by Rob Cornell
We scampered down the stairs so fast, if I had missed a step I would have sailed off my feet and tumbled down the rest of the way, taking Mom with me.
Thankfully, we came out of the stairwell on our feet.
The basement holds a massive collection of magical doodads, from spell and history books to artifacts of numerous shapes and sizes and all manner of cultural origins. My parents had worked as scholars for the Ministry, studying and cataloging the ancient magical items and practices of civilizations most of the normal world had never even heard about, let alone read so much as a footnote about in a history textbook. You could say Dad was like the Indiana Jones of the supernatural word. Which, I guess, would have made Mom Lara Croft. While most of what they gathered went to the Ministry coffers, they had amassed an impressive collection of their own.
And stored it in their basement like a pair of hoarders.
We stood in the middle of it all, a labyrinth of sagging wooden shelves, long tables, and stacked curios, all permeated with the scent of age. A scent that wouldn’t last much longer once the smoke and flames reached down here.
The growing inferno rumbled above us. We wouldn’t have much time to pick out what we needed. I hoped Mom knew her way around her mini-museum better than I did. There was no discernible system organizing all this stuff.
She rushed around a bookshelf to the right of the stairwell that acted as a makeshift wall blocking off the corner of the basement Dad had favored as a sort of workshop. It’s where I had found his enchanted pocket watch last summer, something he had carried at all times, except on the day he went to his death, as if he knew he wasn’t coming back and had left the watch for me to find.
I heard the rustle and clink of Mom rummaging on the other side of the shelf.
Another bout of muted automatic gunfire joined the sound of the crackling flames. It was obvious they were shooting blind. Probably still aiming high, just trying to panic us into rushing out into their trap. I almost wished they were trying to kill us. The idea that they wanted to turn me so badly that they would go through all this drama made my skin want to crawl off my bones.
Mom rushed out from behind the bookshelf carrying something in each hand. In one, a gnarled wooden staff that looked one step more refined than it had fresh off the tree it had been cut from. She tossed the staff at me.
I caught it and looked it over. A hot core of magical energy ran the entire length of the five-foot staff. My own energy seemed to synch with it the moment I grabbed it. I knew right away I could use it to make fire.
“Figured that suited your style,” Mom said.
I checked what she held in her other hand. It looked like one of those old Viking horns made from a hollowed-out tusk of some kind. Three ornate bronze rings wrapped the horn. Another bronze segment capped the narrow end of the horn like the mouthpiece to a trumpet.
“What’s that?”
“It’s Norse,” she said. “And it’s loud.”
I got the impression loud meant more than volume.
“You ready?” she asked.
I tested the heft of the staff. It felt good. And a nice answer to those damn vamps’ flamethrowers.
“So we’re shooting our way out of here?” I asked.
“You got a better idea?”
Her stance, feet apart, shoulders back, spoke of untold strength. Even barefoot and in her cotton nightgown. She might not have been invincible, but my childhood self hadn’t got it wrong—Judith Light was one powerful sorceress.
I knocked the base of my staff twice on the concrete floor. “Let’s do this thang.”
Chapter Three
The back door was directly aligned to the staircase, so it was a straight shot up and then out. Before we reached the top step, Mom waved an arm and tossed a comet of green energy at the door, blowing it off its hinges like I had with the front door.
Like mother like son.
I gripped my staff more tightly, clenched my teeth, and followed my mom out onto the patio. The sudden cold air shocked the breath out of me. My eyes watered, still stinging from all the smoke inside. The smell of the burning house still dominated.
We had no sooner cleared the door when three vampires stepped out of the shadows under the maple as I had expected. Two males and one female. All three toted AKs. And all three wore the same kind of tailored suits as the ones out front. Were these freakin’ uniforms? The vamps who had attacked me over the summer hadn’t dressed this way. Could this be a different crew?
A question I would have to save for later.
The three vampires trained their rifles on us, and they sure as hell looked like they meant to pull the triggers. That whole keeping-us-alive idea could have been a miscalculation.
Mom didn’t give us the chance to learn the hard way. She pressed the horn to her lips and blew.
It did not make a sound like any horn I’d ever heard. Nothing remotely close to a honk. A thousand screams poured out of the horn’s end, as if a mass slaughter had been trapped inside.
My eardrums quivered in response. A cold tingle ran up the nape of my neck.
Mom bore down on the horn, blowing until her face went red and a vein by her temple bulged. The screams not only grew louder, the quality of their agony increased.
The vamps facing us off had no idea how to react to this strange confrontation. They gaped at Mom with their fanged mouths hanging open, the rifles in their hands all but forgotten.
For a second I thought the sound of the horn had put them in some kind of trance, and that was the horn’s magic.
Uh…nope.
Ten seconds after Mom started blowing the horn, at the peak of the chorus’s shrieking, a shockwave of brilliant blue burst forth from Mom in a conical shape. When the wave struck the vampires, all three of them flew off their feet. The shockwave carried them through the air until they slammed against the neighbor’s garage, cracking the siding. All three had their weapons kicked from their hands on impact. They tumbled to the ground in a tangled pile.
Mom hadn’t been joking. That horn was loud.
Mom lowered it from her lips. She glanced over her shoulder at me and waggled her eyebrows.
I smirked.
But the sound of the agonized screams still echoed in my ears, and the smirk faded from my lips. I wasn’t sure I would ever forget the noise that horn made. I shuddered to think who had originally possessed it, or how they had managed the enchantment. Screams didn’t come from nowhere.
Mom must have had a similar thought. Her expression sobered.
The vampires in the neighbors’ yard had started to recover and were grasping at their rifles. Only a chain link fence separated the yards, so they would have no trouble cutting us down from there.
I strode forward and raised my staff. I gripped it in both hands and pointed its end at the vamps. They were so busy getting themselves untangled and re-armed, they didn’t see what was coming.
I connected with the fiery energy in the staff and willed it into action.
A torrent of fire shot from the staff’s end. The steady blast lit all three vampires from head to toe. Their suits quickly fused to their skin in tattering flaps. Their hair burned down to their scalps. As they thrashed about in pain, they collided with one another. Then, one-by-one, they fell to the ground and rolled in the grass, which shriveled and blackened around them. Their metallic screams sounded like music compared to what had come from the horn.
I let up on the staff. The fire went out. A wisp of smoke curled away from the staff’s end.
An orange glow rose into the night sky from behind me. I turned around toward its source.
The flames had taken over the roof of the house. Leaves of black ash danced and fluttered in the air. The smoke formed a dark pillar that blended into the night above. A section of the roof caved in, spitting up embers from the crumbling shingles.
A soft moan slipped from between Mom’s lips.
I took her hand. “We need to go before the ones in front c
ome around to check on their friends.”
She set her jaw and nodded.
Together, we ran across the yard to the back fence that split our yard from the neighbors behind us. We could cut through their yard and out to the street on the other side of the block. From there…? I guessed we would pick a direction and keep running.
Mom clenched her horn in one hand and raised her opposite in a fist as if she meant to slug someone on the way by. An orb of green energy materialized around her hand. Without stopping, she swung her fist and the orb streaked ahead and turned the metal fence to slag.
We booked it through the opening and made a beeline through the adjoining yard. Halfway to the street, and potential freedom, another fucking black van roared up and screeched to a halt in front of us. They must have been parked at the corner, anticipating our escape out this way. They sure had covered their bases.
The van door rolled open (déjà vu much?) and two vampires hopped down to the street. Same fancy suits as all the others. Both females this time. One with ratty blonde hair that, despite her snazzy attire, made her look like she had just rolled out of her coffin. The other had sleek black hair in a ponytail that hung clear to her waist.
Mom and I came to a halt at the point where the sidewalk crossed the driveway. That put about fifteen feet between us and the vampires.
Despite my habit of holding back on my magic, instinct set me in motion. I pulled the air tightly around us in a shield before I realized what I was doing.
Mom sensed it and glanced my way. Hard to tell with the shadows across her face where the streetlight didn’t reach, but I thought I saw a hint of a smile.
I bore down, pushing more energy into the shield. Might as well commit, right? Besides, I had no clue how long my shield would hold against their automatic gunfire at such close range. Every muscle in my body was tensed to such an extreme, I felt like they might snap.
The lady vamps kept their weapons trained on us. I kept waiting for them to start shooting. The anticipation drew sweat across my brow. A drop of it rolled down my temple and tickled my ear.
Come on, shoot already!
But they didn’t.
They just stood there.
The vampire behind the wheel of the van peered out at us. He didn’t look all that excited about the situation, as if this was just another day in his mundane existence. He had a suit on like all the rest.
“What are you waiting for?” I shouted.
They closed their mouths and said nothing.
“They want us alive,” Mom said.
“Or they’re worried about wasting ammo because they know they can’t get through my shield.”
I hope.
The vampire with the black ponytail curled up one side of her mouth. Apparently, she was amused.
“Enough of this,” Mom said. She put that horn to her lips again.
My skin seemed to shrink in anticipation of the horrible sound it would make. I clenched my teeth, still holding my shield in place. Just in case the vamps changed their minds and started unloading on us.
Mom’s face turned red the moment she exhaled into the horn’s mouthpiece, as if putting all the breath she had into it. The screams started nearly at the peak they had reached before. I could almost pick out individual voices in the blended cries. I heard a woman’s voice pleading not to die. I heard a squalling baby. I heard too damn much.
The blue shockwave came quicker this time. It shot out in a luminous blur and hit the vamps within a blink’s time. It shoved them straight back through the van’s door with force enough to rock the van up on two wheels about a foot before it dropped back down, shimmying on its shocks.
The vamp behind the wheel threw open his door.
I dropped my shield and aimed the fire staff at him. He only had one foot on the ground when I roasted him.
He didn’t scream like the ones back at the house. He slid out of the van and shambled toward us.
Mom raised her hand, palm out, and her green energy shot from her palm in a bright beam, striking the flaming vampire in the chest.
He staggered backward, bumped off the van, then dropped to his knees. The fire had burned through his suit by now. His flesh puckered and bubbled. The flames ringed his neck. He glared at my mother through them.
She hit him again with another beam. He twisted on his knees and finally dropped to the pavement, curled in a fetal position and burning like a Yule log. He still didn’t emit any kind of noise. Not so much as a grunt. A tough bastard. I suspected he had some years on the rest of his companions. Something worth noting, because all the other vamps seemed freshly undead. Ten to twenty years past their turn at most. Whoever gave them their orders must have thought they were expendable enough to risk attacking two sorcerers in one go.
Shouts from behind me drew my attention. I turned. Our burning home lit the night sky, the flames reaching high enough to see over the house between us. In that brief moment, I also noticed several of the surrounding neighbors out on their front porches. Some had wandered out into the street, many of them in pajamas and robes. Families gathered tight, eyes wide and worried.
A few started stealing glances in our direction. The confusion and horror on their faces was unmistakable. All they could see was a person on the ground blackened like an overdone roast, an old woman barefoot in a cotton nightgown, and some dude holding a really big stick. They didn’t know the backstory. They didn’t know the roast was a vampire, and that two more vampires lay inside the van, knocked unconscious by a magical blast from a Norse horn. Without that knowledge, the tableau must have looked deranged.
More shouting came from the direction of our house. Our vampire friends were getting wise.
Sirens whined in the distance.
“We need to bust a move.” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “The van.”
Mom nodded, then reached both hands toward the van as if she meant to grasp something, only there was nothing in the ten feet or so between her and the van. Green tendrils of light wrapped around her arms and curled between her spread fingers. She clutched her hands into fists and jerked her arms back as if performing that trick where you whip a table cloth off a table but leave all the place settings undisturbed.
In synch with her motion, the pair of female vampires in the van came flying out. They flopped limply to the ground on either side of Mom.
One of them groaned, but that hit from the horn had clobbered them good, and neither of them stirred.
I heard a collective gasp and a few outcries from the people around us.
I ignored them as I stepped over the lump of charred vamp and climbed behind the van’s wheel. As Mom ran around to the passenger side, I gazed back at our burning home. I had grown up in that house. Much of what I knew about magic, about the hidden miracles of the world, and about not only how to be a good sorcerer, but a good person, had all been learned inside that house. And a gods damned crew of vampires in two-piece suits had destroyed it…just like that.
A gentle pressure touched my shoulder. Mom’s hand. She sat in the passenger seat. I hadn’t heard her get in or pull the door shut. Some light from the nearest streetlight poured through the windshield and across her face. Her eyes glistened in its cast. “We need to go.”
The van’s engine was still running. I threw it in gear and squealed the tires as I pulled a U-turn. I took us out of the subdivision via the nearest main road, moving my gaze back and forth between the road ahead and the rearview mirror. A trio of police cars and a fire engine blew past us in the opposite direction. I drove aimlessly for a while, focusing on putting distance between us and the clusterfuck we’d narrowly escaped. Neither of us spoke until I stopped making random turns and chose a deliberate path.
Mom must have sensed the change.
“Where are we going?”
“The only other place besides home I want to be right now.”
Chapter Four
Fiona answered the door with bleary eyes, her shoulder-length blonde
hair matted down on one side. She wore cotton pajama pants with cartoon tigers on them, and a purple tank top. Her eyebrows drew together at the sight of me and Mom standing in the hall outside her apartment. Her gaze went from the staff in my hand to the horn in Mom’s, then down the length of Mom to her bare feet sticking out just below the hem of her nightgown.
“Sebastian?” she asked, voice full of sleep.
“Hi, Kitty,” I said, using the nickname I had come up with that she despised. I thought getting a rise out of her might shake her awake a little more quickly.
She frowned. Clarity came to her eyes. “I told you not to call me that.”
I nodded down at her pj pants. “Would you prefer Tiger? That’s what Mary Jane calls Spiderman.”
She rolled her eyes. She was good at that. I bet she had made a great teenager, driving her mother nuts with that practiced eye roll.
Normally, now would be the time Fiona slugged me in the arm before shutting me up with a kiss. Instead, she returned her gaze to Mom. Fiona’s lips parted as if she’d meant to say something and forgot what.
Mom looked like, well, like she had survived a house fire. Her white nightgown had turned gray with soot. Her eyes were red from the smoke. Her feet had their own dusting of soot, along with dried mud from trouncing through the wet grass.
I doubted I looked much better, except that I had shoes and normal clothes on. My v-neck t-shirt was already gray, but streaks of soot crossed my chest like painted shadows. The skin on my arms looked crab red, and my face probably matched.
Plus, both my mom and I smelled like a backyard barbeque gone horribly wrong.
“What the hell happened?” Fiona asked.
Mom cleared her throat. “Can we come in?”
Fiona shook herself as if splashed with cold water. “Of course.” She stood aside to let us in, then closed the door and slid the chain back in place.
I guided Mom toward the leather sofa in the living room. We’d ditched the van in a drugstore parking lot a couple of blocks over. Walking those blocks without shoes had left her feet raw and irritated, so she winced with each step. I tried to take her arm, but she wouldn’t let me. Once she was seated, she set the horn on the coffee table and all but melted into the sofa.
