by Jasmine Walt
“This arrogant attitude toward humans and shifters is exactly the reason why we are in this current mess!” I shouted at them, but that only led to further argument. When the hell was Iannis coming back?
“Why don’t you say something?” I challenged Fenris with mindspeak.
“It would be useless – I’m a shifter in their eyes. And I half agree with them,” he responded, to my frustration. “Leave it to Iannis to deal with this.”
“Enough,” Director Chen said at last, raising her voice so she could be heard above the others. “This is a conference room, not a public house!” She turned her dark gaze in my direction, and I stiffened as I realized she blamed the controversy on me. “We’ll have a civilized discussion, or no discussion at all.”
“It’s obvious to me that it’s impossible to have a civilized discussion with you lot,” I snarled, shoving up from my chair. “Enjoy trying to solve the city’s problems with your heads up your asses. It’s not like I know anything about what the people actually want and what they might respond to.”
I shoved away from the table, then spun on my heel and stormed from the room. I was a fool to come to this meeting, to think they might be prepared to hear reason from the one person present who understood the other side’s grievances. Iannis might have wanted me there, but the rest of the mages were unwilling to listen to any outsider. It was becoming more and more obvious to me that there was no place for me in the Chief Mage’s life – that I would never be able to see eye to eye with these arrogant jerks who called themselves mages.
17
I left the Palace in the disguise of a brawny, but otherwise non-descript human male, with the intention of heading to Maintown. Apprehending more looters seemed like a good way to burn off some anger, and besides, I’d promised Gorden I would see to it that more enforcers were sent to his area. If that meant I was the enforcer being sent, then so be it. As a bulky male, I would look a lot less strange beating up criminals than I would as a woman or a teenager.
It took me a good hour to walk through the Mages Quarter and across the warded boundary into Rowanville, and the walk helped me blow off some steam and gave me room to think. Was there a way for me to mobilize the citizens myself, without the aid of the Mages Guild? It was becoming apparent to me that even if the Enforcers Guild was still resentful of me, and there were more than a few people around who were happy to take a shot at me on the Resistance’s behalf, there were others who had shown themselves to be allies. There was Forin, the human who lived in my old apartment building, and then Nimos Barakan, a son of the Tiger Clan. Lakin might even be able to help – he had to be released by now, along with my aunt Mafiela’s family. They were probably conferring even now about what to do next.
Right. The Jaguar Clan. What side did they stand on? Mafiela owed me for rescuing her granddaughter, Mika, from the Shifter Royale. That had been fun, particularly since Mafiela had ignored my warning about a possible kidnapper, and her daughter Melantha had then blamed me for Mika’s kidnapping. In fact, she’d come to my apartment and tried to kick my ass, and I’d had to threaten her with magical fire to get her away from me.
I know, I know. My loving family environment was a big part of why I had such a charming personality. But Mafiela had begrudgingly sent me a thank-you card after Mika’s rescue, so maybe if I went to see her and asked for her help on this, she’d actually invite me into the house for a real discussion instead of making me wait on the front porch.
Yeah, or she’ll just try to rip your face off again.
Okay, so maybe I didn’t have the mental fortitude to attempt a civilized conversation with my aunt just yet. But I could start by talking to Lakin, at the very least, and besides, I needed to make sure he was all right after his ordeal. Once I was done here in Maintown, I’d pop over to Shiftertown and see what kind of reception I got. Hopefully, Lakin wasn’t so angry at the Mages Guild that he’d refuse to work with me.
The sound of shouts and crying pulled me from my thoughts, and I looked around, trying to determine the source. There was nothing happening on the street I was walking on – I was in a residential area, all the shutters closed, all the doors locked, not a single person enjoying the summer night on their front porch – so I followed the direction of the noise, heading west. A couple of blocks later, I found myself across the street from a hospital. A large, horse-drawn cart had just pulled up in front of the two-story building, and as I crossed the street to get a better look, I saw wounded men and women being loaded onto stretchers and rushed inside. They seemed to be suffering from burns, cuts, and broken limbs.
“Hey, you there!” Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned, startled to see it was a thirty-something civilian male, sweaty and dressed in a stained shirt and jeans. “Come, help us get these patients in! The hospital is short-handed. It has asked all able-bodied Maintown civilians to pull together and help. You look strong enough.”
“Uh, sure.” Since I wasn’t dressed as an enforcer, I couldn’t very well tell the guy I was on patrol, so I let him pull me forward and introduce me to the two hospital staff who were directing the transport of all these patients. We grabbed a stretcher, and I winced as they loaded an unconscious woman with a badly burned face onto it.
“What happened to all these people?” I asked the man as we carried the woman inside.
He looked at me as if I were crazy. “A battle broke out between the Resistance and the Mages at the Maintown-Shiftertown border. It was all over the radio. Didn’t you hear?”
“No, sorry,” I muttered. “I’ve been a little busy.” Obviously, this battle was a very recent development, since it hadn’t been mentioned at the meeting.
We carried the woman into a large room filled with beds. The stench of burnt flesh, blood, and other bodily odors and fluids filled the air, along with moans and cries coming from the other rooms. We deposited her as gently as we could onto the last available bed in the room, then went back out to grab the next victim. I hoped there were more beds in other rooms, because, otherwise, these poor patients were going to have to lie in stretchers on the floor as they waited for treatment.
It turned out that this wasn’t the first cart of patients to be dropped off, and nor was it the last. I helped unload three more carts, taking the wounded to different rooms depending on how the staff directed us. All the victims had major injuries – apparently, the ones who only suffered minor burns or scrapes were simply sent home with instructions for care, and told to come to the hospital if they needed supplies – but some were much worse off than others. The man with the broken arm, for example, was deemed much less severe than the woman bleeding out from a gash across her abdomen. As I watched the nurses triage them, I couldn’t help but feel grateful for my shifter abilities – these poor humans would take weeks or months to heal from their injuries, and some might never regain the mobility they’d once enjoyed.
I was impressed with how calm the hospital staff managed to remain in the face of such suffering, assessing each individual’s injuries and sending them off to the right department, and refusing to flinch or back down when some people thought their cases were more urgent than they actually were. They had a difficult job, and one I wasn’t sure I’d be able to manage with my temperament. Bedside manners weren’t really my thing.
Between unloading and delivering the wounded, I also helped bring food to recovering patients and overworked hospital staff. Repeatedly, I was asked to help hold a patient down so a broken limb could be set, or to assist in a minor surgery. As I stood by surgical tables, cleaning used tools and implements and passing over new ones, all while listening to whimpers and screams and trying to ignore the stinging antiseptic smell, I wondered why Iannis hadn’t thought to send a mage healer over to help treat the wounded. When I mentioned as much, both the doctor and a civilian volunteer standing nearby gave me withering looks.
“Haven’t the mages caused enough damage already?” the doctor snapped as she leaned over the abdomen of
the patient she was stitching up. “We just want them to stay out of our lives. We don’t need them here in this hospital, barking orders and making things worse.”
I swallowed the argument that rose to my lips, knowing it wouldn’t do me any good to defend the mages, and kept my head down. I couldn’t bring myself to leave these people – they might be refusing assistance from the Mages Guild, but they needed all the help they could get.
“All right,” the female doctor I’d been helping said, wiping her sweaty brow as she turned away from her last patient of the night. “It looks like we’ve done what we can for now. You ought to head home, and the rest of you too,” she said, raising her voice so the civilian volunteers could hear her. “Well done, everybody – we really needed and appreciate your help today.”
“No problem,” I said, relieved it was over. Yeah, I’d wanted to help, but hospital work wasn’t for the weak, and after all these hours of relentless labor, I was beyond exhausted. I filed out with the rest of the volunteers into the main waiting room, then bit my lip as I glanced at the big clock on the wall. Nine o’clock was two hours past curfew time, and anyone seen on the streets who wasn’t an enforcer or a mage was subject to arrest. Yeah, I was technically both, but I’d just adopted this new disguise, and I didn’t want to lose it just yet by being forced to reveal myself.
Dammit, why couldn’t I have been born a bird shifter? My life would be so much easier if I could just fly places.
“Hey.” The guy who’d commandeered me into helping out clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t you come join us for a drink?” I turned to see him standing with two other guys, all of whom I’d worked with at some point in the evening. “After the day we’ve had, we could all use a chance to wind down.”
“Sure,” I said easily – a cool drink would be very welcome, and besides, there was no place else to go. “Where we headed?”
“Branson’s, of course.” The man gave me a strange look, as though he couldn’t understand why I was so clueless. “Where else?”
‘Branson’s’ turned out to be an underground beer cellar just a block away. It was located in a back alley, behind a thick wooden door with a sliding grate for a peephole. The man who’d invited me rapped on the door, and my sensitive ears picked up on a pattern that must be a sort of code.
The grate slid open, revealing a pair of dark, suspicious eyes. “Password?”
“Humanity.”
The grate slid shut, and a series of locks clicked before the door swung open. The bouncer, a big fellow dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans, gave us all a long once-over. Once he was satisfied we were all humans, he stepped aside and allowed us to descend the long, steep staircase into the cellar.
To my surprise, the place was packed. It was a large cellar, with enough space to fit at least three hundred people. There were so many wooden tables that the servers barely had enough room to squeeze by with their trays, and a bar at the back. Somehow, we managed to grab a table right behind the stairs – not the greatest spot for people watching, but it allowed us some privacy and shielded us somewhat from the loud buzz of conversation.
We all ordered beers and pretzels, as well as an assortment of plain food, and then the man who invited me leaned back in his chair and looked at me. “So, what’s your name?” he asked, and though his tone was friendly enough, there was just a hint of suspicion in his eyes. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around town.”
“Brandt Urson,” I replied, the name coming easily to my lips as I’d already decided on it hours before. “I live in Rowanville.”
“Rowanville!” Another man, this one steel-haired and pot-bellied, spat. “So you’re one of those fools who think we can co-exist with the others.”
“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.” I lifted my chin, speaking coolly. “Or maybe I had a good job over there. What’s it to ya?”
The man who’d invited me laid a hand on Potbelly’s beefy shoulder. “Now, Jemin. Let’s not jump down each other’s throats. We haven’t even made introductions yet.”
Jemin grumbled a little, but he relented. “I’m Jemin Fillbaker,” he said.
“Fiden Trumbel,” the third, a lean, curly-headed blond chimed in. He had blue eyes and the kind of earnest baby face that made you think pure souls might really be a thing. “Nice to meet you.”
“I’m Manson Grandish,” the first man said, “and yes, we appreciate your help, especially since you’re not a Maintown citizen.”
“It’s no problem,” I said as the beer arrived. “I would have done the same for anybody. I was on my way back from checking on my grandmother, and she taught me that everybody deserves to be treated with the same level of respect, no matter what race or background you come from. Beneath it all, everyone’s worth the same.”
Jemin scoffed, and Manson leaned forward on the table, his expression growing serious. “Do you really believe that?” he asked. “That we’re all the same?”
I picked up my beer, took a long drink, and pretended to savor it as I considered my answer. It was warm, but the brew was decent enough. “I don’t believe we’re the same,” I finally said as I put my mug down. “That’s impossible. We all have different personalities, different levels of intelligence, different abilities, et cetera. But underneath all that, as a whole, we’re not that different, right? Mages came from humans, and so did shifters.”
“Very true,” Manson nodded, then took a sip from his beer. “In fact, you might say we’re the original race, right? The master pattern of creation, while the others are just later aberrations?”
“I suppose,” I allowed as alarm bells started ringing in my head.
“Maybe you might even say that we’ve got more right to own this world than any of the other races, including the mages who have had their boots on our throats for thousands of years?”
I shrugged at that. “As far as power is concerned, I think the phrase ‘might makes right’ still stands. And since the mages have all the might, I don’t foresee humans taking power anytime soon.” Just who the hell was I talking to, anyway? Were these guys members of the Resistance?
“How can you say that?” Jemin demanded, slamming his mug down on the table. “Didn’t you see the morning paper? The Resistance is more than holding its own against the Mages Guild. They might even win, at the rate things are going.”
“Right?” Fiden chimed in, his blue eyes glowing with excitement. “What do you think is going to happen when the Resistance wins? What kind of government do you think we’ll have, once the mages are out of the way?”
I managed not to roll my eyes at the sheer stupidity of these men. “Even if the Resistance does manage to prevail here in Solantha, that wouldn’t last long. Mages from other parts of the Federation would come here to turn the tide – in fact, they might be on their way right now,” I added, though I had no idea if that were true. “Mages from other countries could even come to join the fight. There’s no way mages across the world would allow a victory from humans to stand – it sets a dangerous precedent for them.”
“What you say sounds very reasonable,” Manson said easily, leaning back in his chair, “but I don’t think you have the full picture. Our time is coming, Brandt. In fact, it’s a lot closer than you think. Soon, mages and shifters will be gone not just from the Northia Federation, but also from all of Recca, the world over. Humans will be able to take our place once again as the strongest species on this planet, as we were for thousands of years before the mages arose.”
“That’s… interesting,” I said, struggling to hide my outrage. So these guys didn’t just think that mages should be gone – they wanted to get rid of shifters too? I had half a mind to flip the table and storm out of here, but another part of me told me to stay put and see what else I could learn. It seemed like there was some kind of plan among the humans I was missing out on. Besides, the guys were friendly enough, and I was still too pissed about the meeting at the Mages Guild to return to the Palace. “I’d love to know what
inspires all this confidence. It would be great if the human race could be on top again.”
“Maybe you will,” Manson said, lifting his glass to me. “But enough about politics for now. Let’s kick back and relax!” He downed his beer in one go, and the others did the same.
I spent another hour drinking, eating, and talking with the guys. When the vast quantities of beer consumed, coupled with the late hour, made them too tired and incoherent to continue, Manson signaled for a server and told her we wanted a room for the night. There was some grumbling when she told them that the usual price had doubled due to the curfew, but we all pitched in a bronze coin. The woman led us behind the bar, down a hall, and into a sparse room with six cots. Two men were already snoring in them, I noticed, and I made sure to take the cot on the opposite side of the room, so that my back wasn’t facing any of the men. Hopefully, my new companions didn’t snore too much, because unlike them, I was completely sober. My mind was working overtime and not ready to switch off, despite my exhaustion.
As I settled into the less-than-fresh bedding, my mind turned to Iannis. Would he care that I wasn’t back at the Palace by now, and if so, was there any chance he would come looking for me? Surely he knew by now that I’d stormed out of the meeting in disgust – Fenris would have told him. My logical mind hoped he wouldn’t, because having the Chief Mage show up at a human-only bar to retrieve me would blow my cover for sure, and it would destroy any chance to learn more about the plan these humans were hatching. But the emotional part of me, the one that still wanted to get closer to Iannis, wished he would come and find me. He’d told me he loved me, hadn’t he? That he wanted to make me his?