Run the Day

by Davis, Matthew C.

  "When I want her to," Swift said as he left the room.

  Neat trick, that.

  I set my bag down and looked at Hack. He didn't look like death anymore, he actually looked better and his breathing was normal, which was surprising. I slowly worked my coat from around his midsection; surprisingly, it wasn't disgustingly soaked with blood. I dropped it on the floor beside the bed and went back to examining Hack. He had been wearing a pair of slacks and a faded sweater when he was attacked, both of which were now liberally soiled and shredded. I thought I'd gotten it bad, but Bugbrain had really tore Hack a new one. Curiously, the wound in his belly was practically healed. Instead of a gaping hole it was now an angry red mass of scar tissue that went across his abdomen.

  Talk about your miraculous, and mysterious, recoveries.

  Last I checked, spontaneous regeneration wasn't on the long and tawdry list of crazy shit mages could do. More questions to pelt Hack with when he woke up. I heard the front door shut and after a minute Swift was standing at the door to my parent's room.

  "The lady's on the couch. Want me to wake her up?"

  I shook my head and began the onerous task of getting Hack out of his ruined clothes. As I did, I began to notice a number of scars, much like the one now on his stomach, but smooth and faded with time. After I had him undressed and a neat collection of various bloodied garments on the floor, I pulled the cloth covering the bed over him. I stood up straight and my back popped in resentment.

  "One thing at a time please. You said she wouldn't wake up until you wanted her to right?" I made my way past Swift and out of the room.

  "Right. So what are you going to do, then?"

  "That's what I need to figure out. This is all starting to go to hell in a hand basket, and I don't like it. I should probably call Devlin and ask if he knows about any shady individuals that have recently come to town," I said. We made it to the kitchen and I flipped the lights on and went to get myself a glass of water. Some vestigial remnant of manners made me get one for Swift, too.

  "That could be a long list. You're talking about Others, and Hanford. There's a lot of shady to go around," Swift said.

  "True, but it's better than nothing. As far as I know, none of the local Others are into the whole Armageddon business. They might be thirty-one of flavors of crazy, and some of them are in desperate need of an old fashioned stake-burning, but there haven't been any world-enders since the Broken Circle got the boot." I sat down at the table.

  I slid a glass of water across to Swift as he took a chair and we sat in a less than comfortable silence. Between gross mistreatment of my skull and its contents by an angry bug person and tampering with volatile forces, my head was full of static; I was having difficulty just forming coherent thoughts. And to make matters worse my stomach decided to chime in with its two cents and begin growling loudly. In the midst of the day's chaos, I hadn't even stopped to eat.

  "That business with the chalk, I've never seen you do anything like that before. It really was awesome," Swift said into the quiet.

  "Awesome but taxing. There's a reason I don't usually do that kind of thing." I looked across the table at Swift with a frown.

  "But you saved that lady; that has to count for something, right?"

  "Saving her was easier than wasting time cleaning up the mess Bugbrain would've left of her," I said, and Swift's face fell.

  Not the answer he wanted to hear, apparently.

  "You can't really mean that," Swift said.

  "I totally can. Others are disposed of nicely; we poor fleshy humans leave ugly messes. Honestly, it would be the easiest thing in the world to just kill her now and bury the - what?" Swift was looking at me with his mouth slightly agape.

  "Tell me you're joking."

  "I'm joking? Of course I'm joking. Why would I seriously…anyways, might as well deal with it - I mean her. Maybe she already forgot everything, who knows." I cleared my throat and rose from the table.

  Swift was giving me a disapproving look from over the rims of his shades. It's not like I was really considering killing the lady. I was in no shape to dispose of a body. Swift followed me out of the kitchen and down the hall to the living room. I don't think it really counted as a living room anymore, there hadn't been much living done in it in a long time. Like my parents' old bedroom, and every other room in the place except mine, everything was draped with white drop-cloths that obscured the shapes of the furniture and things in it. The big blocky shapes up against the walls were the antique china cabinets that my father filled to the brim with the oddities he collected during his worldly travels. Dad had moonlighted as an anthropology professor at the big university up north when he was alive, and had amassed quite a collection.

  Rosa was sprawled out on the massive sofa-shaped white thing in front of the stone fireplace, her mouth open in mid-snore. I dragged the footstool from under a nearby armchair over, sat it in front of the couch and took a seat. Swift stood at the end of the couch nearest Rosa's head and looked over at me.

  "Ready?"

  I took a breath and a moment to compose myself. No way around it, this was going to suck.

  I nodded to Swift and he reached a hand down to gently run across Rosa's cheek, then he stepped behind me. A rapid sequence of events occurred. She sat up, eyes flew open, threw a furtive look around the room before spotting me, and then her face hardened into a vicious scowl. If I didn't know better I'd say there was murder in her wide, dark eyes. I've seen the look before. She flew off the couch and tackled me.

  "Brujo!" Rosa hollered the word like a battle-cry and so began my second assault of the day. She was strong; she landed a solid blow on my jaw before I could grab her wrists and fight to not get my brains beaten out. Swift was there to pluck Rosa off me, he held her at arm's length where she clawed and hissed like a cat, belting through a blistering string of curses and profanities in Spanish.

  "Swift, Christ man knock her out already!" I picked myself up off the ground, rubbing my throbbing jaw. It went well with the rest of my head trauma.

  Rosa went limp mid-shout when Swift laid his hand on her cheek again and he dumped her ungracefully in a heap back on the couch.

  "See? Should've just killed her, much simpler."

  "I'm beginning to see the logic to that," Swift said and looked down at Rosa, who was again a peacefully snoring puddle on the couch.

  "Damn Tommy, you always did have a way with women."

  I looked over to the hallway where Hack stood. He had cleaned most the blood off and wrapped the white sheet from the bed around him into an improvised toga, and was leaning up against the wall with his arms folded over his grizzled chest, a toothy smile on his face. His eyes were bright, clear, and a dazzling shade of solid blue as if they'd been replaced by luminescent sapphires.

  That was new.

  "You and me, we need to talk. For starters, mind telling me what you got a damn angel of death doing in your house?" Hack squinted across the room at Swift with his glowing blue eyes.

  "Talk about a what?" Apparently my head had been clubbed worse than I thought.

  I looked over my shoulder at Swift who was standing in front of the fireplace like a statue, arms folded over his chest and his mouth set in a flat line. Whatever was going on behind those mirrored sunglasses, he didn't look like he was about to start talking. I looked back at Hack, who had come into the living room and was peeking under the cloths on the furniture.

  "Okay more on whatever that's supposed to mean in a second, I want to know what's up with all the crazy eyes today. Last I checked, yours were brown." I moved across the room to stand in front of Hack.

  Despite the eyes, he looked just like he did the last time we spoke. Yelled, the last time we yelled. That was what six, no, seven years ago now? He was still Hack, though, despite the eye business. Still looked like a mean, short Santa Claus what with that giant white prospector's beard.

  "Yeah, yeah I suppose I might owe you some answers. Make me some coffee, and
I'll tell you everything," Hack said. It was kind of disturbing, looking him eye-to-eye. Something in those eyes pulled at the spark of light inside me.

  "I don't have any more coffee," I said and took a half-step back.

  "Well then make some, boy."

  Make some?

  After all these years and the old man was still testing me. My parents had raised me to study, to be a scholar and use my brain, to observe the hidden truths of reality. When they died and Hack took over as my caretaker and mentor, my life turned into boot camp. Every day we drilled on magical and esoteric quantum theories, and how to manipulate reality to the point of distorting it to achieve unbelievable things. Hack was the last of a dying breed, from the old-school spell slingers, from a time before reality had begun calcifying and paradigms were being wiped out whole-sale. He was a hard teacher, heavy-handed, and he didn't abide failure. Hack had outlived just about everyone he ever knew, and to him failure often equated to death.

  "Well?" Hack asked, waiting, watching me.

  "Whatever. Get in the kitchen, I'll do your little monkey dance. But then you're spilling your guts." I turned on my heel and headed for the kitchen.

  "Wouldn't be the first time today." Hack said.

  Chapter Six

  We met up in the kitchen after I'd gotten some things out of my bag and Hack found a pair of my sweats and an old flannel to wear. They were a bit small for him, he's quite a bit stockier than I am, but it was better than the sheet-toga. I cleared a spot off the dining table and set the coffee tin I'd dug out of the trash on it, then rooted through my bag for a trusty piece of chalk while Hack and Swift stood nearby watching.

  "You've really let this place go, boy. You ain't looking too good, either," Hack said.

  "Yeah well it hasn't been all sunshine and puppy dogs around here since you went walk-about," I spat back at Hack and began creating my workspace. "Hanford's getting...darker. Now would you shut up so I can work?"

  There were more than a few ways to bend reality, to work magic. The most obvious, blatant, vulgar, and stupidly dangerous way of it involved stepping all over the tenuous laws of physics and distorting them beyond recognition. Like the whole chalk-comet business earlier, accelerating a mundane item's natural velocity to launch it like a rail gun; super cool on film, and devastating, as the late Bugbrain could attest, but reality isn't a fan of getting pushed around like that. It comes back on the offending mage with a vengeance, and I got off damn lucky with a headache. Mucking about with forces like that could've blown my head clean off.

  Seriously.

  The far more sensible, and reliable, method was much preferred by the mortality-conscious mage, such as myself. It involved manipulating the flow of the universe's unifying force, that tricky little thing called magic, and paradigms through ritualistic formulae. It all sounds even stuffier and more ridiculous on paper. But it damn well works, and has a much higher survival rate. And that is why I busily and as accurately as possible chalked out the prerequisite magical shapes and non-Euclidean scribbles around the coffee tin that would allow me to focus the necessary energies.

  "What's with all the nutty math stuff?" Swift asked quietly as I worked.

  "The totally unexciting side of the business, now hush," I said.

  Hack grunted and shot a wary look across the table at Swift, turning his attention back to me. I could feel his eyes watching as if an actual weight pressed against me, but I shoved it and everything else from my mind and focused on my work. I shifted spectrums so that I could perceive the subtle fluctuations of energy all around me, the sleepy grey aura that hung around the house itself from generations of mages honing and practicing their craft. I held my hands flat in the air over what I'd drawn and began envisioning the work in my mind, watching as the chalk lines began to flicker with little threads of ghostly light as reality started to shift.

  For thousands of years mages, will-workers, wizards, shamans, and the like have all known a fundamental truth that modern science is just beginning to grasp, namely that matter is simply energy in a static, defined form. If a person were able to perceive the flow of that energy all around them, underlying the fabric of creation, and manipulate it, they could alter and control it.

  Magic.

  In my mind's eye I could see atoms spinning in an intricate dance, stars in galactic orbits weaving a universal tapestry, the memory of a strong cup of coffee on a cold winter morning. The flickering lines of chalk on the table began to glow more brightly and a wispy haze coalesced inside the coffee tin as I stoked the spark of power inside myself, drawing in a deep breath.

  I held my breath, my power, and as I did, reality bent. The gentlest wave of distortion spread out into creation when I exhaled. The lines on the table flared a color that was all colors, the haze in the tin shimmering and solidifying. Stars blossomed before my eyes and my head spun, then I dropped back into the normal spectrum to see my work. There on the table sat a full tin of dark brown coffee.

  Behold my power and tremble ye mortals, coffee ex nihilo.

  "There. Happy?" I turned to look at Hack; he was looking at me with his arms folded over his chest and a small smile on his face.

  "Not bad, guess you haven't forgotten everything," Hack said. "I suppose now I owe you some answers."

  "You're damn right. Now have a seat and start talking, old man."

  I picked up the coffee and went over to the derelict electric coffee maker hiding in the shadows of the counter to begin the blissfully mundane ritual of making a fresh pot. I'm pretty sure Hack couldn't have cared less about a hot cup, he just wanted to gauge my abilities since the last time we'd seen each other. Before he left, a working like that, physically recreating a memory, would've taken me substantially longer to pull off, and a lot more energy. I'd gotten better since then, more efficient, at harnessing and manipulating magic.

  "I'd love to Tommy, but not with him here." Hack looked across the table at Swift as he spoke.

  For his part, Swift sat motionless opposite him, his face neutral and eyes unreadable behind his sunglasses. But you could feel the tension building between them, like the pressure in the air right before a lightning strike.

  "All right, we'll start with that." I pulled a mug down from the cabinet and smacked it onto the countertop. Hack and Swift both turned to look at me as I spoke, "I've known you a while now Swift, and out of professional courtesy I've never dug into your business, but that shit earlier, with the light, and the burning, and the whatever the fuck you are...It scared the willies out of me. The willies. I'd appreciate some clarification."

  The two of them sat looking at me like I'd grown a second head, I began tapping my foot impatiently, waiting for one of them to start talking. Swift looked distinctly uncomfortable, turning to stare down at the table top when Hack looked at me smugly, shiny blue eyes flashing.

  "You ain't got much sense, do you? He's Malakhim," Hack said like that explained everything. Swift shifted in his seat.

  "An angel? Swift's a lot of things but he's no damned angel. Besides, the Jehovah Sentience fragmented into splinters centuries ago. He's not...schizophrenic enough to be an angel," I said.

  Hack was about to speak when Swift looked up and took off his glasses, revealing his eyes had become the empty white voids I had seen earlier. Fantastic, I was officially in a room full of guys with freaky inhuman eyes and questionable intent. Hack snapped his mouth shut and half-rose out of his seat, but Swift raised a hand and turned to look at me. What little light that was in the room began to...blossom, growing and spreading until the whole kitchen was filled with an otherworldly radiance as Swift stood.

  "Malakhim is only one of the names the Children of Dust have given us across millennia. We do not serve the Crippled God; we are messengers of entities that pre-date this iteration of reality. Know that I mean you no harm, Thomas, and be content. Question no further, for your own safety, and your sanity. Had I wished for your destruction, you'd have as much hope stopping me as an ant standing agai
nst the sun. The old vessel knows this to be true; it is why he fears me." Swift's voice rang like a bell that vibrated in my bones.

  It scared the living shit out of me

  .

  Hack had risen to his feet, a nimbus of flickering light growing around his upraised hands, his eyes burning like flares. As much as some sick little part of me wanted so badly to see the two of them go head-to-head, I was pretty sure that would end very, very badly. I did the first thing that came to mind and slung the freshly brewed pot of coffee across the kitchen to go crashing into the table. Scalding liquid and glass flew everywhere, but both Hack and Swift leapt back, turning to look from each other to me with two pairs of unsettling eyes.

  "Knock it off, the both of you." I came around the counter and looked at the both of them like bad children; I even had my hands on my hips. "Not in my house, damn it. This is venturing dangerously close to a whole new realm of crazy that I'm not prepared to deal with."

  For a moment Hack and Swift just stared at me and I felt like all the air had left the room and I was standing at ground zero, waiting for the ominous whistle of impending nuclear destruction. Hack's eyes dimmed, the color slowly returned to Swift's and I took a shallow breath. The two turned to look at each other and gave a mutual nod, a slight dip of their chins.

  "Hack, level with me, what the hell's going on? I've come closer in one day to taking a dirt nap than I have in years. Too much shit's flying precariously close to the fan for it to all be coincidence, and your letter was chock full of doom and gloom." I felt more exhausted at that moment than I had all day.

  I revised my earlier estimate; I was going to be dead before noon.

  "I'm going for lunch. I'll be back." Swift snagged his sunglasses off the table, instantly looking more human, like those mirrored lenses were holding something in. Without another word, he ducked out of the kitchen.

  "Dangerous company you're keeping these days, boy," Hack said.

  "He's helped me out of some rough spots before. He makes a good meat shield and has a knack for dismantling things," I said, staring at the mess I'd made. Unfortunately, I didn't know any fantastical methods for making coffee explosions disappear. I ducked into the pantry to retrieve a broom and rags, "You're deflecting. Why'd you come back, Hack? What's going on?"