by Ben Reeder
“Thanks,” I panted, “whoever you are.”
He pulled the mask up to reveal intense hazel eyes and a familiar, bearded face.“You were late,” Dr. Corwin said casually as he pulled the magazine from the butt of his pistol. He tucked it away and slid a fresh one into place as he spoke. “I figured I’d better come check on you. And here I find you rolling around with a bunch of werewolves.” He slid the gun back into its holster and held out his left hand for the gun he’d handed me. I found myself staring at him blankly as I handed it over. “I’m sure at some schools that would mean automatic detention or something, but I think we can overlook it this time.”
“What kind of gun is that?” I asked as he worked a catch on the top of the massive weapon and pulled a piece of it off. It went into a pouch on the front of the oversized holster that rode on his left thigh. It had a stripe of green tape on the long edge. Next to it were two other pieces that looked almost exactly like it. One had a white piece of tape on it, and the other was marked with blue tape.
“It’s a paintball gun. Very versatile weapon, perfect for what I do.”
“You’re like a monster hunter, right? What was that part on the top? Why are they colored differently?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me. Dr. C had cool toys, and I wanted one.
He pulled the blue marked piece and began to fit it to the top of the gun.“Paintball hopper, kind of like the magazine in a regular gun. I fill the paintballs with different things; the tape is so I can tell them apart easily. The green one is loaded with a mixture of wolfsbane and silver nitrate, good against werewolves. The white one’s holy water and garlic. Vampires hate it.”
“What’s in that blue one?” I asked enthusiastically. This was cool stuff.
Dr. C smiled as he looked at me and pressed a little red button on the side of the gun then gave it a quick look.“Chloroform,” he said nonchalantly, then he shot me with it.
Aw, crap.
Chapter 13
~ If you can avoid a fight, do so. If you can’t, then fight to win. ~ T.S. Cross, The Left Hand of Death.
It was dark when I came to. I opened my eyes, but all I could see was a faint light through the weave of a thick cloth. I blinked, and felt fabric against my eyelids. A blindfold, then. My head was still a little fuzzy from the chloroform, but I could hear movement nearby. I tried to move my hands, but they were bound behind me with some sort of thin metal strip. I reached for the minor magicks I could do without a focus, and felt a ring of fire blaze around my wrists. I managed to bite off the cry of pain before it could be more than a quick grunt, but my captor had to have heard it.
“Sorry about the blindfold and spell binders,” I heard Dr. Corwin’s voice say from behind me and to my left. I turned my head to hear better, and I caught the sound of fabric rustling. “But I can’t take any risks, given what you are.”
“You forgot to gag me,” I growled back. “Aren’t you afraid I might still manage to get a curse off?”
“No,” came his voice from my right. “You can’t see me, you can’t get your hands up to direct a spell or make any gestures, and the binders won’t let you draw any magick without creating so much feedback that you’ll overload your brain if you try to fight it too hard. Besides, if I gagged you, we couldn’t talk.”
“Talk? You knocked me out, tied me up and blindfolded me and you want to talk?” I said, my voice rising with every word.
“Well, I was going to kill you. This is what you might call…Plan B.”
“Sorry if I'm not just gushing with gratitude. Getting knocked out and tied up makes me a little cranky.”
“Standing orders from the High Council are that you're to be terminated on sight. I think a little rough treatment is small price to pay for that kind of reprieve.” I heard him move around behind me, until he was on my right, just a little way in front of me.
“Okay, yeah. Thanks for not killing me,” I said dryly. “Mind if I ask why?”
“Two reasons. First, my friend Sidney didn't kill you when he had the chance to. Secondly…you're trying to find his killer, which does tend to raise my opinion of you somewhat. The copper wand was well done, by the way. I recognize the design. Arianh-Rod's work?”
“Bought the sigil layout and charging spell from her, yeah. So, what are you? A bounty hunter? A mage-slayer?”
He made a harsh noise like a buzzer, “Nope, try again.”
“You’re a mage?”
“Wizard, actually. But yes, I’m a member of the Conclave.”
“Wizard, mage, what’s the diff?” I asked sullenly. “You’re still gonna kill me.”
“It’s the difference between a Jedi Knight and a Jedi Master.”
“No idea what that is.”
“A Jedi. You know, defenders of peace and justice throughout the galaxy for thousands of years?” The blindfold came off, and I found myself blinking at the sudden change in the light. I looked around, and found myself in the science lab, tied to one of the chairs. Dr. Corwin was standing in front of me with a puzzled look on his face. Beside him, my bag was open, and everything in it was laid out in his desk.
“You’ve never seen Star Wars?”
“No. Lucas was going to have me over this weekend to watch it.” It was never going to happen now.
“Well, Sidney must have had a good reason for defying the Council's order. So unless you give me cause, I'm not going to kill you.”
“What are you gonna tell the Council?”
“Nothing. Sidney was my mentor and oldest friend. I trusted his judgment more than most people’s, and he saw something in you. I want to believe Sydney was right about you. He wrote in his journal that he wanted to take you on as an apprentice, and he hadn’t done that for nearly twenty years. I was his last, and the Council practically had to force me on him. But you have to understand something, Chance. He was planning to defy the Council to do that, and he would have been taking a huge risk. I’m taking the same risk. If we’re caught, we’re both dead, unless I have a very, very good reason for ignoring their command. Are you with me so far?”
“This is the part where you tell me what I have to do to stay in your good graces and stay alive, right?” I asked. I wanted to tell him I was through making deals, I wanted to spit in his face and tell him to take his deal and shove it, but I couldn’t. I had a lot of reasons to live, and I knew I would do pretty much anything he asked me to. I hated myself for it, but I couldn’t see any other way out.
“No,” he said sadly. “I’m only going to ask you to let me See you, to open your mind to me. If you say yes, good. If you say no, I let you go, and I wait for a few days to tell the Council I found you and you got away. I don’t want you to do this because you feel like you’re under duress. I want you to do this so I can help you. So if it comes down to it, I can tell the Council that I know you’re not as bad as they think, and you have a fighting chance to walk away if they find you before you're ready to face them.”
I looked at him, trying to see something in his face that would tell me what to do. I wasn’t used to being given a choice. I wasn’t used to trusting people. But, like it or not, he was asking me to trust him, and he was giving me a choice.
“Okay,” I finally said. It was the hardest thing I had ever said; I felt like I was stepping off a cliff.
“Thank you, Chance. Have you ever experienced the Udjat, or Horus Gaze, before? It can be a rather disorienting process. I’m going to step into your mind, and you’re going to step into mine. We’ll see each other in all our glory and shame. There will be nothing in your head that is a secret from me, and nothing in my head that is a secret from you. I promise I will keep your secrets for you, and I can only ask that you keep mine for me.” His voice took on a rhythm that spoke of a formula, an oath. He looked me in the eyes, and his voice grew solemn. “Look into my eyes, Chance. See me, and let me See you.” His eyes bored into mine, and I felt the weight of his thoughts behind them, pressing against mine like against some rubbery bar
rier. After a moment, he shook his head and straightened up.
“Was that it?”
“No, nothing happened. Which is a little unusual, but not alarming. I haven't seen it in someone as young as you before, though.”
“Is that…bad?”
“No, just odd. I need you to open yourself a little. Can you see auras?” I nodded. He continued, “Okay, look at my aura.” I blinked a few times as I shifted my senses just slightly and relaxed my focus, so that I was seeing the soft amber glow of his aura, with a silvery green running through it. I looked into his eyes then, and felt myself falling.
For a brief second, I was standing face to face with him, then it felt like we passed through each other, and I was in the mind of Dr. Trevor James Corwin, T.J. to his friends. It was a dizzy-making place. The man was smart: smarter than any three people I could name, and a LOT smarter than I was.
There was a strength to him, a will that could bend iron with a thought, tempered by sadness, by love lost. I saw the face of a beautiful Japanese woman with pale, almost silver eyes. In his thoughts, I knew she was also a mage: a wu jen, one of the Japanese wizards. I could feel the pang of loss, and knew that he still loved her, even after eight years had gone by since he’d seen her last. He still wore the ring he had planned to give her on a chain around his neck. For an instant, I loved her with the same intensity he did.
I saw a rash of split-second images from his apprenticeship under Sydney Chomsky, and understood in a heartbeat why he had idolized the man. The grief of his loss hit me, then the anger at whoever had done it ripped through me all over again like a firestorm. I felt the beauty of magick when it was wielded right, in harmony with the will of the mage, and with its own will. There was a Zen quality to it when he worked a spell just right, and somehow, things just flowed.
Then I was sailing back into my own mind. My head snapped back, and I blinked in surprise. Tears ran down my face as I experienced the loss of the woman he loved again in a whole new way, as his love for her became something separate from me, and I was once again Chance, a boy who had never felt what he had felt, or experienced what he had, a home where both parents were there, and could be trusted.
I knew then what it was like to be…pure, whole of body and spirit, and never to have known pain so intense that it made me hallucinate. I knew what it felt like to be free. Not only to be free, but to have always been free, never to have bowed my head to someone I didn’t trust or respect. To have had my dignity intact my entire life. To see all that, and end up back in my own head made me feel even worse. The fleeting moment came when I understood, in the half of a heartbeat when Dr. C’s awareness and mine had passed each other on their respective ways back to their own resting places, that he had seen everything I had endured, and would never see his own freedom so casually again. I heard the anguished cry from Dr. C, and saw him stagger up from his chair, hands over his eyes as he stumbled against the corner of his desk. He fell back against the chalkboard and pulled his hands down, staring at me with tears of his own streaming down his face.
After walking around in his brain, I almost couldn’t avoid knowing what he was thinking. He had seen the eight years of Hell on earth that I had suffered under Dulka, felt the betrayal of my father and casual cruelty of the demon and my father as they had used me and treated me as something sub-human, a tool for their own ends. I got to see myself through his eyes: a young man standing between darkness and light; a young man with potential…touched by evil, tainted by it, but not ruled by it. He also saw the boy who had been abandoned by the Conclave, and then condemned for the results of that neglect.
“I’m sorry,” he said. I shrugged. The people who should have been apologizing probably never would. He slumped forward a little and began to take measured breaths: in through his nose, out through his mouth. I leaned into the backrest on the chair, trying to sift through the complicated mess I’d seen while he did the same thing. Dr. C had seen some pretty crappy stuff in his life, but I figured I won the “Sucks to be you!” award hands down. It was going to take him a little while to get a grip on what he’d just seen. After a couple of minutes, I was able to think clearly enough to get past the fading memory of TJ…no…Dr. C’s mind. I looked over at him and cleared my throat.
“Uh, Dr Corwin?” I asked. “Could you take these manacles off?” He looked up at me with distant eyes, then around the room. I saw his pupils dilate, and he started trembling, as he flinched back and brought his arms up. “Crap,” I thought. He must have been sifting through all the memories I had of a science lab. Seeing…feeling all the times Dulka had beaten me on the floor. Of course, I was remembering spending an afternoon in a hot tub with a beautiful Asian babe with silvery eyes, and wondering why he had even left that room. I was definitely getting the better end of the experience.
Suddenly, in the whole jumbled mass of his past that was floating around in my head, I found one of his memories that I wanted to latch on to: of sleeping in his own bed again after a long trip, and being glad to be there. It ripped a sob from my throat. I wanted that, I wanted to be able to sleep in a bed so badly. Dr. Corwin had memories of nights like that all through his life. Getting in a bed and sleeping the whole night through was nothing to him. I could barely sleep the whole night through without night terrors waking me up, much less lie down on a bed and close my eyes for eight hours. I envied him that, and I wanted to hate him for it. I blinked the tears from my eyes and held on to the memory, tried to burn it across the inside of my brain, so that maybe, I could feel that tonight when I went to sleep, instead of huddling on the floor under my blanket.
When I heard the knob of the classroom door turning, I realized I’d had my eyes squeezed shut in concentration, or maybe I was still crying like a baby. I wasn’t sure, but if anyone asked, I was going to go with the more manly and dignified version. I blinked my bleary eyes at the doorway, and found Lucas’s worried face peering in at me through the narrow glass set in the door. He pulled open the door and rushed into the room brandishing a tire iron. Wanda was right on his heels with a baseball bat in her white-knuckled grip; her hands seemed so small around the bat's handle. Lucas was like a little dog; his whole body was clearly ready for violence, despite his size and lack of natural aggression, trusting tenacity and ferocity to carry him through.
They took in the scene, their eyes bouncing between Dr. C huddled on the floor and me manacled to the chair. After a heartbeat, Wanda moved to me while Lucas stepped between Dr C and me. I heard the manacles rattle behind me as Wanda tried to get them off me.
“Where’s the key?” she demanded sternly of Dr. Corwin. “Where the hell is the lock?” she added.
His eyes barely focused on us, and a slight smile spread across his face. He probably recognized them through my memories, but that was about it. He blinked rapidly, then his eyes glazed again as I watched him go back into his head.
“Dude, what the hell’s going on?” Lucas asked as Wanda went to Dr. C. “Are you okay?”
“Hard to explain without a program, but yeah, I’m fine, just a little disoriented. What are you guys doing here?”
“We saw lights on in here, and we heard you yelling at Dr. Corwin about knocking you out, so I went and lifted the spare set of keys from the janitor’s closet. We figured he kidnapped you or something, but man, whatever you did to him, you messed him up good.”
“That’s not a good thing. Look, guys, it’s not like…he wasn’t trying to hurt me, or anything. I don’t have time to explain everything, but he was trying to help me out.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Wanda said skeptically. “In case you didn’t notice, you’re chained to a chair, Chance. We need to be calling the cops or something!”
“No, no cops. Believe me, it could have been a lot worse! Wanda, you said there wasn’t a lock on the manacles?”
“I couldn’t see one.”
“Are there a bunch of symbols around the cuffs?” She came back and looked.
“Yeah,
they're all silver.” Her words made my stomach clench. There was no way I could get the binders off without exposing them to the truth and potentially screwing up their heads.
“Crap. Dr. C! Dr. Corwin!” I had to yell to get his attention, but after a few seconds, he managed to focus on me. “The cuffs, what is their key?” I spoke slowly, and as clearly as I could.
He blinked a few times, then he answered, “Knowledge is freedom.” He leaned toward me and reached his hand out; I got the idea. He had to touch the binders when he said the key phrase. I looked at my new friends and weighed my options. A couple of weird things, they could rationalize away. Too many, and they would have to see their whole world in a different way. But I had to get them out of here, away from this situation, and back to something normal, before they saw too much.
“Lucas,” I said, turning in the chair to get my hands forward. “Get him over to me. He has to touch the manacles.” Lucas tucked the tire iron through his belt and grabbed Dr. Corwin under the arms. It took a few pulls and a little grunting to drag him across the few feet, but he managed. Dr. C said the key phrase again with his fingertips touching the manacles, and they fell from my wrists with a dull clank, sounding heavier than they felt.
“Shouldn’t it be ‘knowledge is power’ instead?” Lucas asked as he eyed the binders cautiously.
“Probably. Kinda like a password on a computer. Easy for him to remember, hard for other people to guess,” I told him as I gathered my stuff up and shoved it into my book bag before they could get a good look at the rod.