Aeon of Horus

by Paul Neuhaus

  Nate hissed between his teeth. “Shit then, girl. Why didn’t you say so? It’s no contest. Do the second one.”

  Ferley nodded again. “Yeah. I’m gonna change my answer. Do the second one.”

  The redhead grinned. “I’m so glad we invited you guys up,” she said.

  Pietro Laskov lost his patience. “This is ridiculous. Why’re we sitting here playing these games?”

  Quinn narrowed her eyes at the little Crimean. “We’re playing these games because I want to play them. And I have the power to burn you all to the ground where you sit.”

  This forced an uneasy quiet onto the room. Nate broke it. “Just to be clear,” he said. “You ain’t talking about burning us down, are you? As far as I can see, we ain’t been nothing but cooperative.”

  “Not to mention wildly disinterested,” Ferley added.

  Henaghan sighed. “No, I didn’t mean you guys. At least for the time being.”

  “Fair enough,” the two men from San Francisco said at once.

  “Mainly I just wanted everybody on the same page,” Quinn said. “Although, maybe in hindsight, it’d’ve been better to play dumb and let you all make whatever mistakes you were gonna make.”

  “Maybe you shoulda done that,” Nate interjected.

  “Yeah, girl,” Ferley said. “You just gave away your trump card.”

  “I agree,” Ristich said from his place at the table. “Nothing better than the element of surprise.”

  Gros folded her arms in front of her ample bosom. “At any point, did you hear any of us say we were going to go to San Francisco to try and lay hands on Set? We’d be damn lucky to have Horus. We’d live like royalty on the proceeds. Trying to get a matched set—pardon the pun—would likely only get us dead.” She looked at her posse and they nodded their agreement.

  “Forgive me for trying to cover all the angles,” Henaghan said. “But it’s not like you guys have been completely straight with me. Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “I know what I’m gonna do.” She turned to Simone. “You should give notice to the landlord.” She turned to Pietro. “Maybe now’s a good time to go back to Crimea.” Finally, she turned to Nate and Ferley. “Do you hear it, fellas? The sound of Vegas calling?”

  Ferley and Nate looked at one another and bumped fists.

  Quinn drew Molly off of the couch and exited the apartment. On the way up the steps to their own place, Molly whispered, “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Oh, I have no fucking clue,” the redhead said. “Not yet anyway. I need to talk to my mentor one last time.”

  When Quinn appeared in Darren Taft’s apartment, she hoped he’d had time to put out whatever feelers he was going to put out. She’d timed her appearance for hours later rather than minutes. In his own timeline, he was coming close to his demise. If this was even the right Darren Taft. She found the man in his bed, asleep. Feeling guilty, she nudged his leg. He didn’t awaken. Instead, he rolled over and said, “Salisbury!” with surprising volume (and ardor). Henaghan grimaced and gave Taft a thorough shake.

  Darren sat up, startled. “What is it?!”

  “Relax. It’s just me. I’ll be in the living room.” Quinn exited the bedroom and sat down on Taft’s ratty couch. Again, she decided to keep mum on the subject of Josie.

  Finally, the older man came in, scratching his belly. “I was having a humdinger of a dream,” he said.

  “I know,” the girl said cringing. “I don’t wanna hear about it.”

  Taft grinned. “Suit yourself,” he said. “But you were in it.”

  “Do you want me to projectile vomit all over this place, because I’ll do it.”

  Darren sat down with mock sullenness. “No, I don’t want you to projectile vomit all over this place.”

  “Did you—?”

  “Did I look into your story? About the statues? Yes, and it checks out. I did a long distance mind meld with a real big shot back east. Man knows his shit. Anyway, he gave a full-on rubber stamp to your story.”

  “Hmm,” Quinn said. “Why isn’t this problem more widely-known?”

  Taft shrugged. “How often you think your workaday Channeler runs into either of those damn statues? It’s a non-issue because it’s such an unlikely occurrence.”

  “Yeah, but the mesh is deteriorating. Any day we could be ass-deep in Asura.”

  “Huh. Reminds me of my dream. See you were—”

  “Enough!” Quinn shouted, clamping her hands over here ears.

  Taft grinned at her. “Alright, alright,” he said, running his hand through his thatch of yellow hair. “I mentioned the Asura thing to Merlin and he was surprisingly nihilistic.”

  “‘Merlin’? His name is ‘Merlin’?”

  “No, I was being cool. Actually, his name is ‘Clarence’. Anyway, Clarence said, ‘I’d have to know where the statues are to do anything about it, and I don’t know where the statues are.’ You’d think there’d be more urgency in the magical community, but I guess we’re all just a bunch of isolationist, no-fuck-giving assholes.”

  Henaghan scowled. “I’m starting to get that impression. What if—and this is where my head’s at right now—I took the statue of Horus and threw it into the Cauldron?” The Cauldron was the home of the Asura in the Astral Plane.

  “Interesting,” Taft said, weighing the plan’s merits. “That’d solve your problems in the short term. The Asura would have the statue but they’d have no way of getting Set. Unless they could trick someone into bringing it to them. Let’s put that possibility aside for a moment and go bigger…”

  “Okay,” the girl said.

  “Tossing Horus into the dumpster gets you off the hook, but it doesn’t repair the mesh. And the mesh is definitely coming down. Clarence said—and I quote—‘No one knows when it’s gonna rupture for good. Could be another hundred years. Could be tomorrow. Either way, the Asura can afford to wait’. By putting your statue in the Cauldron, you pretty much guarantee the mesh’ll never get repaired.”

  “Right,” Quinn replied, twisting her lips and mulling over what her former teacher said. “All that makes sense.” She stood, her brain awash in conflicting strategies.

  Darren looked up at her. “Remember your promise. This is the last time you pop in.”

  “This is the last time,” Henaghan agreed.

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Looks like I’m going to San Francisco,” Quinn said.

  “Good luck,” he said. “Don’t lose your head.”

  Quinn settled down onto her bed and sighed. That was, very likely, the last time she’d see Darren Taft alive and a wave of melancholy settled over her. Channeling gave her the weird ability to go to the past and to other realities and she realized maybe that wasn’t a good thing. Visiting with dead friends only makes you miss them more in the present, she thought.

  “What’s the deal?” Molly said.

  “I hear San Francisco’s lovely this time of year.”

  “Road trip?” Blank asked.

  “Road trip,” Henaghan confirmed.

  Molly grabbed a duffel out of the floor of their closet. Moving around the room, she grabbed a day or two’s-worth of clothing for both of them. Toiletries. Magazines for the downtimes.

  Watching her, Quinn said, “I’m… not sure you should come.”

  “Fuck you,” Molly said without looking up from her packing. “Try and stop me and we’ll tangle.”

  “It’s not like you can really come with me,” the younger woman replied. “I may have to… infiltrate somewhere.”

  Molly considered the point for a moment. “We’ll get a hotel. I’ll stay there while you do whatever you have to do. I’ll play the worried wife until we get a better plan.”

  Quinn shook her head and took her girlfriend’s hands. “Now I’m calling bullshit. Your job isn’t to worry yourself into an early grave. I’m not gonna let myself do that to you.”

  “I… fully endorse that idea. Right now, though, we’re doing what we
can with what we have, and what I have is waiting for you to come back while you kick ass. I wanna do that from a hotel in San Francisco.”

  Quinn squeezed Molly’s hands, let them go and stood. She slipped on her shoes.

  “Where’re you going?” Molly said.

  “We can’t exactly take a statue to NorCal if we don’t have a statue.”

  “Good. Alright. Be careful.”

  Quinn stood on tiptoe to kiss Blank on the lips. “I’m going to the bus station, Thelma. How bad can it be?”

  Henaghan decided not to travel by car during the rest of her time in Los Angeles. It was too slow and too easy to track. She went into her living room and over to Annabelle’s cage. She dug into the little container of birdseed, pulled out the locker key, and dropped it into her oversized bag. Then she summoned a portal. A second later, she was in a stall in the women’s restroom at the nearby bus terminal. Unlike Pietro Laskov, she did not wind up with one foot in the commode.

  Opening the stall door, she looked both ways. At the sink, there was an elderly woman who obviously thought it odd there was someone coming out of a stall she thought was empty. Quinn smiled at her and exited. The old woman watched the younger one enter into the terminal proper.

  Having come from her apartment rather than through the front entrance, Henaghan had to get her bearings. The flow of back-and-forth foot traffic scrambled her brains. Finally, she decided the lockers were a left then another left. Again checking her surroundings, she shot out of the bathroom, determined to make this a quick and pain-free excursion. She reached her locker, used her key and claimed the bundle inside. As soon as she closed the locker door, a strange thing happened: a crossbow bolt embedded into it and vibrated in place. For a second, she thought how odd it was that a crossbow bolt would appear out of nowhere. Before her brain told her that, typically, crossbow bolts come out of crossbows, another bolt struck the locker—this time a lot closer to her head. The girl spun and looked in the direction of the missile fire. There was a man, dressed in black from head to toe, fixing another bolt and pulling back on his bow. Needless to say, the general public had noticed the peculiar circumstance and were scattering in all directions.

  Fuck, Quinn thought. She’d been attacked once before in a public place (a motel on the way to Barstow) and she tried to avoid Public Displays of Channeling. There was no good reason to upset the locals with magic-use if it could be avoided. Plus, she had no desire to make the news. (A headline flashed into her head. Area Woman Actually a Magical Badass.)

  But the die had been cast. To help mitigate the potential blowback, Quinn put a refractive bubble around her head to hide her features.

  With a flick of her wrist, the redhead set the man’s crossbow on fire. It went out almost immediately. (It was probably made of carbon fiber or some other not-particularly-flammable material.) With another flick of her wrist, she froze the bow and it shattered in the man’s hands. He fell to the ground, his fingers frost-bit.

  Ordinarily, Henaghan went fire. Today, she’d go ice.

  Three more Hexenjäger skidded to a stop behind Quinn’s original attacker. They too carried crossbows and all three of them raised their weapons. It occurred to the girl there was probably something special about those crossbow bolts given the Hexenjäger’s mission of fighting Channelers. She’d need to avoid getting shot (but, of course that’d been true even before she had the realization).

  Henaghan hugged her bundle to her body and focused her will at her attackers. A portal appeared beneath the four witch hunters, a gaping disc on the linoleum. The quartet started to drop through it, but amulets they all wore flashed in tandem. Quinn’s portal closed without her permission and her enemies regained their footing right off. Three bolts rattled into the lockers behind her and she did the smart thing. She ran.

  As she weaved through frightened and fleeing would-be bus passengers (bumping and being bumped), the girl did some math in her head. It was no surprise the Hexenjäger had protections against magic, but why had the freezing spell worked when the portal had not? The answer came to her quickly: their anti-magic amulets protected the men from anything mystical like portals through space and time, but it couldn’t do anything against phenomenon based in every day physics. Like fire and ice.

  Good to know.

  She made a quick right and came face to face with still more Hexenjäger. Two this time. Different ones, meaning they were numerous and well-organized. One of them was even a woman which meant the witch hunters were equal opportunity assholes. Which was nice. Quinn shot a single shard of ice not at the Hexenjäger but at the fire extinguisher on the wall. The hallway filled with fire retardant fog and Henaghan used the confusion to dash the other way. She’d made a sound choice. The corridor she’d chosen was a straight one with no more intersections. Better still, it ended in an emergency exit. She poured on the speed and, tripping the fire alarm, she ran out into the California sunshine.

  She was in the facility’s rear parking lot, but she was surrounded.

  Two black vans. Six or eight more men and women in all-black garb—among them Matt Abrigo and Uriah Yellen. Two men with strange, lightning rod-like poles standing at opposite corners of the lot (what these guys were up to was not at all clear). Without thinking, Henaghan pivoted and scrambled back to the building, bundle clutched tight. She didn’t factor in she’d come through an emergency exit and there’d be no door handle on the outside of the building.

  Turning again to face her harassers, Quinn summoned a portal of her own. It appeared in the air in front of her, fizzled, then died. With her peripheral vision, the girl saw both of the “lightning rods” glow in rapid succession with the failed portal and then dim. They were keeping her here, dampening her ability to Channel an exit. There would be two other staff bearers at the front corners of the bus depot facility to close the circuit and make the area a teleportation-free zone. This wasn’t a happenstance gambit on the part of the Hexenjäger. They were prepared and well-organized. Their days of being an ineffectual lunatic fringe were over. Quinn dropped the refractive bubble from around her head.

  Uriah Yellen stepped forward. “That was a neat trick back at the hangar,” he said. “I would not have guessed ‘Late British Rock Star Appears to Save the Day’ would ever be an option. But no one’s getting in or out of this area so Bowie will not save you this time. Nor Freddie Mercury. Nor Marc Bolan of T-Rex.”

  Beside his disfigured brother-in-arms, Matt Abrigo laughed.

  “Yes,” Yellen said to him with a smile. “I am a fan of the British Invasion of the 1960s and early 1970s. This should come as no surprise.” The Israeli turned to Quinn. “You can’t leave. Your ability to fight us with magic is inhibited, and we outnumber you twenty to one.” He took three steps forward and held out his right hand. “Give the statue to me.”

  Quinn pressed the bundle more tightly against her chest. She addressed Matt Abrigo. “You’re working with Simone Gros. Why? What do the Hexenjäger have to gain from a common thief?”

  Abrigo’s expression went slack and he flushed. Uriah turned to him with a question poised on his lips. An interesting development. It didn’t occur to Henaghan that only Abrigo might be working with Simone and not the Hexenjäger collectively. The question had stirred a bigger hornets’ nest than she’d intended.

  “What is this?” Yellen said to his more handsome companion.

  “I—” Matt began, stopped and began again. “What is it? It’s bullshit is what it is. Why would I have anything to do with an Asura?”

  Quinn interjected. “Gros lives in the apartment beneath mine. Just a few blocks from here. I saw Matthew talking to her right hand man in the parking lot of the complex. They were chummy. Matt gave the guy a metal attache case containing—I dunno—anti-magic party favors, maybe.”

  “This right hand man… You’re referring to Arnold Ristich? Four star chef and killer of women and children?”

  Henaghan had been unaware of Ristich’s allegedly murderous past, bu
t she answered in the affirmative.

  “Hmm,” Uriah said, turning his attention back to his cohort. “We will have to table this discussion for a later time, but it is interesting. Very interesting, indeed.” He turned back toward Quinn. “What is—”

  But the girl seized upon her opportunity. She knew that a circuit was only good if it was complete. She launched another dart of solid ice in the direction of the leftmost rod-bearer. The projectile penetrated the man’s armor beneath his anti-magic amulet. With an “oof”, he went down, clutching the hole in his body. He dropped his pole and Henaghan again summoned a portal. The staff held by the still-standing Hexenjäger flashed, but it had nowhere to flash to. The gateway swallowed Henaghan up and she was gone.

  Quinn reappeared in her own bedroom.

  Carrying a tube of toothpaste and two toothbrushes, Molly entered from the bathroom. “Oh, you’re back,” she said. “Did you get it? Of course you got it. You’re holding it. Why’re you all sweaty?”

  “Come on, come on, come on,” the redhead said, snatching the dental hygiene implements out of her girlfriend’s hands and throwing them into the duffel. She zipped the duffel and handed it to Blank. “We’re going,” she said.

  “But I didn’t get the deodorant,” the older woman said, looking back toward the restroom.

  “They have deodorant in San Francisco. Not on Haight Street, but everywhere else.” With that, the redhead grabbed the brunette by her arm and the two left Los Angeles.

  6

  San Francisco

  Molly and Quinn appeared in an alley next to the accommodations Quinn had chosen online. As Henaghan had hoped there were no vagrants to report the sudden and mysterious appearance of two strange women. Pulling Blank along by her hand, the smaller woman rounded them onto the sidewalk and into the lobby of the Hotel Tiamat. The place was all Persian rugs and stained glass lamps on marble surfaces. Inset into the ceiling was a bas relief of a dragon with the head and arms of a woman.