by M C Ashley
Picking himself out of the armchair he sat in, Clooney winced as he stood up.
“To what do I owe this visit?” he asked, moving to stand before me.
“I wanted to thank you for your help,” I said. “I don’t know who sent you, but if there’s any chance you can contact them, I want you to send a message for me.”
Clooney flinched. As if mulling over something unpleasant. “Are you sure?”
It was my turn to flinch. “What does that mean?”
“Messages directed to my family have a price. I’d like to explain further, but…” he tensed up “…these lips are sealed.”
“Even telling them that I’d like to thank them for sending you?”
“Especially that.”
“Although I imagine the reverse would be just as bad.”
“Very astute.”
I rolled my eyes. “Tell them that I’m very grateful that they decided to aid me by sending you. Tell them that I am still adjusting to this world and would like to reestablish ties with them if they knew me previously.”
“That might be hard to do. My family has come under…new management. I doubt any of them knew you personally.”
“Then tell them I extend an offer of friendship, so that we may work together to help rid this world of darkness.”
Clooney snorted. “You really don’t know when to stop digging a hole, my friend. Are you absolutely sure you want me to tell them this?”
I nodded.
“Then so be it,” he said. “I did warn you.”
“I like to make things interesting,” I said.
Clooney laughed again, holding his sides. “I’d forgotten how much I liked to laugh before coming here, Blake.”
I smiled. “To many more, my friend.”
“Was there anything else?”
I cleared my throat. “I’ll get this out of the way. I don’t know if you’re under some kind of geas, but I do know there’s something you’re afraid of mentioning because there would be repercussions for telling me. I want you to know that I will not attempt to pursue this subject until the situation calls for it or you choose to let me know.”
“That is something…foreign to me. Thank you. I will also make a promise too.”
“And what’s that?”
“I promise not to pursue the fair Zea until you have attempted it.”
I flinched. “I’m not interested in that.”
Clooney smirked. “Now who’s under a geas? A self-imposed one at that.”
I fumed. One step forward, twenty steps back with this guy.
2
Zea was easy to find. The St. Luke the Evangelist wing of the Fortress had mostly been spared from the Sanguine Collective’s attack. Zea, despite having many wounds herself, hadn’t slept since the fight, instead working tirelessly to attend to the needs of her patients. Having little use for my abilities then, I’d loaned some of my Christening to her to boost her powers.
Standing over a young girl snatched from what was once Burkina Faso, Zea held her hands over the girl’s body, invoking a healing wave that removed a group of claw marks that had most likely come from one of The Horde. I grimaced. They were still out there, selling slaves to whoever was sick enough to buy them. They were out of my reach now, hiding out half a world away. It would take a lot of time before I could stop them.
Zea, sensing my concern, turned to me and shook her head. “Is what we have done here not enough for you?” she asked, snippier than usual.
“It is,” I said. “But I can’t help it. I worry about what I can’t fix.”
Zea sighed. “I know. It concerns me too.” She looked at the girl and smiled. The girl smiled back. “But we must take whatever victories we can.”
I nodded. The girl scampered off to her mother.
“Your talk with Clooney went well?” Zea asked.
I suppressed every memory of the talk, knowing that it might be easy for her to access it without trying. “Yes,” I said. “I got what I wanted.”
“So you think. He’s smart. You probably gave him exactly what he wanted.”
“And if that’s what I wanted?”
Zea offered another smile. “Then I foresee me having to help you get out of yet another fool’s quest.”
“I’d like that. It’s good to know I have you at my side.”
Zea turned away from me for a moment. “Do you think we can hold this town?” she asked, holding a hand to her shoulder.
“Absolutely,” I said. “The Collective won’t attack off the bat.”
“Off the what? What do chiropterans have to do with anything?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ll explain later. The point being that we’ll have time to plan around their plans. They were always slow, careful to examine everything in context. Losing so much so soon will make them reevaluate everything about themselves. If anything, we really gave them a crisis of faith. If a vampire could be said to have faith.”
“I see. Good. Who will be in charge?”
“Of what?”
Zea turned to look at me again. “The city. The Fortress?”
“They have to be kept separate. We can’t involve ourselves too much in the local government. They need to look after themselves.”
“Will they know how? I don’t even know how it would work. I only have the Archives to have a basic idea of how governments used to act.”
I frowned. I hadn’t considered that.
“I guess we will have to get our hands a little dirty at the start, but we can’t be the ones making final decisions,” I said. “The less power we have like that, the easier it’ll be not to abuse it. We need to work together with the mundanes.”
“What is your plan?” Zea asked.
“My what?”
Zea scoffed. I grinned, rubbing the back of my head. I hadn’t gotten that far yet. Zea, sensing my thoughts, sighed deeply, but allowed herself a smile.
“When you were in your past, did this tendency to not have a plan always work in your favor?” she asked.
I held a hand up and waved it sideways. She stared at me, confused. I grunted in frustration.
“Mostly,” I said. “But the only reason that was possible was because my friends were backing me up. Because friends like you were looking out for me.”
“Then I see why you’ve lived for as long as you have,” Zea said. “I never knew it was possible for a fool to be so successful in life until I met you. Despite what it has cost you to be here, I am glad that we were able to meet, Blake Azarel. I am also glad to be able to count you as a friend. I’ve…never had one before.”
I clasped a hand on Zea’s shoulder and grinned. She recoiled for a moment, but, sensing the friendly intent, softened and awkwardly placed her hand on my shoulder. I fought the urge to laugh, knowing she wouldn’t like it if I ruined the moment.
“Then it is my honor to be the friend of such a wonderful woman,” I said.
Then Zea did something I hadn’t expected: she blushed and awkwardly played with her hair. Where had that come from?
“But enough of that,” Zea said, taking her hand off my shoulder. I reciprocated. “What then should we do? We need to figure something out.”
“This world has clearly gone insane without me to keep it in check,” I said. “I mean vampire nations, Feasts, and demons? This never happened back in my day. It looks like it’s time to do something about that and get these dang kids off of my lawn. We’re going to seek out every single Psionic and Sentinel across the world and teach them. We’re going to take our world back once and for all.” I laughed. “Me a teacher.”
“What’s so funny?”
“If my mentors could see me now they’d probably be rolling in their graves. I wasn’t exactly the best of students. One of them told me that he would pay me to never train anyone at Sentinel Camp.”
“I can see why. But I believe you can do it. What’s some teaching compared to what you have already done?”
I laughed and held
out my hand, balling it into a fist. Zea studied it for a moment and slowly placed her right hand into the same design. I reached forward and then made contact with her fist.
“And we’ll do it together,” I said. “As a team. The glorious leader, the ginger, the other ginger, the tease, and the tagalong kid.”
Zea stared at her fist after it had contacted mine and quickly moved it forward with more force than I’d done for her. It hurt for a moment, but I ignored it, glad she was grasping the concept.
“I am not a ginger,” she said.
“Day-walker, whatever,” I said.
A baby’s cry alerted Zea to someone else needing her treatment and I waved her off. Responding to the call for help, Zea held it in her arms for a moment, clearly not knowing what to do until the baby’s mother showed her how to hold it properly. I smiled. She had a lot to learn. We all did.
I took my leave, knowing my next target was further down the medical wing. I was so lost in my thoughts that I barely noticed Mara’s sudden presence in front of me to stop in place.
Mara wore the grey robes of the Archivist, her eyes gleaming even in the dark hallway. I hadn’t spoken to her since we’d returned from the fight, save to say that we’d won before I’d passed out from exhaustion.
“You have exceeded my expectations,” Mara said. “I thank God for choosing to bring you to us in our time of need. It was the best thing that could have happened.”
I paused. I’d been unexpectedly offered another gift of praise from her. I smiled.
“I couldn’t have done it without everyone here,” I said. “If I were by myself this would’ve ended up very differently.”
“True,” Mara said. “But none of this would have occurred without your uncanny ability to lead them—to make them believe in something that the world hasn’t had the strength to hope for in a hundred years. You possess an extraordinary gift, Guardian Azarel. Be sure to use it wisely.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“She is further down the hall,” she said, referencing my next target. “The first door past the Sam Temple statue.”
I nodded my hat to her and walked down the hall, smiling again. I really had won everyone here over to my side. I always knew my stubbornness wasn’t a hindrance as my mother had always said, and she was one to talk anyways.
I laughed out loud. She would’ve been proud. I wished she was here, but Nane Azarel was where God wanted her. I’d accepted that.
Reaching the door where Cinderella was recuperating, I knocked and heard a soft voice welcome me inside. I closed the door behind me as I examined her.
Cinderella held her arm in a sling, having injured it at a point in the fight that I’d missed. She smiled awkwardly at me, almost as if she’d never been taught how. I kicked myself inwardly for such a stupid analysis. I had been worried about her, given that she had never seen combat before. My first time had been hectic. I’d barely survived thanks to my natural predilection to ignore common sense when fighting an obviously superior foe, in this case a troll three times my size. But Cinderella seemed to be fine, almost ecstatic, despite her injury. I looked to where Zoë had impaled her, and audibly gasped.
Zea was good. Freakishly good. I’d seen a whole lot of healing invocation in my time—mostly because I was the one getting healed after the result of some harebrained scheme—but this was probably the most impressive work I’d ever witnessed. Even some of the greatest healers left massive scars on their patients from their wounds, but all I could see was a faded circle on Cinderella’s abdomen.
I nodded. She had used Cinderella’s body to massively repair the wound by mass producing new skin cells and re-installing any bits of the organs that had been hurt in the attack. I had recruited the right day-walker. Now to make the other day-walker feel at peace.
“Well, hey, kiddo,” I said. “I didn’t know we were recruiting the pretty ones in the Excelsior membership drive.”
Cinderella blushed, but said nothing for a while before deciding on, “Thank you.”
I smiled, but then she grimaced.
“I was lost,” she said. “So lost.” Cinderella shivered, bringing her knees up to her face. “You have no idea what it was like. So long. I was with her for so long. The pain—the torture. So many people like us I found. She fed on them and killed them. Beleth fed too, using Zoë to get the energy necessary to manifest in the world. And I watched it all. I couldn’t stop it. I was too weak—I—” she trailed off and wept.
I reached over to her and hugged her. “It’s okay,” I said. “There was nothing you could’ve done. You’re safe now. She can never hurt you again. There’s no way I’d let anyone hurt you, Cinderella. We couldn’t have done any of this without you.”
When she calmed down, I pulled away and offered a disarming smile.
“Nathan said you would save me,” she said, forming a half-smile. “I’ve never seen myself act like I did when I attacked Zoë. It was so…invigorating. I guess I fought so hard because you’d done so much for me. No one’s ever done that for me before.”
“Seems to be a recurring theme in this world,” I said, grimly. “Cinderella, I have a question for you.”
“Please ask it.”
“What do you want to do?”
She flinched.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“What do you, Cinderella Young, want to do with your life?” I asked.
She drew back on her bed, mulling it over. “What do you want me to do?”
“What you want to do. It’s your choice.”
“My choice,” she said, giggling. “It’s my choice. I can do whatever I want.”
“Well within reason,” I muttered.
“I want to stay with you. I want to fight for you. I want to free people like me from them. I want to learn. I want to—I want to do everything!”
I chuckled. “That’s my girl,” I said.
She blushed. I seemed to really be having that effect on women with increased frequency these days. I had no idea why.
“All right, Ms. Wants To Do Everything, you get some rest and heal up. Your training begins tomorrow.”
“But it’s already tomorrow,” she said. “The sun will be up fairly soon.”
I checked my hand, forgetting I didn’t have a watch anymore. “Huh. How time flies when it loses all concept.”
Exiting the room, I waved a hand at her and placed my hands in my pockets. I whistled lyrics to a song I’d long forgotten the name of, wondering how effective of a teacher I’d be. I wasn’t used to it, that was sure. If I made up plans, I normally kept them to myself, but that was no way to act now. I might even have to express feelings.
I shuddered at the thought.
But at least I had willing participants who’d been easy to sway. Now for the runt.
“I am no such thing,” Nathan said, making me jump up in surprise.
I had the worst sense of awareness in the entire omniverse. How had a ten-year-old child snuck up on me? I had enhanced hearing. I had trained for this. Why was it failing me so? And why did I keep finding these people in quick succession so easily? It was lamentably forced.
“He wants to speak with you,” Nathan said. “Outside. Where you came here first, he says.”
I nodded. “You doing okay?” I asked.
Nathan nodded back. “I didn’t get hurt like you guys. I’m just happy that we got out of there alive.”
“Ready to join the army, kid?”
“Yes.”
“Huh, that was easy enough. I’m good at this recruiting thing. I think I missed my true calling in life.”
“Dream on.”
I paused, raising a hand, but then laughed at the joke. It wasn’t particularly good, but he was proud of it if nothing else.
Taking my leave, I plotted my way to meet Nathan-Prime.
3
Nathan-Prime sat next to me as we watched the sunrise on the desert sand. This was the first time I had ever seen him on the physical plan
e, well, at least to an extent. He had no physical body tying him to the world; instead an astral projection of himself inhabited the space next to me. The sand, however, seemed to react to his body, which shouldn’t have happened, given that he had no weight in this form.
“An illusion,” he said. “It helps ground myself in your mind, allowing this image of myself to conform to your predisposed sense of how reality works.”
“Cool,” I said.
We sat outside Mordecai’s Gas Depot. I watched the decrepit building crumble down rapidly. I clicked my tongue, knowing that I had a part in its downfall.
“Destructive as always, I see,” Nathan-Prime remarked.
“I’m just surprised it stood up so long after I was in it,” I said.
“Indeed.”
“Why am I here?”
Nathan-Prime smirked and I rolled my eyes before he could ask the obvious question.
“Do you know why the Forum had to fall?” Nathan-Prime asked instead, crafting a ball of light in his hand that started to orbit around his fingers.
“Was there a reason?” I asked. “Did we really need to go through that?”
“Yes, and the fact that you are asking that proves that it did. You must look into the past—what you remember and what will be returned to your memory. You must realize why the Forum was doomed to failure and seek to change it.”
“We weren’t proactive enough.”
Nathan-Prime paused, mulling over the idea. “A factor, but not the factor.”
“But our job was to protect the world from supernatural threats. We hid behind our Fortress while the Horde sold people into slavery and the Collective fed off of people who had no idea they existed. We made treaties with them.”
“And who introduced those treaties?”
I frowned. Who had? For years we had actively fought against the Collective and other groups like the Red Council, so why had we suddenly stopped? Surely none of our members who understood why we fought them in the first place would’ve seriously been willing to consider a treaty with such foul beings.
