The Serpent Waits

by Bill Hiatt

  No doubt, this Khalid had lived a much different life from ours. He would have killed and not thought twice about it. But would Tal and the others really let him die? The thought made my blood feel like ice in my veins.

  I looked around as fast as Other Khalid was doing, but I wasn’t sure how to read this group. Umbra’s eyes gleamed like ice picks. Magnus had the smile of a torturer. Most of the others looked blank. Were they stunned by what was happening, or did they just have really good poker faces?

  Only our Khalid looked as upset as I felt. He seemed to be caught somewhere between yelling and crying.

  Other Khalid, pale and tense, was staring at his bleeding fingers. “OK, OK, I’ll talk. Just stop the poison.”

  Tal and Viviane began reshaping the sunshine Magnus had conjured. The light began to solidify, and a tiny drop fell from it. Carla caught it in midair. Another fell, and she intercepted it as well.

  “I’m still not hearing anything,” said Magnus.

  “What…what do you want to know?”

  “Can you confirm that it was Amen Hafez who brought us here?” asked Magnus.

  Other Khalid nodded—or at least tried to. The combination of being held immobile and trembling made it difficult to tell.

  “He didn’t tell me directly. He usually doesn’t say much about his plans. But he did say something about ‘guests from another world,’ and he’s the only one I know of who can jump from one parallel to another.”

  Magnus frowned. “If he doesn’t let you in on his plans, why did he send you to follow us?”

  “He didn’t. Knowing people were coming from a parallel made me…curious. When you came out of the restaurant, I spotted you because my dub was with you. I knew you had to be the ones Hafez had mentioned, so I followed you, understand? I just wanted to know…what he was like, I guess. How different your world was.”

  “But Hafez gave you that amulet,” said Viviane. “Or did you steal it from him?”

  This world’s Khalid looked offended. “I don’t steal…anymore. Yeah, he gave it to me, but for protection. For situations when my invisibility by itself isn’t enough.”

  “He has enemies, then?” asked Tal.

  “He never said so in so many words. I know there are other people in the world with magic. Maybe he’s made some of them angry.”

  “He doesn’t trust you enough to tell you much of anything,” said Magnus. “Yet he gives you powerful magic protection. Do you really expect us to buy that?”

  “Perhaps a better question would be whether you know anything that might actually be helpful,” said Tal. For instance, how does Hafez move from one parallel universe to another?”

  “He has an artifact…a staff of some kind. It’s like the Staff of Moses.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Stan with a little hint of David in his voice. “The true staff’s power came from God. It has no innate power of its own.”

  “I said it was like the Staff of Moses.” Other Khalid glanced warily at Umbra’s dagger and then at his hands. “I don’t know all the history. Mr. Hafez told me that, after Moses trounced the Egyptian priests and sorcerers while he was liberating the Israelites from Egypt, they made it their mission to find a way of replicating the power of his staff. Over several generations, they succeeded—or so Mr. Hafez told me, anyway. He has a staff. I can feel its power. I’m not sure about any of the rest of it.”

  “How does it enable him to travel from one parallel universe to another?”

  “Mr. Hafez and Allah alone know that secret. Moses parted the Red Sea, did he not? Perhaps he could have parted other things if he had wanted. Perhaps he could even have parted the barriers between the universes. I swear I don’t know the exact details.”

  “Why did he bring us here?”

  “I don’t know. I swear I don’t! As I said, he doesn’t let me in on the details of his plans most of the time.”

  “You knew we were coming,” said Umbra, shifting her dagger from hand to hand.

  “I knew someone was, but not why.”

  Magnus’s eyes narrowed. “Hafez told you about his staff. That suggests to me he likes to brag. He went to a lot of trouble to get us here. Surely, he must have bragged a little about such an intricate plan. If you don’t know why, I’ll bet you at least know how—how he knew who we were, anyway.”

  “He’s looking for things in other universes,” said Khalid. “Things that never existed here or that were destroyed here.”

  “There could be an infinite number of universes,” said Stan. “How does he know what exists in the others? If he had to visit each one, it might take several lifetimes just to find anything useful.”

  “He’s got a seer that works with him. When she holds the staff, she can get visions from other universes.”

  “Where is Hafez right now?” asked Tal.

  “I don’t know for sure. I can usually sense him if he’s nearby, so he’s probably not in Orcutt. Sometimes he goes to the Lost City Amusement Park. A lot of the time he’s at home.”

  “Is that where the staff is?”

  “As far as I know, he’s always got that on him. It can resize to fit his pocket.

  “Anything else?” Magnus asked, turning to the rest of the group. When no one responded, he said, “OK, Khalid, congratulations, you get to live—for now. If we find out you’ve lied to us or left something important out, we’ll come after you.”

  He nodded to Carla, who now had what looked like about a syringe full of liquid sunshine. She and Viviane moved over to Other Khalid. I couldn’t follow exactly what they did, but they made the light flow into Other Khalid’s arm as if they had injected it.

  “It’s a good thing they had to work out how to do that when they needed to save me,” Lucas told me. “Even Tal would have had trouble coming up with magic that complicated on the fly.”

  Other Khalid’s relief was masked to some extent by his continued fear of Umbra and Magnus. His eyes were dilated, his breathing shallow and rapid.

  “I can travel through shadow,” said Umbra. “You’re fast, but I can always outrun you. I can be halfway around the globe in minutes.”

  The other Khalid’s terror peeked out from behind his frayed tough-guy façade. “I…I can go now?”

  “Yeah, but keep in mind what we said,” replied Magnus.

  “Is it wise to let him go?” asked Shar, putting a big-brotherly arm around our Khalid. “After all, he did try to kill Khalid.”

  “We were all…disturbed by that,” said Tal slowly. “But what else can we do? We’re not in a position to drag him around with us. Frankly, that wouldn’t be much safer, anyway.”

  “Why did you try to kill me?” asked Khalid. Other Khalid stared at him as if our Khalid had suddenly switched to a different language.

  After an uncomfortably long silence, Other Khalid said, “I…If I had been trying to kill you, you’d be dead. I knew you could dodge as fast as I can.”

  “Then why throw the dagger at him?” asked Shar, gripping Khalid even more closely. “What could you possibly have accomplished by missing?”

  Khalid stared back, sullen, his lips pressed tightly shut.

  “Are we back to this again?” asked Magnus. “Umbra still has her dagger.”

  Other Khalid looked down at the floor. “I…I…I was trying to escape.”

  “From a crowded van with several people between you and the only possible exit?” asked Shar. “That can’t be true. You might have thought that when you grabbed for your amulet, but a second time with the same failed strategy? You’re too smart for that.”

  “I…wanted to see how all of you would react.” A single tear ran down Other Khalid’s cheek. “Please, can I go now?”

  The change in his demeanor reminded me again of my brothers. At that moment, I thought I saw more in his eyes than the callous thug he was pretending to be. I also saw the frightened little boy he didn’t want anyone to know lurked inside of him. I longed to reach out to that little boy, to hug him and tel
l him everything was going to be all right.

  “Let him go—now,” said Khalid loudly. “This isn’t serving any purpose.”

  Magnus waved his hand dismissively. Other Khalid’s bonds faded, and he was up and out the rear exit so fast he blurred the way Lucas had earlier. Running footsteps echoed on the concrete of the parking lot as he put as much distance as he could between him and us.

  Part of me wished I too could run away. New as this supernatural mess was to me, I understood that Amen Hafez seemed to be pursuing his dubious agenda at our expense—and maybe the expense of hordes of people too large to count—but Other Khalid wasn’t Hafez. He was just his instrument. He was just a boy. Misguided, deceitful, maybe even warped, certainly capable of violence—he was all those things, too, but that wasn’t all he was. I knew that as surely as if I could read minds like Tal. That was why the way Umbra and Magnus handled him chilled me so much.

  “That was terrible!” said Khalid. “You shouldn’t have treated him like that!”

  “Khalid, he was right,” said Tal. “We were just bluffing. You know us well enough to know we aren’t going to harm some innocent—well, semi-innocent.”

  “That’s right,” said Magnus. “No half-djinn were harmed during the making of this—”

  “It’s not funny!” Khalid was yelling at the top of his lungs now. “Didn’t you see how scared he was? Don’t you understand? Don’t any of you understand? That could have been me. It wasn’t, because I met you. Well, you aren’t the same people here, and we never crossed paths. If I’d been born here, that would have been me.”

  Umbra raised her dagger. “He was in no danger. From Lucas’s experience, we know about how long it takes shadow assassin poison to adapt to an unexpected target. We could have taken much longer to cure him if we had needed to.”

  “He thought he was in danger, though,” said Khalid, staring at her accusingly. “He thought he was.”

  Shar patted him on the shoulder. “You know what, buddy? We could have done better, maybe thought of a different way. We need to focus right now, though. This world’s Khalid may just be a victim of circumstance, but Amen Hafez kidnapped us. And the threat he poses extends far beyond us.”

  Khalid nodded. “I know, I know. It’s just—we usually fight monsters, demons, stuff like that.”

  “It’s harder when the enemy wears your own face,” said Tal gently. “We’ll do our best to keep your counterpart out of the crossfire from now on, OK?”

  Khalid nodded again and even managed a slight smile.

  I wished I could find a way to smile.

  “What should we do next?” asked Carla. “We still don’t know where Hafez is. He could be in our world right now.”

  “You mean, he could be after our friends and families?” Khalid sound much less angry—and a lot more frightened.

  “Probably not,” said Eva. “It’s us he wants, or he wouldn’t have brought us here. It’s too bad the local Khalid didn’t know why.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it takes too much imagination to figure that out,” said Magnus. “It has something to do with our newest member.”

  I was uncomfortably conscious of everyone’s eyes on me. “What do you mean?”

  Magnus rolled his eyes. “Do I have to draw you a diagram? You have Ameniridis, the god’s wife of Amun, churning around inside of you. Someone tricks you into coming after us. That makes Amenirdis stir, and the result is an attempt to help you that goes sidewise and nearly rips barriers between worlds.

  “Then we came to Orcutt to investigate the imaginary city council member, your supposed confidential source. We see an Egyptian hieroglyph, and suddenly we’re ass-deep in snakes. Soon after that, we get pulled into a different universe.

  “This was all planned. Hafez wanted us to mess with reality. When things didn’t work out quite the way he hoped, he drew us here to try again.

  “Surely, it isn’t lost on all of you that Amen is a later form of Amun. Pretty large coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “Try what again exactly?” asked Gordy. “What’s his end game? I’m not seeing a point to all this.”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Magnus. “What I do know is that she brought this upon us!”

  He was pointing right at me. I had to fight the urge to jump out of the van and try to match Other Khalid’s speed.

  Umbra still had her dagger out.

  “We’re being surrounded by what looks like private security,” thought Nancy. “This world’s Khalid brought them.”

  “Why have one problem when you can have two?” muttered Gordy.

  As far as I was concerned, a better question would have been, “Why have both friends and enemies when you can’t tell the difference anymore?”

  Losing Yourself

  “We can’t fight,” thought Tal. “Too many people around. The supernatural community in this world is probably just as sensitive as ours is to public exposure.”

  “We can’t surrender,” thought Magnus.

  “Get out of the van slowly with your hands up,” boomed a voice that sounded as if it had been amplified by a bullhorn. We might have been trying to be inconspicuous, but they certainly weren’t.

  “We’re going to have to risk putting them to sleep,” thought Tal.

  “People are moving away—fast,” thought Nancy. “You aren’t going to get a better chance.”

  As if they had done this a thousand times before, Dan opened the back door of the van just a little to make the music more easily heard, Magnus started strumming the lyre, and he and Tal started singing. The magic was directed at the guards outside the van, but the rhythm made me feel drowsy.

  “They’ve got some kind of…chaos magic around them,” thought Tal. “It’s disrupting our spell.”

  “Amp up the power,” thought Magnus.

  “They could be innocents. I don’t want to risk frying their brains or causing a catastrophic interaction between their protection and our magic. Dan, close the back door. Magnus, let’s kill the parking lot lights. Nancy, get out of the front seat and into the back compartment with us.”

  A partition separating the back compartment from the front seat slid down silently, and Nancy scrambled over the seat to join us. As she did so, I got a look through the windshield. The parking lot darkened as the lights failed, leaving only pale moonlight. I heard a gasp from the bullhorn operator. The security men might have been protected against magic, but sudden darkness still unnerved them.

  “Magic doesn’t usually interact with technology that well,” Khalid whispered to me. “Tal is one of the few people who could do something like that. He and Stan worked it out.”

  Someone was pounding on the windshield. I winced, but it didn’t shatter. However, it wasn’t going to last long. Nancy slid the partition shut, but how much protection was that going to be?

  “These guys are nuts,” muttered Gordy.

  “Innocents,” muttered Magnus, glaring at Tal.

  “Can’t exactly call the police, though,” said Stan.

  “Can’t get out of here without a lot of messy violence, either—unless we ditch the van.” thought Tal. “Umbra, is there a safe shadow nearby to which you can move us?”

  “Side street a block or so away.”

  “Do it!”

  I heard the windshield shatter. These guys were more like thugs than private security.

  The dome light flicked off, plunging us into almost complete darkness.

  “Step forward!” thought Umbra. I did so hesitantly, afraid of bumping into somebody else. I heard shuffling around me. Everybody was moving, and through some miracle, none of us collided.

  Suddenly, I had stepped from complete darkness into the narrow space between someone’s garage and a brick wall that separated two properties.

  A dog noticed us. I couldn’t tell exactly what kind in the darkness, but it looked big, and its snarl worried me.

  “I’ve got it,” thought Tal. The dog calmed down with remarkable speed,
turned, and walked away.

  “I need to rework the don’t-notice-me spell to include the sense of smell,” thought Tal. “That was close.”

  “Well, Umbra got us away from what I guess were Hafez’s thugs—but what are we going to do without wheels?” asked Gordy.

  “Umbra, can you get us near Hafez’s house in Summerland?”

  “That’s not close enough for me to do local shadow travel,” thought Umbra. Her mental signals were about as toneless as her speaking voice. “If what Stan told us is true, I should not risk a trip into Erebus to find a Summerland shadow. It could be a different Erebus—with a different Imperator who would either kill me as an intruder or acknowledge me as a member of the Populus Umbrae and expect me to obey his every word.”

  “No sense taking that kind of risk,” agreed Tal. “Viviane, what about portals?”

  “This world is different enough from ours that I can’t seem to open a portal to Summerland. The restriction to places I’ve actually been applies.”

  “How about a little Lady-of-the-Lake water travel?”

  “If the geography of this world is the same as ours, the closest natural body of water I can think of is Orcutt Creek, and that’s more than ten miles away. Then there’s the problem of finding an exit near Summerland. Ortega Reservoir isn’t ideal because it isn’t natural, and we’re likely to be spotted. I can think of two creeks within ten miles of Summerland, but, depending upon how bad the drought is in this world, the water level might be inadequate.”

  “Orcutt Creek is too long a walk, anyway. We’ll have to fly.”

  “Fly?” I hadn’t meant to pose that question to the group. I wasn’t used to this kind of mental communication.

  “More like levitate, really, but with some momentum,” thought Tal “Khalid’s the only one who can fly on his own. Carla, Magnus, and I can all levitate, though. With the power of the lyre to amplify our magic, we should be able to lift all of you.”

  “That’s really the best we can do?” asked Magnus grumpily. “Sure, we can get everyone up in the air, but steering that many people is going to be slow going, and it’ll make us damn conspicuous to anyone sensitive to magic.”