by J. R. Rain
I verbally stumble over an account of what happened after my Static spell knocked out the electronics. Agent Prince strolls up to us, staring upward at the circling Andre. He looks about ready to laugh like an idiot and go home. Two of the other agents stand watch over the cultists while the last guy wanders around searching the grass with his flashlight.
Andre lands far enough away not to knock us flat, then walks over. I stare up at him, understanding what a field mouse feels like in their last three seconds of life. “Solstice. Climb on my back.” He attempts to bend forward to make the task easier.
“Who… what… is that?” asks Jade.
“What she said,” mutters Agent Prince.
Mr. Moody streaks out of the dark and climbs up onto my backpack.
“Gah!” shouts Jade, jumping back and grabbing for her Glock. “Oh, shit… your cat.”
“This is Andre.” I run a hand over his feathers.
“Hurry, Solstice,” says the huge bird. “We need to find Eva.”
I look down. “I don’t know where to even start looking.”
“I will find her. Get on my back.”
“Trust him,” says Mr. Moody.
Agent Prince pinches the bridge of his nose. “Did the cat just talk?”
Jade shrugs. “We’re standing next to a bright green eagle big enough to carry a car back to his nest, and you’re freaked by a talking cat?”
“Oh, hi.” I wave. “I’m an elf.”
“The man’s going to start drinking heavily and die alone at forty-two,” says Mr. Moody.
Agent Prince glares at my cat.
“I gotta do this.” I squeeze Jade’s hand. “I trust him.”
“Okay, we’ll clean this up here, but I need you to come in and give a statement as soon as you can. Call me if you need backup.”
I leap into a hug, shivering from a mixture of relief and worry. “Thanks. You’re the best.”
She gives me a ‘be careful’ stare.
Once I’m up on Andre’s back, he waddles off a bit and spreads his wings. The takeoff leap almost sends me tumbling head over ass down his body, but I cling as best I can.
“Ouch. Feathers,” mutters Andre.
Mr. Moody pulls open the zipper on my backpack and crawls inside. With, I assume, a hooked claw. Smart cat.
I smile sheepishly. “Sorry about the feathers. Next time, I’ll just fall.”
My perch bobs up and down with the beating of wings. Elven eyes are a curse at the moment, since I can make out the ground sinking away below in perfect starlit clarity. “Oh, shit…”
“You’re afraid of heights?” asks my backpack.
“Not so much heights as falling.”
“You are fine,” says Andre. “Now… speak your sister’s name.”
“Eva.”
“Her full name, and concentrate on your memory of her.”
My tired brain struggles to dig it up, but I eventually fish it out of the murk. “Eva Marie Winters.”
A band of emerald shimmer starts at Andre’s beak tip and rolls over him to the tail. “Eva Marie Winters. I sense her. Several miles north and west of here.”
I’m about to ask how, but I realize I’m sitting on top of a colossal eagle that used to be a hang-drum playing barista. “Andre… what are you?”
“My kind are known as Manaia. We are messengers and protectors.”
I lean forward as if on a high-performance Japanese motorcycle, and cling with my arms and legs. It’s hard to tell how fast we’re going, but the wind is getting painful… and freezing. “And you’re here for me?”
“Not specifically, though you appeared to be a lost soul in need of a friend.”
My breath hitches in my throat. Choked up, I can’t speak, and simply hold on as tight as I can. In spite of my sister’s life in danger, and being hundreds of feet off the ground, the gentle up-and-down motion of his flapping helps me center my emotions.
For Eva’s sake, I’m going to need to stay calm.
hicken Caesar salad gurgles in the back of my throat when Andre pitches downward. I can’t get the image of Eva struggling out of my head. However long we’ve been flying, it’s played over and over in my memory. Mr. Moody wails from my backpack, clearly enjoying the weightlessness of a hard dive as much as I do.
Andre levels off, crushing me into his back. I grunt and make the mistake of opening my eyes. We’re like fifteen feet off the ground and still moving faster than most cars. Wait, no… not ground. Treetops. Forest is everywhere, and if I wasn’t an elf, I wouldn’t be able to see anything. I thought West Kill was ‘middle of nowhere,’ but I think we’ve gone underneath nowhere, or we left nowhere behind a long time ago.
After a moment or two, we lose speed. Andre leans back, hanging on his wings, and we plop down in a tiny spot of clearing with miles of forest in all directions. I let go and slide down his back, over his tail feathers, and wind up doing a backward somersault that leaves me face down on dirt.
“Are you all right?” Bless Andre for trying to whisper, a task for his size.
Mr. Moody’s voice comes out of the backpack. “And the legends tell of the exquisite grace of the elves.”
Smirk. “Little stiff. Where are we?”
“Mallet Pond Forest. There is a cabin a short distance from here. Your sister is inside.”
Mr. Moody squeezes out of my backpack and walks over my head to the ground.
I push myself up and stand. Eva can’t afford to let me rest. “Okay. So, there’s no way Jade’s getting here in time to save anyone’s bacon. Demon’s probably already on his way here or told them to… yeah.”
Andre tilts his head. “Do you have a plan?”
“Plan? No. I’m a photojournalist. I don’t do this kind of thing.”
“You can probably find a book about sneaking into cultist strongholds on Kindle,” says Mr. Moody. “They’ve got how-tos on almost everything.”
“Funny.” I pace around for an instant before it hits me. “Wait here.”
“What are you going to do?” asks Andre.
“Not waste any time.”
I’ve done a lot of reading from Dad’s books and I think I’ve worked out a little trick. The exponential decay of spell duration roughly halves with every additional copy of the spell running at once. With one item, I get about four hours (256 minutes to be exact). Sweatshirt, t-shirt, bra, panties, jeans, sneakers. Six items. That’ll give me only about eight minutes on the new trick I’ve decided to call Pocket. The magic folds reality around an object and stuffs it into an alternate dimensional space, with a tiny hole left hovering nearby. Using Pocket to store my clothes is a different spell from Vanish so it doesn’t conflict and shrink the duration.
Wait, no. Two sneakers. Down to four minutes. I strip and put back on my sweatshirt and jeans, leaving my tee, undies, sneakers, and the FBI earrings in Andre’s care. Two items make it around 128 minutes, something like two hours and some change. Plenty of time.
“What are you doing?” Andre cocks his head, his feathery eyebrows scrunching together.
“The same thing people with no skill have done for millennia. I’m cheating. Vanish is short-lived. If I turn my clothes invisible, I only have minutes. I don’t really feel like running around naked, so I’m sticking my clothes in a dimensional pocket. Snap my fingers, and they’re back.”
I invoke Pocket, and my jeans disappear. Again, and my sweatshirt is gone. As soon as I want them to, they should pop right back on me. When I cast Vanish, Andre’s confusion goes away.
“Ahh, yes. That will work provided they have no numina with them capable of seeing you.”
I stare up at him. “I guess you can still see me?”
“Yes. But my kind are focused on finding. With a name, I can pinpoint any living being in the world.”
“Right. Messenger. Where’s this cabin?”
Andre points with his beak.
Here I come, Eva. I look at Andre. “Please wait here unless stuff gets crazy. If
there’s shouting and explosions, that means I need help.”
He nods.
Remember that romantic notion of an elf running nude through the woods? Yeah. So much for that. Ouch. Twigs, rocks, branches scratch at me. Not something I’d do for fun. And yeah, it’s cold. But this is my kid sister they’re messing with, so I’m more than willing to put up with a couple thorns and a bug bite or thousand. Other elves in wherever-the-hell-we’re-from either have totally different woodlands (without painful shit to step on) or magic that must make this less painful. Or maybe I’m just new at this.
I get the hang of the barefoot-in-the-forest thing pretty quick, and ‘wood nymph’ along at a good clip until the glow of artificial light shines out from the trees. A square light hangs on the outside wall of a house that looks like it ought to be in the suburbs. Three men sit on folding chairs upon a deck out front, drinking beers and chatting about football of all things. They’ve got to be OSA cultists, but I suppose they’re still men. A pair of white Cadillac Escalades are parked out front next to a white Mercedes. Seems there’s good money in plotting to take over the world. The smallest dirt road I’ve ever seen snakes off to the right into the woods.
Mr. Moody threads between my legs.
“You can see me too?” I whisper.
“No. Smell you. Plus, I know where you are. We’re linked, remember.”
“Looks quiet,” I say. “Hopefully she’s still there.”
Mr. Moody rubs his head against my calf. “Of course, she is. Big Bird brought us here.”
I catch myself tiptoeing toward the house. What am I doing? They can’t see me. I can’t see me. Straightening, I walk at a normal pace, careful not to bump any branches or vines that could sway and attract attention. Mr. Moody slinks along behind me, low and small enough that they don’t notice him. With the bright light over their heads, this entire area has to look completely black to them. Damn. Maybe I didn’t even need to leave my shoes behind.
The men get into a playful argument about quarterbacks, laughing and picking on each other’s teams like normal not-part-of-a-secret-cult guys. Once I get past the corner of the cabin, I head for the first window, grab the sill, and pull myself up enough to peer in. Empty bedroom. I repeat at the next window. It’s a bathroom, where an average-looking man is in the middle of a shower, singing in Spanish to a bar of soap. I get a full-on display of his averageness.
Below my dangling feet, Mr. Moody hisses, then mutters, “That’s so off-key, he doesn’t even have one.”
I’d laugh, but I’m too worried about Eva. The next window around the back is a kitchen, with a view via an open archway into the living room. Another two guys are on the sofa watching… football. Eva’s screaming breaks the relative silence inside.
“Hey! I gotta go to the goddamn bathroom!”
Sounds like she’s two rooms left of the kitchen.
I drop down and hurry over. Grabbing the sill, I pull myself up to see over it.
The headboard of Eva’s bed is against the wall on the right. A door leads into a hallway in front of me opposite the window. My sister is still lying with her arms out above her head to either side, handcuffed to the bedposts. She’s barefoot, and the cultists locked a third pair around her ankles, but those aren’t attached to the bed. Her Army boots stand by the door. She writhes about, knees pinned together in the universal symbol of ‘gotta go bad.’ Her wriggling has caused her gauzy skirt to ride up dangerously close to indecent.
“Come on you assholes!” shouts Eva. “I’m gonna piss myself.”
No wonder they didn’t gag her. Artillery could go off here, and there’s no one close enough to notice. I grab at the window, looking for a way to open it, but it doesn’t move. Locked. Fortunately, that’s not a big problem.
Before I can cast Open, a fortyish woman with straight black hair, fake eyelashes, and too much foundation walks in. If a mosquito landed on her face, it would get stuck and sink. Her grey skirt suit suggests lawyer or something. Another cultist, a moderately big guy, looms in the doorway with a handgun out but not pointed at anyone.
Eva’s face gets even paler than usual.
The woman frees my sister’s left wrist, unlocks the bedpost side of the cuff on her right hand, and re-locks her hands together in front. She leaves my sister’s ankles chained, forcing her to hop out of the room. Watching her treat Eva like a convict makes my blood boil, but giving myself away right now will not end well. As much as I want to see if I can get Lance to make a human burst like that creature at Pennhurst, I bite my lip.
As soon as the room is empty, I grab Mr. Moody and hold him up to the screen.
“Claws out,” I whisper.
He obliges, and with his help, I shred the screen out of my way. After tearing the mesh all the way down so no one sees a jagged rip, I cast Open at the window, which emits a sharp click. A hand flat on the glass isn’t the best leverage, but eventually, I push the window up enough to get a grip on the bottom and shove it open. That done, I pull myself over the windowsill. Breaking into a house feels weird enough. Doing it naked is surreal.
And I’m in. Mr. Moody clears the sill and scurries under the bed. I close the window and stand in the corner to the left, flat against the wall, and wait. The man with the gun didn’t look at all familiar, so he hadn’t been on the deck or watching football. I’m dealing with at least eight goons. Three on the deck, two on the couch, Mr. Gun, the woman, and the Mexican Pavarotti in the shower―who by the way, I can still hear. No wonder Eva was screaming. My poor sister couldn’t even plug her ears.
Soon, repetitious thumping and clicking of chains in the hall announces her return. My fingernails dig into my palms. It takes every ounce of self-control I have to stand there and only watch as my sobbing sixteen-year-old sister hops back to the bed and tolerates being re-shackled to the headboard. Eva tugs at her restraints, whimpering for a few seconds until she stares straight at me and freezes. Confusion. Oh, wow… she can see something, but there’s no recognition in her expression.
The two cultists leave in a hurry, grumbling at the interruption. The nerve. They kidnap my kid sister and are put out by having to let her actually use a bathroom. As soon as we’re alone, I pad over to the bed.
Eva’s confusion shifts to terror. She yanks on the handcuffs and sucks in a breath to shriek. I pounce, clamping my hand over her mouth.
“Shh. Eva… it’s me.”
She trembles. I’m glad I let them take her to the bathroom first.
“Eva. It’s me. It’s Solstice. Invisibility spell.”
My sister stares generally in my direction for a few seconds longer before she relaxes, breathing in heavy gasps out her nose.
“Don’t scream.”
Eva nods.
I pull my hand away. She keeps crying out of relief. “Help me.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Are Mom and Dad okay?” she whispers. “Something weird happened at home… I woke up feeling scared. Everything was all blurry-glowy. Mom an’ Dad were frozen in bed. I got freaked out and felt like I had to get out of the house. When I got dressed, my pajamas floated in the air after I took ‘em off.”
Shit. “Umm. I don’t know. I think these guys stopped time around the store. Mom and Dad are probably okay, just… out of it.” I am not going to tell her that magic of this kind may not be altogether healthy for whoever’s in stasis. From what little I know.
“I went out my window, but I didn’t see the guy in the alley. I was tryin’ to call you, but he grabbed me.” Eva glares at the ceiling while squirming at the cuffs. “The bitch has the key. And sorry for spazzing out on you. You look like a blue wraith. A ball of energy with little eye spots.”
“Key?” I fold my arms, not realizing she likely can’t see that. “Keys are for lesser beings.”
“Oh, right. Duh.” She rolls her eyes. “Well, get me out of here already. I can’t do an Open ‘cause they cursed me or something. My magic isn’t working.”
I brush her hair off her face. “Let’s get on the same page first. I can turn you invisible too, and we go out the window, but we’re going to have to move quick.”
“Okay. Let’s go.”
“As soon as you’re loose, ditch your clothes, and we’ll get out of here.”
“Wait, what? Strip?” She stares in horror. “Are you… naked?”
“Functionally.”
“What the hell does ‘functionally’ mean?” she rasps. “There’s degrees of naked?”
“I have clothes with me but not on me. No time to explain.”
“How can you run around naked?!” Eva turns scarlet. “I can’t… I’m not a wood elf like you. Do something else.”
I sigh. “These people are going to kill you. We don’t have time to―”
“Please do something else.” Her blush deepens.
“Okay… Okay… Umm.” I pace. “All right. I have a friend outside. Go out the window and run straight into the woods. I’ll… blow up one of their cars or something as a distraction.”
“Better plan.” Eva nods.
Open pops her free. The red marks around her wrists and ankles make me give strong consideration to blowing up cultists instead of innocent Cadillacs. She scrambles off the bed and grabs her boots. Right as she’s stepping into them, the door opens and Mr. Gun walks in with a tray bearing a PBJ sandwich on a plate.
Eva stares at him.
He stares at her.
Mutual confusion lasts only a second before the man snarls. “Back to bed, sweetie.”
Eva edges away from him, shaking her head.
Shit.
I drop Vanish.
Mr. Gun jumps back, flat to the wall and staring at me. While he’s fixated on my boobs (I guess the size doesn’t matter that much), Eva hauls off and kicks a field goal straight into his balls. The tray tumbles out of his grip, but she snags the PBJ out of midair before it hits the floor.
“Thanks.” She jams the sandwich in her mouth and runs for the window.
A quick mental impulse drops Pocket, causing my sweatshirt and jeans to reappear. Mr. Gun goes for his sidearm, but I pound a Lance into his face. The violet bolt breaks his nose and sends two teeth flying, while leaving a skull-sized dent in the drywall after he bounces off. He slides down to sit on the floor and slumps over sideways.