by Sevan Paris
“Henna.”
“That’s a ‘Henna’ to the whole tattoo thing?”
“No, Indian Tattoos are called Henna Tattoos. At least the ones that people are interested in, generally speaking. And somebody did come by looking for a book the first day we reopened, but she didn’t order anything.”
“What did she look like?”
“Dyed red hair. Like too red.”
“Will you let me know if you see her again?”
“Will you let me know if you get back to work?”
I turn away and roll my eyes. She’s a real gem, that Jessica Gem.
The door chimes as another customer walks in. She is an attractive, well bundled blonde in her late thirties. Anybody who lives in the city of Prose would recognize her immediately: Lisa Lancaster from iWitness News.
“Hi,” she says after moving a tuft of hair back into her toboggan. It’s one of those really cute ones that has a fuzz ball on top.
Bo rushes back to the counter, picks up another cup, and starts wiping it again. “What can I get for you, ba— ma’am?
She walks up to the counter, stuffing the gloves in her pocket but leaving on her pink Ray-Bans. “What is, like, the thing you have that sucks the least?”
That doesn’t sound like Lisa Lancaster.
She looks at me and smiles. I’ve seen that smile a lot of times on a lot of different faces: It’s Pink.
She’s inside Lancaster.
I walk to her, with a fake grin. “That’s okay, Bo, I got this.”
“And let you wait on the prettiest lady in Prose? Don’t think so, G-Dog.”
“Take a breath, hefty,” she says. “You’re not my type.”
“Hefty?” Bo slaps his pudgy belly. “You talking about this, babe? This ain’t fat—this a fuel tank for a love machine.”
“Bo, really, I got this. It’s okay, we know each other.” I place my hand on Lancaster’s shoulder and steer her away from the coffee shop.
“How do—oh, yeah right, the whole Dr. Villainous destroying the store thing. Guess you met then. Well, all right, babe. Let me know if you’re ever ready for a ride on Bo Street.”
We step into the science fiction and fantasy section, still walking toward the stock room in the back of the store. “What are you doing?” I say.
“Getting a cup of coffee. That a crime?”
“No—that’s—what are you doing in Lisa Lancaster’s body? And why did you bring it here, to the place where I work for a cup of coffee?”
“Relax, hero. She isn’t gonna remember a thing when I leave. Just like everybody else.”
“… I didn’t know that happened.”
She takes off her sunglasses, exposing two glowing pink eyes. “It’s not something I like to advertise. Weirds people out.”
“Yeah, well,” I take the sunglasses away from her and put them back on her face, a little crooked, “I would say it’s the initial riding around in someone’s body that really weirds them out.”
I wouldn’t say the experience is generally “weird.” Dreadfully awful, perhaps. But not weird.
I look behind me and over her shoulder, just to make sure nobody sees us, and lead us into the stockroom. We stop next to an unopened case of Game of Thrones and stacks of twenty ounce cokes. “Criminals are one thing, but—”
“Trust me, she’s criminal.”
“What do you mean? What’s she done?”
“Well, for starters, she was an advocate for getting that Sarah McLachlan service announcement on TV. You know the one where you see all the puppies dying and stuff? And these shoes, with this coat? And—ungh,” she reaches behind her and pulls on the seat of her pants. “Thongs? Really?”
“Pink, you have to stop. You can’t just ride around in somebody’s body whenever you like.”
Pink screams.
It’s a horrible, shrieking sound, full of terror and pain that echoes off the walls and high ceiling of the stock room. With a flash of light, a pink mist seems to be blown—hurled—out of Lancaster’s body. The scream changes to a higher pitch and follows the whooshing cloud, away from the body, and to the rafters.
Pink left her.
Lancaster blinks rapidly and shakes her head. “What …” She stumbles forward. I barely catch her before she fumbles into three cases of Dasani. She mumbles something else before going completely limp.
“I didn’t mean to leave her right now!” I say. “Take her home first!”
Pink darts to the other side of the stockroom and hovers above the lockers. She keeps her pink, transparent body turned away, but looks at me out of the corners of narrowed eyes. “That wasn’t me, Garrison. I don’t knock people out when I leave willingly. It was you—you forced me out.”
“How? I don’t know of any—”
“I do,” she says. “I’ve felt it before. You’ve been Magicked.” Pink’s voice is full of fear.
CHAPTER TWO
It takes the ambulance seven minutes to arrive—Lancaster never wakes.
“So what happened?” Jessica says, watching the ambulance pull away. It fishtails slightly in the grey slush covering Broad Street.
I shrug. “Don’t know. She asked me some questions about some stuff and then just … passed out.” It wasn’t hard to talk my way around this one. Considering it wasn’t a lie to begin with.
“What did she ask you?”
Okay, now it’s awkward lie time. “She wanted to know why … I …”
Jessica locks eyes with me, waiting.
I swear, I never grow tired of these moments …
“Why I … do—did do what I did. When I did it.” Blood rushes to my face.
“Huh? No, forget it. Whatever. At least it happened here. I mean, not really, but at least she wasn’t by herself. So, you’re okay?”
I nod.
Jessica looks at the crowd of customers walking back into Rock Creek. “Okay. Do you need a little while out here? I can clock you out if I need to.”
Such a gem, that Jessica Gem.
“No, I … I’ll just be a minute.”
She nods and walks back into the bookstore. A warm wave of air hits me from the closing door. Customers talk to each other, caught up in the caffeine fueled excitement of the moment. A few of them mime a passed out reporter and point to the area the paramedics carried her.
“Any idea where Pink went?”
None. The tawdry tween bolted right after you screamed nine eleven to Jessica Gem.
“Nine-one-one.”
Same thing.
“Not really, no.”
Two ladies in their early twenties give me strange looks from the table next to the window. I turn and head down the alley. “Do you have any idea what happened? Did you sense any sort of weird energy or anything?”
No. But right now, with my limited senses, we could be in the middle of Chernobyl and I wouldn’t know it.
I stop and stare at the snow covering my Keens. “ ‘Magicked’ … what does that even mean?”
Nothing of importance, I can assure you. Especially since it doesn’t help us understand this situation any better.
“Even after everything you’ve seen, on this planet or any other, you can’t accept that something like Magick exists?”
Do you really want to open this door?
“Actually, I would like to close it. Once and for all.”
Fine. If it will put this matter to rest, I’ll say it: It does exist, Gabe. But let’s use the far more common, less semantical synonyms, shall we? Ignorance. Nonsense. Thoughtlessness. And let’s not forget ludicrousness.
“Something is causing all this,” I gesture around me in the alley. “If you’ve got a theory let’s here it.”
Nothing.
“Yeah, awesome. You’re so quick to poke fun at me—at everybody, for what we do, what we say, and what we believe. But you never serve up anything better.”
Just because I don’t understand something doesn’t mean I’m about to retreat into the cave like s
ome homosapien, point a trembling finger into the unknown and say, “Beware—it’s Magick!”
I lean against the brick wall of the bookstore. “It’s a little more complicated than that.”
Oh, it’s far more complicated: Your race had the audacity—the absurdity—to assign such a ridiculous and all powerful concept to something that it didn’t understand. “Magick” … the very notion implies the discouragement of any further, rational means of comprehension.
“If people didn’t understand it, they wouldn’t be able to control it,” I say in a small voice.
Most of your kind attempts to control things it doesn’t understand all the time: combustion engines, computers, the atom—
“No, this is different.” After everything I’ve learned about Superheroes, about how horrible, how human, they can be … I really want—need—this Magick stuff to remain the way I’ve always seen it: Proof of wonder, of amazement. Of a power so crazy fantastic it defies reason, logic, or any that other adult stuff. “M, using something like this—it’s mighty. Dope even. Using it means that you have to know how to hocus pocus something before you actually hocus pocus it. You need the know-how.”
No, you need the perception of ‘know-how.’ Instead of existing as what something actually is, it then becomes something smaller. Limited, like yourself. Only then may you understand it through the prism of mediocrity that you’ve constructed. Your hesitation—your flat out refusal—to recognize the logic of what I’m saying is proof enough.
I walk around the corner of the alley, towards the rear entrance of the store. “Don’t turn this into something else. It’s—”
Someone slams me against the wall, hand clamped over my mouth.
He’s just a little taller than me, but leaner. I strain to see around the furry edges of his mad bomber hat, catching just a glimpse of a man in his early fifties with salt and pepper stubble. I recognize him immediately.
Casa.
Great googley moogley, how does your kind survive without knowing what’s in their immediate surroundings? It’s like I’m as blind as, well—as a human.
Casa lowers his hand, quickly holding an index finger to his lips. His other hand goes into the pocket of his black coat. He pulls out a green stone, about the size of a quarter, attached to a silver necklace.
I jump away from the wall. “What—”
“Quiet!” he says hurriedly. “You want to kill us both?”
I shake my head slightly, trying to understand exactly what he’s talking about.
He rubs his stubbled chin in agitation. “Pink told me what happened. Unless you want to start making faces melt or buildings implode, put this on.” He dangles the necklace from his index finger. There are weird markings on the stone that look like two crescent moons facing each other.
I snatch it off his finger and hold it up, queueing M to do his thing.
It’s no use. I can’t tell anything.
I start to say something. Casa shakes his head, points to the necklace, and then points to my neck.
I sigh and fasten the clasp under my chin. “Now—what is this thing?”
“That ‘thing’ is all that stands between you and a really bad day. It suppresses Magickal abilities, if you’re wearing it willingly.”
Ugh—you too?
“Why didn’t you lead out with that,” I say. “Instead of slamming me against the wall?”
“Remember that part about faces melting? I kinda need mine—I’m paying a nice young woman to sit on it later.”
Why on Earth would you … oh. Never mind.
I circle the green stone around to my throat. “Pink told you what was going on.”
“She said that you’d been Magicked. And since you stayed here and didn’t come immediately to me, I can only infer you have no idea what that means.”
“Since you’re acting like an ass hat, I can only infer you know exactly what it means.”
His eyes scan my face, hurriedly. “You have the power to make anything happen, simply by saying it should happen.”
I step back. “What? That …”
“Doesn’t make sense? How about simply willing Pink out of a Lisa Lancaster’s body. Does that make sense?”
“ …. You’re starting to make this sound like a genie in the lamp kind of thing.”
“For some, it can be. People have to train for years to be ready for the kind of power you have. It takes a very disciplined mind to handle it.”
And yet one only has to be an idiot to accept it.
“Doesn’t seem so discipline-y. You want something to happen, it happens.”
Casa laughs under his breath and reaches down to scoop up a handful of snow. He packs it into two snowballs. “You didn’t even know you had this power and look what you did to Pink. It’s not what you mean that’s so scary.” He pelts me in the neck with the first snowball; it hits my neck and clops down the front of my shirt. “It’s what you don’t mean.” I look back at him right in time for another snowball, right in the ear.
“Stop!”
“Stop what?” He holds his hands out, palms up. “Throwing snowballs? Talking? Breathing?”
I feel the blood leave my face—the fill impact of what Casa says hits me. “But that’s—I didn’t mean that.”
He shrugs. “If you’re not clear, it’s not up to you. It’s up to wherever the Magick comes from.”
You mean your imagination?
“Ninety-five percent of Magick is small time. On par with anything you could get out of an energy weapon, a drug, or a computer. The remaining five percent—that’s the stuff nightmares are made of. It takes a perfect balance of emotion and intent. Too much of one or the other and minds turn inside out, souls are cut in two, realities turn upside down. The consequences are more dangerous than whatever the Magick’s being used against. Few Magick Sayers can access it—even fewer try to. Unless, like you, they don’t know any better.”
I rub my forehead, mind reeling. No wonder this stuff wasn’t common knowledge. People would freak. “How do I get rid of this?”
“Depends. First you need to tell me how you got it.”
Casa paces back and forth, occasionally looking back in the alley, while I tell him everything that happened in the diner. I leave out anything about losing my powers or M and finish with what happened with Silver Sentinel. Casa stops his pacing and looks at me. “And you thought what?” he says. “That you intimidated him?”
My feet shuffle in the snow. “I thought I … I—can we move on to the part where I get rid of any accidental face melting concerns?”
“I thought—hoped—it was some sort of Magickal object that gave you these powers. But you’ve been given them by a Ward—which is far more problematic. And serious.”
“A ward? You mean like Dick Grayson?”
Casa furiously rubs his head. “When a Magicked person dies, one of three things happens. One: His mojo goes to the person that kills him. Two: If the killer already had the mojo to begin with, he gains more … precision—he can access Magick more efficiently; it becomes easier to control the balance. Or three: The mojo safely goes on standby, into a Ward. The Ward then choses who she passes the power to.”
“So Ember’s person is dead.”
“Sayer.”
“Ember’s Sayer is dead. And she picked me. But why did she pick me? I don’t know how to use this stuff. I’m like a Harry Potter time bomb.”
“She shouldn’t have picked you,” Casa says. “She wouldn’t have. Things must have been desperate.”
“Like running from Ms. Mystick desperate?”
“And running from Mystick’s Ward, Tommy Rivers. Maybe Ember didn’t trust them—” Casa paces again—“thought they were going to force the power from her. She thought that hiding it in you—somebody that had proven himself, his intentions—would be the lesser of two evils.”
“Hiding it? But that would mean she can take it back.”
“I don’t know,” Casa says. “Hopefully. And
hopefully within the next twenty four hours. The juice in that necklace will run out by then.”
“Well, I have the rest of the day off if I need it. Let’s go find her.”
“Can’t.”
“What? Why?”
“Mystick has Magick at her disposal, yet Ember somehow managed to stay hidden. Which means Ember can stay hidden from anything I’ve got.” He adjusts the ears on his hat. “You’ll have to wait until she contacts you.”
“How do you know Ember will contact me? She doesn’t know my name, what I look like, or where I am.”
“Ember gave you this power because she had to—not because she wanted to. She’ll want it back. And she’ll find you because part of being a Ward means you can sense your Sayer’s power, regardless of who has it. At this point, the only thing that would stop her from coming to you would be Ms. Mystick’s capturing her. In which case, things will go from crappy to shitty. For both of you.”
My phone buzzes, letting me know I have a text. I pull it out of my pocket and check it:
From Mom: will u go w me to Liberty’s vigil tonite?
I sigh. “Things are already shitty.”
***
“…. surrounded by candlelight and sorrow, thousands have gathered tonight at the steps of Doss’ Landing for the vigil of the World’s Greatest Hero. Liberty, the Superhero that has been defending American idealism since 1938, disappeared mysteriously during a prison riot at The Bend three months ago. It’s important to note that HEROES, the organizers of the event, haven’t given up hope looking for Liberty. The government sanctioned Superhero organization released an official statement this morning stating (quote) While the weather may make it difficult for many to attend tonight’s vigil, we still think that it’s important to let the event continue as planned. Now more than ever we need to send a message to those responsible. We need our voices, our sadness, our anger, our desire for justice to be heard (end quote).
Rumors and speculation, fueled by anger and sadness, have surrounded the vigil like a dark shroud. Signs with phrases such as “Why did you take him from us, Galaxy?” and “Galaxy: World’s Worst Hero” are a common sight tonight. And since HEROES hasn’t commented on witness reports of Galaxy being at the scene during the night of the riot, people have been left with nothing BUT rumors and speculation. This is Ted Benjamin, filling in for Lisa Lancaster—iWitness News.”
