The Immortal Queen Tsubame: Awakening

by H. D. Strozier

  22

  Though they walked silently through the halls, MaLeila could sense that Bastet had something to say, something very firm if the heaviness of her usually light steps were an indication, the way her eyes kept narrowing and her eyebrows kept furrowing only for her to realize that her facial expression was so before she released the tension. When they got to their floor, they went towards their rooms, but Bastet stopped at the door to Devdan’s room rather than taking MaLeila the room she shared with Marcel.

  “What?” Devdan said as he opened the door.

  “All of us need to talk,” Bastet said as she pushed Devdan out the way.

  Devdan shot MaLeila a questioning glance. MaLeila just sighed and rolled her eyes in response as she walked past him.

  “What’s going on now?” Devdan asked, letting the heavy hotel room door swing shut behind him.

  “The Magic Council is going to frame MaLeila for Fathi,” Bastet said without preamble.

  “Why the fuck aren’t I shocked about that?” Devdan said dryly as her leaned against the desk. “Where’d you find that out?”

  “Tsubame,” Bastet grumbled.

  “And you believed her?” Devdan asked.

  “I used to work for the council. They take advantage of anything and everything that could be used to their benefit, even the things that make them look suspicious. Not only does putting the blame on MaLeila get the heat off them, it also gets rid of a prickling thorn in their side.”

  “They have no proof,” Devdan said.

  “They don’t need it. They have connections to the magic families who own the non-magical people who own the media. They can say anything about and do anything they want to her and no one would care. She wouldn’t even get a chance to get her side of the story exposed.”

  “I love the way you talk about me as if I’m not here,” MaLeila cut in. “I probably wouldn’t be here talking about this with you if I hadn’t walked in on you talking to Tsubame and she hadn’t told me.”

  “I would have told you eventually.”

  “Just like you eventually told me that you and Devdan are essentially my slaves,” MaLeila shot back.

  “Let’s not go there right now. I could point out that you went to talk to Tsubame yourself about something and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t because Marcel sent you,” Bastet said.

  MaLeila pressed her lips together, eyes narrowing as the anger and resentment that she had since set aside since the entire situation with Claude’s binding spell and Devdan pulling his gun on Jaffe blew up.

  “Well at least Tsubame was honest with me. In fact, she seems to be the only one that seems to be honest about anything when she opens her mouth and that’s very ironic considering she’s the one we’re all supposed to be concerned about,” MaLeila snapped.

  “When did you start defending Tsubame?” Devdan asked before Bastet could respond.

  “I’m not defending her. I’m just saying that it hardly seems fair that all we seem to talk about is Tsubame and how much of a threat she might be when yet she’s the only one who hasn’t done a fucking thing to me,” MaLeila said through clenched teeth.

  “Marcel has gotten in your head,” Devdan said.

  “Actually he hasn’t. He just helped me figure out how to stop being afraid of accepting and saying what I really thought and wanted rather than going along with what everyone fucking tells me.”

  Before Devdan could retort, Bastet cut in and said, “We can deal with this later. Right now, we need to figure out what to do about the Magic Council framing MaLeila.”

  “Well you’re the one who’s worked with the council before. You tell us,” Devdan said.

  “To be honest, I haven’t gotten a fucking clue. Trying to make a deal with the Magic Council is like trying to make a deal with the devil. They don’t make deals unless they’re getting something out of it and it’s a better deal than the one they’ve already got going for them. If it’s not a better deal then it better be something that’s so obvious that even if it doesn’t benefit them they had to do the right thing,” Bastet explained. “There’s nothing more they’ve wanted in the last few years than to put MaLeila in what they deem to be her place and not have to worry about her.”

  MaLeila fell backwards on the bed and said, “What the fuck do they have against me?”

  “You’re a powerful sorceress whose black, gave the magic council the proverbial fuck you, has bested everything the magical world has thrown at you since you became aware of its existence, and even managed to make a friend out the future family head of one of the most powerful and influential magic families. Need I go on?” Devdan asked.

  “There’s more?” Bastet asked.

  “She’s Claude Thorn’s heir.”

  “Guess I’ve really got a lot going against me, don’t I?” MaLeila asked dryly. “Isn’t there some other sorcerer or sorceress with a lot more power than I’ve got that they can mess with?”

  “Lucky for you this time, yes.”

  MaLeila, Devdan, and Bastet turned to where Anya had just entered into the room, the hotel door swinging shut behind him.

  “What are you doing here?” Devdan asked

  “And what do you mean by that?” Bastet asked.

  “The Magic Council has just gotten a report from one of Tsubame’s maids. Apparently, Tsubame admitted to her that she had more to do with Fathi’s attempted murder than she originally told us,” Anya replied.

  “Why are you coming to us with that?” Bastet asked. “Shouldn’t you be interrogating Tsubame then?”

  “That’s the problem. She’s on her way to catch a flight back to her country right now, with Fathi mind you. We’re going after her, but we doubt she’ll come quietly. Per our agreement, we’ll be requiring your assistance in capturing her,” Anya said directly to MaLeila.

  “Taking down a sorceress with visions of grandeur. Finally something I’m good at,” MaLeila said as she sat up and stood up off the bed. Then she added, “Guess that means you won’t be framing me for it anymore, right?”

  Anya said nothing, only pressing her lips in response and giving MaLeila that condescending glare that silently asked how she could dare speak to a supposed superior the way she did. MaLeila wondered if it was too late to renegotiate her deal with the council to include not framing her for crimes she certainly didn’t commit. Now wasn’t the time though. She’d ask about it later if she was able to get into their good graces for a while by subduing Tsubame. As they made their way downstairs to the lobby and then to the front of the hotel where a limo was waiting on them to follow Tsubame, MaLeila also wondered where Marcel was in all of this and what role he would play. Certainly if he knew Tsubame as well as he seemed to imply, they were on some level friends and certainly he wouldn’t fight against her. Or maybe all this time they had been estranged and the reason he hadn’t outright gone against her was because he didn’t have a grip on her plan just yet. MaLeila shook her head in doubt at the thought. Either Marcel would fight for Tsubame or he wouldn’t fight her at all. Of that much she was sure, if only because she knew Bastet and Devdan would do the same thing for her, had done the same thing for her whether they agreed with her or not, like they had followed her here when she agreed to help the council. Then again, Marcel probably wasn’t forcefully bound to Tsubame either…

  “You better start setting the mood,” Bastet said, snapping MaLeila out her thoughts.

  For centuries, ever since science and logic had eclipsed trust and faith in magic, magic users caused storms and sometimes even catastrophic disasters to cover the magic involved in their battles and wars. When Nina had witness Devdan cloak the city in darkness in order to buy MaLeila time to defeat the demon that was trying to possess and eat her soul, she had jokingly called it “setting the mood,” a reference to how movies and books always set the mood for a battle or climax by making the weather to reflect the mood whether it was by angry red skies, a cloudy overcast, a chilling stillness in the air. Bastet had replied that i
t was magic users who had spread the idea to the general public which was why it was a trope in entertainment. Ever since, whenever they had to use the weather to disguise a magical fight, they referred to it as setting the mood.

  There was a lot more to setting the mood than making the atmosphere feel ominous and dreadful. Whatever they did had to blend in with the natural environment and geography of the place they were in and it didn’t necessarily have to disguise the magic as much as it had to keep the general public from witnessing it like the time Bastet made it so hot one summer day the National Weather Center put out a heat advisory and advised that everyone stay indoors unless they needed to go out, or when a couple of years ago in February, Devdan caused an ice storm and snow to blow through Georgia.

  “Will it be weird if a sudden rain and windstorm blow through?” MaLeila asked.

  “Weirder things have happened. And we’re coming up upon the rainy season here. It wouldn’t be too strange or off kilter,” Bastet replied.

  MaLeila nodded, focusing on one spot outside the window, but not looking outside of it as she stopped seeing with her eyes and became intimately aware with the magic that ran through her and then followed its reach outside her, to the magic in the atmosphere, particularly the humidity. She then manipulated it to begin collecting into heavy clouds in the sky while also gathering all the electricity and energy in the air to accompany it until she no longer had to manipulate it and like a domino effect, it continued the process of becoming a thunder storm shortly on its own. By the time they arrived at the airport, the clouds had finished gathering and thunder had begun to boom through the sky.

  The Magic Council had clearance to drive right onto the airport field and in the time it took for them to find Tsubame’s plane, the rain had begun to fall, not particularly hard on its own, but once the wind began to blow, it did significantly reduce visibility. So when they got out the car just as the woman’s plane was about to take off, no one saw how the way the sinkhole formed beneath one of the wheels of the plane coordinated with Anya’s movements, nor would anyone see what was going on or be able to get close to them because of the loop MaLeila casted around them.

  The plane jerked violently, its takeoff now impeded by the massive sinkhole beneath it. They surrounded the plane, waiting silently for Tsubame to inevitable come out the plane. Even with the rain falling, the wind blowing and thunder and lightning booming and crackling in the air, it was somehow still and silent. Then one of the exits closest to MaLeila opened and Tsubame poked the top half of her body out.

  “Took you all long enough. I was starting think by the time you caught up with me you would have had to drag the plane out the air,” the woman said in a soft nonchalant tone, her voice someone managing to carry over the storm so everyone could hear her.

  Tsubame then stepped out the plane, but instead of gravity suddenly dragging her to the concrete ground, wind and rain rushed around her, causing her elegant bun to fall and her red dress to billow as she slowly descended to the ground.

  “I have to say,” the woman said as she shook out her hair, “I’ve really been looking forward to this particular meeting for a while.”

  “Looking forward to being captured?” Irvin asked from where he had just arrived.

  The English boy exchanged a looked with MaLeila who shook her head, lips pursed together. She had a feeling this was not going to end the way anyone was expecting it to, no one except Tsubame anyway.

  Tsubame pressed her lips together, almond shaped brown eyes narrowing. She raised her hand in the air and said, “I’ve been waiting months to do this.”

  Lightning crashed directly into her hand, causing everyone around her to shield their eyes in order not to be blinded. Through the intense light, MaLeila saw that rather than having been hurt by the lightning, Tsubame had collected it into her hand into a compressed ball of energy. MaLeila barely managed to pull up a shield around herself and Devdan before the woman let go of the ball. The energy, no longer compressed by Tsubame’s manipulations, dispersed into an electrical sonic boom that shocked and knocked back anyone who didn’t have some kind of shield prepared. Even with a shield though, most disintegrated after mere seconds of holding the assault back causing the sorcerer or sorceress at the receiving end of the attack to be shocked and/or thrown back into the concrete.

  In the end, only MaLeila’s shield held. She almost started to extend the power of her shield to Irvin and Bastet, but she wouldn’t risk weakening the shield around her and Devdan, if only for Devdan’s sake since lightning was a type of yang magic and the man had a particular weakness for it. Bastet was resistant to it and Irvin, while also particularly inclined to yin magic prone to being controlled by his moon magic like water, was more resistant to yang magic than Devdan was.

  Only once all the electricity had dispersed did MaLeila release her shield, and Devdan disappeared from her side, reappearing out of Tsubame’s shadow. Shadows grabbed her and turned her in the direction of Bastet who had generated electricity from the storm around them. As soon as Bastet had a clear shot, she hurled the energy at Tsubame and Devdan prepared to duck out the way.

  Tsubame, rather than resist the shadows embrace, fell back into them, falling against Devdan as he fell back into the shadow of the plane. They both disappeared and Bastet’s attack hit the plane. Devdan reappeared next to Bastet, but Tsubame, appeared near Anya. Anya tried to catch Tsubame off guard while she regained her bearing and caused the ground to shift beneath the woman with her magic. Tsubame hadn’t needed any time to gain her bearing again though and fell back into one of the many shadows of the plane and reappeared behind Anya, pushing the woman into the crumbling ground that had been meant for her.

  As Anya fell and the ground and concrete fell behind her, burying her into the ground, MaLeila exchanged a look with Irvin. The raven haired boy nodded, the rain around him suspending in midair before forming a cyclone around him. He threw it at Tsubame and when it was midway to her, MaLeila added an electrical charge to it. A combo attack like that had once killed one of her many enemies that she had faced with Irvin in the past, but Tsubame didn’t even looked alarmed. The woman spared the cyclone a glance, like a mother would glance at her child when he was doing something troublesome. The cyclone kept going, but instead of hitting Tsubame, it circled around her and back towards Irvin at twice the speed.

  Irvin barely pulled up a shield in time, but even that didn’t stop the attack from tossing him across the hard concrete ground.

  MaLeila summoned her staff to her hands, gearing up for a real attack against the woman when Devdan appeared next to her and shook his head.

  “We can’t defeat her with magic.”

  Proving his point, the old council man reached out his hand toward the woman, a look on his face that suggested he thought he had allowed this fight to go on too long. He twisted his hand into a fist and jerked. MaLeila wasn’t sure what the attack was supposed to do, but it did nothing to Tsubame. What did happen was that the old council member fell, clutching his chest, Tsubame looking at him as though she was insulted.

  “We’ll have to find her hand to hand,” Devdan said, his hands becoming incased in black energy with silver streams in it.

  MaLeila nodded, twirling her staff in her hands. Devdan disappeared again and reappeared again in front of Tsubame. MaLeila thought she might have looked mildly surprised to see Devdan coming at her with a physical attack but it was always hard to make out the woman’s expressions, and if she had been surprised, she got over it just as fast as the expression had appeared and pulled out the two fans that she had been so fond of using to fan herself over the last few weeks. She crisscrossed her wrist and caught Devdan’s fists between them and used the leverage to twist his arm and flip him onto his back. Devdan opened up his fist and grabbed her wrist forcing her down with him. Using her free hand, she cut Devdan’s upper arm with her fan causing him to let go of her wrist so she could turn around just in time to block MaLeila staff with her fan.
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  MaLeila pulled back and twirled the staff in her hand, while Tsubame flipped her fans. Then the two charged at each other.

  “This is truly so disappointing,” Tsubame said. “I was hoping you’d take me up on my offer.”

  “Thanks,” MaLeila said blocking the woman’s fans as she tried to cut her, “but no thanks.”

  Tsubame ducked around MaLeila’s staff when she tried to stab her with her and made her way behind the girl to try to cut her with her fans. MaLeila turned to face the woman and backed out the way of the fans.

  “Whatever the council promised you, I can give it to you tenfold with no strings attached.”

  “Except I have to join you.”

  “Which would benefit me and be another benefit for you. Technically, you’re getting the better deal out of this,” Tsubame said.

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  “But the question is have I ever lied to you?” the woman asked.

  MaLeila didn’t answer, even as a voice in her head whispered no. By this time Devdan had joined her and soon after, so had Bastet. It seemed like they were eventually bound to overtake her, but the more and more the woman’s fan struck her staff, blocked Bastet’s energy sword, and absorbed the bolts of magical energy from varying forces of nature they all periodically threw her way only to have them bounce back, the more MaLeila got the feeling the woman was playing with them. She didn’t want to know what would happen when the woman got bored of it.

  “I think that’s enough. Time to end this,” Tsubame said and with one sweep of her hand, a harsh gust threw Bastet and Devdan back.

  MaLeila was unaffected and while Tsubame dealt with the recoil of the attack, she gathered energy in her hand, golden white with fuchsia tendrils infused and threw it at Tsubaae. It exploded upon making contact with the woman and the dust that kicked up mixed with the rain temporarily disoriented MaLeila. By the time she got her bearings back, all she saw was red and then Tsubame’s fan infused with the woman’s magical energy struck down on her.