Chariots of Wrath

by R. L. King

  She shakes her head. “Go ahead. I’m surprised you want to tell anybody.”

  “I don’t…but I think if we’re going to get anywhere with all this, I need to.”

  “It’s okay,” Nick says. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want to…but I need to,” I repeat. “If you want to hear it, anyway. It’s a pretty nasty story.”

  “Up to you. If you want to tell me, I’m listening.”

  The server picks that moment to show up with three steaming plates. More than once, I’ve believed there’s got to be a secret server school where they teach you skills like “showing up with the food just as the customer’s about to reveal a deep dark secret,” and “turning up to ask how things are going the second the customer shoves too much food in her mouth.” If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was its own kind of magic power. Waitstaff Witchery. Server Spellcraft.

  Fortunately, this one also has the good sense to notice she’s intruding, so she drops off the plates and gets the hell out. I make a mental note to leave her a good tip, then realize I’m stalling. Already, my heart is pounding and I feel like I want to jump up and run out of the room. I swallow hard, examine my plate, and plunge ahead before I lose my nerve.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’m not going to give you the details, because…well…I’m honestly not sure I could get through that even after all this time. But…as you might have guessed, my family is really magical.”

  “Yeah, I thought so. But not like mine, right?”

  Twyla tosses me a questioning look, but I ignore it. “No, not like yours. Like I told you, we’re kind of a big, tight-knit group of people who aren’t all related, but who all consider each other family.”

  He nods, and I can tell he’s thinking about his own family—the new one he only just discovered a month ago when he found out he was the long-lost grandson of Quentin Happenstance, magical crime lord.

  “Anyway, in our family, mages are apprenticed to other family members. Nobody thinks it’s a good idea to apprentice with your own parents, since there’s too much baggage associated. So the older generation trains the younger one.”

  “That makes sense,” Nick says. “You spend enough time with your mom or dad telling you what to do while you’re growing up.”

  “Exactly. So, Twyla’s mom and mine were good friends from the time we were babies, so when it came time for me to apprentice, it made sense for me to go with Mara.” My voice shakes a little as I picture Mara’s warm brown eyes, turned-up nose, and happy smile.

  “Did Twyla apprentice with your mom, too?”

  “No.” I glance at Twyla, but she’s picking at her enchilada. “My mom was busy with another apprentice at the time. Twyla didn’t want to wait another year to start, so she trained with another friend of our mothers’, named Selene.”

  Twyla makes a little sound I can’t identify, kind of like a strangled swallow.

  “Okay, got it,” Nick says.

  “So anyway,” I continue before things go off track and I lose my nerve, “I started training with Mara when I was eighteen—that’s when apprenticeships traditionally start.”

  “They don’t train kids younger? Isn’t that dangerous? When does magic show up, anyway?”

  “If somebody’s really good, they can see signs of it in young kids, but it usually isn’t measurable until sometime after puberty.”

  “Except for me,” he says, dropping his gaze back to his plate.

  I let that go—there’s no point in dredging up bad memories for him, too. Enough of those to go around already. “Even if kids have magic, they can’t really do much with it before they’re trained. Sometimes you see spontaneous stuff happen if the kid’s really upset or agitated about something—”

  Twyla snorts. “Like the time I turned Jimmy Chen’s hair bright green when he dumped me right before the big dance in middle school—remember?”

  “Oh, man, I forgot all about that!” In spite of everything, I laugh for the first time tonight. It feels good. “Poor guy’s mom grounded him for a week, thinking he let those punk rocker high-school kids dye his hair!”

  Our eyes meet, and for a moment it’s just like old times: two friends close enough to be sisters, sharing a funny childhood memory as if our five-year estrangement had never happened. But then we catch ourselves at the same time, and both of us look away. Guilt surges, and I feel my cheeks growing hot.

  I don’t have a right to those happy memories anymore.

  Nick picks up on this immediately—all that skill in reading rich old ladies carrying over, I guess. “Listen, Bron, if you want to stop—”

  “I don’t want to stop,” I insist, trying to keep my voice from shaking. Okay, so I’m not coping so well. I probably should have been in therapy for the whole thing—sometimes I think everybody in Los Angeles is in therapy for something, even the therapists—but it’s not exactly the kind of thing you can dump on a mundane counselor. Maybe dumping it on a friend in a Mexican restaurant might be the next best thing.

  I guess I’m about to find out.

  “Just let me plow through this so we can get to the other stuff, okay?” I pick up a taco, take a huge bite, and get myself back together while I’m chewing. “Okay, so I apprenticed with Twyla’s mom. Everything went really well for a couple of years. I learned what I was supposed to learn, I was doing well, and we got along great. It was the kind of apprenticeship most people only dream of.”

  “How long do apprenticeships take?” Nick asks.

  I have to remind myself how little he knows about the magical world. Even with his rare, scary, and really powerful wild talent, he’s like an American dropped into the middle of rural China. He barely even speaks the language, let alone understands the concepts. “Usually around four years. I worked mine around college courses, so it probably would have taken closer to five if…things hadn’t gone wrong.”

  I look down at my hands again. Yeah, it’s fading. It’s definitely nowhere near as raw as it was even a year ago. But I’ve been doing a great job not thinking about it for a long time, too. Before Nick can say anything else—I don’t need his sympathy right now and it’s only making things worse—I force myself to forge ahead again.

  “So after a couple of years, Mara decides it’s time to teach me something a little more complex. It’s a basic summoning—not easy, but not too hard, either.”

  “Summoning?” Nick looks intrigued. “You mean…you guys can do that? Summon spirits? I’ve read about it, of course, but I thought that fell on the ‘fake’ side of the world.”

  “Oh, no,” Twyla says, taking an interest in the conversation for the first time in a while. “Our family does a lot of summonings. Usually to ask for guidance or help with other magical rituals.”

  “Wow. What do you summon? Are you talking things from…other dimensions?” Nick’s looking enthusiastic, but then he catches a glimpse of my expression and immediately goes contrite. “Damn, I’m sorry, Bron. I’ll shut up and pull my foot out of my mouth.”

  “It’s okay.” I do get it—even though the idea that magic is real is brand-new to him, he’s been obsessed with the concept since he was a kid. Of course he wants to know everything he can. I give him props for catching on that this isn’t the time, though. “Maybe later on you can ask Twyla to answer some of your questions, if you don’t want to take them to your grandfather.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Anyway, go on. Sorry for the derailment.”

  I nod and take a few deep breaths. This is going to be the hard part, even if I’m not planning to give him any of the details. The gory details, the expression goes—but in this case it would be factually correct. “So…the first summoning is kind of an important stage in our family’s style of magical training. Sort of a…coming-of-age thing, representing the transition from basic apprenticeship into the more detailed stuff. Once an apprentice gets through that, it signals she’s ready to start learning the more advanced techniques. Some students don’t
make it past that point, which isn’t a stigma or anything. Some of them even choose to stop there. It’s more like finishing your education with high school instead of going on to college. Does that make sense?”

  “Yeah.”

  I wonder if Nick went to college, but this isn’t exactly the time to ask. “So, Mara asks Selene to help out with my first summoning, which is also standard.” I pause and take a long swallow of my drink. “Summonings…can be dangerous. Things can go wrong with them, though the types apprentices do are usually pretty safe.”

  “Did Twyla attend too?” Nick asks. “Selene’s her…mentor, right?”

  “She is, but no, I didn’t attend,” Twyla says. “I’d already finished mine a couple months ago, but other apprentices aren’t allowed to watch.”

  “Too distracting.” My heart’s beating faster again, and I’m sure the sheen of sweat on my forehead isn’t just coming from my spicy tacos. “So…anyway…my first job was to cast the circle for the summoning. The being I was calling was a minor spirit from one of the nearby dimensions—the type we use to help us with our study. I was supposed to summon it, bind it in the circle, and ask it three questions. After it answered, I was to dismiss it, sending it back to where it came from. The whole process, once the circle was complete, should take only fifteen or twenty minutes. Very simple, right?” My voice shakes, and I clench my fists in my lap. Damn it, I am not going to break down! It’s times like this that I wish I drank alcohol, but that would be a stupid idea. The nightmares would be worse than anything I’m feeling now.

  “So,” I say, plowing ahead and raising my voice a little to try to take the shake out, “I get the circle done, and Mara checks it over. She says it looks great. Selene checks it too. I’m feeling pretty proud of myself right about then. They back off, and Mara tells me to go ahead with the summoning. She stays in the room, but Selene goes out to watch from kind of an observation chamber, so she won’t affect the magic.”

  I glance over at Twyla. She’s stopped eating, but she isn’t looking at me or Nick. Unlike me, she doesn’t have a problem with alcohol, and she’s already finished her oversized margarita.

  “Okay, so the next part is the incantation. I stand just outside the circle and recite it, using the true name of the spirit I’m trying to summon.”

  Nick looks interested again and almost says something, but then does the mental equivalent of sitting on his hands.

  Another deep breath. Come on, Bron, you’ll feel better if you get it out. “I begin the incantation. Everything’s going fine for a while. Something starts forming in the middle of the circle, just like I expected. I’m nervous, but excited too. I’m thinking about all the things I’ll be able to learn once I get through this.”

  My voice is shaking again, and I give up trying to control it. I grip the edge of the table and keep going. “That’s…when something goes wrong. And I’m not going to describe it. I don’t think I could—not without going crazy. Please don’t ask me for details. But whatever I got—it wasn’t what I was trying to summon. It was much bigger and much more…horrible. I don’t know where it came from, but…”

  Twyla reaches out and covers my hand with hers. I’m surprised, because hers is shaking too. She didn’t see what happened, but I’m sure her imagination has filled in the details over the years.

  “I…” I swallow. “I barely remember what happened after that, except…” My voice drops to a whisper. “…the thing…whatever it was…killed Mara. Didn’t just kill her…”

  “Bron, it’s okay. You don’t need to go into detail,” Nick says gently.

  I nod, grateful to him for trying to help even though the images in my mind are every bit as vivid as they were that night. “Anyway…I thought it would come after me next. I didn’t know how it couldn’t have. I froze. I had no idea what to do, how to fight it. And then…I passed out.”

  I feel like crap right about now—like a dishrag somebody’s wrung out and tossed on the side of the road. I’ve been fooling myself all this time, believing that if I refused to think about what happened, it would get easier.

  It’s not easier. The fresh memories are worse than ever, ambushing me without even the desensitization that comes from frequently reliving them. But I have to finish the story.

  “So…when I woke up the next day, Selene came to see me. She told me what happened—that Mara was dead. At first I couldn’t figure out why she seemed to be treating me so coldly, but then she told me the rest: because what happened to Mara was my fault. Because I’d messed up the incantation, mis-recited the spirit’s true name. It was the most important part of the ritual. If you got anything else wrong, your spotter could deal with it. But if you summoned the wrong spirit and nobody knew how to get rid of it—” I bow my head, looking down into the ruin of my dinner. I’d barely eaten anything, only pushed it around in my nervous energy.

  “But…” Nick began, “you were a student. Students screw things up. That’s why they have teachers.”

  “Not that badly.” My voice is bitter now. “They’d never have let me try the summoning if they didn’t believe I was ready. I was careless—that’s all it was. I mean, come on: kids who take driver’s education might run into the back of a parked car, or turn the wrong way on a one-way street, but they don’t hop the sidewalk and mow down crowds of pedestrians.”

  “But even so,” he pressed. “You’re saying this Selene person blamed you for it? Got you kicked out of the family?”

  I shook my head, still not looking at him. “No. Well—yes, she did blame me for it. She and Mara were close friends, so I’m sure she was grief-stricken over the whole thing. But she didn’t get me kicked out of the family. She just told everybody it was my careless screw-up that got Mara killed. She said it was important that they know, because it would affect my future magical training—if there even was any. If anybody even wanted to train me anymore, after that. I was the one who left the family. I couldn’t face them anymore, so I left. Gathered up my stuff and came out here.”

  “And that’s why you don’t want anything to do with magic anymore.” His tone is understanding. “Hell, I don’t blame you, but—I still say you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it like this.”

  “Yeah, well, tell that to my subconscious,” I snap. “I came out here so I could start a new life as a mundane. I didn’t want anything to do with magic anymore. I didn’t want to be surrounded by people who had it. I didn’t want to take the chance of being tempted to try again, and screwing something else up. The couple times I did try, back when I first got here, I couldn’t even do it. I froze up and couldn’t even cast a simple spell without breaking into a cold sweat and spiking my heartrate into the stratosphere. I took that as a sign from the universe that I wasn’t meant to, and you know what? That’s fine.” My voice rises and loses the shake. “It’s fine. I’ve done just fine out here as a mundane. I’m happy. I don’t need magic.”

  Nick doesn’t answer. He looks into his plate and takes a long drink from his beer. I can’t fault him for it—there aren’t too many tactful ways somebody can respond to a story like that. Sometimes silence is the best thing.

  “Bron…” Twyla speaks for the first time since the beginning of my story.

  “I’m so sorry, Twyla…I’m so sorry about everything.”

  She takes my hand again. “I know. I know. I’m sorry too. About a lot of things—including not contacting you in all this time.”

  “Why would you? My screw-up got your mom killed. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either.”

  “But that’s just the thing,” she says gently, still gripping my hand. “It’s like I told you last night. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, but this whole freaky cannibal zombie thing sort of took over.”

  “Can’t imagine why,” Nick drawls.

  “We have to figure the cannibal zombie thing out.” It probably says something about my mental state that talking about cannibal zombies actually calms me down—relatively, anyway—compa
red to thinking about Mara’s death.

  “We do,” Twyla agrees, shuddering. “That was…terrifying. But one problem at a time. Let’s deal with them in order, okay?”

  I give a reluctant nod, wishing we could stay with the current problem for a little longer before diving back into the old one. “So…last night you scared me, Twy. You weren’t acting like yourself. You said something about…what happened not being my fault.”

  “Yeah.” Her voice is dead serious now.

  “What did you mean by that?”

  She takes a deep breath. “You know how I have…dreams, sometimes, right? You remember?”

  I’d forgotten until she mentioned it. “Yeah…” I have them too, sometimes: prophetic or precognitive dreams. But mine only come when I’m particularly upset about something—or when I’m drunk, and they usually don’t amount to much. A lot of women in our family have them, to some degree. “So?”

  “Well…a few days ago I had one. It was pretty scary. I…relived Mom’s death. It was like I was in the room when it was happening. You were there, and Mom, of course…and Selene.” She swallows hard, looking away again.

  “That…kind of makes sense.” I don’t look at her either. “You’re about to come and see me for the first time since it happened. I’d be surprised if it wasn’t on your mind.”

  “Yeah…I’d think so too. Except that wasn’t all that happened in the dream.”

  Both Nick and I lean forward—him more subtly than me. “Okay,” I say. “So what else happened?”

  “You were standing there, at the edge of the circle, getting ready to recite the incantation. I know I wasn’t there so I couldn’t have really seen it, but my first summoning was in the same chamber so it wasn’t hard to picture it. You started to chant, and…” She shudders.

  “What? What happened?” Normal people would probably write this whole thing off as absurd—dreams were dreams, right? They might tell you something about what’s rattling around in your subconscious, but that’s about it.