by Jade Alters
It takes me more than a few minutes to realize she is not, in fact, in my bed when I wake up in the morning.
Wine Run
Emery,
The Broken Academy, Room B-22
I stare at the little piece of paper all the way back to my room. A big, red, ninety-two is emblazoned on the top of it. It’s the lowest grade I’ve ever received. After so many years of fearing what would happen if I received a grade so low, there’s something oddly satisfying about how little it affects me. But I can’t take all the credit for the odd zen I have towards my academics. Sure, I’ve let up on some self-pressure, but mostly it’s all the distractions.
The disappearance of the Kyrie. Near-death Fiend-hunts in the suburbs. The threat of the Academy being unveiled to the Norman world. Darius’ uneasy freedom. Wild Astral sex in a memory-world. How could I possibly get wrapped up in test grades with all that banging around the inside of my skull? I pocket the slip and linger by the door to our room. The weirdest thing is: I feel no call to action stirring in my gut to remedy the situation. I feel no urge to negotiate extra credit, or bury my nose in textbooks to ensure a perfect on the next test… there just doesn’t seem to be a point to it anymore. I don’t know what I want to do. In the absence of an answer, I push my way through the door.
Helena is splayed out on her bed. Fey Deller sits at her desk, jotting away at some homework assignment. Both of them turn to face the door when I walk through. Helena squints at me instantly. How she can always tell is beyond me. Another hidden magical talent of hers, perhaps.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
I shrug. “What makes you think something’s wrong?” I challenge, to throw her off the trail. But Helena’s emotional bloodhound nose could smell me from half the Academy away.
“You’re making a face,” says Helena.
“Are we not always making faces?” Fey Deller interjects. Helena and I both frown at one another, before a light chuckle.
“It’s another expression,” Helena explains. “I say she’s making a face, but that means she’s making a particularly odd face.” She looks to me, discreetly, to whisper, “The hell are we going to do with her if the humans find out about all of us?” That’s it! The great question of apathy is answered within me. I know what I want to do. What we need to do.
“We’re going to teach her,” I decide.
“Teach who?” Fey Deller asks. I snort at the irony before going on.
“You. This whole business of the Normans looking into the supernatural… it’s getting under my skin because there’s nothing we can do about it. We keep hunting the Fiends. We keep screwing it up,” I explain. Helena and Fey Deller both tilt their heads at me, brows curved up in empathy. “But there is something we can do. We can prepare. Just in case the veil does come down…”
“Prepare… how?” Helena asks.
“I could go for a drink. And Fey Deller could learn how to order one, before we all need one.” I wink at her.
“What would I order the drink to do?” Fey Deller asks.
Emery,
Gossman’s Liquor, San Francisco
It’s not the first time our new ASTF clearance has come in handy. As long as it’s not after curfew, Helena, Fey Deller, and I are able to pass through the Tether Teleporter without authorization, or consequence. I lead us from the little storeroom to the edge of the Academy Training Zone backstreets. It’s a trip I’ve made many times alone, and a handful of times with Helena. But this time is different. This time, I stop and turn to Fey Deller.
“What are you doing?” she asks as I grab her by the shoulders to straighten her up. I close one eye to envision what I want the Normans to see. Her skin is no problem. A simple pigment reflection will do it. Her ears are a little more difficult. I create a light distortion lens around them to make them appear round. With a snap, the trick is in place. I grab her arm to walk her outside the alley to a nearby shop window. There, she can see her reflection in the same way she appears to others.
“Don’t want to go alerting the media before we have to,” I smirk. Fey Deller reaches up to run fingers through her long auburn hair. Her eyes drink in the image of her fair skin and round ears with perhaps more interest than I’ve seen her look at anything.
“Incredible…” Fey Deller murmurs. She then glances left and right, down the street filled with bodies. Even in the middle of the afternoon, Valencia Street comes alive with people of different shapes and colors. “This… we’re outside the Training Zone? Everyone can see me?”
“That’s right, girl,” Helena smirks, and pats Fey Deller on the shoulder. She twitches at the touch. I can see how naked she feels in her widening eyes. This might well be the first time she’s been out into the Norman world, with the exception of our journey to Point Arena. But that journey took place mostly inside a car. This is different. This is an alien Realm.
“Let’s take it slow. Just stay between us, and you’ll be fine,” I assure her. My voice seems to snap Fey Deller awake from a sort of trance.
“A-alright,” she manages. Still, it takes both Helena and myself to guide her down the street, an arm hooked through each of her own.
Fey Deller’s eyes light up with a magnified version of the intrigue and fear all people experience during their first trip to a city. Her eyes drink in the tall, the short, the thin, and the ones so overweight they can hardly drag themselves around. She takes in men, women, and every indiscernible middle-ground. Fey Deller analyzes suits, torn jeans, dresses, and patchy cargo shorts alike. But nowhere in this vast sea of skin colors and dispositions does she see a single other like her. There is no green skin. There are no pointed ears, or a face quite so tranquil as that of a Fey. Of course, she sees none of that in herself either. Her usual calm has left her, right along with everything else.
“You still with us?” Helena asks when she notices the dead pearls Fey Deller’s eyes have become.
“Yes,” she answers, probably thinking Helena means to ask if she’s literally still walking in between us.
“Alright. We’re coming up on the bar soon,” I tell her. “It’ll be across the street, to the left. We’ll cross here.” I point to the intersection, and the heavy, white-barred walkway painted on the street.
Helena and I lead Fey Deller out onto the cracked asphalt. We join a river of other bodies teeming across in the intermission of a red light. The infinite chatter of conversation and idling car engines call Fey Deller’s eyes out over the sprawling cityscape around us. Her sensitive ears even pick up something above us as Helena and I tow her along. Maybe it’s the strong wind between the tall buildings. We’re about halfway across the street when she stops, dead in her tracks. The odd thing is, she didn’t just decide to stop completely on her own. I stopped her. I stopped all three of us, and I’m not entirely sure why.
Something just… hit me. It’s the only way I can think to describe it, even to myself. Even if it doesn’t make sense. I didn’t feel anything touch me, physically, yet I feel something on me in a very different sense. It’s akin to the way it feels being near another Magician’s trick, but not exactly. That helps me deduce what it is. What hit me were eyes. Someone sees me. Not just my body, but the illusory light tricks I’ve wrapped us in to hide Fey Deller. I’m sensing someone else sense me. It’s not after curfew yet, but I can’t imagine there are too many Academy students prowling the streets in the late afternoon these days. Not with everything that’s going on. Reynold and Thise would hardly approve if they knew what we were up to, let alone a student outside the ASTF.
I turn to one side, then the other, in search of our watcher. Another Magician, maybe? Who else could see through my trick? I give the city block around us a once-over, and then I scan the area again. I see the three of us in the middle of the road, bodies teeming past us in both directions, in the reflections of a hundred mirrored buildings. The sheer amount of windows and bouncing lights makes it difficult for me to pinpoint anything unusual, like manipulated light. I
appreciate for the first time how the Normans have erected something so confusing, like a magnified version of a glass puzzle-box I played with as a younger girl. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much trouble pinning down something I knew was there.
Then I see it. Our watcher is the last thing I expect, in the last place I expect it. Someone dressed drastically different from everyone else around us, right out in the open. In the center of the street, between us and a wall of waiting cars, stands a featureless figure wrapped in a violet cloak. Twisted ribbons of burgundy and other dark, rich reds and purples climb both pant legs that stick out from beneath the robe. The indiscernible being is tall, but everything else about it is hidden in the shadow of its raised hood and swirling cloak of fabric. Everything except it’s mouth. Two thin, pink lips sit flat, neither pleased nor displeased as it stares at me. People on the street walk by it. People in their cars stare through it. Is it another Magician? Is that why my heart is thumping through my ribcage? Is that why I can’t look away?
“Emery!” Helena’s voice booms through the void my mind is trapped in, “Come on!” I look to my side to find she’s no longer there, but in front of me. I’m leaning forward, my arm hung in Helena’s tugging hand. How long has she been trying to drag me out of the street? Then all the background noise blasts alive at once. The screaming people. The blaring car horns.
“Come on, you lunatic!” one man spits from his window a foot off my back. The breeze of his car speeding by nudges me forward, towards Helena. A hail of, “Holy shit, get out of the road!” and “The hell is wrong with you?” hits me from behind as I trot onto the sidewalk with Helena, where Fey Deller waits patiently.
“What happened?” she asks when Helena and I arrive. All at once, I realize how out of breath I am. I lean over to compress my cramping gut and make it easier to fill as I suck down air. I swipe a hand instinctively across my forehead to find it absolutely drenched. What the hell did that robed figure do to me? Wait - the figure! I wheel around to find the ornate rogue robe replaced by the blur of cars passing by. There’s no sign of the mysterious pedestrian anywhere. Not on the road. Not on the sidewalk. I even look up, like Fey Deller did just before the figure appeared. Nothing.
“Emery,” Helena calls me back again before I can get too lost this time. She grabs both of my hands to ground me in the reality that counts. “The hell is going on?”
“I… I saw someone. In the street,” I struggle to explain. But that doesn’t explain it, which is precisely my problem. “I… when I looked at them, I couldn’t move.”
“What… like a trick, or a spell?” Helena asks, perplexed. Her wide eyes shoot all over the street in search of the person who almost laid me flat under a traffic jam.
“It sounds more like possession by an Astral,” Fey Deller comments. I prop my chin up on a finger to mull it over.
“It felt almost like a trick, but… it wasn’t, not really. You... you didn’t see it?” I tremble to ask. I already know the answer. We’d be having a different conversation now if they had.
“What did it look like? Man? Woman?” Helena asks. When I try to reflect on the memory of only a few seconds ago, fear embeds roots deep in my heart. It feels like a lifetime ago. So long, in fact, that I hardly remember a damn thing about the figure. I know I didn’t see much of it, to begin with… but… what was the color of its robe again?
“I… I didn’t get a good look, but…” I struggle, “It had… a robe on. I think… like a half robe, with pants. They were… agh, I can’t remember the color.”
“You… can’t remember?” Helena gulps. I can remember question thirteen from a test three weeks ago. But the figure that just paralyzed me right out in the streets? She knows as well as I do, it must have done something to me.
“I didn’t see anyone in a robe,” Fey Deller interjects.
“Yeah. Me either,” Helena says. I chew my lip, glancing back at the street where it stood every few seconds.
“But… you heard something,” I remember. I look to Fey Deller for whatever sort of help she has to give. “You looked up just before it happened. What did you hear?” Fey Deller crosses her arms. She closes her eyes and tilts her head up to the towering mirrored buildings high over our heads to call it back.
“It was a low-frequency hum. Almost like a car engine, I guess,” Fey Deller tells me. “I thought it was one, until you asked me about it just now. It was a little lower in tone and volume.”
“Then some weirdo in a robe showed up that only you could see?” Helena marvels. “Did… it say anything? Or do anything?”
“No,” I answer so fast I surprise even myself. Maybe it did, and I just don’t remember. But instinct tells me otherwise. “It just… watched.” Helena and Fey Deller look to one another, then back to me. None of us can settle on a face or stance, not in the presence of so ominous and unpredictable a threat.
“Well,” Helena decides at last with a shoulder-sinking sigh, “I definitely think a drink is in order now.” I snort. For a brief moment, I forget about the unknown threat with no warning but a low hum only one of us can hear.
“Let’s just get a box of wine to go,” I say when some looming fear creeps back into my mind. “We’ll teach Fey Deller the intricacies of bar culture another time.”
“Agreed,” Helena nods. I lead the way inside, and through the side door to the shop portion of the bar. There, we browse stacks and racks of our favorite liquors.
“What an odd container for a fluid,” Fey Deller marvels as the cashier pulls down a box of Franzia for us. She puts a hand on the cardboard, presumably to test how the wine isn’t just pouring through. We usually stick to bottles, so I guess I should have explained things a little better. My mind is rather busy at the moment, though. I hardly pay attention to the cash that slides back across the counter to me as change. I swipe it down into my pocket as I turn for the door. Helena takes the box of wine in both arms and brings it close to Fey Deller.
“There’s a bag in the box, see?” She smiles, holding it up like she’s teaching a child.
“Why not just sell the bag and save the cost and waste of cardboard?” Fey Deller asks as we squeeze through the doorway to the street.
“So they can… print advertising on it maybe? Attractive boxes sell more?” Helena tries to explain.
“But it doesn’t change the contents of the bag,” Fey Deller grumbles, scratching her head.
“You know, sometimes I think humans make less sense to me than they do to you, Fey Deller,” I chuckle. For that one second, I laughed with my friends and forgot all about the robed figure. That was all it took.
I step out from the bar-shop into the light of the street. Pain seeps into my brain through the gates of my eyes. What begins as irritation beats into agony. I feel my pulse in my gray matter, bulging against the inside of my skull. I hardly notice it at first, but a single, low note plays across the strings of my mind, heightening to the sharp and constant twang of a migraine. I just barely pick up the conversation between Fey Deller and Helena in the background of the horrible noise.
“There it is again. I hear it,” one says to the other.
“Emery!” Helena’s muffled voice calls to me from somewhere. I can’t tell where from through my palms as they flatten over my ears. I have to do something to fight the noise. To chase, or squeeze it out of my brain. I just need it out. Out. It’s all I can think about.
But it won’t go, so whoever’s making the noise has to go. I force my eyelids to pry themselves open, despite the stabbing knives of sunlight that pour into them from the Norman’s world of tall mirrors. I shoot glances from my bursting, bloodshot eyes all around the street. There. There’s that ridiculous robe! How could I have forgotten that? All those purples and reds. The long, ornate garment among a sea of other clothes that look nothing like it. This time, I notice something in its gloved hand. A little metal orb, pock-marked with a hundred mesh holes. It looks almost like a speaker. The sound…
“There�
�” I force myself to growl. A finger trembles up at the end of my arm, guiding Helena and Fey Deller’s eyes to the robed figure.
“There?” Helena echoes. I don’t even turn my head. My eyes dart to her, then back to the robed watcher, or rather where it was. The figure is gone again, but the echoes of that note sing on through the ache behind my eyes.
“Emery…” Fey Deller mutters. My head creaks sideways to face her, only to be stricken with the same horror that’s infected her. Ripples of color dance around Fey Deller’s skin, unveiling her true green color in waves. Her ears poke up from her head.
“Your trick,” Helena realizes. “It’s wearing off.”
“It’s…” It’s alright, I tell myself because I have to. My inability to get it out only proves the inverse. I put my index finger and thumb together for a snap, but they won’t tense. They just slip away from one another without a sound. Without my concentration, there’s not a single spark of magic. Fey Deller’s true form continues to unveil itself.
“Here,” Helena hands Fey Deller the wine, then sheds her button-down shirt to cover more of our friend. She even pops the collar to hide most of Fey Deller’s neck and face. She puts a hand on each of our backs. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“I’m… I’m sorry…” I murmur, suddenly short of breath as we hustle along.
“Just shut up and let me help you,” Helena whispers back. She ushers us through the illusory curtain around the Academy Training Zone just before my trick fades from Fey Deller completely.
The Council
Rock,
Chamber of the Six
I shift around in the seat, but no matter what I do, it doesn’t feel right. I still feel like I should be on the other end of the stone table. I sigh and push my chair out. The scrape on the floor, too dark to see what it even is, is an eerily loud and lonesome sound in the empty chamber. The secretary let me in with no qualms, though I am fifteen minutes early. I guess the Councilmembers don’t need to come in this early, with their offices right down the hall.
