Never Just One Apocalypse

by Karen L Mead

  “You’re Aeka. Short for Agniezcka, which is a name from Poland.”

  The knight turned to look at her, but of course, it was like looking into a mask of ice.

  “I was called that a long time ago.” Her voice was muffled, distorted.

  “So what are you called now?”

  “No one calls me anything now,” the knight said. She returned her gaze to the seemingly endless fields of snow and ice below the castle.

  Corianne kicked her feet, getting out some nervous energy. “So what do you do here, anyway? You’re waiting for something.”

  To her surprise, the knight stood up.

  “They attack, I defend. Over and over.”

  Corianne looked up at the gleaming silver figure.

  “You defend? Does that mean you kill them, cut their heads off?”

  “Usually.”

  “Are you killing people?”

  “No, not people.”

  “Oh, okay. That’s good, then.”

  “It is good.”

  A few moments passed in companionable silence. Eventually, Corianne stood up.

  “It was nice to meet you, but I’m looking for my mom. Usually I don’t find her, but sometimes I do, and when I do, she sings to me. That’s when I sleep the best.”

  The knight looked up at the sky. The snow, which had been falling softly for a long time, was becoming thicker, coming down in white sheets. The snow didn’t seem to cling to the knight’s armor, though; only clear tendrils of ice did, snaking around her armored limbs.

  “Your mother is not here. I am sorry.”

  “That’s okay, it’s not your fault,” said Cor, wiping ice and snow off the back of her dress.

  “It is my fault; your mother was supposed to be here. I took her place.”

  That took Corianne by surprise; she wasn’t expecting to find any trace of her mother from the moment she began climbing the castle wall, but apparently, she had been close. Closer than she’d been in a long time.

  It was a long shot, and probably a waste of everyone’s time, but she had to ask.

  “Do you…sing?”

  Chapter Two

  Alastair fiddled with the lock, then made a noise of frustration.

  “Ellie, luv, unhex the bloody door, would you?”

  “Of course, dear,” said David’s mother, moving from David’s side to stand in front of the service door. She moved her lips, made a few quick motions with her index finger, and there was a clicking noise as the lock popped open. She turned to David.

  “I hope you were paying attention, dear, because when your magic comes in, it’s you that’s going to be doing this.”

  David barely suppressed a sigh. He was seventeen years old; if there was any chance of his magic “coming in,” he was pretty sure it would have happened by now. As only one-quarter demon, it wouldn’t be unusual for him to have no magical powers at all, but his parents had been in denial about that for a good ten years. It showed no signs of letting up.

  “Yes, Mum. I see what you did.”

  “That’s my boy,” she said, stopping to give his arm a little pat before stepping through the door and beginning down the old stone steps. Alastair cast his son a doubtful look before following her. Shivering slightly, David followed.

  He’d been down into the bowels of the British Museum before, but never like this. When his mother had taken him to see the artifacts before, it had been an academic exercise; one of those things she did to ensure that he was properly “cultured.” There had been a sense that the dusty relics contained in the sub-basement were things from an era obliterated by progress, things that had no use in the modern world. Tonight, they were going to retrieve something in order to use it, or at least try to use it; it felt wrong to David, on some level he couldn’t explain.

  Halfway down toward the storage room, Hughes caught up with them. “Alderton,” he said, acknowledging David’s father. “Ellie. Good to see you.”

  “I wish it were under better circumstances,” said Ellie, as the tall man patted David on the back.

  “Good evening, Mr. Hughes,” David said dutifully, mentally wishing that he could be anywhere else right now.

  Exchanging further pleasantries quietly, the group of four descended the last two sets of aged stairs and began down a dark hall. The last time David had been here, the place had been lit with torches, but now paltry electric lights provided minimal illumination. He supposed it was kind of silly, using torches in this day and age, but using modern technology in a place like this seemed a little weird, too.

  To David’s surprise, when they reached the door to the appropriate storage room, his father stopped and turned around, facing Hughes.

  “Are we really going to do this?”

  “We have no choice.”

  “Are you certain?” Alastair whispered, as though he were worried that the rest of the Eastern Court might overhear. “We don’t want these bloody things around, no one wants them around.”

  “You’ve read the same intelligence I have, Al,” Hughes responded calmly. “You know what the Westerners are up to. Either we use them first, or we’re the victims.”

  “And they’re thinking the same bloody thing!” Alastair hissed. “This is, what you call it, this is mutually assured destruction! A stupid arms race we can’t back out of because everybody’s afraid of what the other bloke might do! We ought to be smarter than this!”

  Hughes put a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Maybe we should. But let me ask you this: Do you have any doubt that the Americans are brash enough to use the Phantasms, if they got the chance? Do you really?”

  Alastair let out a long, pained sigh. “They would.”

  Hughes nodded. “And you know full well they’re after our witches.”

  Ellie drew herself up to her full height. “Yes, and I’ll die before I let those upstarts touch me, or any of the other girls! I would absolutely die! Let those right bastards just try to put their hands on me, I say!”

  David had noticed that Ellie tended to get very worked up on this subject. Glancing at his mother, he found it hard to believe that the Westerners were falling all over themselves to abduct her, or any of the other witches he knew, but no one had asked his opinion.

  “Well said, Ellie. And nothing is happening tonight, you know: we’re just retrieving the artifact, as a matter of routine. It needs to be properly accounted for before we call a full vote on the summoning. So you can think of tonight as a formality, if you like,” said Hughes soothingly.

  “Yes, I suppose. No final decision is going to be made until the whole Court is in attendance,” Alastair said, mostly thinking out loud. “But I can’t stop thinking about it. We’ve been on the brink of war with them before, many times, but this time, it feels like it’s really going to happen.”

  “I know,” said Hughes, putting a large hand on the door handle. “And this time, those scheming American bastards will get their just deserts[GW1].”

  Against his better judgment, David spoke up.

  “Excuse me, but this whole thing isn’t because we’re still mad that they won the Revolutionary War, is it? Because I’m over it, personally.”

  He shrank under the weight of three withering stares.

  “You’ll have to excuse David, he thinks he’s a comedian,” said Ellie contemptuously.

  “Yes, well, he’d better watch his mouth at Court,” said Hughes with a strained expression. Then he turned to the door and turned the handle; it made a screeching noise, as though the mechanism had been dormant for some time.

  When Hughes turned his back to the Aldertons to enter the storage room, Alastair gave David a quick slap across the face. “What are you thinking? Think my name will protect you if you make fun of the Lords Arcane?”

  “But it doesn’t make sense, Dad,” David whispered, not wanting Hughes to overhear. “The Westerners have pretty much left us alone ever since they broke away, right? And the last time a witch was kidnapped, I heard that it was o
ne of our people kidnapping one of their girls. So why is everybody acting like they’re the ones out to get us?”

  Alastair opened his mouth, searching for words that would not come. Eventually, he grabbed David by the scruff of the neck.

  “Stop talking about things you’re too young to understand,” he snarled, pulling David into the room behind him. “You teenagers think you know everything, maybe we’ll send you over to New York by yourself and see how smart you are….”

  When his father released him, David took stock of the room. He was pretty sure he had never been in this particular storage room before, because he would have remembered one this big; the room was at least the size of the cafeteria at his school. Though most of the artifacts were stored in locked safes, some were out on display. An aged stone pedestal near the entrance held a single silver ring, which seemed to glow unnaturally brightly in the weak light; there was no placard. Clearly, anyone who was allowed in here was expected to know what the ring was, whom it had belonged to.

  “What’s this?” David asked his mother quietly, pointing to the ring.

  “That’s the Ring of Solomon. Don’t touch it.”

  “Really? It’s the real thing, not a replica?”

  His mother sighed. “Sweetheart, where do you think we are? I told you, this is where we keep the oldest, most valuable artifacts. Sometimes I think those stupid earbuds have destroyed your hearing.”

  As Hughes and his father moved on, commenting on the contents of different displays and even stopping to examine the contents of a few of the safes, David approached a large harp, positioned majestically in the center of the room. The instrument’s body was made of a creamy white substance, each elegant curve complemented by detailed engraving. The designs were unfamiliar to David, but that made the overall effect no less stunning. Even the strings were special; instead of being white or clear, they were made of some inky black substance that seemed to give off its own light. It was difficult to resist the urge to touch it, to rub his fingers over the harp’s neck and feel the incredibly fine details that must have been carved with ancient tools.

  “Is this carved from whalebone?” David asked his mother in a whisper.

  “I don’t know, it’s some kind of bone, clearly. Come on, let’s keep up with your father and Mr. Hughes,” she said, her high heels clicking on the tiled floor as she picked up her pace. David gave one last look at the harp before he turned to follow her.

  “The Anointed Rod,” Hughes was saying when David and his mother caught up. They were standing in front of a low glass case, with several weapons stored on brass hooks. “You know, for a long time we thought there were two of them, one for the Prophet and one for his brother. It’s only recently that our scholars concluded that all the references to the rod in the Sacred Texts must refer to the same weapon.”

  “So we have the only one,” said Alderton. “What a relief.”

  “Are you sure we have it?” asked David.

  Alderton’s face screwed up in anger. “David! What did I say about--”

  “No, look in the case,” David pleaded. “I see two swords, and that’s an axe, and that’s a spear…and that’s crossbow, or something, I dunno. A rod just looks like a stick, right? Do you see anything that looks like a stick in there?”

  There was a moment of silence as all the adults peered into the case.

  “He’s right,” said Hughes, finally.

  “It was here!” said Ellie, indignantly. “I remember, when I was a girl, my father took me to see it, right in this very room! It was hanging on that hook in the back!”

  “That was a very long time ago, Ellie,” said Alderton.

  “Excuse me?” said Ellie. Her tone could have frozen hot coals.

  “I hate to tell you this,” said David, feeling oddly elated for some reason he didn’t understand, “but sometime between when Mom was in kneesocks and now, someone made off with The Rod of Moses.”

  Chapter Three

  It started out as a typical school trip to the Sterling Zoo. Really, the Chemistry students should have taken their day trip to Morse Chemical—the plant where Chem students from Silver Crown Academy had been visiting for decades—but some idiot kid had burned his hand in a vat of chemicals last year, and the school board had bowed to parental pressure and canceled all further trips to the chemical plant. Now, rather than have no class trip at all, the Chem students got to repeat the zoo trip they had taken in Biology the previous year; the packets they had to fill out during the visit emphasized the biochemistry unit to try to make it somewhat relevant, but no one was fooled.

  Not that most of the kids minded, since for most, a trip to the zoo was way more fun than tromping around the rusty old chemical plant. The day of the trip turned out to be one of those perfect, sunny spring days with clear blue skies and virtually no humidity, so a feeling of euphoria reigned as the students leisurely strolled from exhibit to exhibit, polishing off their ices and other snacks with abandon. Everyone had been stressing over the upcoming SATs for months, and even with the test looming less than two weeks away, the break from academics was wonderful. The girls cooed and fussed over the cuter animals, while the guys each tried to outdo each other to see who could have the most devil-may-care attitude about the whole thing.

  One of the boys had even brought a skateboard, and he and a bunch of his friends were busy trying to do tricks off the railing surrounding the monkey habitat. Cassie was amazed that the chaperones hadn’t confiscated the skateboard, although it was possible that they themselves were so busy enjoying the weather that they hadn’t noticed yet.

  They’d better watch out; if one of those kids falls and hits his head, parents will complain that the zoo is also too dangerous, and then there will be no school trips at all.

  Cassie frowned as she held her activity packet up against one of the informative signs and jotted down the answer to an easy biochem question. Despite the gorgeous day, she couldn’t help feeling a bit peevish; she was one of the few students who had actually wanted to take the trip to the chemical plant. She was hoping to secure an internship for the summer, and the plant was one of her top picks. Now, she was missing out on a good opportunity to learn more about the place, and she would have to start from square one when it was time to apply.

  As she began walking toward the next exhibit, she wondered if Sam would be alright with her working at the chemical plant. Should she land the internship, she would have Miri nearby for safety, but he wasn’t terribly keen on her doing anything that would put distance between them, and the plant was far—on the very edges of the Sodatown neighborhood, almost outside the city proper. It seemed like it was going to be a tough sell, but she wasn’t going to sit back and do nothing this summer when she had to start applying to colleges almost immediately thereafter.

  Maybe Sam could moonlight there, so he won’t worry about me? He can’t get a science position since he doesn’t have a degree, but he could always get a job as a janitor or something.

  The thought of Sam wearing a janitor’s jumpsuit, carrying a mop and pail, brought a smile to her face, and that was when Jay caught up with her.

  “Isn’t this awesome?” said Jay. He had his packet in one hand, and a giant ice cream cone in the other. The two of them walked together out of the shadowed monkey enclosure and onto one of the shaded asphalt paths, pigeons and squirrels making themselves busy in the patches of greenery between exhibits. The trees had blossomed, and countless flower petals marked the sun-dappled path.

  “It’s about the same as it was last year,” said Cassie, “Although we do have way better weather this time.” Two girls, Madison Clarke and another student Cassie could never remember the name of, jogged past them, giggling.

  “You must be the only person who actually wanted to go the chemical plant,” said Jay, in between licks of his ice cream cone. “You need to lighten up.”

  Cassie had to cock an eyebrow at that.

  “Gee, you’re so right; it’s not like I have
any reason to be stressed out or anything.”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said, shifting his book bag as he walked. “What did you get for number 14?”

  “Do your own packet.”

  “C’mon, they’re probably not even going to grade it.”

  “I know Mike says that, but they might—”

  “They’re not going to grade it,” Mike said, falling in step with them. He was busy typing furiously on his tablet (technically her tablet, but whatever) while walking, something Cassie didn’t have the knack for. “The packet is just so they can pretend this is educational, but the teachers don’t want to have to do any work today either; you can tell just by looking at them.”

  Cassie followed his gaze to where several chaperones were clustered under a dogwood tree. A bunch of flower petals had landed on Ms. Servakis’ suit, and one of the male teachers was trying to brush them off, while the other teachers laughed heartily. Two of the younger teachers were obviously flirting next to the duck pond, and the Italian teacher was feeding the ducks and pigeons with crumbs from her croissant, even though the signs said you weren’t supposed to feed them.

  “Well…okay, probably not,” she admitted. “But I’m going to do mine just in case.”

  “Of course you are,” said Mike in a tone of mild disgust. He continued fiddling with the Venus 2800X as he walked.

  “What are you looking up, anyway?” Cassie asked, trying to see the screen over his shoulder. A bunch of the guys ran past them, and Cassie realized that some bright light of a teacher must have finally confiscated the skateboard.

  “Apartment listings. What do you think of this one?” he said, tilting the tablet in her direction. She stopped to look at the screen as Jay did the same, cupping his hand under his ice cream cone to keep any from dripping on the device. Normally glare from the sun overhead would be a problem, but not with the Venus 2800X, undisputed king (or maybe queen?) of tablets.