Chi wandered up to collect his own mug and sipped it with a sigh of pleasure. “Tell me about it. Gagging smell, that is.”
Anxiously, he inquired of all of us, “This experiment of theirs, has it infected my soil?”
“A little,” Rena admitted to him, then upon seeing his alarm, she threw up a hand and hastily assured him, “I’ll clear it out before we leave, don’t worry. I wouldn’t leave it here to spoil your land.”
“In fact, we’ll cart all of the corpses away and locate their graves,” Maksohm announced, coming back to the group. “You’re the owner here? Sorry this happened to you, sir. I’m Special Agent Dah’lil Maksohm. I’m in charge of clearing all of this out and putting things to rights. If you could give me a detailed report of exactly what you saw this morning, or if there was any hint of someone here that you didn’t recognize in the past few days?”
A cart rumbled toward us with a policeman driving it. It looked like a coroner’s vehicle, and I assumed that was how we’d get all of the corpses out of here. Which meant I had to handle these things. “Rena, my love, if you could clear out all of that nasty energy for us before we pick them up, I’d appreciate it.”
“Three minutes,” she requested, then drained her coffee before setting the mug aside under one of the trees, safely out of the way.
Chi came up to stand next to me and mentioned, quite conversationally, “I’m going to hate the next thirty minutes.”
Yeah, hauling half-rotten corpses sounded like such a party. “It’s okay. I’ll hate it with you.”
“I don’t know how that makes anything better.”
“It makes everything better. Everything I’m involved in is by default better. I would think that’s obvious by now, what’s wrong with you, haven’t you already picked up on that? My general awesomeness makes life better just by my standing here and breathing. Your laughter is very hurtful right now, Chi, I’m hurt, truly hurt; you’re not my friend anymore. I renounce our friendship. You’re hauling bodies by yourself.”
Chi threw an arm around my neck and hauled me forcibly forward. “No sarding way,” he denied cheerfully. “Misery likes company and you are hereby designated as ‘company.’ All in favor?”
“Seconded!” Maksohm called, just as Vee put in, “Thirded!”
“Some friends you are,” I groused at them.
It took most of the morning to get everything cleaned up, squared away, and the poor orchard owner reassured that this wouldn’t affect the dozen trees near the corpses. I didn’t envy the coroner the task of sorting out which corpse was who, and was just as glad that wasn’t my job. Bannen and Chi actually borrowed a washroom and cleaned off first because they couldn’t stand being in their own skins otherwise.
Maksohm portaled us up to the next city, an agent meeting us there and portaling us up again, but we couldn’t keep doing that without good reason—despite how convenient it was. Without an actual emergency, there wasn’t a good excuse for draining other mages. They had jobs to do too, things that didn’t revolve around Toh’sellor. They needed the energy and magical power to tackle those problems.
Halfway back to Foxboro we hit a nowhere-town that I’d never heard of and bought enough clothes and toiletries to tide us over. Then, we hopped on board the next train and resigned ourselves to four days on board.
The boys quickly found other things to do, people to chat with, and hopefully weren’t out there creating trouble. I was so tired that I didn’t have the energy to go out and join them. I didn’t have a book to occupy me this trip, but still, I found myself as effectively mired into my chair as if I’d been glued to it. The compartment was a spacious one—first class. It had to be in order to accommodate Vee’s long legs. She normally didn’t stay in the compartment either, but the on second morning of our trip she made herself comfortable with her back on the floor and her legs propped up on the bench, hands casually on top of her stomach. I found myself mirroring her on the other bench, and it was nice, in a way. Relaxing. Part of me wanted to sleep, as I hadn’t been getting good sleep for a while, but the idea of waking up to another nightmare—no. Just, no.
“Rena.”
“Hmmm?”
“Did I ever tell you that I had to go through therapy?”
Alarmed, my head jerked toward her, even though I could barely see half of her face from this angle. “No. What happened?”
“Part of it is just MISD policy,” she admitted frankly, “because if we survive anything traumatic, they require it. They don’t want us broken. Makes sense, right? But the first time I went through it, it was because I nearly lost Chi.”
I listened to the story, eyes growing round as she related the terrible circumstances, her fear, how desperate she was to get Chi down off that terrible mountain and to help. I felt my heart ache in sympathy for her, because I’d been under scarily similar circumstances and knew very well how she must have felt. “I’d no idea that you and Chi had lived through something like that. Do you still dream of it?”
“Not often, not anymore. Only sometimes, and it’s generally triggered by being in the mountains, or something about the situation being similar. I bring this up because I’m seeing similar symptoms in you that I lived with.”
Urk. I bit my bottom lip, not sure what to say to that.
Propping herself up on one elbow, Vee gave me an encouraging smile. “Normally, you’d be in therapy right now too. Rena, what you lived through—and I don’t count just your first battle with Toh’sellor, I’m counting the past three years of insanity—is more than the human mind should bear. You’ve come through it, remarkably, with only insomnia and nightmares. Most people would have broken under the strain. I think, with some coping techniques and time, you’ll pull through this just fine. But right now, we literally don’t have the time to get you proper help. Can I offer you some tips until you can see a therapist?”
Perhaps some people would have been offended by the offer. I’m fine would be their response. I was just independent enough that I almost said it, but this was Vee. She saw me struggling, knew how to help, and was talking to me one-on-one. She put the choice in my hands, and strictly mine, on how I wanted to handle this. Taking in a breath, I forced my pride down. “Please.”
She lifted up, snagged her new bag, and dug a small bottle out of it. “First thing that will help is scent, believe it or not. I put a dab on both temples every morning. Lavender is fundamentally soothing and calming anyway, but the scent of it grounds me. I think it’s because every time that I’ve done something insanely dangerous, my surroundings didn’t smell so good.”
“They normally smell awful.” I didn’t realize how true that was until the words left my mouth, but literally the only time I’d been in an okay environment when doing something I desperately didn’t wish to was when I’d broken the familiar bond with Bannen. And we were in my workroom for that. I put a dab on my finger, smelled it, and it was earthy and pleasant. Nothing in my previous experience really mixed with lavender, and I couldn’t see how it would hurt; so, I applied it to my temples as she’d suggested before handing the bottle back.
“This is more a preemptive measure on my part,” Vee admitted, repacking the bottle. “But if that helps, tell me, I always keep a bottle on me. What really helped me were the steps I was taught for when I do have any kind of anxiety attack. First, focus on your breathing: take a deep breath through your nose and then sigh really loud, a ‘hah’ sort of sound.”
I tried it, felt a little silly, but kept going as she walked me through breathing, holding my breath for three seconds, doing it ten times. It seemed so simple, but my body relaxed with each repetition, and after doing it ten times, I didn’t feel as clenched as I was before.
“Good, now relax your muscles,” she coached. “Get perfectly comfortable. It’s best to sit in some place clear of distractions. Close your eyes and have your body relax. Good. Focus on your left hand, how it feels. Inhale slowly, clenching your fist into a ball, and squee
ze hard until you feel the tension. Hold five, four, three, two, one. Exhale and let all the tension out, feel your muscles relax. Relax. Okay, now focus on your right hand, do it again.”
I did both hands, then my neck, shoulders, eyes, and as strange as it felt to focus on individual muscle groups, I could sense that it helped. My body focused on something physical instead of the fears whirling and trapped in my brain.
We spent the next two hours talking about what to do when I woke up from a nightmare. How to ground myself to my immediate surroundings, how to slowly and lightly press my thumbs against each finger, how the repetition of that forced the body to focus on the physical. Vee suggested having something familiar that I could hold onto, an object that I could rub with my fingers to help draw me firmly back into the waking world. I had no idea at first what to use, then realized I already had one on my hand—my wedding ring. The ridges and filigree that made up the band were something I loved to trace with my thumb anyway. It would work well for this.
Part of the glamour of the MISD was that the agents dealt with danger. Anything troubling, anything that the average person couldn’t handle, that was what the MISD were for. I knew better, of course, than to assume them to be superhuman. I’d seen these people lose limbs, sometimes their lives, battling the problems the world spewed at them. But somehow, some part of me still didn’t think they’d have consequences. Or I should say, that the horrors they lived through didn’t seem to affect them like it did with me. To hear otherwise, to have Vee teach and share her own experiences, opened my eyes.
They were people. People like me, people with amazing talent, but still human enough to be fallible. Their strength was collective, each person applying what they could to support the other, all doing their best so that no one fell. I felt more reassured by that than the coping techniques.
Still, I promised to use what she taught me, and I had every intention to start meditating that night in the hopes that I wouldn’t be waking up nightly with nightmares.
We got back to Foxboro mid-day, so we decided to take it easy. Well, by that I mean I wrote a formal report on everything I’d found and submitted it. Maksohm did as well. Everyone else went back to Archives to search some more, as we wanted to see if we could divine a location of the corpses’ graves and see if anything else strange had been stolen by the crazy mages. No one found anything remarkable, at least nothing that could be obviously tied to the group.
Maksohm decided it was better use of our time to make sure we had some place secure to put Toh’sellor once we got our hands on it again. With that thought in mind, he bought tickets for us to travel to Heaberlin. The boys groaned at the idea, as doing that was not a short trip. Not in winter. It would take a week, assuming more with delays because of the snow, which was a safe thing to assume at this time of the year.
I ran out and bought my own lavender oil that morning before coming back to the bed and breakfast. Bannen had our bags down in the main room already, and I snuck the bottle into the front of my suitcase for easy access as I asked him, “Where’s everyone else?”
“Maksohm had to run up to HQ for something,” he rattled off, “and the other two are not quite down yet. Got your lavender?” I could see the relief on his face as he saw the label.
“Yup, I found a pure bottle of it at the pharmacy.”
Bannen hadn’t said a great deal when I related what Vee had told me. He just hugged me hard, action expressing that he was glad someone could help me. So far, the techniques were working, as I hadn’t had a nightmare, not an intense nightmare, in two days. Last night I’d had a mini-one, but I was able to quickly orient myself when Bannen woke me up, and after that I’d gone peacefully back to sleep.
Seeing me rested today eased his panic in regards to me. I knew it did because I didn’t see him thump against the familiar bond, didn’t feel it protest from my end. Hopefully, by helping myself, I helped him too. In fact, I had plans that tonight when we stopped at the hotel I could convince him to start meditating with me every night before bed. Bannen’s culture was fond of meditation as a rule, especially as part of their martial arts practice, so odds were good on me succeeding.
The front door abruptly flung open and Maksohm strode back in with that angry, intense expression on his face. “Good, you two are ready. CHI! VEE! WE HAVE TO MOVE!”
“Now what?” I growled, worried and feeling a little sick to my stomach. Please no more seedling attempts, please oh please.
“Njorage,” Maksohm answered shortly. He turned, saw the other two running down the stairs, bags in hand, and related, “Put all the bags back into this corner, we’ll have to send for them later. We’re going by portal.”
Chi took in Maksohm’s general expression and demanded, “What?”
“Njorage,” Maksohm said darkly. He spared Chi a sympathetic look. “Monkeys.”
Chi’s wail of protest covered the range of the human voice, loud enough to reach the heavens. For once, I didn’t blame him.
Don’t tell me. Please don’t tell me that the idiot group that stole Toh’sellor also stole the monkeys? Because that, those two things added up together? That was not nice math.
It took another three agents to take us away from Perrone and into Sira. I kept a hand on Rena’s shoulder as we went from one portal to the next, anxious for a reason I couldn’t quite put a finger on. The last agent dumped us in some place just outside of one of the larger hotels that offered outdoor onsen baths.
Njorage strangely reminded me of Z’gher—in architecture at least. Most of the roofs sported overlapping tile, each building connected tightly to the next by walls, the front yards enclosed behind stone and gates. The city gave a cramped impression, all of the buildings nearly on top of each other and gated off from the street. The scent of sulfur wafted in the breeze because of all the hot springs—not unpleasantly—mixed in with citrus and fruits. After a beat, I realized I recognized where we were. In fact, I remembered the place. We’d stopped here last time. I’d barely gotten my bearings, standing at the corner of the building surrounded by low-lying bushes, when my eye caught the first hint of trouble.
Njorage’s citizens were quite accustomed to monkeys. I mean, there were hundreds of them everywhere, and they’d lived here before people moved in, so of course everyone was used to them. To see those same people frantically running from monkeys down the main street alarmed all of us. It seemed like a tidal wave crashed down along the street—one of frantically moving bodies, both animal and human. They crashed into vendors’ carts, toppling things over and sending a mess into the street that people leapt over, but didn’t stop to pick up. The noise was raucous, almost ear-splitting at moments, in-between people yelling at each other and the monkeys screeching. Then I took a closer look and realized these were not run-of-the-mill monkeys. They’d definitely been touched by Toh’sellor. They were three times the normal size, their bodies misshaped to resemble a gorilla’s inverted triangular form. Savageness raged in their eyes, snarls pouring out as they quickly moved on all fours in a gait that jittered instead of working smoothly.
Poor Chi took one look and ducked behind Vee, whimpering, “Wifey, save me!”
Vee patted him sympathetically on the head even as she demanded, “Maksohm, talk to me.”
“We got a report of Toh’sellor-like minions running rampant,” he answered dryly with a wave to indicate said monkeys, “but no sighting of Toh’sellor itself. Rena?”
“They’re definitely Toh’sellor touched,” she answered promptly, but she kept staring through narrowed eyes like something didn’t quite add up. “But there’s something else. Some shield around their core, acting like a…protective coating? It looks similar to the corpses from the orchard but there’s enough differences that I’m not sure. I need to get closer to get a fix on what I’m really seeing.”
We were more than fifty feet away, so I understood why. “Then let’s get closer and start nixing these things.”
“YES,” Chi agreed savagely, popping out from around Vee to glower at the monkeys running rampant. “DEATH TO THE MONKEYS.”
I more or less expected that response. We all did.
With no direction of where to go, no idea if Toh’sellor was actually here or not, we just started with the area right in front of us. It got brutal very quickly as soon as we hit the streets, as people recognized the blue uniforms of the MISD and scrambled toward us for help. Maksohm kept pulling people into an ever-growing barrier, putting them safely out of the way, while the rest of us worked on the problem.
It became a madhouse in minutes, with monkeys swarming in every direction, trying to chase people, and me trying to keep them off Rena’s back so she had time to figure this out. She kept frowning instead of speaking, and that was never a good sign. “Honey-bunny, you want to poof the monkeys out of existence? Before, you know, they start chomping on all of these nice people and possibly making Toh’sellor zombie minions?”
“That protective shielding I mentioned earlier is tricky. It’s different from the ones at the orchard, and none of them are exactly alike,” she answered in an abstracted way. I knew that tone, I had maybe a third of her attention, the rest of her focused on the problem.
“Kill first, ask questions later,” Chi encouraged her darkly.
“We’ll need to keep one alive, then,” she agreed, frown deepening. “Two minutes to clear this street.”
I fell in along her back, trusting Vee and Chi with the other sides, using throwing daggers and swords alike to take down any monkeys within radius of me. It wasn’t a particularly warm day, in fact it was downright chilly, considering we were just past the first month of the year, but the exertion got my blood pumping, adrenaline surging through me. The bond jumped unhappily at having Rena down here on street level. I shared its opinion on the matter, but short of finding some high vantage point...my eyes caught a set of stairs out of my peripheral vision. Yeah, like that. That offered a good perch to work from.
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