Ward

by C Bilici

  “Concentrate on your chosen form. Your avatar is your power, and you are its. You are separate but one. The same. Call forth your power and give it life.”

  Stacey waited. “Nothing’s happening.”

  “Call forth your power!” he said, insistent.

  “I’m trying!” she replied, agitated.

  Tension built in her shoulders and she rolled them, tilted her head and took several deep breaths.

  “Just try to rel—”

  “Shhh!” she hissed.

  Stacey clenched and unclenched her fingers, eyes pressed tightly closed as she imagined the drawing coming to life. She tried to picture it moving from that static pose, standing, fighting, anything to animate it. She didn’t know what she should be feeling, if anything, but there was nothing. No warmth on her new sigils as before. No sensation. After a time of concentration she let out a growl.

  “So much for me being sensitive! Fuck you and your stupid arse!” She imagined herself flipping off the image in her mind.

  A sudden heat burst on her chest. The image in her mind turned to face her, anger flashing in its eyes. The fire on her chest burst out across her breasts and she gasped as gooseflesh played over her skin with an electric chill.

  A weight built around her. The air crackled with energy. The hairs on her skin stood on end. Stacey opened her eyes, saw Fenton standing back, watching her in awe.

  The ink on her chest was visible and the heat from it was still building. The tattoo flamed to life, making her gasp. As Stacey drew in that breath the ink brightened. The air collected in her lungs felt heated by the fire on her chest. She knew what she was supposed to do.

  She had to breathe life into her avatar.

  Closing her eyes, she again saw the form of the creature, moving toward her. Stacey exhaled until the last of that hot air in her lungs was out. Sparks pricked her windpipe, tongue and lips as they rose. As she opened her eyes, she saw them dancing.

  A million embers on her breath flew from her face to drift slowly in the space in front of her. They twirled about, a ball forming at the centre, the rest locked in a dance about it, like a galactic atom. The sparks spun faster and began to collide. They burst to split and multiply like fireworks. Or cells. The chaotic ball stretched, growing vertically, sucking up white matter from the Nexus as it went. Cords of Nexus stretched and coalesced as the sparks touched it. It was like watching a fairy floss made, if the main ingredient was fire instead of sugar.

  Her avatar was being knitted together.

  Even as she watched she could feel her influence playing across its surface. From what Fenton had said, and from what she intuited, she could adjust and modify as she went. So she built on Jasper’s drawing.

  Before she knew it, it was done.

  The newborn towered over her and stared down with the same attitude and expression she’d envisioned. Something in her mind echoed. It was liked hearing the younger kids at her work trying to talk. Was it trying to communicate her?

  “What do you think?” Fenton said.

  Stacey’s eyelids slowly fluttered as her stare broke and she swallowed, her mouth dry.

  The avatar completed the motion it had started in Stacey’s mind and gave her multiple middle finger salutes.

  Stacey smiled. “That’s my girl.”

  It was an almost identical approximation of the sketch in her hand, with the exception of the changes she’d wrought. The lips a little fuller, the hair style a little wilder. Then there were the accessories. She knew that Jasper would be proud. The thing was practically their baby.

  Her avatar flexed its four arms, like some punk goddess figure. She tested the roller-skates on her feet and the tight black denim hot pants creaked. She ran a pair of her hands over her torso to the black crop top and felt her breasts. The other pair, covered in studded leather gloves with the fingers cut off, ran over her toned midriff, an ornate piercing setting off her navel. Spiked elbow and kneepads that looked like they’d been through several wars adorned her limbs. Steel mesh fishnets flowed down her legs from beneath the tattered legs of the hot pants, what little of them there were.

  A steel choker ringed her neck, and above that, her thick bottom lip was pierced with a ring either side of centre. Two spiked bars jutted through her left eyebrow, a jewelled stud in her right nostril, and copious piercings hanged at her ears, some joined by chains hung with charms that looked like claws, scythes, and varying weapons.

  The hair atop her head was a dark mass of dreadlocks, tied into a bunch of coils, which jutted out, the sides of her head bereft of hair where they were shaved.

  Her skin was a bluish grey and covered in tattoos.

  Four leather wrapped juggling clubs each hung from her studded belt, their bulky bodies highlighted with sharp studs. Each of the handles was wrapped in a different colour, a metal ring with a swivel link on their ends tied with steel cable.

  The avatar picked one of the clubs off and pulled, cable spooling out of the club. A blade sprang from the head of the thing, whistling as she twirled the club and glared down at Stacey with sharp eyes.

  Who the fuck are you supposed to be?

  The avatar’s voice boomed in Stacey’s head. Stacey sneered back up at it, her smile gone.

  “Don’t get testy with me! I made you.” Stacey glanced at Fenton, gave a shrug and shake of her head. “Do you believe this one?”

  “Only you can hear her, Stacey.”

  Stacey nodded. “Cool your jets,” she shouted up at the giant. “I’m your Ward, and you’re my avatar. We’re like yin and yang, or some shit. Got it?”

  The avatar snorted and spat, barely missing Stacey as she jumped aside. The Nexus absorbed the viscous blot up as she watched. Fenton cocked his eyebrow at Stacey.

  “We’re getting on like a house on fire,” she responded.

  “Clearly,” Fenton said.

  Stacey grimaced and looked up to her avatar once more. “Alright, listen up, hot stuff!” The avatar looked down at her gritting its teeth in anger. “Someone took my lovers and took one of their eyes. You going to help me get payback, or am I going to have to sort you out first?”

  An odd feeling flowed over her as her anger lashed out. Stacey’s eyes burned and seemed to cover over with some sort of lens, or filter. The Nexus grew brighter. With a glance around her, she noticed that all of Fenton’s sigils were visible to her, including those odd lines across his body. Godfrey and her own avatar also glowed with a golden fire. She didn’t have time to investigate the new clarity, though.

  Her avatar narrowed its eyes, opened its mouth to bare its teeth and bellowed in anger. Stacey yelled back at it and watched as an energy seemed to flow across the creature in a shockwave that made it falter, then stand up straighter. It looked her over, assessing. Then, it smirked and hung up the club, crossed its four arms.

  “See?” Stacey said, grinning at Fenton as her eyes returned to normal. “Now can we save Paul and Jasper?”

  Fenton nodded, smiling. “Impressive. You’ll have to learn as you go, but something tells me you’ll do just fine. At some stage you’ll need to make yourself some more ink and we’ll arm you with more sigils, but we can’t delay any longer.”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked to where the mess of the Shadow Man had been and wondered if they’d killed the monster that took Paul’s eye. Somehow she doubted it.

  “We can’t go back to the farmhouse now that it’s compromised.”

  “Shit! The rest of Jasper’s notebook is there. How am I going to remember the symbols?”

  A deep thumping drew their attention and they turned to look at Stacey’s avatar pounding her chest with a fist. She rolled closer on her massive skates to kneel and held out one of her arms for them to inspect. Laid out in the embedded ink there were replicas of the notebook pages spiralling the limb in one-to-one size with the real thing. By Stacey’s reckoning the whole of the notebook was there on that single arm.

  “Smart little bitch.” She’d
only briefly though of the notebook as the creature had been brought to life. The avatar smirked back. “I’m gonna need to get you a name, huh?”

  “But,” Fenton interjected, “for now we need to get to the Enclave and update the Cardinal.”

  “OK. You two play nice now.”

  Stacey’s avatar looked at Godfrey, who bowed his head in greeting. She sneered, turned about and rolled away leaving Godfrey to flare his eyes as he turned his massive back to her in return.

  Fenton took Stacey by the shoulders, shaking his head. “Definitely your avatar.”

  They disappeared out of that strange universe.

  * * *

  It had been three days since Stacey’s Ward bonding vision. Since Paul had lost his eye, and Fenton his house, though she really couldn’t care less about that. There was a whole world of empty houses in the Enclave, she’d found.

  A clean-up crew had been to Fenton’s house and cleared it of any infection, brought back what they could salvage, but there hadn’t been much. The Umbra and the Shadow Man had done a real number on it all, apparently. She’d lost Jasper’s notebook and her guitar. When the Wards had returned and she had looked to Fenton with hope, he’d shaken his head. The notebook was nowhere to be found, and he used the word kindling when she asked about the guitar.

  The only positive of the last several days, she now had her first real sigils on her palms, though learning to use them was proving trickier and slower than she’d thought. Her accuracy left a lot to be desired also, according to Fenton.

  Her gains definitely were not equal to her loss.

  They’d been living in an empty mud brick house in the Enclave until they could be furnished with a new safe house, Despina told them. There seemed to be no time frame for that, though the Enclave was as good a place as any given everything. Stacey had suggested her flat could become a new safe house, but Fenton had shot her down.

  “It’s a heavily populated block of flats. More lives than your own now depends on you remembering such things,” he’d added.

  Her world was no longer the cosy place it had been, and if she didn’t get it together, it was going to get a lot darker for her and others as a result.

  It didn’t help that she found Fenton to be more of a grumpy old bastard as a teacher, and he’d been on her case constantly about practising. She’d already had to reapply the tattoos on her palms from overuse. There were marks in the whitewash walls of their shack to attest to that, though most were borne out of frustration than her failure to control her new powers.

  At least she’d gotten some practice at producing her own ink and using the Nexus. She’d taken Fenton to a suburban farm she remembered visiting in school and had stolen a fresh egg and found some rich grass.

  Now she sat on the floor against the plastered wall and waited, fiddling with a jar lid she’d been using as target practice. It flew across the room to bounce off a wall. She stood to stare out the window.

  Left alone to practice her skills, Fenton continued the investigation, saying it was far too dangerous at the moment for her to be out, and that she needed to be armed with some experience. She’d gone out and explored the streets and the market. It was a multicultural bazaar buzzing with activity where she had gotten them fresh tobacco, since they’d lost all of Fenton’s, and fed herself on foods of the Earth, but generally interacted with as few people as possible. There was a tavern, but she was in no mood for any kind of frivolity. Maybe one day.

  She kicked at the floor in anger. Jasper had hand painted the back of that guitar for her. Now it was gone forever, she and Paul probably along with it at this rate. Stacey at least knew that Paul was alive, or had been. Which was more than she knew about Jasper.

  Someone in the markets had mentioned a library, had suggested for her to read up on Ward history and the other worlds, or realms as they were referred to. Maybe it would be a good distraction.

  The rickety front door rattled. Fenton parted the thick rug that acted as door to her room, stuck his head in.

  “Come on.” He disappeared again as he dropped the makeshift curtain.

  “Hey! What is it? Where we going?” She threw the thick cloth aside and nearly ran into him as he was turning around.

  “Ianka’s club.”

  Stacey pulled a face in anger. “Now really isn’t the fucking time. Who knows what’s happening to Paul and Jasper.”

  His face contorted, sigils surfacing, and eyes clouding. His hands were rough where they grabbed her shoulders.

  “Exactly. Who knows. Ianka and her entire club, on the other hand, are all dead! So either shut up and follow me without question, or stay here and feel sorry for yourself. At the moment I don’t care which.”

  He almost threw her aside as he turned and stormed out the door, slamming it so hard against the wall Stacey thought the thing would fall apart.

  She followed in silence.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THEY ARRIVED AT the Cardinal temple where several Wards waited. One of the Cardinals stood from his chair at the large circular table and slapped the stone several times for everyones attention. Stacey looked the middle-aged man over. He was average to attractive with mid-length brown hair and a strong jaw line. The Wards stopped their low talking and gave him their full attention. When he spoke it was with an American accent.

  “People. We have called an emergency session for a joint investigation into a serious matter. One of our own, a Ward of the South, was brutally murdered in her safe house along with a handful of her employees and patrons.

  “Some of you may have heard rumours over the past few days that there has been a growing problem with the Umbra increasing their attacks and intelligence. The six of you, an enforcer from each region and two who have witnessed the threat themselves firsthand, will be going to the safe house to investigate.

  “I needn’t remind you that you are to be vigilant and absolutely thorough in this. If what you find is as we suspect, this will be nothing short of all-out war. Any questions?” The group remained silent. “Then Godspeed.”

  Wards grouped to talk in louder conversation, clearly all alarmed at the Cardinal’s information. Stacey hadn’t spent all that long outside of the house she’d been cooped up in, but she’d heard whispers. Things seemed to be escalating world wide and word spreading.

  She saw Fenton nod to someone in the throng but not who it was aimed at. She thought it was either a short Asian woman, or a big African man. Her money was on the woman.

  Fenton walked toward them and clasped hands firmly with the big man, who slapped Fenton on the shoulder with great force.

  “I didn’t have any cash anyway,” she muttered to herself.

  “Komi. Long time, my friend” Fenton said, his voice low and full of agitation, tempered by his obvious admiration for the man.

  The tall man nodded back at Fenton. “Yes, it has been quite some time since I last saw you, Fenton. I wish it was in better circumstance.” Fenton nodded. “How is that grumpy old Knight of yours?” the man asked, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Still grumpy. And your giant spider?” Fenton gave a small shudder. “Still gives me nightmares.”

  Komi chuckled. “Anansi is fine.” The man turned to Stacey, who was mooching behind Fenton, trying to maintain some kind of respectful distance. “So the rumours are true. They finally got you to accept an apprentice?”

  Fenton nodded. “A forced situation for us both, but yes. Komi, this is Stacey,” he said, finally introducing her. “Komi is an enforcer,” he said to her.

  “Hey,” Stacey said, holding her hand up, Komi giving her a nod in return.

  “We are all thrust into this life unwillingly, my dear. But it is a pleasure to meet you nonetheless.”

  “Yeah. I suppose. I just wish I didn’t have to lose my boyfriend and girlfriend to these fuckers to get here.”

  The man raised his eyebrows. “Twice the heartache.” His hand fell on her shoulder too, though softly. The squeeze he gave it spoke
of genuine empathy. “I do not envy you. I hope you find them safe and well.”

  “Thank you.”

  A statuesque blond man walked up to them, his blue eyes sweeping over the small group. “Are you prepared to leave?” He had some sort of Scandinavian accent.

  “After what we have seen,” Fenton said indicating himself and Stacey, “I doubt any of you are truly ready.”

  The newcomer smiled, flashing bright white teeth over his chiselled jaw. “We’re enforcers. We—”

  “I know who you are. I also know what you don’t. My apprentice and I, on the other hand, have survived several attacks from the Shadow Man, as she calls him. But I’m sure you know all about that already,” Fenton said in a calmer tone now, “being that you are a so-called enforcer.”

  Stacey couldn’t help but smile as she watched the man’s face move through a series of confused emotions. He opened his mouth to speak, but Fenton cut him off.

  “I doubt, however, that you have been in his vicinity much less in battle with him. He’s killed many people, including Wards now, and destroyed two safe houses. That we know of. We on the other hand have survived two attacks by this—”

  “Three,” Stacey cut in. Fenton scowled at her. “I’m counting him breaking into the Nexus as a separate attack.”

  “How right you are.” He turned back to the dumbfounded man. “Three attacks. So you had better know who you are and what you can do, and remember all that I have told you, because if I have to even once save your sorry arse, or you endanger my apprentice, then there will be hell to pay? Understood?”

  The man stood agog. Then he smiled wide and clapped Fenton on the back. “I like this one. We go soon, yes?” With that he walked away.

  Fenton looked to his friend. “Apologies, Komi. No offence intended.

  Komi gave him an awkward half smile. “Non taken.”

  “Go, Fenton!” Stacey said. “Who knew you were such a hard arse?”

  “Me,” said Fenton. “Sadly I think it was all in vain when I see the look in his eyes.”