by R. L. King
Jason looked Stone over as if evaluating which job he wanted to trust him with, then handed him a pruner with long handles. “Okay, let’s get started. We’re pruning down some of the bushes and branches around the perimeter. Don’t take them out completely, just cut them back. We’re not looking for pretty here, so no channeling your inner Mr. Miyagi. We’ll come through and gather the cuttings when we’re done. Think you can handle that?”
Stone chuckled. “I’m not a complete incompetent, Jason. Give me a bit of credit.”
“Yeah, Jase,” Amber teased. “Let’s see what he can do. I’m glad he’s helping out.”
Jason grinned and turned up the radio, which was tuned to a classic-rock station. “Yell if you run into trouble, Al. I’m glad you’re helping too. Just giving you a hard time.”
Stone chose a likely-looking bush and began trimming back the wild overgrowth. He could probably stand to do this in his own backyard, he decided—he already paid someone to come through once a month and keep the place under control, but perhaps it might be nice to have a little more manicured yard.
The thought didn’t last long, though. The day was hot, and before long his hair was as damp as Jason’s, and rivulets of sweat ran down his back and chest. He was glad he’d started by using the sunblock, or he’d have a nasty sunburn by now.
Despite his best effort to focus on the work at hand, his thoughts inevitably returned to last night. He hadn’t slept very well as he turned the problem over and over, and had even risen from bed at three a.m. to consult Melvin Whitworth’s notebooks when a sudden thought had struck him, but it hadn’t panned out.
Damn it, something had to be going on! He didn’t buy the whole “adrenaline” thing. He’d seen Jason in the grip of adrenaline more times than he could count, but it still hadn’t given him the strength to wrench free of cuffs and rip the door off an elevator. The change in aura color had to indicate some change in Jason’s abilities, but if that were true, why hadn’t he seen any indication of it during his experiments with lifting heavier weights, running faster, or other physical feats?
There had to be something he wasn’t seeing here. Had something triggered Jason’s unknown abilities? Was it because Whitworth’s treatment had been fresh? Would it be necessary to re-inject him with the concoction to see the same results? If so, then Jason was out of luck because Stone didn’t have the faintest idea how to reconstruct the mixture. And without the rest of Whitworth’s notes, he doubted any of his alchemically-talented colleagues would either.
But it didn’t make sense. Stone barely noticed as he increased the ferocity of his pruning, sending little bits of bush flying in every direction around him. The aura was there. It was different. Whatever was active in there, it had to still be there, waiting for the unknown trigger to kickstart it again.
Wait.
The unknown trigger.
He tensed, cutting through a branch as thick as a man’s finger.
What if the adrenaline was relevant after all—not as a cause for Jason’s enhanced abilities, but as the trigger?
What if he couldn’t summon the abilities at will, but needed some kind of catalyst? In the archetypal story of a mother lifting a bus off her child, nobody had ever expected her to do it without the urgency and terror brought on by the accident. She needed the fear to drive away the body’s normal safeguards against overextending itself—to spur her to do something she’d otherwise never have a hope of accomplishing.
Maybe Jason was the same way!
He lowered the pruner and swiped his hair off his sweaty forehead, looking around for Jason. He didn’t see him, but he did see Amber over by the table, popping open a beer and swapping her machete for a weed-whacker.
I wonder…
He hurried over to her, newly energized as he leaped onto the rickety deck. “Amber…I wonder if you might help me test out a theory…”
They continued working for another hour as the day got hotter. Stone moved on autopilot, clipping away at the bushes along the north side of the house. Given the sheer number of them bordering the place, it was likely he could continue the same job for the rest of the day and still have some left over. Amber, meanwhile, was hacking at underbrush, switching between her machete and her industrial-strength weed-whacker, and Jason was using the chainsaw to take down low-hanging branches from the trees closest to the house.
“We’ll break for lunch in a half-hour or so,” Amber called. She’d been working her way steadily closer to Jason, and was now cutting brush only twenty feet from him. She had to yell loudly to get over the growl of the chainsaw.
Stone watched her, pretending to pay attention to his pruning but in reality waiting for a prearranged signal. His heart pounded with anticipation. He knew he was probably wrong and this would likely end up being yet another failed experiment, but he couldn’t be sure unless he tried.
Amber moved to her right, closer to Jason and directly beneath the oak tree she and Stone had identified earlier in the day. Twenty feet above her, a heavy branch overhung the sloped backyard, extending almost to the edge of the deck.
Stone almost forgot to prune as he watched Amber even more closely.
Any second now…
She turned toward him to swing her machete at a patch of brush, and gave him a nearly imperceptible nod as their gazes locked.
He barely moved, appearing to focus on the bush in front of him while reaching out with his power to take hold of the branch. Using not only his usual power from Calanar but also the extra he’d pulled from Jason yesterday, he gave it a sharp twist, wrenching it free of the trunk with a loud crack. Damn, it felt good to throw around that kind of power! The branch they’d selected was nearly six inches in diameter at the trunk and probably weighed at least a hundred pounds.
“Look out!” he shouted as the branch appeared to plummet downward. Keeping it under his control while still making it look like it was falling was tricky. The rest would be up to Amber…and hopefully Jason.
Amber put on a performance worthy of the stage. She yelped, jerking her head back, her eyes widening in shock and her face twisting into a terrified ‘deer in headlights’ gape.
Jason moved almost faster than Stone could follow. “Amber!” he yelled, already in motion. His body was a blur as he flung the chainsaw aside and covered the distance between them in less than a second. He lashed out with both fists, and another loud crack split the sudden silence. The branch, now broken into two pieces, flew toward Stone.
It almost hit him before he realized it was coming his way a lot faster than he’d planned. He shifted out of magical sight long enough to use magic to divert it. Both ends slammed to the ground, one on either side of him.
“Holy shit!” Jason panted, grabbing Amber and yanking her away from the tree as if he expected another branch to come down. “Al! Are you okay? I didn’t realize you were—”
He stopped when he got a good look at Stone and saw he was smiling. “What the—”
Then he looked at Amber and realized she was smiling too.
“What…the hell…is going on?” He pushed Amber away with shaking hands and stepped back, sweeping his baseball cap off and shoving his hair off his forehead. His eyes were wide, his expression still confused.
Stone grinned. “Congratulations, Jason.”
Jason’s gaze darted between Stone, Amber, and the tree. “Something…just happened.”
“Yes.”
His eyes narrowed. “You two were in on this.”
“Yep,” Amber confirmed, nodding in satisfaction.
Stone strode over to them and gripped Amber by the shoulders. “You were brilliant! You deserve a bloody Oscar for that performance!”
“Performance…” Now Jason glared at them. “You guys knew that branch was coming down?”
“Of course I knew,” Stone said. “I did it.”
“You—” His glare turned hard. “You dropped a hundred-pound branch on my wife?”
Amber laughed, pulling him i
nto her arms. “It’s all good, O Protective Hubby. I knew it was coming. And even if he didn’t have it under complete control, you honestly think I’d freeze up and let it hit me?”
It was almost funny to watch Jason cycle through a series of expressions: anger, confusion, fear, shock, and utter befuddlement. “So…you two planned this.”
“He’s a sharp one,” Stone said dryly to Amber. “I’d keep him if I were you.”
“He’s good in bed too,” she said in the same tone.
“Wait.” Jason staggered back until he hit the edge of the deck. He raised his hands and stared down at them as if he didn’t recognize them, then looked at the two broken pieces of branch on the other side of the yard. “I…did that.”
“You did.” Stone gestured, levitating one of the pieces and dropping it near Jason’s feet. It landed with a meaty thud on the carpet of leaves covering the ground.
Jason bent and hefted it. “This weighs like fifty pounds. So the whole thing must have been at least a hundred. And I…”
Suddenly, his face lit up like a little kid on Christmas morning. His gaze settled on Stone. “You figured it out!”
“I did. Go, me. Gold star for the mage who needs a long, hot shower.”
“I think we all do.” Amber vaulted onto the deck and dug in the cooler. “Would you settle for a beer? And we really ought to eat something. We’ve got some sandwiches packed…”
“Wait,” Jason said. “Hold on. I’m…still processing this.” He looked down at the branch and back to Stone. “So…come on, Al. Don’t keep me in suspense. What’s the deal? Is this real? Do I have…”
“Magic?”
“Yeah. Do I have magic? Did that crazy old guy actually do it?”
“It seems he did.” Stone joined Amber on the deck, accepting a bottle of beer from her. “All it took was working out the trick.”
Jason climbed up too, still moving as if he didn’t quite believe his body was under his control. “So…what’s the trick? That I have to be freaked out of my mind?”
“Essentially, yes…though I hope now that we’ve worked out the trigger, we won’t have to fool you into thinking your loved ones are in danger.”
“That could be inconvenient,” Amber drawled. She retrieved another cooler from under the table, opened it, and began handing out wrapped sub sandwiches.
“Come on.” Jason took a seat at the table but didn’t unwrap his sandwich yet. “Don’t leave me in suspense, Al. I know how much you like the sound of your own voice, and you’ve got an attentive audience here. Tell me everything.”
“Oi.” Stone chuckled. “Don’t insult the messenger.”
“Sorry. I mean,” Jason said with exaggerated politeness and a big grin, “that you enjoy lecturing. So make with the lecture.”
“Better.” Stone didn’t sit, but instead paced the deck with his beer. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get much useful data from Whitworth’s notes. There just weren’t enough of them. I think most of the good stuff was lost when he destroyed his lab—probably on purpose. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the situation you were in last time this thing manifested. You were terrified, and the whole place was coming down around your ears. I thought you might be right—that it was an excess of adrenaline that had nothing to do with magic.”
“Yeah. That’s what I was afraid of. So what changed your mind?”
“A couple of things. I realized all the times we tried to re-create what happened, it was under normal, non-stressful circumstances. You tried lifting weights, running, all sorts of physical activity, but there was no urgency to it.”
“Yeah, okay. And what was the other thing?”
“Your other power. I do apologize—I’ve been so focused on this business Gina discovered that I haven’t been at the top of my game for everything else. But last night when you reminded me about your other ability, I started thinking the two must be related. You already have a magical ability. An odd one, to be sure—I still haven’t found any records of anyone else with it—but definitely magic. So I surmised that Whitworth’s treatment must have…interacted with your existing magic in some way. Damned if I know how, and that’s going to bother me until I work it out, but we don’t need that knowledge to go forward.”
“I don’t get it, though.” Jason was already halfway through his sandwich and eyeing another one. “What’s my ability to give power to mages got to do with…”
“Leaping tall buildings in a single bound?” Amber offered.
Jason glared at her, but he looked too stunned and happy to make it stick.
“I was watching your aura while you performed your little feat of strength,” Stone said. “And don’t worry—before you’re tempted to punch my lights out for putting your blushing bride in danger, I had full control over that branch at all time.”
“Plus,” Amber added, “like I said, I knew it was coming, and you know I could easily have jumped out of the way.”
“That too.” Stone nodded. “I wouldn’t have risked it without a fully consenting partner with supernatural abilities. But anyway, I was watching. And you lit up like a bloody Christmas tree when you leaped into action.”
“I…did?” Jason stared at his hand again.
“You did. Your aura flared around you almost like some sort of…force field. I’m not certain of the extent yet, but I suspect in addition to the extra speed and strength, you probably had some sort of protective barrier around you. We can test that further too, of course. This is going to be tricky, because I still don’t know how to induce that level of adrenaline without fooling you, but we’ll get there.”
“Shit…” Jason murmured. “That’s…amazing.” He looked up. “And…you don’t think it’s temporary? It’s not gonna just fade away like what happened with that potion?”
“I’d be quite surprised if it did, given that your aura hasn’t reverted to its original color after this much time. I haven’t seen any change at all. I think whatever change Whitworth’s concoction made to you, you’re stuck with it.”
“Shit…” he whispered again. Then his grin widened. “So your blood makes me strong, Al. That sounds like…I dunno…some kind of weird vampire country song.”
Stone sighed. “I can’t take you anywhere.”
Jason finished one sandwich and grabbed another, sobering. “That’s…amazing, though. I don’t get any of it—I don’t see how injecting me with your blood can do something like this, but I’m not gonna argue with it. I just need to figure out how to control it.”
“I think my blood was just a small part. Whitworth had most of it worked out already—his only mistake was relying on his own blood, which wasn’t potent enough to do the job.”
“Yeah…maybe. Can we do more experiments, though? If you can figure out how I can make this work at will…”
Stone didn’t want to say his next words, but he couldn’t lie to Jason. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. You’re right—this is an amazing power, and potentially quite useful. But I’ve got to tell you that it’s possible you’ll never be able to call on it at will.”
He frowned. “What’s that mean? Why not?”
“Obviously I don’t know anything else yet—we’re still at the early stages of our experiments. But if the ability is triggered by something external—adrenaline, your fight-or-flight instinct, excessive fear—then it might not be possible to induce that without an actual, legitimate stimulus.”
“I don’t follow. You mean, I won’t be able to do it unless I really am scared or freaked out or whatever?”
“Possibly. There is family precedent for it, remember.”
“Huh?” Both Jason and Amber looked at him in confusion.
“Remember Verity’s ability to eject the Evil from their host bodies?”
“What’s the Evil?” Amber asked.
“Long story.” Jason grabbed a bottle of water from the cooler. “I’ll tell you all about it later.” He focused back on Stone. “Wait…you’re talking about h
ow she couldn’t do it unless it was threatening her or somebody else directly, right?”
“Yes, exactly. It might not be possible to fool your body—or your mind—into exhibiting the response when there’s no reason for it.”
He considered. “Yeah…I see where you’re going. And that would suck, I guess—but not entirely. I mean, yeah, it would be nice to be that strong and fast and hard to hurt all the time, but if I have to only do it some of the time, doing it when somebody’s in danger is probably the best choice.”
“That’s the best way to look at it. But don’t give up yet. You know how I am with a puzzle, and this is a good one. As long as you don’t mind me poking and prodding you—aurically speaking, anyway—and taking a bit more of your blood for examination by my crack team of alchemists, we’ll get this sorted out and find you an answer.”
“That’s great, Al. I never thought I’d thank you for trying to kill my wife, but…”
“I’m happy to take one for the team,” Amber said with a grin. She glanced over Jason’s shoulder out into the yard. “But remind me to watch where I stand in the future.”
“Huh?”
Stone got up, following Amber’s line of sight over the deck rail. “Bloody hell. Me too.”
“What are you two talking about?” Jason leaped up and joined Stone at the rail, then gripped it and sagged as he spotted what the two of them were looking at.
The chainsaw wasn’t running anymore—its safety cutoff switch had ensured it stopped when Jason had taken his hand off the trigger—but it now hung suspended, its blade buried six inches deep into a stout oak tree.
19
Verity called Stone late the next morning, waking him from a sound sleep.
“Hey,” she said brightly. “I’m back, and I’ve finally worked through all the dust and spiders. Want to have lunch or something?”
“Er.” Stone threw off the covers, sending Raider leaping to the floor. “What time is it?”