The Glamour Thieves

by Donald Allmmon

  —Buzz? JT was starting to panic. This was not just a glamour. The images were coming too fast, alien thoughts and memories flung at him like a poltergeist, furious and throwing anything it could find. “Buzz!” JT shouted aloud. He couldn’t feel Buzz’s hand in his anymore. “Buzz! Where are you?”

  —I’m here, JT. But JT still couldn’t feel Buzz’s hand, and he was afraid the voice wasn’t Buzz’s but the Unicorn feigning Buzz. He was losing himself.

  A blue unicorn on a Washington mountainside. If JT reached out to it, it would turn to look at him. So he reached for it. It turned. Then JT remembered only a virgin could touch a unicorn. He pulled his hand back before he could ruin it.

  “Don’t, you’ll scare it away,” Roan said to Austin. They were children in bushes, elegant elven eyes blinking amid needled-leaves, hiding like wild animals.

  “There is more to this world than heaven and earth,” Roan misquoted. JT didn’t correct her. JT couldn’t remember where they’d been when she said that.

  Blood. There was blood. JT could smell it now, and his heart was going like a trip hammer. Blood reflected everywhere in the street puddles of Seattle. JT tried to drop out. It should have been easy. All you did was fall back and out, but there was nowhere to fall back to because the Unicorn was everywhere. —Buzz? Buzz, get me out of here. But Buzz didn’t answer him, and he felt the glamour blood-scent seep in, setting his orc blood afire. It stoked him with need.

  An arrow struck the Unicorn. It sprouted from its neck like disease. A bullet. More. Holes bloomed in the blue. Horse carcasses. Silver-blue horns, bloodstained.

  —Buzz, get me out of here!

  Swarms of monarch butterflies swirled, unchased.

  Roan wept onto Austin’s shoulder. JT could taste her tears and grief. “Buzz!” JT didn’t know if he was screaming out loud or only in his mind. He could hear nothing but the gunshots and the thrumming of bows. Nothing but horses screaming, Roan’s crying, and the whine of a bone saw that sounded like AC fans on high.

  Blood wept from the hole in the head of a horse where a unicorn’s horn should have been. The mounted policeman didn’t seem to notice. “Move along,” he said. “Move along.” He flipped up his visor, erasing Austin and Roan. It was an old elf JT didn’t know.

  In a room in Seattle, a bone saw opened Roan’s head, and the surgery began.

  JT drowned in her tears and the smell of blood. He lashed out at everything, every image, every scent, every sound. He roared like only an orc could roar, loud enough his throat broke and bled.

  Buzz found his hand, and the nightmares stopped.

  Silence.

  Electric gray.

  In the gray was a woman, but that was all he could see.

  —Who are you? she sent.

  JT was afraid of her. Buzz’s hand tightened on his.

  —I should know you, she sent.

  She walked toward him out of nothing. She was a silhouette and watercolor.

  —There’s something about you. He’s tangled up in you. I can almost see him.

  She was dark-skinned and lithe as a cattail frond.

  —Where’s my brother? Where am I?

  Her ears stuck out of the halo of her hair, and butterflies circled her.

  —Where’s Austin?

  And JT could see the ghost now.

  JT couldn’t stand the sight of her. It tore him apart. He fought free, erasing Buzz’s touch on his hands, and fell into the real world.

  JT hit the ground hard enough to force all the air from his lungs. He’d sprung the door in his need to be away, and fallen two meters to the parking lot pavement and landed flat on his back. Now he couldn’t breathe and stars nova-ed in his eyes. Never mind the pain in his back and ribs, he had to be away from here. He scrambled to his feet and ran into the woods.

  Behind him people shouted his name. Still in range of the truck, he heard Buzz in his head, —JT! He closed the link and ran.

  “JT!” he heard behind him. It was Austin. JT ran faster.

  “JT.” Austin was right behind him now. It didn’t matter how fast JT ran, the fucking elf could always outrun him. So he stopped and he spun and he hit him.

  He hit him as hard as he could, one good solid crack across the jaw for every goddamn thing Austin had ever done to him: for blindsiding him with that fucking ghost and exposing a wound that JT had never allowed to heal, for all Austin’s endless lies, and for forcing JT to leave him when JT had wanted nothing more than to stay. JT hit Austin so hard the elf nearly flew into a backflip. Austin hit the ground. And the elation of seeing Austin laid out flat like that was better than any sex.

  Austin didn’t move, and for one horrifying, sobering split second, JT thought he’d killed him.

  Then Austin groaned, wiped at his jaw, and missed. Now JT was even angrier for having worried one moment about this asshole. Austin tried to push himself up.

  “Stay down. Just stay down or I swear by the moon I’ll put you back down.”

  Austin collapsed onto pine needles and dust. He opened his eyes dazedly.

  “You know, Austin, the sad thing is that after all the shit you’ve pulled, I still can’t believe you just did that to me. I must be the most naive, gullible, stupidest goddamn orc on the planet. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you warn me? Because that was the most . . . the worst . . . Goddamn you. Goddamn you . . .” JT’s eyes burned, and the world went blurry. He wiped furiously at them, and his arm came away wet. “Goddamn you. Why?”

  “Because if I’d told you what Buzz had found, you wouldn’t have believed me.”

  “Bullshit. You and your fucking bullshit rationalizations—”

  “You would never have listened to me. You’d never have helped.”

  “Bullshit!”

  Austin got to his knees and shouted up at him. “It’s not bullshit. You know how I know? Because you’ve done it to me before. Two years ago, you did it to me.” JT wanted to shout bullshit again and again, but Austin kept on. “After we escaped those wizards and we were holed up in a basement for three weeks hiding, scared, I told you something didn’t add up about that job. Something wasn’t right. We didn’t screw up. It wasn’t bad luck. We were sold out. But you wouldn’t believe me. You wouldn’t listen to me. And you wouldn’t help me. You left me. You left me alone.” Austin punctuated every you like everything was JT’s fault. Well, it wasn’t.

  “You were obsessed. You didn’t sleep, you didn’t eat, you spent hours looking at surveillance tapes with nothing on them. I was not going to stand around and watch you destroy yourself. I begged for you to leave it behind and go with me.”

  And now it was Austin’s eyes that had gone red and watery. “You asked me to forget her!”

  “I asked you to give up your crazy conspiracy theory! Sometimes bad things happen. They just happen. And people we love die.”

  “You see? You see! That’s why I had to lie to you: so that I would get the chance to prove I’m not crazy, otherwise you never would have given me one!”

  Austin started to get to his feet, and JT bunched up his fists ready to take another swing. “I ain’t gonna let you hit me again. Once, I deserved. But that’s all you get.”

  “You didn’t let me hit you.”

  “Please. You ain’t a fighter, JT. It doesn’t matter that you’re strong as a fucking ox. You can’t throw a punch worth shit, and you’re slow as dirt.”

  JT let him stand. He might not have been able to throw a punch worth shit, but that swelling jaw was damn satisfying to watch.

  Austin pointed back to the truck. “That ghost proves I was right.”

  “That ghost doesn’t prove shit. We don’t even know what the fuck it is.”

  “Buzz knows. You don’t want to listen to me? Fine. Listen to Buzz. He’ll tell you.”

  JT looked over at the truck. The words Country Orc written down its side looked ridiculous, and JT wished he hadn’t painted it there. Buzz and Victor were still in the cab, hidden behind tinted gla
ss.

  “If Buzz wasn’t in danger, Austin, I would leave you out here, right here in the middle of fucking nowhere. But this isn’t over, and Buzz still needs our help. So we’re going to do this, and then I’m going home.”

  Austin started to say something, but JT stopped him. “It doesn’t matter, Austin. It doesn’t matter whether you’re right or you’re wrong. That was two years ago. It’s ancient history. It ain’t bringing Roan or Grayson back. I have a life now. It’s a perfectly good life. And once we’ve finished up this mess, I’m going back to it. So please, just stop it. Stop fucking with me and let me be happy.”

  JT started back to the truck. Austin didn’t follow. “What did she look like, JT?”

  Austin sounded so broken that JT almost stopped and went back to him. But that was just Austin’s glamour, always calling to JT and adding one more lie. Odysseus lashed to his mast. “It’s not her, Austin.”

  “But what did she look like?”

  If they had a pair of VR glasses, Austin could have seen the ghost for himself, but they didn’t. Austin, the only person around who actually wanted to see the ghost, couldn’t. So thinking it was probably the cruelest thing he could do, JT answered him. “She was wearing a silk dashiki like she used to wear. African patterns. She had butterflies in her hair.”

  While the boys fought, Buzz and Victor watched from the safety of the truck. Austin was lying flat on the ground with JT standing over him shouting.

  Buzz shook his head. “I hate to say it, but I saw that coming. Austin should have just told him the truth from the start. I hope JT ain’t mad at me too. I don’t think I’d live through a punch like that.” He turned to Victor. “Um. Hey. I’m sorry about dragging you into this.”

  Victor the Wizard shrugged. “This Blue Unicorn, it is priceless.”

  Buzz turned back to watching the two men outside. “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “You have a buyer for it already? How much are they going to pay?”

  “A buyer? Are you kidding? We ain’t selling her. We’re going to free her.”

  They watched the elf and the orc argue.

  “I see,” Victor the Wizard said.

  Finally Austin stood. JT didn’t punch him again.

  Victor said, “You are right, Buzz. Austin should have told the truth from the start.”

  JT checked over his drones, tightening cabling and reloading spent magazines. Everyone was watching him in a long, uncomfortable silence because there was nothing else to do. Except Austin apparently decided every silence was made better by the sound of his voice filling it, so he started to talk. JT almost told him to shut the hell up, but for once Austin was saying something JT wanted to hear.

  “Roan found the blue unicorn when we were kids. She wouldn’t let me touch it. She said only a virgin could touch a unicorn, and I wasn’t a virgin. That was bullshit, because everyone knows blowjobs don’t count. But I never did touch it.”

  Austin took one of the empty curved plastic magazines and began to slot AP rounds into it. It was a make-up gesture. JT wasn’t sure if he wanted to make up, but getting any work out of Austin was rare enough, so let the elf load ammo if that’s what he wanted.

  “A couple years later there was a disease outbreak in our settlement, so Grandfather Henry—he wasn’t our grandfather, but he taught us and looked after us, so we called him that—Grandfather Henry led a hunting party . . . and they killed it and took its horn for medicine.

  “Roan, she was . . . Well, she didn’t understand. She and Grandfather argued, and Roan said she was leaving. She wouldn’t study under him anymore, not if magic meant killing something like that. I think it broke Grandfather’s heart, her saying that.

  “I went with her, not because I thought she was right or Grandfather was wrong, but because I couldn’t leave her, so I went with her. We ended up in Seattle. And we . . . we got some money . . . and we found a guy who’d . . . she got the surgery done . . . cortical implants. I always thought . . .”

  It wasn’t often JT heard Austin stumble when he talked. Had they ever actually talked about Roan after she’d died?

  Austin snapped bullets into his magazine, all his attention on it, like there was no one else there. “I always thought she didn’t get the implants so she could jack the net. She got them so she couldn’t work magic anymore.”

  JT looked for Victor the Wizard, expecting some response from him. Horror? Disgust? Pity? But Victor wasn’t even there. He was just coming out of the dingy restroom and hadn’t heard any of it. Probably for the best.

  Austin laid his magazine down as JT finished his second. “So there you go: The Blue Unicorn Story.”

  Back on I-80. This time Buzz rode the middle and Victor was at the passenger window. Austin was in the truck bed lounging amid the recharged, reloaded drones. JT was perfectly fine to have him back there and not in the cab. Outside, endless pine and fir trees blurred past as they drove higher into the Sierra Nevadas. JT kept working his jaw to pop his ears, and he kept ducking his head to look up through the windshield at the sky.

  “You nervous?” Buzz said.

  “Fuck yeah, I’m nervous. You would be too if you knew what was good for you.” He couldn’t get as good a look at the sky as he wanted. “Fuck this. Heads-up, Austin,” he said through an exterior speaker, and then didn’t really give Austin enough time to do anything before the four aerial drones unfolded like metal flowers and took to the air. They dispersed a few hundred meters in cardinal directions, then started a slow orbit around the truck.

  JT’s mind slipped into three-hundred-sixty-degree vision as if he’d been born to see the world that way. He sighed, relieved, now able to watch everywhere at once. He’d leave the drones out there the rest of the drive to Tahoe; their batteries would last that long at least.

  Buzz watched the drones fly off. “Feel better?”

  “Maybe. You gonna tell me what happened in there?” JT hadn’t meant the question to sound as sharp as it had. Victor made a point of turning farther away from them, a show of offering privacy where there was none.

  —I was there, Buzz sent through the truck’s net.

  —I couldn’t feel you there.

  —It had overloaded your input channels. It took me a moment to realize what it was doing, but once I figured it out—

  —Why would it do that?

  —Lashing out at whatever came near it? I don’t know. Maybe because it spent the last month imprisoned and poked at by gangsters?

  —I want to see it again.

  —That’s not safe.

  —I have to see her again.

  Once it had been Roan always next to him in cyberspace. The way Austin and Grayson had each other’s back out in the physical, JT and Roan had been like that too. Early on in their relationship when Bell Anderson had still been coordinating things and they’d flopped in some mansion with an owner gone on holiday, Roan had found JT sprawled out on the couch deep in the net, and she’d asked, “What are you doing?”

  Hoping to embarrass her, he said, “Looking at porn.”

  But of course it didn’t. “What kind of porn?”

  “My kind of porn.”

  “You mean guys?”

  He opened his eyes and looked at her slyly. “I’m not telling.”

  “Let me see.”

  “Uh-uh. You wouldn’t like it anyway.”

  “I like watching guys getting it on with each other.”

  “Why? They’re not interested in you.”

  “They would be if they met me.” Now she was teasing him.

  He laughed. “I’ve met you. I’m still not interested.”

  “Yeah, well my brother keeps cockblocking me.”

  JT blushed so furiously it hurt.

  “I’m joking, JT.”

  Well yes, he’d known that, but it made him blush more. “Fine, you wanna look, come on.”

  She shoved him over to make room for herself on the couch, and he shared the files with her, and they closed their eyes tog
ether.

  She said, “These are cars.”

  JT shrugged. He rotated the 3-D images in his head. He flipped through engineering schematics. He reviewed energy transfer efficiency ratios on transmissions. They were all muscle cars, mostly—Corvettes, Chargers, Mustangs—but some exotic performance cars too. He lingered over a 2048 McLaren. It had been Roan’s glamour that had gently turned his mind toward the vintage models. What it was about cars, JT never understood. The lines of their bodies, angles, and curves; the way the paint reflected and absorbed the light; the contrast of glass and plastic—JT could never explain to anyone, not even himself, why cars got him hard, but they did. More than once, unthinking, he’d reach out to touch whatever he was looking at, but they were just images and there was nothing to touch.

  Roan didn’t say anything. JT felt more and more embarrassed, like Roan was watching him jack off.

  “Austin teases me about it,” he said. “You can too if you want. I don’t mind.”

  “Yes, you do. And Austin’s an asshole most of the time.”

  “Let me show you something.” Suddenly excited and confident, he had shown her the design for his truck, the beginning fantasies of the one he drove now. He gave her the grand tour of it, and she asked him to show her its computer, so he created a virtual machine in their shared space.

  “May I?” she said when she saw something she thought was off, and he said yes with that hesitant thrill you feel when you finally find someone with whom you can share what you’ve always wanted to share, but are still terrified they might break it or laugh.

  She didn’t break it, of course. And she didn’t laugh. They worked on his dream side by side for a while, like two friends playing “Heart and Soul” on an old upright piano.

  “When someone finally whacks me, I want to come back as a car.”

  “I don’t think it works that way. When I’m whacked, I want to come back as—”

  Now what had she said? She hadn’t said unicorn; she’d said something else. What did it mean that he couldn’t remember the important things anymore? Was it just that he hadn’t known then to pay attention? Or did it mean that JT had been a shitty friend?