by CM Raymond
Ezekiel turned to look around the room and his eyes landed on a magitech rifle pointed right at him. Apparently, the guard who took the full extent of the blast earlier wasn’t out of the fight.
He raised the weapon, but just as he was about to fire, he began to scream. The guard dropped the gun and began clawing at his own face. He then ran forward blindly, screaming before he crashed into a wall, his head rebounding off the stone, dropping unconscious to the ground.
Ezekiel looked up and saw Julianne standing in the doorway. Her eyes were white blanks, and they held no warmth in them.
He smiled, “I thought you mystics were people of peace. How did you say it? ‘Not accustomed to the martial affairs of this world.’”
Julianne’s eyes regained their color, and she looked down at the unconscious guard. “It was only a simple illusion. Who knew he would freak out so badly? And just because we prefer not to fight, doesn’t mean we don’t know how.” She gave Ezekiel a wink.
A cough broke the moment, and Ezekiel stepped around the carnage to find the doorman who had been taken down by the magitech weapon. His eyes were wide and he was shaking. Blood seeped from the man’s stomach, and Ezekiel could smell burnt flesh.
Julianne reached down and touched the man’s temple. She spoke a word of comfort and Ezekiel could see the fear and pain disappear.
But Ezekiel wasn’t ready to let this man die, no matter how peaceful Julianne could make his passing. The fight had taken nearly all Ezekiel’s energy, but there was a bit left. Laying both hands on the man’s torso, his eyes burned red. Ezekiel could feel the man’s body responding, the wound working double time to heal itself.
When Ezekiel had finished, the man was still unconscious but breathing steadily.
Her voice was next to him. “Thank you, Ezekiel.”
Ezekiel slumped down to the stone floor. “Don’t thank me just yet. I just killed a man, one of the Governor’s soldiers on your doorstep. When that man doesn’t come home, there’s going to be hell to pay, and the devil himself will bring it to your doorstep. I may have just involved your temple in my war, whether you wanted it or not.” He looked up to her, “For that, I am so very sorry.”
Julianne looked over at the dead man, a smile on her lips. “Oh, we are involved. But maybe Adrien doesn’t have to know that just yet. Who says that his dead soldier won’t be going home?”
Ezekiel looked over at the man he had killed and Julianne’s plan suddenly became clear. “Do you think you can pull it off?”
“I was Selah’s prized student, remember? Handpicked to replace him. I spend my days leading the mystics in prayer and meditation. My nights are spent exploring other worlds with my mind. I think I can handle a little mimicry for a few weeks. But for us to fool Adrien, it will depend on you.”
Ezekiel cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean?”
“Adrien sent three men here,” Julianne answered as she looked around and pointed. “One’s dead,” she turned to the one she had attacked, “and another’s unconscious. But the third… “ she looked down at him.
“Any chance you could dig him out of my floor?”
****
The plate of vegetables and wild pheasant let off a fragrant smell, and Parker drew in a deep breath, enjoying every moment. Food like this wasn’t abundant in the quarter, and he had no clue when the last time he had eaten anything like it. “This is amazing!”
“Yeah. Magic has its benefits.”
“Wait. You…”
She loved fooling him, and this was no exception. “Leftovers. Zeke brings it in from somewhere.” She shrugged. “Too many questions about magic and druids and history to get a question in about the food. And by the time we eat, I’m so exhausted I’d eat Sal here if nothing else was around.” The dragon scampered under the chair and hid from its master. She tried to look under the chair, “Hey! I’m just kidding, boy.”
Parker thought about the dragon and the lycanthrope and all the other things he assumed were just myths. “Little small for a dragon, don’t you think?”
Hannah slapped his hand and let her fingertips linger on his knuckles for a moment. “Manners, Parker. He can hear you.”
She laughed, but as she picked up her plate, pain like a jagged blade stabbed into her brain. The plate slid from her hand and shattered on the ground. “Shit!”
Parker jumped up, concern was written clearly on his face. “Hannah! What is it?”
She held a finger in the air. Pushing out everything around her, Hannah attempted to control her mind, to remove the pain and assess what the hell was assaulting her.
Then it struck her. “It’s William. He’s in trouble.”
“How the hell…” he started.
“He’s in pain,” she said through clenched teeth. “I can feel it. We have to go to Arcadia.”
****
Hannah and Parker kept silent as they trekked miles through the woods back to Arcadia. Darkness had surrounded them as they drew near to the city walls.
Hannah created a flaming torch in her hand to light the way. She kept its power low. They didn’t want to alert anyone of their presence, and she knew that if things got bad—really bad—she was going to need all the power she could muster.
“Gates will be closed,” Parker said.
“I should be able to do something about that.”
“You want to announce our entry by blowing down Arcadia’s front door? Real subtle, magic girl. I thought you said you needed to be smart to control magic? I have a better idea, let’s do this the old-fashioned way.”
Parker led them around the southern wall of the city. Extinguishing her flame, Hannah stayed close to her friend who knew the outside of the walls like he knew the best places to pull a trick in the quarter. They got to a spot where Parker crouched low. “Follow me,” he whispered before disappearing into the darkness.
Hannah and Parker crawled through the drain pipe and under the city wall. Splashing through several inches of water—at least Hannah told herself it was water—made the trip close to unbearable.
What was worse was that it smelled like a mix between cow feces and lycanthrope brains. She had to hold in her dry heaves more than once. But she would crawl through worse if it meant helping her brother. Finally, they popped out of the pipe on the edge of the Market Quarter.
“Piece of cake.” Parker smiled.
“I didn’t think of cake once down in that shithole.”
He shrugged and led the way toward QBB.
Hannah noticed how quiet it was on the city streets. Normally, in the market, people would gather, drink, and tell stories into the early morning hours. You couldn’t say that unemployment was without its benefits. She mentioned it to Parker, and he told her that after she and Ezekiel left, when the Governor and Chancellor got serious about finding them, a curfew had been issued in the city. Breaking the curfew was punishable by jail time.
Hannah cursed them, and the way they were ushering Arcadia into a deeper circle of hell. As they turned for Queen’s Boulevard, they saw two men at the toll.
“Maybe it’s Jack,” Hannah said.
“Don’t count on it. Jack doesn’t work the toll anymore. In fact, I haven’t seen him since you left. This new guy ain’t so friendly, and I doubt his friend there is a barrel of rainbows either.” Parker placed his hand on the small of Hannah’s back and pulled her in close. “You don’t have time for this. If your magic head is right, William needs your help. Give me a minute with this guy, and then you slide by.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Well, when he sees me, I’m not going to have to do much of anything…”
****
Monte took a slug from his friend’s bottle and winced as the homebrew burned its way down to his gut. “Shit, Hank, this sure ain’t the mystics’ elixir, but it’ll do the job.”
“Well,” Hank said, “beggars can’t be choosers. We don’t all hold down a government job like you, you ungrateful twat. And th
ey don’t call me Wildman just for my work in the Pit.”
The men laughed, passing the bottle back and forth. Since the curfew had been set, Monte’s job had gotten a hell of a lot easier. Sure, there weren’t as many tolls to skim, but he got paid to sit on his ass and do a whole lot of nothing. The streets were quiet at night, but if any shit hit the fan, he didn’t hate the fact that Arcadia’s best fighter was with him to handle a tussle.
“Hey, check this out,” Hank said, giving Monte a backhand on the shoulder and nodding down the Boulevard.
A drunk with a jug swinging by his side stumbled down the alley. Piss drunk, the man started belting out the Arcadian anthem at the top of his lungs.
“Oh, this one’s going to be fun,” Monte said, getting up off his stool.
As the dunk got closer, Monte squinted, trying to bring the man’s face into focus through the haze of his friend’s booze.
“What the hell!” Hank shouted, suddenly recognizing Pitiable Parker from the Pit. But his recognition was too late. As Wildman’s vulgar tongue filled the alley, Parker swung the jug with precision. It shattered over the brawler’s head, sending shards in every direction.
Monte cursed and dove for Parker, but the kid was too fast, and Monte was a bit too drunk. Parker ducked his giant arms and spun off down the Boulevard.
Getting to his feet and steadying himself, Monte picked Wildman Hank up off the ground. His friend’s temple was leaking blood, shards of the jug still impaled in his face. “Let’s get that son of a bitch.”
The two friends raced down the dark streets with murder in their minds after the kid from Queen’s Boulevard.
****
Rather than teleporting the last leg of the journey, Ezekiel decided to walk it. The last few days had taken more out of him than he had expected, and he thought that stretching his legs would use less energy than another jumping spell. Nevertheless, he was exhausted when he finally arrived home.
Collapsing on the couch, he exhaled. Reflecting on the meeting at the monastery, he was reminded just how precarious things were in Arcadia and realized more than ever how much there would be ramifications on all of Irth if things didn’t work according to plan.
The fight with the Capitol Guard was a hitch he wasn’t expecting, but the arrival of the Chancellor's men had drawn Julianne into the fray.
Before Ezekiel left, he dug the guard Dirk out of the ground and helped the mystics wipe his memory.
Julianne had appreciated that act.
Then he watched as Julianne took on the exact likeness of Stellan, the man that Ezekiel killed. In a few days, she would lead the brainwashed guards back to Arcadia. So, Julianne was on board. Time would tell if the other mystics decided to get involved in the fight against Adrien.
Unusually quiet, he thought. More often than not, his arrival would spark the appearance of his smart ass little student.
He pushed himself off the couch and walked the halls of the tower, looking for Hannah, but the place was empty. He stepped outside the front doors and scanned the edge of the forest.
Nothing, he thought. Something isn’t right.
Returning to the great hall, he found two plates of food—one hardly eaten, the other smashed to pieces on the floor. Something was wrong, and the wizard feared the worst. She had had company, and there was some sort of conflict.
Ezekiel fastened his robe, grabbed his staff, and concentrated. His body had not yet rested from the last jump; the magician’s power was still waning. Digging deep into his reserves, he concentrated on his pupil and jumped away from the tower.
****
As Hannah raced toward her home, she smiled thinking about Parker. Her friend was more than able to handle himself, especially at home on the Boulevard. She was lucky to have him. Although she didn’t believe in the Matriarch or Patriarch, she nevertheless felt blessed by someone or something. For the first time ever, she felt like she had been given much and felt incredibly strong.
Her magic was far from mature, but the power inside of her was there and waited to be used to set things right.
Turning the corner toward her house, she was glad to see light in the windows. Something had psychically clued her into trouble with her brother, and now she was beginning to think that maybe it was just the power bubbling around in her blood mixed with her imagination.
It wasn’t exactly something she had learned from Ezekiel, after all. By the time she reached the door, she had convinced herself that there was nothing wrong, and she was even glad for the chance to see her brother. It had been so long since she’d seen him.
Hell, she was even happy to be back in Arcadia.
Despite her haste, Hannah had the presence of mind to pause before entering the house, making sure that there were no prying eyes lurking outside. She then climbed the steps to her door.
The few weeks spent living in the ancient tower in the woods had changed her perception. All of Arcadia already looked smaller, including her house. It was as if she had drunk a potion that made her grow. She turned the knob and pushed open the door.
As she opened her mouth to yell her brother’s name, something struck her. It was the smell, something like the iron that made up Ezekiel’s tower. But this was somehow different, and as she stepped further in, her stomach began to boil.
Her house was covered with blood.
****
Parker glanced over his shoulder just as Hannah cut down a side street toward her house. Their ruse had worked, now he just had to keep those assholes busy to give his friend time to make it to Will. He slowed, letting the men advance on him. Their footsteps clattered on the cobblestones.
He knew that either of them would gladly rip his head off. Wildman Hank wanted vengeance for the humiliation Parker had put him through, and the toll master was just a cruel son of a bitch. In a fair fight, either of them would be able to do Parker some serious harm. But there was nothing fair about fights in Arcadia, and he would use every trick he had against them.
Kicking over a bucket on the curb, to make sure they still had a trace on him, Parker turned for Leroy’s Pub. Leroy’s was a dive, the kind of place where you could buy black-market booze that had a better chance of causing blindness than getting you drunk.
More importantly, he knew that Leroy’s had what he needed. With the men on his tail, he cut past the corner of the pub, climbed a stack of wooden crates and grabbed the bottom rail of the ladder that led to the roof. There were a hundred ways onto the roofs of Queen’s Boulevard, and Parker knew them all. But he needed one that the clumsy, drunk men could follow.
Making it to the top of the pub, Parker ran to the opposite side and waited.
The men, in due time, scrambled over the edge and onto the roof. Monte, the toll master who’d spilled the beans about the government looking for Hannah, shouted out, “Thought you gave us the slip, you little bastard? The Queen Bitch herself couldn’t help you now.”
When the men got close, Parker spun and jumped from Leroy’s to the building adjacent. It was a three feet gap and Parker made it easily. Legs hitting the flat rooftop, he ducked into a roll and popped to his feet. Cursing filled the night air behind him.
Glancing back, he saw the men standing on the edge, trying to convince each other to go first. Finally, Wildman made the jump and Monte followed. Parker repeated the process several more times, the gap between the houses increasing as he moved on.
Growing up in the quarter, Parker knew the sequences of roofs like the back of his hand. It was the way the kids of the neighborhood would move around to avoid detection. But these two men had kept up with him so far.
