Critical Failures IV

by Robert Bevan

  “I’ve got him!” he finally said.

  Stacy nodded and did some quick math in her head. “If both we and Ravenus maintain our current velocities, you should have just enough time to get your spells back before we catch up to him. I recommend you do that.”

  Julian went back into his meditative state, and Stacy flew the carpet just above the treetops, maintaining full visibility of the road on her left. Whenever the road curved, Stacy cut across the trees, picking up what precious few seconds she could.

  Having a rough idea of how far away the bird was, Stacy kept her attention on avoiding danger. She scanned both the ground and sky for signs of monsters. While she was thankful not to see anything in the air, she was kind of disappointed not to spot any terrestrial creatures. Now that she knew better than to fly so close to the ground, she would have liked to get another look at Sweetums.

  “I’ve got some good news,” said Julian after a few more minutes had passed. “And I’ve got some bad news.”

  “What’s the good news?” said Stacy, feeling they could really use some. Now that fifteen minutes had passed, it was time to start looking for Ravenus. She took the carpet up a little higher to get a better view of the road ahead.

  “I think I’m a third level sorcerer now.”

  “Congratulations. What’s the bad news?”

  “I’m still limited to first level spells.”

  Stacy shrugged. As bad news goes, this wasn’t so bad. “If you’re third level, why can’t you cast third level spells?”

  “Spell levels are different from caster levels.”

  “That seems unnecessarily complicated.”

  “I know, right?”

  “So how do you know you leveled up?”

  “Because I was able to prepare one more first level spell than I could before.”

  “Cool. What did you get?”

  “A couple of Mount spells, and I filled up the rest with Magic Missiles.”

  Magic Missiles sounded cool. “So what’s the plan?”

  “We find Mordred, and I blast the shit out of him with Magic Missiles. If he’s a Level 1 character, he should be easy enough to take down.”

  “Don’t we need him alive?”

  “You don’t truly die until you reach negative ten Hit Points, but you fall unconscious at zero. Since a Magic Missile only does a maximum of five points of damage, I figure it’ll be impossible to kill him outright as long as I stop shooting him as soon as he drops.”

  “That sounds pretty lame for something called Magic Missile.”

  “I thought so, too.”

  “Look!” said Stacy, pointing down at the road ahead of them. A covered wagon, pulled by two horses, was making its way southward down the road.

  Julian put his hand on Stacy’s shoulder and leaned over for a look. He smelled like nutmeg, which was surprising, given the filthy state of his clothes.“Let’s try to get a closer look before we’re spotted.”

  Just as Stacy pushed down on the front of the carpet, a flash of white light shone from the back of the wagon. A glowing orange bead shot out like a bottle rocket, heading in a trajectory that would have intercepted them if they had maintained their previous cruising altitude.

  The night sky lit up like the sun had just exploded thirty feet above their heads. The heat and force from the shockwave was tremendous. The carpet shook violently but remained airborne.

  Stacy did a quick check to make sure that neither she, nor Julian, nor the carpet was on fire. “I dunno. We may have been spotted. What do you think?”

  Julian narrowed his eyes. “Take us down.”

  He wasn’t normally the angry sort… not like Tim. That’s what Stacy liked about him. He bumbled his way through ridiculous situations with childlike curiosity and wonder. Life hadn’t yet worn him down like it had the others. In the short time they’d been acquainted, she didn’t recall ever seeing a spot of malice in his heart… until now.

  She took the carpet down as Julian had requested, but in the back of her mind, she wondered if he had put any thought into this, or if an equally childlike sense of immortality was causing him to recklessly endanger both of their lives to save his pet bird.

  The road curved to the right just ahead, allowing Stacy to cut across the treetops and close a bit more of the gap between them. As they drew closer to the wagon, she counted at least four sets of legs through the flapping canvas. A driver brought the minimum body count to five, not including the bird. If one of these people was Mordred, and not just some random birdnapper, he wasn’t alone. Strangely enough, none of the passengers she could see in the back of the wagon seemed the least bit concerned about being chased. All of the legs sat as still as statues.

  “Don’t shoot anyone until you know which one’s Mordred,” said Stacy.

  The horses pulling the wagon picked up their pace when the road straightened out again. Stacy felt like they might be losing ground.

  “Come on, you fat bastard,” said Julian. “Show yourself.”

  An elf seated on the left side of the wagon pulled back the canvas flap and smiled at them. He wore black linen robes, the same style Julian wore under his serape, but they looked like they’d just come back from the laundry. Not a smudge or tear on them. The same went for his silky blond hair, carefully styled to look tastefully disheveled. The combination of that and his cold blue eyes made him look like the frontman for an Aryan boy band. He might have been handsome if Stacy couldn’t see right through him.

  “Mordred!” shouted Julian. “Just give me Ravenus, and I’ll let you go!”

  Smile unwavering, the elf pointed a small wand at them.

  “Shit!” said Stacy. “Lie flat and hold on!”

  Stacy knew that both their lives depended on her timing and successfully not telegraphing her next move. She glared at the elf like she was coming to get him, wand be damned.

  Then, just as she sensed he was about to fire, she yanked up one corner of the carpet as hard as she could, sending them into a corkscrew spiral, through the center of which passed another glowing orange bead.

  Once they were right-side-up again, Stacy looked back just in time to see the explosion. The spell detonated far enough behind them that she felt no increase in temperature and barely a tremor in the carpet.

  “Magic Missile!” said Julian. A golden arrow of light shot out of his open palm and soared through the air until it struck the torso of the elf, who didn’t so much as flinch as green bolts of electricity crawled over his body from the point of impact.

  “Nice shot,” said Stacy, thinking it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect a similar recognition of her sweet carpet-driving skills.

  Julian frowned. “It didn’t hit him.”

  “Sure it did.”

  “We’re losing him,” said Julian. “Can’t this thing go any faster?”

  This was not the recognition of her carpet-driving skills that Stacy had in mind. “This is as fast as it goes. We’ll get them. Those horses can’t keep up this pace forever.”

  “Horse!” cried Julian. “Brilliant!”

  “Um… thanks?”

  “Do you remember how much time passed between those two fireballs?”

  “About a minute and forty-seven seconds.”

  “About?”

  Stacy smiled and shrugged.

  “And how much time has passed since that last fireball?”

  “Twenty-six seconds.”

  “It’ll be close.” Julian turned and looked at the ground. “Horse!” he cried again.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Stacy thought she saw something whiz by. She looked behind them, and was surprised to see that a brown and white speckled horse was standing on the side of the road, getting farther and farther away as they kept flying, veering off to the left with the curve of the road.

  Then Julian whistled. The horse broke into a full gallop, and rapidly began to catch up with the carpet.

  “Stacy! Steer!”

  Stacy faced forward. With he
r attention on the unexpected horse, she had neglected to keep the carpet over the road, further widening the gap between them and the wagon.

  Julian got on his feet in a squatting, steadying-himself-on-a-surfboard position, his eyes fixed on the approaching horse.

  “Julian,” said Stacy. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m going to get Ravenus.”

  “Come on, Julian,” pleaded Stacy. “Think this through. If we stay on the carpet, I might be able to keep dodging his spells. You can’t dodge shit on a horse.”

  Julian gave her a quick glance and a smile. “If I can get close enough, he won’t be able to use his fireballs without them blowing up in his own face. There’s obviously a lag time between uses, or he would have been blasting us with them a lot more frequently.”

  Julian’s theory made some kind of sense, and it was too late to reason with him anyway. Julian readied himself as the horse caught up to the carpet, then jumped onto the horse’s back. Oddly enough, the mysterious horse was already equipped with a saddle and bridle.

  Stacy focused her attention back at the elf they suspected to be Mordred.

  The Mordred elf appeared to come out of some sort of trance. That must be an elf thing. The smug expression that had been frozen on his face turned into one of alarm as he saw Julian on horseback pulling ahead of the carpet. He leveled his wand at Julian.

  “Shit!” said Julian. That was not what Stacy had wanted to hear.

  Doing a bit of math in her head, Stacy calculated, based on the approximate size of the previous two fireballs, that the one about to hit Julian was easily going to engulf her as well. She couldn’t save Julian, so she did the only thing she could. She rolled the carpet around her body like a burrito and braced herself for a great deal of pain.

  Chapter 9

  Popular culture hadn’t adequately prepared Katherine on the finer points of being a vampire. She thought back to all of the vampire movies and television shows she had seen as she lay on her back, staring up at the trees, reconstructing the fall in her mind, wondering which branches she had hit on her way down.

  Every goddamn one of them.

  All the shows and movies had covered the basics. Stay out of the sun. Don’t walk into people’s homes uninvited. Try not to get stabbed in the heart. None of them, that she could recall, had ever warned against changing bat forms mid-air without an ample amount of open space beneath you.

  The transformation from huge bat to normal sized bat had only taken a second, but it was enough to throw off her wing-flapping rhythm. For her panicky effort to regain her orientation and maintain flight, she’d been rewarded with a faceful of pine needles, one of which poked her right in her little bat eye.

  From there she bounced from branch to branch without knowing which way was up, slamming her right ear on a particularly large bough, before her fall was finally broken by the ground.

  She took her half-elf form, sat up, and was annoyed to find that her ear still hurt. She needed some life juice. Concentrating on the creatures of the night, she willed them toward her.

  The first customer who lined up to die was a rust-colored wolf. He bounded toward her, tail and tongue wagging, and lay down at her feet. Having a wolf not hate her made Katherine think of Butterbean. She’d tried the creatures-of-the-night trick on him, willing to regain his affection, even if only temporary, by any means she could. But Butterbean had only growled and snarled louder at her.

  She couldn’t bring herself to kill the wolf lying in front of her, thoughit was so eager to serve. She stroked the fur on top of its head until Option Two came along. A lean, brown rat, much healthier looking than the city rats she’d grown accustomed to, scurried forward to do its master’s bidding.

  Katherine allowed the rat to crawl onto her hand. Its fur was soft, sleek, and not crawling with fleas. Gripping its unresisting body tightly around the belly, she tore its head off with her teeth.

  When she’d sucked the last fluid ounce of blood she could squeeze out of the poor creature, she was left wanting more. But at least her ear felt better.

  Sadly, she didn’t have the time for an all-out feeding frenzy. She had to get back above the forest canopy to keep an eye on Julian and Stacy, which is why she’d switched bat forms to begin with.

  They’d been easy enough to find. Julian was wasting his time trying to find his bird by peeking through gaps in the foliage. Katherine had a much better view of the area from here on the ground, and it was lacking in talking birds.

  Not really having any helpful advice to give, she’d decided not to announce her presence. After seeing them kiss, it felt really awkward to barge in uninvited on their romantic, moon-lit magic carpet ride. Stacy would probably think she was just trying to vag-block her for Tim.

  Katherine had no time for that drama. She would hang back, observe, and only intervene if they got into the sort of trouble that could only be resolved with fists and teeth.

  Taking her normal-sized bat form again, she flew to the top of the tallest tree in the area and found a branch that would support her meager weight. The carpet had barely moved. Julian was still hopelessly peering down into raven-less forest.

  Standing was still awkward, so Katherine tried taking Ravenus’s advice and hung upside down. It felt more natural, but at the same time extremely stupid.

  She didn’t have long to ponder that quandary. Stacy took control of the piloting, and the carpet zoomed away.

  Katherine took off in hot pursuit.

  The carpet moved faster than her little bat wings could take her. She’d need to take her big bat form again if she was going to keep up. Having learned her lesson about changing forms midair, she climbed higher into the sky. When the air was noticeably cooler, and the flying carpet was little more than a tiny red speck zipping across the shag carpet of forest, she changed forms.

  She only fell about twenty feet before regaining control of herself in the air. She’d probably overdone it with the altitude, but at least she wasn’t crashing through the trees again.

  The main road was just up ahead, and it looked like Stacy was making a beeline for it. When your target could be anywhere, head for the place where you can cover the most open ground as quickly as possible. Katherine and Cooper had used the same logic to find Ginfizzle.

  Upon reaching the road, Stacy turned right, back toward the city. She flew curiously low to the ground. Katherine would have opted for more height, but the reasoning behind Stacy’s choice of altitude became apparent when Katherine observed her peering into the trees as she flew. Not a bad plan, but telling of just how hopeless a goose-chase they were on.

  While Stacy was preoccupied staring into the empty forest on her left, some horrible monster broke from the treeline on the right and ran toward the carpet. It looked like Sweetums, from The Muppets, but with a beak. They were flying too low. If Stacy didn’t turn around, that thing would tear them to pieces.

  Dammit, Stacy! Turn! Look!... Fuck.

  Katherine would have to step in, which was all the more awkward now as she would have to admit she’d been stalking them this whole time.

  No. Fuck that. It wouldn’t be awkward at all. It would be vindicating. Keeping their stupid asses from getting killed had been the whole point of following them to begin with.

  Katherine started her dive. She had spent too much time deliberating. Hopefully, Stacy would have enough Hit Points to allow her to survive a single attack from that thing. Flapping harder, she thought she might just make it in time to ram the beast before it intercepted them. For that to work, there was no time to try to catch it from the side. She had to count on the carpet being at least high enough off the ground so that she could swoop under it without planting her face into the road.

  The monster let out a terrible howling scream as it moved in for the attack. Just as Katherine was able to make out just how narrow a gap she was dealing with, it widened. Stacy had pulled the carpet up out of harm’s way. This, of course, put Katherine on a co
llision course with the beast, which wasn’t a terrible thing in and of itself. It was a giant, walking bag of much needed blood. But she didn’t want to face it in bat form if she didn’t have to, and she also didn’t want to give away her presence now that not giving away her presence was once again an option. She banked a hard right and made for the trees. The combination of her great size and speed made it impossible to maneuver between them, and she caught a trunk with her left wing, spun around counter-clockwise, and crash-landed in the dirt.

  Her whole body hurt like a son of a bitch, and she couldn’t move her left wing. Transforming back into her half-elven form was excruciating. Her bat screech transitioned to a half-elven groan.

  “Screeeeeeaaaaaauuuuuunnnngggghhhhh… fuck.”

  The payoff was less than she’d hoped for. She was hoping her limb would have righted itself as it morphed from wing to arm, but she knew as soon as the process was complete that the bone in her upper arm was broken.

  She’d give it a few minutes and see if her regenerative powers would kick in. After a few seconds without even a trace of relief, she knew it wasn’t happening. She needed blood.

  Trying her best to ignore the pain, Katherine closed her eyes and focused her mind on rats and wolves. In her current state, she’d be more than happy to kill a wolf, thoughts of Butterbean be damned.

  CRASH CRASHCRASHCRASH

  “Shit.”

  Katherine opened her eyes just in time to see the terrifyingly ridiculous beaked bear-man monster lunging at her. She rolled onto her back and slammed both heels into its furry, feathery chest, launching it backwards into the air. Its head connected with a low branch, somersaulting it so that it landed on its head.

  The beast was disoriented long enough for Katherine to struggle to her feet, but not much longer. Its eyes were wild with rage. This wasn’t a creature that hunted for food. It lived for the sole purpose of killing anything it came across.

  Katherine bared her fangs and brandished the nails on her good arm. Those crazy-ass eyes were coming out. She kept close to a tree, sheilding her gimpy arm behind the trunk while trying not to advertise it as a weakness.