Forgery of the Phoenix

by Michael Angel

  “It is along this line,” Liam whispered.

  “Hold that pose,” I said.

  I scooted around Liam and made my way back to the hall closet where I’d stored Galen’s set of human clothing. The wizard’s multi-pocketed burgundy jacket hung neatly on a wooden hanger. I got a whiff of several spicy scents as I brushed it to one side.

  I rummaged around until I found the backpack I’d retrieved from outside the Sepulcher of the Eight Talons. The straps were still broken from the fight at the end of that adventure, but I ignored the damage as I turned the pack on its side. Instead, I unzipped each of the khaki-colored pockets until I found what I was looking for.

  “Here we go,” I announced, as I returned to the kitchen, pocket compass in hand.

  “Very good,” Galen said approvingly, as he watched me lower the device and wait for it to settle on its north-south axis. “Your world still uses the lore of cold iron.”

  “Mostly when we don’t have a GPS system handy,” I remarked offhandedly. I finally got a good bearing on the direction Liam indicated. It was easy, because it was due east. “Okay, I have it.”

  Liam opened his eyes, and the charged feeling in the air dissipated. I spread out the map on the kitchen table and marked the location of my house with a penciled ‘X’. My friends gathered closely, either looking around my elbow or over my head as I snatched out one of my notebooks from the attaché case.

  Instead of opening it, I used its spine as a straight edge. I oriented the spine so that it tracked eastwards and carefully drew a gray graphite line to the far edge of the map. Exactly as I had hoped, the line went right through the location of the one remaining stock of dimerized isobutene to the east of Los Angeles.

  The location lay at the edge of several towns that dotted the map between Los Angeles and San Bernardino. In fact, that specific section boasted a petroleum tank farm and various other industrial properties. That was curious. Although the whole area had been zoned for heavy industry, what I’d seen there when passing by on the I-10 freeway had been abandoned.

  “This might not be the exact location of the power source that the Quondam mentioned,” Galen cautioned. “It could simply be a point that happens to lie upon the same eastward bearing.”

  “If so, it’s still helpful,” Liam pointed out. “The closer we get, the easier it is for me to get another, better fix on that same magic spoor.”

  “We’d better tell Korr,” I said. “Besides, if Liam can track the spoor of Seraphine magic, I’m betting that he’ll be even better at it.”

  “A most logical proposition,” Galen agreed.

  The wizard followed me outside, then waited at a safe distance as I approached Korr’s ‘Inert’ form. Shaw and Liam stayed back behind Galen as he made the same half-twist with his wrist and recited the incantation for his Fire Shield spell.

  Once I got Galen’s nod of approval, I rapped three times on Korr’s Inert form. On cue, the Seraphine blazed to life. Korr opened his eyes and spread his wings. I quickly stepped back out of range so Galen could allow his spell to drop. Instantly, the warmth of a crackling winter fire spread over my skin as the phoenix regarded us with a curious look.

  “Since you have woken me from my slumber,” his voice rumbled in my head, “Then I shall assume that you have solved the mystery upon which hangs my people’s fate.”

  “We’ve made progress,” I agreed, as I held up the little bag with the shard. “This comes from a crime scene I recently investigated. Liam’s been able to trace its spoor to a specific location towards the east–”

  A basso rumble blotted out my words as Korr’s head came up. His head plumes stuck straight out and his flame-feathers quivered in excitement. I realized that the creature had just let out the equivalent of a Seraphine gasp of astonishment.

  “The Hearts of the Mother’s Body! You have found a piece of it!”

  “It’s ruby, at least. We don’t know if it’s going to lead to one of these mystical ‘hearts’.”

  A slow shake of the head. “This is what the Quondam meant in her message left on the cave wall. She found the Heart that would restore the realm of the Seraphine!”

  “Can you read the spoor off this piece of it?” I asked. “Liam was able to get the general direction, at least. You might do even better, as you were able to follow a magical trail all the way to this world.”

  Korr’s eyes glowed solid red for a moment. “Yes. I have done better than trace direction. I have location. Which is all I need.”

  “Great. Let Galen know the details. I’ll need a minute to prep the van for the four of us.”

  “You will not need to do that,” Korr said, in a tone that chilled me, even in the face of his flame. “None of you shall need anything from now on, now that you have served your purpose in restoring my glorious people.”

  The Seraphine’s flame grew more intense. His glowing-ember exterior flared into lava-red, then forest-fire red, and kept on going. I staggered back, as did my friends, as the wave of heat threatened to make our hair, fur, or feathers burst into flame.

  “Korr!” I shouted, as I fell to my knees, blinded for a moment by the radiance. “Stop it! You’ll kill us all!”

  An evil chuckle sounded in my head.

  “That is the point,” his voice intoned. “Now you sparks shall be consumed by the fire from one of the brightest of all beings. Feel blessed that you shall become fuel for the ascension of the greater goodness of the universe.”

  Galen shouted one of his incantations. A spark of blue, and one of his protective spheres winked into place around the Seraphine. Korr paid it no mind. Instead, he continued amping up his power surge from beyond fire-red into incandescent-white. It looked like a miniature sun had blossomed behind my house, and I shrank away from it, helpless before its power.

  Unlike the wizard’s fire-shield, this spell didn’t stop the heat, but it muffled the blaze enough for me to try and crawl away. The blue-green of Galen’s magic had already begun to spark and crack. A few feet in front of me, beyond Galen’s barrier, the plastic bag containing the ruby shard lay liquefied and bubbling on the ground.

  “I shan’t be able...to hold this much longer!” Galen cried. “Get Dayna out of here!”

  “No!” I reached out for my friend, lungs burning in the hot, dry air. “You can’t just–”

  Liam grabbed one of my wrists in his mouth. Shaw did the same with his beak on my opposite elbow. They dragged me towards the house, leaving Galen silhouetted like a dying ember against the white-hot glare of Korr’s raw power.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Galen’s magic bent, then began to buckle under the fierce swirl of flame. The wizard had been forced to his knees, preventing him from retreating any further. He held up his hands, palms out, desperately trying to avoid incineration. I doubted he had more than ten seconds left before his force shield collapsed.

  And there was no way that I was going to leave my friend to his fate.

  I pulled away from Shaw and Liam. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of the one thing that might save my friend’s life. I turned and ran towards the back door. Right next to the door, just where I’d set it yesterday evening, sat the fire extinguisher.

  Instead of wasting time with undoing the cone-shaped nozzle or yanking the pull pin out, I hefted the crimson cylinder with both hands. Then I ran back towards Galen. I skidded to a stop as soon as the heat grew so intense it vaporized the beads of sweat at my brow.

  “Get down!” I cried.

  I shifted my grip on the extinguisher and did a full body twirl like I was doing a hammer throw at the Olympics. Then I let it go, sailing the canister right at Korr’s white-hot head. The phoenix saw the improvised missile coming and reflexively snapped its beak at it.

  The pressurized container exploded in its face with a BANG!

  A fragment of metal whizzed by my wrist close enough to ruffle my sleeve. Two more chunks of shrapnel rattled and bounced off the tattered remains of Galen’s shield. But
that was nothing compared to Korr’s shrieks of rage and fear as more than twenty pounds of compressed potassium bicarbonate fountained over his body at pointblank range.

  The Seraphine’s fire came painfully close to guttering out completely. He staggered back, dazed by the explosion and the flame retardant. Fire-feathers fell to the ground, sizzling like bacon on a griddle for a moment before crumbling into ash.

  Then with a griffin-like squawk, Korr reignited his flame, though nowhere near as hot as before. With a flurry of mighty wingbeats, he rose straight up into the sky until he vanished into the low clouds. Shaw spread his own wings, ready to take off after our foe.

  “Hold on!” I said firmly, causing the drake to pause. “Korr’s beyond our power for now. Help me with Galen!”

  The wizard lay slumped on the ground next to me. A groan escaped his chapped lips as I slipped an arm under one shoulder. Shaw quickly got under his other side. Between the two of us, Galen managed to stagger back into the house.

  I got Galen into one of the chairs at the dining room table. He opened his eyes, and I saw to my relief that they were clear and undamaged. I could spot treat a lot of wounds, but a corneal flash burn wasn’t one of them.

  “Praytell,” he croaked, “what just happened?”

  “Korr’s gone, and you’re safe,” I said, as I checked Galen over.

  The wizard had gotten luckier than I’d dared hope. His face, palms, and forearms were all bright red, and the skin around his eyes had already begun to swell with fluid. The arm hair below the elbow, as well as his eyelashes, had been almost completely singed away. And his golf shirt had actually blackened under the intense heat.

  Shaw clacked his beak angrily. “What happened was betrayal, vile betrayal!”

  “It does seem to be the case,” Liam agreed as he came inside. He closed the back door by grabbing the knob and pulling it shut with his mouth. “I can only hope Korr does not return to finish what he started.”

  “He shall not,” Galen said. “Even as I fought him, I sensed that he was close to the threshold of his power. Korr’s magic is some of the strongest I’ve ever faced, but it is hardly limitless.”

  “Good news for a change,” I said. I pulled the entire glass pitcher of iced tea out of the refrigerator and put it in Galen’s hands. “Drink as much of that as you can. I don’t want you dehydrated and passing out on us.”

  “Perish the thought,” he averred. The wizard tipped the pitcher back and began to take big gulps of the cold brown liquid.

  I went back through the living room, on my way to my medicine cabinet. Far in the distance, I could hear sirens approaching. That wasn’t surprising. Between the flame effects and the sound of the exploding extinguisher, someone on the block was bound to have called emergency services.

  But it did put a strict limit on what time we had left.

  “Shaw,” I called, and the drake was by my side in an instant. “I need you to keep watch. Try to keep hidden, but let us know if you see anyone or anything coming down the street towards the house.”

  “Aye, Dayna,” he said, and the griffin loped over to the window. He raised a corner of the flame-singed curtain with one massive lion’s paw and ducked his eagle’s head under it.

  Meanwhile, I took a deep breath, held it, and then entered my bedroom.

  The room was dimly lit, but I could tell at a glance that no one had touched or moved anything in it. I didn’t waste more than a second before getting my nerve up to push into the bathroom.

  I steadfastly refused to look at the toilet and bathtub area, instead going right for the medicine cabinet. I snatched up a bottle of ibuprofen tablets and a tube of aloe vera gel. On the way out, I caught a glimpse of the rest of the bathroom in the mirror. The shower curtain had been drawn discretely across the tub. An ominously high, dark-colored mound sat behind it.

  My breath came out in a pah! as I returned to the kitchen. I got Galen to take a dose of the caplets to stave off the worst of the pain and swelling. He stopped me before I could smear on the aloe gel.

  “There is healing salve in my wizard’s jacket,” he reminded me. “Can you bring it hither?”

  I nodded, mentally chastising myself for not thinking of it earlier. Galen had used that same salve on Shaw twice before, during two encounters with Magnus Killshevan. That had been before all this nonsense with the ‘Old War’, ancient prophesy, or the Codex.

  That thought stopped me for a moment as I grabbed Galen’s jacket from the closet.

  “Shaw,” I called. “Just a moment.”

  The drake pulled his stern-looking eagle head out from under the window curtain. “How may I be of service to thee?”

  “You’re the one with that griffin talent for recall. Think about Pirr’s message, the one she left in fire-writing on that wall. What was the symbol for ‘Seraphine?’”

  Shaw blinked, and then focused his golden eyes on the wall next to the window. With an extended talon, he sketched out the design, which looked like a series of scribbled, elongated ‘M’s stacked upon one another. I nodded and left him to continue his watch as I returned to the kitchen, jacket in hand.

  Galen immediately located the jar in one of the many pockets. He left opening the container to me, as my fingers weren’t beginning to swell like so many sausages. A pepper jelly smell permeated the kitchen as I dipped my fingers in the gel and began to smear it liberally over the wizard’s palms and the backs of his hands. He sighed contentedly as I worked my way up his forearms, following the retreating line of reddened skin.

  The magic salve didn’t cure anything completely. However, it worked to instantly reduce Galen’s wounds to something like a moderate sunburn. His fingers and eyes stopped swelling any further, and the burns and chapping all but vanished from his face and lips.

  “My state is much improved,” he said, as he held up his hands, studying them.

  “I agree. In fact–” I stopped, and my mind did another one of its weird clicks.

  “Dayna?” Liam asked cautiously, as he saw the stupefied look on my face.

  “Korr’s betrayal,” I muttered, as I absently re-sealed the jar. “Of course.”

  The wizard and fayleene traded a puzzled glance.

  “Come on,” I said, beckoning my two friends to follow me. “I need to show everyone something.”

  “What might you need to show us, given these dire circumstances?” Galen asked, as he got up, jacket in hand.

  I gave the wizard a grim look. “The reason that Korr just tried to murder us all.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Liam and Galen followed me into the living room, watching intently as I went over to my rolltop desk. I located the key, unlocked the desk’s rollup section, and slid it up smartly. Shaw poked his head out from under the curtain as I took out the Codex of the Bellum Draconus and began flipping through the pages.

  “Dayna, ‘tis time for battle soon,” the drake said, as he raked his talons across the remains of my poor hardwood floor. “I see flashes of red moving this way, and mine own ears pick up the shrillness of a war cry. Methinks that the Seraphine have allies approaching, ready for combat!”

  “That’s the fire trucks, and you’re hearing sirens,” I muttered offhandedly, as I found the page I was looking for. I set the Codex out on the back of the couch and showed my findings to my friends. “There it is!”

  “What are we supposed to be looking at?” Liam asked, puzzled.

  “The first thing is the symbol that Shaw’s scratched on the wall, next to the window.”

  Galen rubbed his chin. “That appears to be one of the word-symbols from Pirr’s message. The part that I would venture to say was not a forgery.”

  “It’s the symbol meaning ‘Seraphine.” I walked over to stand next to Shaw’s talon sketch. Once there, I jabbed a finger at the uppermost lines. “That’s a scorch mark, I’m sure of it. The phoenix write in fire-letters, so it’s natural to see these as part of their script.”

  “I wouldn’t
contest that theory, as it makes logical sense.”

  “But what if you’re writing about the Seraphine, and you don’t use fire-lettering?” I returned to where I’d left the Codex atop the couch back. I held the book up so that my friends could all see what I pointed to. “Without those scorch marks, what would you get?”

  Shaw, with his raptor-keen eyesight, saw it first. He let out a breath with a leonine hiss. Liam nodded sadly, his antlers bobbing as he did so.

  Galen shook his head in remorse. “As some might say, too little, seen too late.”

  I set the book back down. The pages I’d selected remained open. The very same pair of pages that listed out the ‘battle line’ of the ‘Creatures of Light’ who’d faced off against the ‘Creatures of the Dark’ almost three thousand years ago.

  I hadn’t been able to translate all of the symbols. On the side of the Light, both Shaw and Liam’s peoples were listed. So were the pouquelaye, the ‘dream horses’. By contrast, the dragons and the demons fell under the listings for the forces of Darkness.

  And scrawled right under those two symbols was the one for the Seraphine.

  “How could I have been so blind?” I gritted, as I shook my head.

  “We were all blinded,” Liam said, “because each of us had hope.”

  “Hope?” I asked, puzzled.

  Liam tossed his head. “Yes, hope! You were there when my people’s home burned, when Shaw’s aerie tore itself apart, and when the owls slew their own Parliament. We’ve been taking losses each time, even when we’ve won. We had hope...that after all of this, we’d have found another ally in the fight against the Darkness.”

  “Thou hast a point,” Shaw conceded. “But no matter our intent, defeat hath a bitter taste.”

  “I must concur,” Galen said. “Victory is beyond retrieval, for our quarry leaves us in his wake, free to retrieve this ‘Heart’ to the east. Once Korr returns and wakes the other Seraphine, I see no force that could withstand them.”