I pull the staff from my back and hold it in both fists, then plant my feet on the opposite shore and stop. The beast reels to face me. It throws back its head, the fur there matted now with rainwater collected from the leaves and fronds in the forest. It roars, and I stumble, but only for a moment, and I raise my staff and roar back.
Beneath me, the ground rumbles. The trees tremble around us, and the stream begins to bubble like it’s boiling. I can feel the power in my eyes and my lips. They both seem to fill with blood, and the beast is sent hurtling into the nearby stand of trees. It whimpers as its back slaps a thick tree trunk, and it slides to the wet grass. But I know it’s down, not out, and I don’t have much fight left in me. Without help, I can’t beat this thing, and I have the feeling the beast knows that too. He’s already recovering when I put my fingers to my lips and call my ride. The griffon lands beside me, and with one hand out and casting a shimmering shield of holy magic to hold the beast back, I manage to grip the griffon’s leather rein tightly and get one leg over its back. We take off as the field flickers and drops. The beast plants a heavy paw on my calf and tears my boot to shreds.
I’m out of energy and bleeding, so I lower my head to the griffon’s downy neck and begin to drift to sleep. She’ll take me home, and there I can get help. The wind and cold air as we climb rush over my bare shoulders, and I shiver. Only my left hand, still gripping the rein, is warm. My palm and the strap of leather are damp with sweat. Soon we’re diving; I hadn’t realized how close we’d been to town. Why would the beast be prowling so close? I’m drifting away now as we descend from above the clouds. The cool mist presses against me, and then it’s raining. Someone takes my hand, takes the reins from me, shakes me, and I can’t get to my feet.
“Lana, dear,” says a woman’s voice—a familiar voice, a caring voice. “Can you sit up?”
I open my eyes and find Ms. Grimmish looking back at me. She smiles. “You’d better get to the nurse’s office,” she says. “I’ll help you if you can’t get there on your own.”
The mean girl is gone, but I can’t have been out for more than a few seconds. It never takes long. The dreams, though, seem to last forever. My doctor once told me that if you don’t have to actually do things—don’t have to actually move within a physical space—time ceases to exist, and we can dream a lifetime in the most fleeting moment, like absorbing every frame of a whole movie as a single image. I admit I don’t get it, but I do like it. I’ve never told my family, but sometimes I like my vasovagal episodes. Besides the dream and the feeling of weightless freedom, I usually end up in the nurse’s office with a cookie.
Ms. Grimmish helps me stand and leads me out, Roan standing off to the side, watching. She’s seen me like this before, of course, but I guess it never gets fun. As we pass through the media center doors and start down the steps toward the nurse, Lesh walks by on his way up.
“Svetlana,” he says, but my voice is still not with me, and my tongue is thick and heavy and dry, so I grip Ms. Grimmish’s arm a little tighter and do my best to just hold on.
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CHAPTER 35
LESH TUNGSTEN
“So you’re actually going to do this?” Greg says. School’s over, and we’re standing out front, at the top of the ginormous set of steps that lead down to Marshall Avenue and, by extension, our homes. I’m looking over his shoulder at the white Pontiac Firebird idling in the drop-off/pickup spaces at the curb. It’s Jelly’s car, and I wonder who she’s planning to pick up, and why she’s already in the car and not just on her way out like the rest of us.
“Yup,” I say. “I am.”
“As long as you know what you’re getting into here,” Greg says. “I realize I’m not remotely the coolest guy in this high school, but you’re talking about twenty-sided dice here.”
I nod a little and say “Yup” again. Greg follows my gaze and finds the Firebird at the curb. “And you can forget that whole situation too,” he says, “if Jelly hears you’re hanging out with this Svetlana person and her deeply weird compadres.”
“She knows,” I admit, and briefly recount the happenings of the previous afternoon.
Greg shakes his head, disappointed as hell. I guess he figures if he doesn’t have a chance with our resident metalhead hottie—and he doesn’t—he’d at least like to hear about it from his lifelong best friend.
I put out my hand for a five, and he obliges, begrudgingly, head still shaking. I watch him hurry down the steps in a sideways quick descent. He goes straight to the Firebird and sticks his head in the passenger window. That Deel is kind of a brave little man. But I’m inside-bound, so I pull open the front door and find my way to room 3212, where I assume some kind of inaugural ritual is already being prepared.
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CHAPTER 36
SVETLANA ALLEGHENY
Roan and I are walking laps around the basement before we head to Gaming Club.
“There’s something you should know about the new possible member of the GC.” We chose this area for a reason: it’s so dead, you wouldn’t be surprised to see tumbleweed fluttering up behind you. While much of the school at this hour is bustling with the rituals of departure, the basement is a dead zone. There are no after-school activities here. There are no lockers in this hallway. There are no exits—outside of a pair of emergency doors—and even the teachers have no reason to hang out down here. Only a handful of students, leaning on walls, and a pair of hall monitors at either end let on that this hallway is not in fact in some alternate dimension, where the apocalypse has begun, centered right here in the basement at Central High.
“Okay,” she says, so I should go on, but I’m not ready to yet.
I start at the end. “He’s very quiet.”
“Okay.”
“Also, he’s a metal boy,” I add. I’m choosing my words carefully, deftly avoiding such issues as my possibly blossoming affection for his person, and his person’s central role in the destruction of the originals of our campaign, monster manual, and spell book, not to mention his ongoing crusade to distance himself from me and his female associate’s apparent tendency to threaten me with bodily harm, even if not in so many words.
“Like, a robot?” Roan says, and I can’t be sure at once if she’s kidding, but obviously I haven’t been choosing my words as deftly as I thought.
“Like, into metal,” I say. “Heavy metal. A genre of music, such as it is.”
“Ah,” she says. “Is he, like, scary?”
“No,” I say, and I try to remember if he ever was. I think so. I think he and his ilk were definitely scary, and one of them at least still is. I remember the pounding in my chest as I rode off on my dented bike that first night, and I can’t be sure how much was anger, and how much was fear, and how much was the thrill of a violent collision in the small hours of the morning and the pair of eyes behind black bangs that came with it. “He’s tall,” I add, mostly for something to say.
“So are you,” Roan says, so I nod. “Is that it?”
“What?”
“That’s what you wanted to tell me about him?” she says. “He likes metal and he’s tall?”
I take a deep breath and stop, and so Roan stops a step later and turns to face me. She waits.
I breathe.
She smiles.
“Roan,” I say.
Her smile erupts. There’s no other word for it, when Roan smiles and her mouth opens wide, so you can see her teeth and the pair of silver fillings in the back, and her freckles are like fireworks across her cheeks and forehead. When she throws out her arms and says, “You like him,” I have to cover my face to hide
the blush and grin.
But I do nod. “I think so.”
Roan’s arm’s around my waist, and she’s pulling me along the hallway. “Let’s go,” she says, hopping a bit as she pulls me along. “Now I’m even more excited to get to GC.”
“Well, that’s the other thing … ,” I start, and I steel myself, because I’m about to admit that first of all he might not show, because this morning it sure seemed like he was taking his out, and second that the boy I might be falling for is in fact a cretin like the rest of them, and wouldn’t be seen talking to me in public—twice now. I stop and stomp my foot and cover my eyes with my hand.
“Forget it,” I say as we climb the steps toward the third floor. “Forget the whole thing.”
But Roan isn’t listening, because we’ve reached room 3212, and Roan is hugging my arm and whispering up at me, “Is that him?”
So I look, and it is.
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CHAPTER 37
LESH TUNGSTEN
I’m sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall of 3212 when Svetlana rounds the corner from the stairwell. She’s with a tiny freshman-looking girl with the craziest, curliest red hair I have ever seen. When they see me, they stop short. Svetlana’s mouth literally hangs open.
“Hey,” I say, standing up, shoving my hands into my pockets. I pull one out briefly to offer a halfhearted wave and glance at the redhead.
The girls continue toward me. “Um, I thought I should wait for you,” I say. “I didn’t know if those guys were expecting me or what.”
“Um, okay,” says Svetlana. “I didn’t think you were coming. This is Roan.”
“Hi.”
“Hello,” she says.
I face Svetlana and ask her quietly, “Are you okay? You looked … before.”
“Oh, yeah,” she says, even waving me off a little. “It was nothing. Let’s just go in.”
So we do. A teacher I recognize but don’t know sits at the big desk at the front of the room. She looks up and says, “How are you feeling, Lana?” and Svetlana smiles and says, “Fine, thank you. I guess I was just so tired.”
The teacher offers a weak and suspicious smile, but I’m not in on this, whatever it is, so I head toward the back, where two guys—one little and black and severely overdressed, the other taller and white and drumming his fingers on the table and his feet on the floor—are seated on the far side of a long table.
“Um, everyone,” Svetlana says as Roan slips past us and grabs the empty seat next to the overdressed boy, “this is the new member I told you about. Lesh, you met Roan.”
She waves again.
“Reggie.”
The overdressed one tips his hat at me.
“And Abraham.”
“Yeah, hi,” says the last one. “Wait a minute. Did you say Lesh?”
“Um, that’s me,” I say, ready to once again deflect a childish comment about the uncommonness of my name. But it doesn’t come. Instead comes this:
“Lesh the miscreant who knocked Lana off her bike?” Abraham jumps to his feet, like he’s ready to fight me.
“Oh my gosh, Svet,” says Roan, and I’m struck: Svet? I haven’t heard this version before. It’s so brusque and Russian. I hate it at once. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Svetlana takes a chair opposite the other three and says, “It’s not a big deal.”
I pull a chair a little way from the table and sit down. “We made up,” I add.
“Made up?” says Abraham. He’s still standing. How many guys are there who are so committed to ill-advised physical defense of this girl? “He destroyed your work and nearly our lives and you made up?”
“Shut up,” says Svetlana, and she shoots him what must’ve been a pretty nasty glare, because he closes his eyes, puts up his hands, and sits down.
“Anyway yes, this is Lesh,” she goes on, “and he is the boy who will help us maintain our official club status, and our firm grip on Ms. Grimmish.” The teacher at the front of the room smiles and waves but doesn’t look up from her book.
“Lesh,” she says as she digs around in her bag, pulling out notebooks and pamphlets and a folded map, “we’re already started on this campaign, so you can watch and kind of get the hang of what we do and how we play.”
“He’s never played?” Abraham says, barely containing his derisive laughter. “What the hell, Lana?”
“He’ll learn,” she says, taking her own seat again. She unfolds a screen—a big cardboard fold with lots of confusing things printed on the side facing her, and with drawings of dragons and elves and other such goodies on the side facing the players.
“Whatever, whatever,” says Reggie. He pulls off his hat and adjusts something and puts it back on. “Let’s just get back to it, okay? Where were we?”
Abraham lets out a sigh to aggravate the dead. “We just stepped into the big chamber at the end of the tunnel under the inn.”
“And it’s cold,” Roan adds. She shifts in her seat, pulls her foot under her butt like a booster seat. She’s quite small. I can’t understand how a girl who looks barely old enough for high school is hanging out with three seniors. “Svet said the temperature dropped by like thirty degrees.”
“That’s too much,” Abraham says, crossing his arms.
“Who’s the DM here?” says Svetlana.
Reggie pulls off his fedora again and puts it down on the papers in front of him on the table. “He has a point,” he says. “I mean, if it’s that much colder, our stats would … Oh.”
Svetlana is grinning like a cat in a mousetrap factory. “Roll for a constitution check,” she says, and her voice is sinister and frigid—icy enough that I almost feel the temperature in the classroom itself drop by thirty degrees. The three players each grab a die and toss it.
Svetlana examines the results. Only Abraham’s roll is sufficient. “Meridel and Ambient, you both suffer a minus-three penalty to dexterity,” Svetlana says. Then she reaches into her tote bag and pulls out a huge sheet of plastic. She lays it on the table between herself and the players, revealing it to be a map of the chamber on giant graph paper. She clicks a button on the iPod player behind the screen, and classical music starts.
“Ah!” says Ms. Grimmish from the front of the room. “Boito’s Mefistofele. Cosi bello!”
“Here we go,” says Reggie. He leans forward.
“Finally,” says Roan, and she switches her booster foot with a youthful hop. Can she really be a high school student? She looks about thirteen.
“Finally is right,” says Abraham. “Let’s kill something.”
“You can try,” says Svetlana, and she lifts a cloth bag and dumps onto the giant graph paper thing a pile of little metal monsters. “It’s going to be a tough fight. I hope none of you have any plans.”
It is a tough fight. It’s a long fight too, and it proves to be my first time ever listening to an entire opera. The opera is more tolerable than I would have guessed, but the game: I am a little disappointed at how little Svetlana gets to talk or do anything other than roll dice behind the screen and announce damage. The other three, meanwhile, are shouting orders at each other, calling each other by fantasy names, and getting visibly more and more nervous as the battle goes on. Finally the last monster falls. All the player characters are deeply wounded, even near death. If they rest, they will survive.
Ambient—Reggie’s healing character—climbs to his feet, from what I can tell. “I’d like to investigate the chill in here,” he says. “It must be related to the blue runic markings in the center of the chamber.”
“Do you approach?” asks Svetlana.
“Dude,” says Abraham. “Don’t be a moron.”
Reggie glares at his companion, and who could blame him. I already hate this guy Abraham, and I only met him about two hours ago. Reggie close
s his eyes to push through the aggravation of listening to Abraham, and as he opens them says to Svetlana, “Perception check?”
“Sure.”
Reggie rolls and calls out, “Fifteen.”
“That’s with your bonus?” Svetlana asks, and none of this makes sense to me, either, trust me.
Anyway, Reggie nods, and Svetlana leans back in her chair. She pulls her braid around front and holds it in both hands. “You identify several of the symbols glowing on the floor of the chamber, within the runic circle. They represent a minor demon, not of this dimension, but frequently worshipped by local shamanistic races and even some of the higher races—the humans, the dwarves—that live in the wild areas outside the main village.”
Abraham sighs, and I glare at him. He doesn’t notice.
“In the center of the runic circle, something is moving,” Svetlana goes on. “You at once recognize it as a face of the demon himself.”
“It’s really him?” Reggie says. “Not an illusion?”
“You can’t tell.” Svetlana has a die in one hand now, and she’s shaking it absentmindedly.
“Is it trapped?” Reggie asks. “Can it get out?”
“You can’t tell that, either,” Svetlana says. She puts the die down in front of her, then leans forward on her elbows and props her chin on her hands.
“Let’s just get back to town,” Abraham says. “We can come back and check on this in the morning, once we’re rested.”
“I think it’s probably fine,” Reggie says, and Abraham guffaws. “I use a healing salve on myself.”
“Okay,” says Svetlana.
“And I approach the rune.”
“How close?”
“How far am I now?” asks Reggie, and he counts squares on the giant graph paper in the center of the table. “Thirty feet. I’ll move in to … ten feet.”
Guy in Real Life Page 17
