by C. T. Phipps
“Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. That is messed up,” I said, before realizing that wasn’t exactly a sympathetic response.
Alex made a turn down a road that I knew led nowhere. “Yes. It left me traumatized and hearing voices which, combined with the fact I’m neuroatypical, led them to misdiagnose me with something much worse. I spent a year in a mental institution as I mentioned. I eventually returned to my mother’s home but it was never the same between us. In fact, I believe that’s part of the reason she adopted Lucien. It was her chance to have a do-over with a child she hadn’t utterly failed or hated.”
Yikes. “I’m sorry, Alex. That’s…terrible.”
“It is what it is,” Alex said. “After I finished high school, my mother and I parted ways. I sought out a mentor for sorcery and ended up studying under Kim Su after a particularly grueling series of tests. I completed my degree in psychology simultaneously with finishing my final test to become a master of spirit magic. Given my family history, nobody wanted me joining up. I managed to just squeak by, though.”
“Because you were a wizard?” Emma asked.
“I speak fluent Spanish and know a little about forensic accounting,” Alex said. “That put me over the edge with the other magical candidates.”
I saw there was more to the story. In my head, I saw a vampire rapist being stabbed with a wooden dagger in a sorority house by a trench-coat-and-hat-wearing Alex, a pair of police officers behind him. The idea of Alex being a vigilante fighting evil in the post-Reveal world amused me before I remembered “hunters” had always existed and tended to target people like me.
That explained how he’d managed to get in the FBI. It was just an irony that he was probably a guy who was more liberal than most in supernatural law enforcement. A part of me envied him. How could it not since I was ready to track down and murder my second evil god of the week.
“Wait, if you’re a master of spirit magic, then why can’t we just use you to exorcise the Red Wolf?”
“I don’t have the juice for it. Not a spirit as powerful as it.”
Huh, well, that was honest. “So if we don’t get Kim Su’s help we’re—”
“Yeah,” Alex said.
Well, we had the Merlin Gun. I wasn’t going to let my family stay endangered. I just hoped Emma would be able to forgive me, though I doubted she would. I really hoped Alex’s Yoda would come through for us.
The car pulled to a stop in the middle of an empty trailer park which was set for demolition. It had been taped off with signs built around it. The O’Henrys had plans to turn Bright Falls into a resort town like New Detroit, but so far, they’d only managed to make one enormous hotel which had never been more than half full until this week. The fact they were planning on building another hotel here by the look of the signs said they sometimes had more money than sense.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“The summoning,” Alex said.
“Ooo, Grandpa isn’t going to like that,” Emma said. “Do it!”
“It’s going to take a lot out of me,” Alex said, raising his hands. “I’m also going to need everyone else to do something.”
“What?” I asked. “Chant? Hold hands? Pray?”
“Close your eyes.”
“Okay,” I did so.
“Everyone,” Alex said. “That means you, Maria.”
“Aww!”
A second passed.
Alex said, “Okay, you can open them now.”
“What?” I said, opening my eyes. “You can’t have…what the holy hell?”
A strip mall had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the woods, displacing the deserted trailer park and surrounding us with a road to town. Even the weather was different as the rain had suddenly let up even though I could hear it just a few hundred yards away. A patch had emerged in the clouds above us.
The strip mall wasn’t particularly impressive with a Dollar Store, Big Buy, an IHOP, a beauty salon, a game store, and a few other strip mall sort of places. All of the businesses seemed open and there were people in the parking lot we’d suddenly found ourselves in. I also noticed, at the end of the half-square of stores was a small store called “KIM SU’S THE TOWER - FOR ALL YOUR OCCULT AND SCENTED CANDLE NEEDS.”
I did a double take between it and Alex. “Are you frigging serious?”
“I’m afraid so,” Alex said.
“You conjured this?” I asked, stunned. “Just how powerful are you?”
“Not as much as you’d think,” Alex said. “Kim Su keeps an extra-dimensional pocket of time and space around her so she can move around at will without discomfort. I didn’t create this, just called it to Bright Falls. It exists in other places simultaneously at her will and time. However, for the purposes of Bright Falls, you could go down to the mayor’s office and find it’s always been there.”
“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. “What do they sell in the stores here? Mogwai?”
“Mostly toilet paper and liquor,” Alex said. “When you get to be as old as Kim Su, you want access to all of the stuff you like without difficulty.”
“It is wrong I find this both awesome and incredibly lame?” I asked, trying to take it all in.
“I was hoping for a real tower,” Emma said.
Maria stepped out of the car. “If anyone needs me, I’m going to be buying liquor.”
“That’s probably not good given your condition,” I said, watching her leave.
“It’s antiseptic!” Maria called back.
I watched her depart into the liquor store by the Big Buy.
“I like her!” Alex said, smiling.
I rolled my eyes. “Is it safe to let her go wandering about with evil gods in the woods? Which I’m really upset isn’t a euphemism.”
“This is probably the only place in Bright Falls which is one hundred percent safe from the Red Wolf,” Alex said,
“Call it the Big Bad Wolf,” Emma said, her voice low. “It hasn’t been the Red Wolf in a very long time.”
I looked over at the Tower store. “Does your master know we’re coming?”
“Now she does,” Alex said, frowning. “Mind you, it may be on the other side of the line between polite and incredibly presumptuous to summon her home to this place. We didn’t exactly leave on the best of terms.”
I felt my head. “Now you tell me. What did you do?”
“I kinda-sorta stole the Merlin Gun,” Alex said. “I wanted to hunt evil with it.”
“You are not nearly as nice and law abiding as an FBI agent should be,” Emma said, frowning.
“You’re right about that,” Alex said, unbuckling his seatbelt. “But I try.”
I reached under the passenger’s seat and pulled out the Merlin Gun before making sure the safety was on and hiding it in my purse. I didn’t normally carry one, but I was dressed up for today’s meeting. Thankfully, I’d brought my work shoes so I wasn’t stuck wearing high heels trying to save my family. “Yeah, giving me your gun feels a whole lot less cool now that I know it’s hot. Also, was asking her to teach me an apology?”
“No,” Alex said. “I believe you have a talent which should be nurtured.”
“What was yours?”
Alex paused. “I thought it was to bring justice. Now I think it’s more to be a defender of humanity in all of its forms.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?” Emma said.
“Sometimes,” Alex said.
I tried not to gag at the righteousness on display. Then again, I didn’t blame Alex for wanting to go out in the world and slay monsters. If I’d had his childhood, I’d try to make up for what had happened to me too. I couldn’t imagine being responsible for the death of…oh wait, yeah I could. Huh, maybe the FBI agent and I had more in common than we thought.
The three of us headed through the glass door of the Tower shop and I was immediately overwhelmed with the auras within. The Tower looked like a combination of knick-knack shop and one of the post-Reveal occult stor
es which had popped up in recent years. There were a variety of knives, swords, and axes on the wall but no guns.
I saw dozens of ordinary objects on tables, marked with little cards and tags ranging from teddy bears to expensive jewelry under glass. Bookshelves were filled with spiral notebooks next to expensive medieval-looking volumes and those were next to regular shelves of the store’s titular scented candles. I also saw a comic book rack with Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #1 that didn’t look like reprints but were next to more recent comics (also a few Playboys).
And everything inside this place was magic.
Having the ability to sniff out magic, I found my attention going in every direction around me, trying to trying take in all of the auras about me. I accidentally bumped into a table that caused a baseball to roll against me and I was filled with an image of it being used to win the World Series. The item had since been enchanted to bring general good luck and success to any contest one engaged in. My hand also waved over a key that I found out had been carried by a thief for decades as a good luck charm that could increase one’s ability to not be seen. Another item was a lucky rabbit’s foot which, ugh, made a person able to have sex for hours. I paused, thinking about that, then checked the price. Really? Ten bucks? I needed a shopping cart.
No, Jane, focus!
“I think Stephen King wrote about this store,” Emma said, looking around. “Except this is a lot trashier.”
“If we can’t get Master Kim’s help in defeating the Big Bad Wolf, then maybe we can find aid in the objects here. Everything has a price.”
“Our souls?” Emma said.
“No,” Alex said, pulling out his credit card. “Something much costlier.”
That was when I heard a deeply annoyed young woman’s voice with a…Southern accent? “A werewolf, a wizard, and a weredeer walk into my shop. It sounds like a joke but I’m not laughing.”
That was when I heard a shotgun cock.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I turned to see a girl who looked about my age with long raven hair, copper skin, and Asian features I was inclined to say were Chinese but that covered a lot of groups. She was wearing a pair of shorts, a blue robe that was open in the front, and a shirt with floral patterns. I also saw a pair of unicorn slippers on her feet. It was the ultimate in ‘I don’t give a crap’ wear. Except, I also noticed she was carrying a shotgun too. It was covered in the same sort of sigils as the Merlin Gun. In a room full of powerful objects, it stood out as the strongest.
“Master,” Alex said.
“Dumbass,” Kim Su said. “Deer lady, Wolf lady.”
“Hi!” Emma said, cheerfully.
“You look like a teenager,” I said, trying to avoid drawing attention to the fact she was pointing a gun at us.
“You look like an adult,” Kim Su said, lowering her shotgun. “When I was young, you probably would have five or six kids and then die at thirty in childbirth so your husband could remarry.”
I grimaced. “How old are you?”
Kim Su paused. “Actually, I’m not too sure. Things get a little hazy after the last three thousand years, but it was after the Elder Gods ruled the universe. I recall it still being a novel idea that the Earthmother and Sun had convinced the vampires as well as werewolves to turn against their masters. Most of the New Gods were still new back then.”
“I don’t recall this from my Bulfinch’s Mythology,” I said.
“You wouldn’t.” Kim Su shrugged. “Humanity still has trouble with the idea it’s a fundamentally uninteresting species to the rest of the universe.”
“We are not!” Emma said, indignant.
“I don’t think you’re included in that,” Alex said, correcting her. “Kim Su is of the old school that thinks of humans, mages, shapeshifters, and the undead as all different species.”
“And what are you?” I asked, not really disagreeing with her. Humanity couldn’t get along with itself so why should be a big happy family? Strong fences made good neighbors and wow, that was racist again. I blamed my mother and dad now.
Kim Su stretched her arms out over her head, shotgun in one hand. “I am Kim Su, First of the Magi (as far as you can prove)! Holder of the Akashic Record and Master of So Many Disciplines Even I Don’t Remember Them all! That’s an official title by the way. Grandmistress of the Order of the Sun and former High Priestess of Mia!”
“Mia?” I asked.
“That’s what I call the Earthmother,” Kim Su said. “I like to change her name every few decades after my latest favorite actress. I think her next name will be Snookie.”
Wow, she was already behind the times. “I take it you’re from the ham-and-cheese school of sorcery?”
“I am a wizard, so I can do or say whatever I want,” Kim Su said. “It’s really awesome and you should try it. Being obnoxious and not getting stoned for it is a privilege modern women should not take for granted.”
“Believe me, I’m very appreciative of it but I need your help,” I said, deciding I liked Alex’s mentor.
“Yeah, and yet you came with Alex,” Kim Su said, glancing at him as she rested her shotgun’s barrel on her right shoulder. “My greatest disappointment.”
Alex lowered his head. “I’m sorry.”
I started to defend him. “Alex is—”
“Working for the government!” Kim Su interrupted, her mouth open in mock outrage. “I mean, did you retain nothing of what I taught you? You could have been a drug dealer like your brother, head of a cult, a mass murderer, or a supervillain and it’d make me think more of you. At least tell me you’re having sex with models while using your powers for personal gain.”
Alex did his best to maintain his composure but I could tell he was furious in the way adult children got in the presence of parents. “This is important, Master.”
“You graduated, so it’s Kim Su or Sexy Lady to you,” Kim said. “You stopped being my apprentice when you decided to go out on your own. There was no more I could teach you anyway.”
“Really,” Alex said.
“Oh hell no, I could have taught you new tricks every day until you died but you wouldn’t get to actually use any of them,” Kim Su said. “Besides, some of the stuff you do is impossible, like creating new gods out of TV shows and altering reality. You should stop that as we follow the laws of physics in this store—at least as I define them.”
“My family has been kidnapped,” I said, taking a deep breath.
“Well that sucks,” Kim Su said, walking to the counter and stepping behind it. She plopped her shotgun on the top. “What do you want me to do about it?”
I blinked. “I dunno, help?”
“Sorry, but I don’t get out of bed in the morning unless it’s an Elder God being awakened from its slumber. That’s why I have minions.”
“Minions?” Emma asked, looking at some of the goods in the store. I saw her pick up a handheld shopping basket and start browsing while I talked with Alex’s master.
“It sounds better than apprentices,” Kim Su said.
“It really doesn’t,” Alex said, walking up to her. He looked like he was trying to stay calm but it was clear Kim Su was getting to him. “Master, I beseech you, it was you who taught me to use my powers for good and the benefit of mankind.”
Kim Su furrowed her brow. “That doesn’t sound like me. You must be thinking of some other kickass archmage.”
Alex looked like he was ready to throttle her but managed to keep a straight face. “Jane is the woman I told you about. Her potential is immense and she could be a force for good in the world if she had your assistance. That’s not going to happen, though, if the local demon brings her family to harm.”
“The local demon has kidnapped them, that’s already bringing them to harm,” I corrected, walking up to her. “I can return the Merlin Gun to you if you do.”
Kim sat down in a stool that made her stand face-to-face with Alex. “You mean, return my stolen property to me in exchange
for a reward even though you received it from the guy who stole it?”
“Yeah?” I suggested.
“Keep it,” Kim said, patting her shotgun. “I’ve got like three. The weapons crave violence and sending souls to Hell. It’s what you get when you make them out of angelic metal and summon an Ophanim into one.”
I recognized that as a Christian angel type, that caused me to blink a bit. My gun had an angel inside it? That was a little unsettling. “Uh-huh. Well, what would make you want to help me?”
Kim Su paused and conjured a pair of glasses before leaning over the counter to look at me intently. “You claim to be a weredeer, right?”
“Claim?” I asked.
“Yeah, they’re shamans lately,” Kim Su said. “That’s new. I want you to prove it.”
“Okay,” I said, ready to turn into a deer. “Just point to where you want me to transform.”
“No, no, that can be faked by magic. I need you to do something more substantial.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Make a pun,” Kim Su said. “A good one.”
“What?” I said, angry she was joking around like this when my family was endangered.
“Oh Lord,” Alex said, covering his face.
“We don’t have time for this,” I said, balling my fists. “People have died.”
Kim Su sighed. “My dear, I have born witness to more murder, genocide, and raping than you could possibly imagine. I drove a spike into a Persian king’s head to save the Jewish people, gave Arthaeus a sword that could cut through steel, and managed to sneak in Nazi Germany to make sure Hitler’s plan to sacrifice all of Berlin to become a god failed. The Merlin Gun made it look like a suicide since I shot him right against the side of his head after forcing cyanide down his throat. His vampire lover too. Believe me, I’m aware people have died. They always died but if my ways sound strange, it’s because I know what I’m doing.”
My eyes widened. “You did all of that?”
“Maybe,” Kim Su said, straightening her back. “I could also be saying complete deershit but you’ll never know.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose to ward off a migraine. “And if I do this, you’ll help?”