by Chloe Garner
“But our friends aren’t,” Valerie said.
“You got friends in trouble, too?” Jason asked. She looked at Ethan and he shook his head.
“None of them know where to look for us. You aren’t with your mom, so Martha isn’t useful.”
“They all know where to look for us,” Valerie said. “Sasha has the paper she wrote it down on.”
Ethan shook his head.
“No, no one knows about that. We took off because the Council squeezed you too hard. No plan. No way of contacting anyone either of us have ever known without them reporting it to the Council. Your parents are in the wind.”
“Geez, you two are screwed,” Jason said.
“You’re very helpful,” Valerie said, and he grinned.
“Kiddo, I fight demons for a living. Human problems are special, I’ll give ‘em that, and the way that Sam and Sam reacted to you, you’re right in the thick of it, but we’re all screwed. What’s cool is that we win anyway.”
“Will you show me how to use a sword?” Ethan asked, and Jason grinned.
“You stick around long enough, and no one turns up begging for attention, I’d be happy to.”
Ethan reached slowly for a bag of chips and Valerie rolled her jaw to the side.
“Just for tonight,” she said. “And then I want to go see my mom and figure out what we actually do next.”
Ethan nodded enthusiastically and grabbed the chips.
“Demons,” Valerie said after a moment. “How do people live with them being around?”
Jason shrugged.
“There’s one around here, somewhere, if you look quick.”
“What?” Valerie demanded, rolling forward to stand, but Jason held up his hand.
“She’s bound to Sammikins, and she can’t do anything that Miss Samonica herself wouldn’t approve of, so she’s harmless. Pretty useful, too. They’re like people. All of them. They’re just people who can’t die and only think about themselves and have a gameplan that involves hell. You know. People-y.”
Valerie stared at him, and he grinned slowly.
“Look, kid, the world is big and wide and I thought I had it all figured, out once upon a time, too. Any more, I’m not even surprised when someone walks in with something I literally thought was impossible, because… I’ve just seen it too many times. You roll with it. Take it for what it is, change the pieces you really can’t stand, pretend like you can stand the ones you really can’t change. Heaven. Hell. Angels. Demons. Magic. All of it.”
She blinked at him slowly, and he stood, brushing orange powder off on his jeans.
“And with that, I’m going to make a dramatic exit and go sleep in my piece of crap trailer while you go up to your fantastic four-poster beds. Really, though. Dumb luck or design, you ended up in a good place. Don’t be in too much of a rush to split back out of here, okay? You’re just kids. And, look, I started when I was just a kid, too, but you are just kids, and you need to take it slow. You take off too fast in the wrong direction, you might end up where no one comes to get you when you find you can’t dig yourself back out. Cool? Right. Night.”
“Did he say Heaven?” Ethan asked. “He did, didn’t he? I didn’t just, like… Pop a wire in my head and start hearing things?”
“And then he left without explaining any of it,” Valerie said, nodding. “These people are crazy, Ethan. We shouldn’t be here.”
“But you agreed to stay,” Ethan answered. “Because you know this is exactly where we were supposed to come.”
“You’re sure?” Valerie asked, taking a second bag of chips and opening it. He scooted further around the couch to pull her next to him.
“You wouldn’t have agreed to stay if you didn’t feel safe here. They’re… They’re Shadows. Like us. A third group, not with the Council, not with the Pure. They just want to do what’s right. We’ll see what they have to say in the morning, and then we’ll get where your parents are and we’ll get out of here.”
“Once we have their address, we have to go fast,” Valerie said. “My parents move around a lot.”
He nodded.
“If we miss them, we’ll just come back here and ask again,” he said. “We don’t just get one swing at it.”
Valerie crunched on potato chips and nodded.
“It just feels like that’s how it always ends up,” she said.
“Did you sleep last night?” he asked. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I tossed and turned all night, worrying that my dad was going to track us down and drag you away.”
“You said they couldn’t track the car,” she said, and he nodded against the top of her head.
“And it’s true. I don’t know how they would find us. I just… I don’t have any more tricks up my sleeve. When they catch us again, it’s going to be for good. And we don’t have anywhere to go.”
“I don’t,” Valerie said. “You do. You could go back to school.”
“Not until you do,” Ethan said. “If they come and take you, I won’t go back to school. I’ll come looking for you.”
She smiled.
“I know.”
“But I’m going to sleep, here,” he said. “And so are you. And you know it.”
She nodded.
The place had a… a feel to it. Valerie wished Sasha had been her to read it to her, to tell her what was going on in the odd, intuitively clinical way that the girl could do that sort of thing, but even Valerie could feel it.
It was potent and it was made of light.
“I’m amazed demons can get in here,” Valerie said, and he nodded.
“It’s all so weird,” he said. “Nothing is as simple as I thought it was, and I thought it was all pretty complicated to begin with.”
Valerie jerked, realizing that the kid with the dimples was sitting over on the couch across from them.
Where Samantha had been sitting.
“How long have you been there?” Valerie asked, and he shook his head.
“Just for fourteen seconds,” he said. “Sam told Sam that you don’t leave teenagers alone together, so he sent me down here to watch you. I think you’re not supposed to have sex.”
Valerie blinked very, very quickly.
“What?” she demanded.
He shrugged.
“I mean, I know you’re not supposed to have, sex, obviously, but apparently there are times that freewill is… He sent me down here to watch you.”
“I didn’t see you come in,” Ethan said, easing away from Valerie.
“I didn’t,” the kid said.
There was a pause.
“Huh?” Ethan asked.
The kid - Kelly? - nodded.
“I glitched.”
“You…” Ethan said slowly.
“Glitched,” the kid said just as slowly.
“We don’t know what that means,” Valerie said.
“Okay,” he answered. “First I was one place…” He disappeared. And reappeared. “Like that.”
“Whoa,” Ethan said. “Are you a demon? He’s the demon Jason was talking about.”
“I think you don’t know how insulting that is,” the kid said. “I’m an angel.”
Valerie blinked.
Stood.
Looked at him for a long moment, then nodded.
“Right. I’m going to bed.”
A New World
The shower really did run hot forever.
Valerie woke up rather early the next morning.
She wasn’t certain what had woken her, but she wasn’t going to go back to sleep, so she got up and found a robe - a proper, fluffy morning robe - that hung on the back of the bathroom door and matched her pajamas. Putting it on with the slippers by the door, she went out into the hallway, past the closed door to the room where Ethan was sleeping, and down the stairs following the sound of voices.
Samantha, Sam, and another woman were sitting in the den, all of them leaning out over the
ir knees. Sam stood as she rounded the corner and put an arm out.
“Can I make you something to eat?” he asked.
“What is it with you people and food?” Valerie answered. “Who is that?”
“That is Jalice,” Sam said. “And if you have even a two-word conversation with her, she is going to call you a demon and refuse to cooperate with you.”
He gave her a wan smile and started for the kitchen. The dark woman looked over her shoulder at Valerie with an even darker expression, then turned her attention back to Samantha again.
“But I’m not a demon,” Valerie said, going to sit at a bar stool.
“I know that, and you know that, and Sam knows that, and believe it or not, Jalice knows that. Her people just define all magic users to be demons. Just the way it is. No point fighting with it.”
“You people are weird,” Valerie said, and he nodded.
“Just the entrance to the rabbit hole, too,” he said. “You’ve done pancakes. You want scrambled eggs? Waffles? French toast? I’ve got pretty much anything here you could possibly want. Breakfast burrito?”
“I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to let strangers make me breakfast,” Valerie said slowly, and he grinned.
“Not unless you’re paying them for it, huh? Well, then, you can make your own.”
He went to a cupboard and got out a box of cereal, then milk from the fridge. He put those in front of her and took a bowl out from under the counter she was leaning on, setting it directly in front of her between the box and the carton, then he pulled open a drawer to find her a spoon.
“Breakfast of champions,” he said, and she shook her head.
“You’re older than you think you are,” she said, and he grinned.
“And you’re impolite to people you don’t trust,” he said.
“You know me so well,” she said sarcastically, pouring her breakfast.
“Look, I know last night was a lot,” he said, leaning on the counter. “And I’m sorry we just ditched you like that. You’re in the middle of a conflict that… Well, it’s happened before.”
“I know that,” Valerie said sullenly.
“I know how it started,” he said. “If you’re interested.”
“The Pure decided they wanted to dole out superpowers and started killing people instead,” Valerie said.
“It’s less far off than I’d like to admit, but it’s not that simple,” Sam said. “In the beginning, it was a very small idealistic group who thought that they could screen humans for whether or not they would be dangerous with magic, and prevent them from fostering any latent talent they might have. They had tracked down and killed a man, and I mean, a really bad man with no conscience at all… He’d been a bad person before, but through an unfortunate series of events, he got access to magic and it turned out he had a lot of power, and things just snowballed. This group, they hunted him for years, and he killed a number of them, and in the end when they caught him, they realized they couldn’t contain him. They had to execute him in order to keep him from doing what he’d been doing. And… Not everyone has someone in their lives with the guts to perform an execution when they have to. It was a hard situation, and they started asking some really hard questions, after it was over.”
“Like whether or not people should be allowed to just have magic,” Valerie said.
“Is it that outrageous a question?” Sam asked.
Valerie twisted her mouth to the side.
“I don’t know. Maybe not.”
“So,” Sam said, nodding. “They came to the conclusion that magic is dangerous in the wrong hands - which I think we can all agree is very true - and they set out to prevent the wrong people from getting it. The documents they wrote all got destroyed during some political stuff that you don’t care about. This is all still twenty-five years back. But they were trying to put together criteria for who they would forcefully remove the magic from. People with violent convictions. Major mental illnesses. There were a lot of big arguments, and they really were well-meaning. They wanted to make the world safer.”
“There’s a ‘but’ coming,” Valerie said, and he nodded.
“Yeah. Everything went wrong.”
He paused, watching as the dark woman put on a cape and walked out the front door, then Samantha came over from the couches.
“Fundamentally, you cannot remove someone’s magic from their self, because the magic inside of them is part of their life force. It is supernatural, and without it, people die. Every time,” Samantha said, taking the cup of coffee that Sam offered her. Valerie motioned that she would like one, too, and he went to get another mug.
“So why did they keep trying?” Valerie asked. Samantha shook her head.
“Especially back then, from what Sam was telling me last night, they didn’t have the full understanding of the way that magic works. They thought if they tried things and were aggressive and precise enough, they could make it work.”
“But they were killing people,” Valerie said. “After they had all that problem with executing one really bad one.”
“You can’t kill people easily,” Sam said. “You shouldn’t talk about it like it’s simple or light.”
Valerie glanced at him, not really appreciating just how familiar he was with her, then turned her attention back to Samantha.
“Most people still don’t understand magic,” Samantha said. “You get a hold of it and you think that you’ve got it figured out… It’s a temptation. You fool yourself that you know what you’re doing well enough to take care of yourself, not to do anything wrong, but you have no idea what you’re doing. There’s a reason it’s hidden.”
“It’s hidden because the magic community doesn’t make a big spectacle about it,” Valerie said. “And that’s one of the arguments they made for…” She paused. All of the arguments got muddled up in her head. That was a Superior argument. That people should be allowed to use their magic publicly, because they were able and they shouldn’t have to hide it for civilians’ sakes.
“It’s a splinter group,” Sam said. “They exist.”
“The Superiors are real?” Valerie asked.
“They don’t call themselves that,” Sam said. “But the philosophies get close to matching.”
Valerie frowned.
“Okay.”
“It’s hidden because it ought to be hidden,” Samantha said. “And your instinct to keep it hidden is a reaction to that. It is hidden in who you are, and you can feel that it fundamentally alters who you are and your relationship with the world around you, to be able to use it. You don’t force someone into that without them consenting. Not if you aren’t evil.”
It made sense.
Simply and elegantly.
It made sense.
“Okay,” Valerie said. Samantha nodded, sipping her coffee and putting it back down.
“When all of this started, it was just a group of rogue, well-meaning magic users trying to protect the world in their very niche way. As it gained steam, though, and people started buying in that the ‘magic community’ ought to be involved in controlling who got magic and who didn’t, the group got bigger and the opinions got divided. Things changed quickly, different people were involved, while the rest of the community was either agnostic or ignorant of the entire movement. They sent their kids to school, they did their jobs, they tried to be good people. The same way it is everywhere around the world,” Samantha told her.
“Meanwhile, the science of the magic progressed, and they started to need to do trials,” Sam said. “They wanted something that would split someone from their inherent magic, obviously, but there was a group of scientists who had come to the conclusion that all magic had the potential to be dangerous, so it was better to select who could have magic rather than who couldn’t, and they were backed by a very ego-centric cult of personality who thought that all magic users were select and elite, and that they needed to cull the competition. That was when the first casualties started hi
tting bigger radars.”
“Bigger radars,” Valerie said.
“My people,” Samantha supplied. “I obviously wasn’t around back then, nor were most of the people who are in charge now, but my people heard about increasingly large swaths of innocent people being killed by what appeared to be magical means. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the mages involved weren’t regulated mages, and the regions that were hardest hit were run by… Well, Bane tried to knock it back some, but he was as full of himself as any of them ever were, back then, and he thought it was mostly just a nuisance. Much flashier to go hunting demons.”
“Humans aren’t his problem,” Valerie said, and Samantha gave her an odd look, but nodded.
“Exactly.”
“Jason said it last night,” Sam said, and Samantha shook her head.
“I’m going to beat him a ring around that trailer and then back again,” she said.
“He didn’t mean it,” Sam said gently, with humor, and Samantha shook her head.
“Still. At any rate, we mostly sat out the entire last war. Sam was looking for records on casualties, but your Council avoided taking any that put them in a bad light, and then the new guard of the Council, Ethan’s dad and the rest of them, they destroyed what records there were at the end of the war as part of the celebration that it was over. The other side is way too fragmented to have been able to take good records, so I’m just going off of what Sam is able to see. They aren’t… We aren’t talking about tens of thousands of people, here. There just weren’t ever that many involved. But the number of human lives lost to that war is… unjustifiable. Unacceptable.”
“What’s going on, now, is different, though,” Sam said, and Valerie looked over at him again. “There’s a demon involved, and I haven’t been able to figure out who or why they’re involved. They’ve been teaching the Pure and the various subgroups that you associate with that side of the conflict all kinds of magics that they didn’t know before. The concept of natural magic… Don’t see how you didn’t come to that on your own, but that was just the beginning. Warding and offensive weapons…”