meals we’d ever eaten: mine was the Ham and Lima Beans C-Rats, hers was the Omelet MRE.
After a long while she called it a night; I told her to hit the rack while I took the first watch.
After three hours or so, I woke her up and took my rest. She, in turn, woke me up three or four hours later as the sun was cresting the horizon, sending orange arms reaching across the desert. We ate a couple of granola bars—health food is worse than MREs, let me tell you—and then mounted our rides, her on the horse, me on the moped, and rode.
It took us five hours to reach the edge of the Salt Marsh—desert, sage, scraggly trees, and foothills gradually giving way to mucky ground, pools of stagnant, reeking water, tangles of moss-green water plants, and biting bugs of one variety or another. The road devolved, turning into little more than a footpath, but still I managed to scoot along on the moped—little suckers are more resilient than they look.
Another hour into the Marsh brought us to what could only be the Mists of Fate.
TWENTY-THREE:
Mists of Fate
The mist came on slow at first, just a low clinging cloud of silver, maybe half a foot off the ground, rolling and dancing in some unfelt breeze. It was cool against my skin, sound seemed to dampen and distort as we rode in; the hum of my moped died to a low drone, the clopping footfalls of Ferraro’s horse faded to a whisper. On we rode, ‘cause what the hell else were we gonna do? But damn did this place give me the friggin’ heebie-jeebies.
Another few minutes and the mists became complete and all consuming, just an endless wall of gray in every direction. As sight faded away, so too did the world—things sorta thinned out, became fluid and somehow less substantial.
“You okay, Ferraro?” I called out, unable to see her in the gray soup around us.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice sounding far away and distorted, even though she was likely no more than a couple of feet from me. “I feel a little sick though. Woozy, lightheaded. I think I might vomit. Is … is this normal?”
I nodded my head, then felt like an idiot since there was no way she could she me. “Yeah. It’ll pass in a bit,” I hollered, knowing she would be having as tough a time hearing me as I was hearing her. “We’re tripping. I’ve been in the mists once before, on assignment with the Guild years back. Right now we’re stumbling our happy asses into a Time Lap, a shadow of the future. Once we breach, the sickness will pass.”
There was power in the fog, Vis, moving and flowing like a stream, blowing across my skin like a stiff breeze—damn, did it feel good. Being so close to all that energy—even if it was outside of me instead of inside me—was like getting a taste of a cigarette after a long dry spell. Secondhand smoke, but still divine. The power almost felt alive and purposeful, which I guess it was in one sense. To be honest, the construct swirling through the fog felt like a conjuration—and I had the funny notion that Ferraro and I were the ones being conjured. Being conjured into a different world by our unseen benefactor, Lady Fate. Kind of strange being on the other end of this equation.
Then, the power sifted, changed, boiled, and the thinness in the air stretched tighter still—everything began to blink and flicker: black, gray, black, gray, black-gray, black-gray, blackgray. Faster and faster as reality distorted and transformed into something else.
Flicker … The world stretched taut and became as thin as cheap toilet paper, sound faded and died away completely—I couldn’t hear the moped beneath me, couldn’t feel it vibrate and hum along the ground. Even my own breathing was a noiseless thing. Cool mist filled my chest with every silent breath, spreading out snaking tendrils of suffocation into the rest of my body. My hands and feet went first, pinpricks doing a boogaloo in my fingers and toes, creeping up my limbs, turning my body numb and dumb.
Flicker … I was floating along and for a second, I could’ve sworn I was nothing more than a thing of mist and spirit, a ghost detached from the world, just another wisp of fog. The sensation was sorta pleasant and peaceful, I guess. I couldn’t feel my body, but that also meant I couldn
’t feel the aches and pains—the dull throb in my calf was gone. Being a thing of mist was easy, it was the loss of responsibility and care. Of desire, striving, or failing.
Flicker … And then the sensation was gone. Sound came back first, followed closely by the sense of feeling in my hands and feet, the vibration of the moped purring between my legs again. The sound of Ferraro’s horse: hooves clacking down on pavement instead of sparse, marshy ground. The mists receded around the edges, revealing buildings that jutted up along the skyline. Big skyscrapers of concrete and glass. Finally, into the real world again … well, sort of. A possible future, but a possible future on Earth, not in the Hub or the Hinterlands. A win’s a win, even if it’s only a small one.
The Space Needle reared up on spindly legs—its spire stabbing into the sky like a magnificent middle finger to the world—which told me this was Seattle. God it felt good to be back in some place relatively normal. And Seattle was mostly a great place to wind up.
I’ve never spent too much time out in Seattle, the scene’s always happening, but the friggin’ weather never really agrees with me. Soggy, dark, and rain slickers galore. Pass. But the scene? Yeah, lots of music, which is always up my alley, tons of good coffee shops to grab some joe—even if the coffee purists are a little hoity-toity for my liking—and beer. Lots of good beer. So once a year or so, usually around late July or August, I liked to get up that way for a week or two, bathe in all the glorious seventy-degree heat, full of nice bright days. Certainly could’ve been worse places to get dumped.
The mists peeled away at last—I glanced back and found an honest-to-goodness wall of fog, thick as soup, and maybe thirty or forty feet high, stretching into the sky. It also snaked off left and right for as far as I could see, curving just out of sight around the perimeter of the city. Surreal. Overhead, the sky was as gray and dreary as a shitty retirement home. Laid out before us was a massive multi-lane boulevard, edged by rough concrete dividers—a green-and-white hanging sign suspended across the road on iron beams, proclaimed that they we were on the I-5 North.