by Ben Reeder
“What did he do to him?” Lucas asked after we walked in the doors.
“Distraction and misdirection,” I said. “I’ve seen scam artists pull similar tricks. It doesn’t work when someone is looking to break your arms, though.” I looked around the room, noting the red exit signs and the openings to the employee only areas of the convention center. In my peripheral vision, I could see Lucas doing the same. As I scanned the room, a weight landed on my right shoulder.
“Ren?” I said softly.
“Yup,” Ren’s voice sounded beside my right ear. “Came in through one of the skylights. A human won’t fit, but a smaller demon would.”
“Did you deliver my message?”
“Yeah. Not sure about my reception in some places, but I delivered it.”
“Good work. Feel free to raid the snacks, but keep an eye out.”
“Cool! I will, and I will. In that order.” The was a clatter of wings, and he was gone. Music started playing, and I could see Hoshi and Kiya already on the floor.
“Pictures?” I asked Shade. My feet weren’t getting the itch to dance or even tap my toes, but I wanted to capture this moment and at least make it look like I got to go to junior prom.
“Yeah,” Shade said with a smile. “You look super-hot in that tux. No way I’m not getting another pic of you in it.” We waited while another couple got their pictures taken under the arch of red roses. The prom theme was Fantasy Wonderland. Every young man a knight, every girl a princess! read the sign above the background that featured rolling hills, trees and a castle, with brightly colored tents and a pair of knights on horseback riding toward each other. Shade looked more like a queen than a princess, and I smiled as I realized she really was in a way, and I was her wizard. We stood there and let the photographer blind us with the flash a few times, then stumbled into the darkness after giving him our info. A slow dance was playing, and all our friends were on the dance floor. Hoshi and Kiya were a few feet from Lucas and Monica. Even Wanda was dancing with a slender girl in a pale dress.
“Shall we?” I asked, trying to be as smooth as I could. Shade pulled me toward the dance floor, and a few seconds later, we were face to face with our arms around each other’s waist. She smiled but I could still feel the tension in her, and she didn’t rest her head on my shoulder.
“Are we ever going to get this right, Chance?” Shade asked. “I know this is supposed to be the perfect night, and here we are, fumbling along. You’re tense and worried...and hurting. I’m confused and scared.”
“And hurting because of me,” I added.
“Yeah...no...I don’t know. It just seems like everyone around us is getting it right. Even Wanda’s night is going better than ours.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Shade tilted her head to the right and said, “Look for yourself. The girl she’s dancing with just asked her if she could kiss her.” I tried not to hurt my neck when I went to look. Wanda was looking up at the girl she was dancing with, a wavering smile on her face, her eyes wide with disbelief. Then she nodded and tilted her head to one side. The girl bent down and pressed her lips to Wanda’s as the song faded into silence.
“Wow,” I said, my smile getting broader by the second. I turned back to Shade. “Lucas and Monica are like young Morticia and Gomez, and Hoshi and Kiya...well, they’re the definition of a charmed life.”
“And we’re more like...well, I can’t think of anyone as messed up as we are.” She smiled as she said it.
“We’re both pretty screwed up on our own,” I said. The next song started, an upbeat dance number neither of us seemed ready to endure. We walked off the floor, leaving Lucas and Monica to enjoy the peppy beat. I didn’t see Hoshi and Kiya, and Wanda was walking off with the girl she’d been dancing with.
On instinct, I took a closer look at the girl. She wore a pale pink dress, and she moved with a grace that rivaled Shade’s. Her hair was pinned high on her head, and when she looked our direction, I could have sworn she looked familiar for a second. Then the light changed, and her features were obscured by shifting shadows. I turned my attention back to Shade.
“Are we too screwed up?” she was asking.
“Maybe, but who else is going to get us?”
“Desperation isn’t my idea of a relationship,” Shade said. She shook her head and was about to say something else, when she stopped and looked down at her purse. With a shrug of her shoulders, the little clutch was in her hands and she was checking her phone.
“Expecting a call?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, apparently not getting my tone. “I need to take this. I’ll be right back.” She moved away and disappeared into the darkness. I looked for Lucas and Monica, but they seemed to have disappeared into the growing crowd on the dance floor. I let my gaze rove across the dance floor, hoping to find them, sure I was going to see them doing things that would probably get them kicked out of the dance. Hoshi and Kiya weren’t on the dance floor, either, and I started looking more intently, fighting images of bad things happening to my friends and indulging in conflicting scenarios in my head, half imagining the worst possible thing happening, the other half trying to conjure perfectly logical explanations for what I was, or more accurately, wasn’t seeing.
As I was trying to find my friends, the girl Wanda had danced with came up to me, her face drawn with worry. “You’re Chance, right?” she asked.
“Yeah. Where’s Wanda?” I demanded.
“I’m sorry, I must have said something that upset her,” the girl said. She looked back over her shoulder then back at me, wringing her hands. “She ran off into the back. I think she was crying.”
“Which door did she go through?” I asked, my feet already moving. The girl headed toward the back, pointing to one of the unmarked doors.
“I think it was that one, but it was dark, and I didn’t know where she was going,” the girl said. “The next thing I knew, she was gone.”
“What’s your name?” I asked as I got to the door.
“Amanda,” the girl said.
I stopped and turned to look at her, trying to remember where I’d heard her name before. “Okay, thanks for coming to get me, Amanda. I’ll take care of this from here.” I opened the door and slipped through, into the dimly lit concrete floored realm of the convention center staff. Looking both ways, I didn’t see or hear Wanda. My brow knotted as I realized this wasn’t the first place Wanda would likely go. If she didn’t go find one of us, she would have gone to the bathroom. This area was supposed to be off limits, and Wanda was a lot better about following rules than I was. The vague uneasiness I had started to feel on the dance floor came back, and I turned to head back, only to find myself face to face with Amanda.
“You really are a good friend, aren’t you?” Amanda said. In the slightly brighter light of the corridor, I could see her more clearly, and the sense of familiarity came back stronger than ever. Then my attention fell on her hair, and I saw the pale streaks in it. Sudden recognition dawned; it was the girl with Hoshi in the hangar. “I feel kind of bad tricking you like this, but it was the easiest way to get you away from everyone else.” Her remorse was pretty short lived, though, because she followed up the statement with a quick left jab.
To my surprise, I blocked the punch and found myself dropping into a stance I wasn’t sure I remembered being taught. But one thing Dr. Corwin had always emphasized, and my experience bore out, was to never stop in the middle of a fight for weird shit. And I fought a lot of weird shit.
“Don’t celebrate yet,” I said, letting my Sight shift. “Getting me alone just makes me more dangerous.” Red lines of potential attack flowed from her aura, and I waited until they felt right, until I saw her center of balance shift and the lines narrowed to one or two possibilities before I moved. She threw a series of jabs with her left followed up by a right hook, and my hands flowed up to deflect each blow.
“Oh, you’re pretty good,” she said, ducking one of my jabs and thr
owing a punch of her own to keep me at a distance. “But I’m better.” She stepped up and threw a flurry of punches, then her balance shifted back, and I found myself dropping low in my stance before I even realized that I was ducking under a roundhouse kick that my Sight hadn’t seen coming. Belatedly, I realized I hadn’t seen any of the last half dozen attacks from her aura. But somehow, my brain knew what she was about to do the microsecond before she did it. Then I remembered my fight with Kim, and let her next attack come in. I ducked under it and came up, pulling my arm in and driving my elbow into her body.
She staggered back, then resumed her stance. “You call that an elbow strike? You’re form is sloppy. My sensei would call that a chicken wing strike.”
“Ba-caw,” I clucked. “I’m not the one trying to catch my breath.”
“Fair point. Mom said you put up a decent fight last night.”
“Last night?” I blurted out. My stance shifted as I did exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do: let myself react to what she was saying. I barely got my right hand up in time to stop the lightning fast jab she threw, but the right cross that followed it caught me square across the jaw. I saw white for a split second, and when my vision returned, I was falling. Not a weak-kneed stagger; I was just laid out like a chump. I hit the floor like a slab of beef, none of my muscles doing what I wanted them to do. The world spun around me, and my eyes wouldn’t focus. But all my brain could focus on was the fact that Amanda was Kim’s daughter.
“Careful,” I heard Kim say a moment before she stepped into view. “We need him conscious and healthy. No head injuries.” She knelt down next to me and turned my head toward her, making the world spin even worse.
“I only stunned him, Mom,” Amanda said. “He’ll be fine in a little bit. But something is wrong. He fought better than he should have been able to. Are you sure it worked?”
“The boy’s mind is troublesome, but he’ll suffice for our needs. I’ll take him with me. See that his friends are in place.” I tried to move, tried to focus, but I felt like a puppet with the strings cut.
“Hai,” Amanda said. I heard her footsteps receding, and I managed to move my arm a little.
“Wha’ ‘re ya doin’?” I slurred as Kim picked me up in a fireman’s carry. “Wha’ sh’ do t’me?”
“Shhh,” Kim said, sounding like a concerned mother. “She simply struck the same nerve I hit last night. Your control over your body will return soon. Then I will need you to do the one thing that only you can.”
“He’ nah,” I muttered. “Nah doin’ nothin’ f’r ya.”
“This one thing I know you will do,” Kim said as she pushed a door open and carried me outside. A few seconds later, I was being laid on the floor in the back of a van. She leaned over me and smiled, pulling my phone from my pocket. “Because you are going to help me make sure my beloved Trevor survives this night. For now, be at peace.” The last three words she spoke in Japanese, but something in my head translated them from memory. What little returning control I had over my muscles vanished, and I went limp. The doors closed, and all I could do was lay there and hope I didn’t drool too much while the van started up.
Chapter 16
~ Love conquers all ~ Proverb
“How can you be certain he will come?” Arata asked in Japanese as the doors to the van opened.
“Corwin may be a wizard, but he is ruled by his feelings,” Kim said. “He will not let the boy come to harm, even if it means his life.” She picked me up and carried me to a table, which she unceremoniously dumped me on. Over the past half hour, I had figured out that I had control of two things: my eyelids and my esophagus. I could blink and I could swallow, and that was about it, aside from breathing.
“He is an undisciplined fool,” Arata said. He came to stand over me, and I found that I also had control over my eyes. I looked up at him and wished I could slap the sneer off his face. Preferably with a shotgun or a TK bolt. “You should have killed him when we first ordered you to. Do not look at me, boy,” he said the last part in English and pushed my head away from him. Reverting to Japanese, he said, “Are you sure he cannot cast any magic like this?”
“He is only an apprentice, and barely that,” Kim replied in the same language. “His record at the Franklin Academy is rife with disciplinary write-ups and overflowing with reports of substandard work. He is little more than a boy with a few talismans and a wand. He can barely cast a spell with a focus, much less by simply looking at you.”
“Kill the boy when Corwin arrives. We will no longer need him.”
“Even though we promised to release him?” another man asked.
“They are both gaijin,” Arata said. “They have no honor. We are not obligated to keep promises to them.”
“As you say,” another voice said. “Oyabun,” he added after a moment’s pause.
“When you have killed Corwin, there is one thing left for you to do to regain your honor among the clan, and prove you are worthy of serving me.” Arata’s hand slid into my field of vision with a short tanto bladed knife and a folded piece of white linen. Yubitsume, my ever helpful brain provided. Finger shortening. He was effectively telling Kim to cut off part or all of her little finger on her left hand as a form of ritual apology. Kim’s slender hands reached into view and took the knife.
“I thank the oyabuns for the opportunity to finally regain my honor,” she said. She stepped up closer to the table and cocked her head, then smiled as she looked off into the darkness. “And I thank you, Trevor, for still being the man I knew seventeen years ago.”
“I never could hide from you,” Dr. C said in Japanese as he came closer, his footsteps suddenly audible. Where he had come from or how he’d gotten there, I couldn’t guess, but then, he was a wizard, so go figure. Being mysterious was like breathing for him, it was something he did almost involuntarily sometimes. Evidently, no one else in the room was used to it, though, since I heard swords being drawn and guns being cocked amid exclamations in Japanese. If I could have smiled, I would have.
“You never tried that hard,” Kim said. I could hear the smile in her voice as she moved around to the other side of the table. She tilted my head back to upright as she went.
“Kill the boy, now!” Arata barked.
“In good time,” Kim said. “There is something that must be done first.”
“If you hurt him, I swear I will level this entire block if that’s what it takes to kill you.”
“Ever the good leader, aren’t you Trevor?” Kim asked.
“Get my name out of your mouth,” Dr. C snarled.
“As you wish,” Kim said, her voice sounding a little sad to me. “Let it begin then. Let us see if you remember the way we once danced.” I heard the sound of steel being drawn, and the metallic hiss of Dr. C’s paramiir changing shape, but all of that was background to the words “remember the way” echoing in my head. My brain burned with memories of hours in the dojo, practicing the simplest of moves with infinite care, arms burning as I put them through each move at a snail’s pace. Defenses, strikes, stances, movements, built into katas, strategies and combinations. My arms and legs twitched as my body remembered learning a martial art I had never heard of before. In the background, I heard the sound of feet shuffling on concrete and the constant ring of steel on steel.
“Don’t try to move just yet,” Amanda’s voice came from the other side of the table.
“What the hell is going on?” I muttered.
“You know everything my mother knows about fighting, but your body doesn’t have the training. You have muscle memory but not the conditioning to use it fully.”
“Why?”
“So you can defend yourself without doing your own body harm. Just… please, trust her. If not her, then trust your master.”
“What are we supposed to do?” I asked.
“When the time comes, we help her fight. You are the bow, I am the sword,” she said.
“Is this the part where you tell me it’ll
all make sense later?”
“No,” Amanda said with a soft laugh. “You already know that. This is the part where I tell you to be patient.” She nudged my head to the left, toward the fight.
Dr. Corwin and Kim were going at each other so fast I could barely see their blades. Kim seemed to have him on the defensive, but something about the expression on his face told me that was how he wanted things. Kim came at him with a sudden burst of speed, her blade ringing against his. As well as I knew Dr. C, I almost missed the movements of his off hand as he parried Kim’s blows, but there was no mistaking the way his blade started to glow. With each impact against his sword, the blade got brighter, and Kim’s weapon began to rebound with more and more force, until she was struggling to control it.
“I know this dance too well, Kim,” Dr. C said. He stepped in and swung, forcing Kim to bring her sword up to block. When their weapons met, there was a flash and the deep thrum. Kim flew backwards, her sword knocked from her hand. Even in the air she was graceful, spinning around and landing on her feet. The impact drove her to one knee as she slid back a few feet. She steadied herself with one hand on the ground and looked up at Dr. C with a smile on her face. “Figured I’d add a new step,” he quipped.
Kim surged forward, and Dr. C took a step back, withdrawing the paramiir back into its ankh form as she crossed the distance between them. When she was a few feet away, she jumped into the air for what my brain recognized as a jump kick. Dr. C brought his left hand up and the air rippled around his arm as he unleashed a TK bolt at her, but she leaned back, flying just under the bolt. As she came in, he stepped forward and pushed her aside. With a quick twist, she landed on her feet, then back-flipped out of the path of Dr. C’s kick.