Branded

by Rob Cornell

  But, to me, the potion was more important than the contract. I’d give up collecting bounties for good if it meant getting this to work.

  “Take what you need.”

  “You sure?”

  “To hell with Vic. He wants to bitch about it, he can shove his contract up his ass and explain to the Ministry why he didn’t pay on a bounty.”

  Sly grunted. “I hate politics.”

  I gestured toward the pouch. “Take it. Whatever you need.”

  Sly nodded and grabbed the bottle of yellow liquid. He added more to the vial, then added another fluid, this one purplish. Then he used a teaspoon to scoop up more of Darius Strong’s remains and deposited it into the vial.

  The mixture hissed, and a wisp of smoke rose out of the vial.

  “Nice,” Sly said.

  I felt that ray of hope grow again inside of me despite all the cynicism I had saved up since the day my family’s life had been blown apart.

  “Okay,” Sly muttered. He moved over to his centrifuge and put the vial in and started it spinning. The machine whirred.

  “Couple more minutes and it’s done.”

  “It worked?”

  “The potion set, yes. But that’s still no guarantee.”

  “I know.”

  He reached across the bench and gripped my wrist. “I want to make sure you do.”

  “You’ve already told me, Sly.”

  “This is dangerous shit you’re dealing with. Not earth shattering or anything, but still…”

  “I know,” I repeated. “But I don’t have many options left.”

  Sly shook his head. “You don’t have any options left. If this doesn’t work, it could kill her.”

  I pressed my lips together and took a deep breath through my nose. The air smelled bitter. I wasn’t sure if it was from the potion Sly had mixed up, or if it came from some combination of the things in the boxes surrounding us. Those boxes felt a lot closer now. A titch of claustrophobia crept in and rattled me. I found it hard to breath. I had even started sweating a little despite the freezing level of the air conditioner.

  “I know,” I said one more time.

  Sly looked at me intently for a couple more seconds. He came to some decision, nodded, then hit a button on the centrifuge. The machine slowly whirred to a stop. Sly retrieved the vial. It had turned a deep red. I had no idea what he had put into the potion that would make it turn that color, but potions didn’t work like paint.

  He raised the vial to eye level and squinted at the contents. “That’s it.” He handed the position over. The glass vial felt cool. The moment I took it into my hand it changed color again.

  It turned black.

  I quickly looked up at Sly.

  He frowned. Grunted.

  “What’s it mean?”

  “I can’t be sure. Sure as hell looks like a bad portent.”

  “Thanks,” I said sarcastically. “Should I still use it?”

  “That’s your call. Like I said, there’s no guarantees to this. Now, if I actually knew what had happened to her…”

  He trailed off. We’d had this discussion before. The whole reason I needed this potion was because I didn’t know what had happened to my parents three years ago.

  This potion was supposed to help tell me that.

  I wrapped my fingers around the vial. The chilly glass sent a wave of cold up my arm to the elbow. I quickly tucked it in my pocket. “I owe you.”

  “Yeah. About three grand.”

  “You want me to write you a check?”

  He waved me off. “I know you’re good for it.”

  I’m glad he thought so. In fact, everyone seemed to think I was rolling in cash. Which was fine. I wasn’t hurting, but I had spent a lot of my bounties trying to solve one thing.

  The mystery behind what had killed my father and left my mother nearly catatonic for the last three years.

  Chapter Three

  With traffic it took me about forty minutes to get out of Detroit and into Sterling Heights where the nursing home my mom lived was located. I approached the front counter and asked the nurse stationed there where I could find my mother. She directed me to the activities room, which I found amusing since my mother hadn’t done anything you could call an “activity” since three years ago when she was found mumbling nonsense over my father’s dead body in a crack house in East Detroit.

  There’s a fond memory.

  I entered the activities room and scanned the place for Mom. A large screen TV played a golf game and two gray-topped men sat on the couch watching some dude putt his ball into the hole. They were mesmerized by it. I couldn’t imagine.

  A trio of women sat at a table by the window playing cards.

  My mother sat in her wheelchair toward the back of the room, facing the sunlight coming through the window. She stared into space with a vague smile over her face.

  A good day. Sometimes when I visit she has this intense scowl that deepens all the lines in her face. When she’s like that she looks like she’s plotting to destroy the world.

  A water cooler sat just inside the door to the room. I took one of the paper cups in the attached dispenser, then crossed the room to Mom.

  I scooted a chair over from an empty table that had a half-finished jigsaw puzzle of a giraffe on it. The remaining pieces sat in the cardboard box the puzzle came in. I sat down next to mom and looked her over. The nurses must have recently done her hair. It looked clean and the salt and pepper strands hung about the sides of her face in soft wisps.

  She had her hands folded in her lap. I took one of them and sandwiched it between both of mine.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  She continued to stare in the distance beyond the windows. The sunlight coming through the window warmed the air. But it didn’t seem to bother her. At least there was none of the humidity in the nursing home. And they didn’t have it down to subfreezing temperatures either.

  “I’ve been working a lot lately,” I said to her. “Sly says Dad would have been proud of me. I’ve kept up my studies. Practicing. Honing my craft. Have to admit, I’ve gotten pretty good in the arts. Better than the last time we talked about it.”

  Which had been four years ago, when she complained that I wasn’t taking my gifts seriously. Mom was old school about the magical arts.

  “Anyway, I’m here today because I have a present for you.”

  She continued to smile. I could have been talking to a statue. Except that I could feel her presence inside her shell of a body. She was in there somewhere, the mother I used to know, the vibrant, talkative, sometimes cocky woman who had raised me.

  The mom I loved more than life itself.

  I glanced over my shoulder. No one was paying any attention to us. So I pulled out the vial of Sly’s potion from my pocket, uncorked it, and poured it into the paper cup.

  I rested a hand on Mom’s shoulder.

  “I have your pink lemonade,” I said. She used to love pink lemonade. And it had to be pink, damn it. None of that plain old yellow stuff.

  Despite my tempting her with an old favorite, she didn’t respond.

  I gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Mom? You want your lemonade now?”

  She sighed, like someone remembering something missed from long ago.

  I held the cup to her lips. “Take a sip, Mom.”

  She sat still. Didn’t even register the cup’s edge pressed gently against mouth.

  I knew she could drink. She could eat, too, though the nurses had to feed her. But she could respond well enough to simple commands a lot of the time. She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—speak, but she could sip and chew and swallow.

  The trick was getting her to start. The nurse had a way with her. I never got reports of her giving them a hard time at mealtime. Maybe that was the problem. It wasn’t time for a snack.

  I took a deep breath to calm my frustration. But I had the potion poured and I didn’t know how much longer I could cajole her into drinking it before a n
urse or orderly came by and noticed.

  They might wonder why I was being so insistent on giving her a drink. They might even notice that what was in the cup was black. Not water. Definitely not pink lemonade.

  I leaned close and kissed her cheek. Then I whispered in her ear, “Please, Ma. This could make you feel better.” Then I hit below the belt. “Dad would want you to drink this.”

  She blinked a few times as if waking from a sleep. Her eyes watered. A tear ran down one cheek.

  The far away glaze in her eyes left, but she didn’t look at me. She turned her focus to the cup I still held by her mouth. Another wisp of a smile touched her lips. Then she tipped her head forward and put her lips to the cup. She rested her hands on my hand that held the cup and together we tilted it back so she could drink. I had no idea how the potion tasted, but she swallowed it all down without any sign of distaste.

  When she finished, I took the paper cup away and rested back in my chair to watch for any signs of the potion working. At first, nothing happened. Mom returned to staring out the window. The vague smile remained on her face. Some of the tears remained in her eyes, making them shine in the sunlight.

  The low murmur of the announcer of the golf game on TV filled the silence. The only other sound was the flick of playing cards as the ladies at the table by the window set down their hands in turn. I couldn’t tell what game they were playing, but from a casual glance it almost looked like Texas hold ‘em.

  A small cough drew my attention back to Mom.

  A thin, glistening line of saliva ran from one corner of her mouth. Her smile had dropped away. Her face took on a pinched look as if something bitter rolled across her tongue.

  I leaned forward. “Mom?”

  She coughed again. A white saliva foam flicked off her lips.

  Oh, gods, no.

  My stomach clenched. A wet chill slid down my back like cold sewage.

  Mom coughed once more. Then again. Until she couldn’t stop. The saliva dripped from her mouth turned a light shade of pink. I grabbed her hand in one of mine and rested my other hand on her back, patting gently, hoping this would pass, please it had to pass. I kept thinking about what Sly had said, how the potion could kill her if it didn’t work, and the realization that I may have killed my own mother nearly dropped me to my knees.

  It didn’t matter that I had meant to save her.

  It would still be my fault if she died.

  Her coughing grew more violent. She jerked in her wheelchair, her thin frame bucking back and forth between the arm rests. The brakes were on the wheels, but the chair scooted a little with each of her thrashes.

  “Mom, you have to…” To what? Not die? Like she had any say in the matter. I glanced over my shoulder hoping to find one of the orderlies or nurses happen to have shown up since I had come into the activities room. No one else besides the men watching golf and the women playing cards were in sight.

  “Help,” I shouted, my voice sounding feeble to my own ears. “Please, nurse. Help me.”

  Mom’s thrashing turned to a full on seizure. She shook from her shoulders to her slippered feet. I put an arm across her chest to keep her from bucking out of her chair. For such a tiny woman, she held a lot of secret strength. She had always been strong. But after the incident, after three years of sitting in a wheelchair nearly completely unresponsive, I had thought that strength had been stolen from her.

  I was damn wrong about that.

  “Nurse,” I shouted. “Get in here!”

  Finally a woman in white slacks and a colorful flower-print shirt rushed into the room. She took one glance in our direction and stuck her head back out the door. “Connie, I need help here.” Then, without waiting for a response from Connie, the nurse in the flowered shirt hurried over.

  “What’s happened?” she asked while she body checking me aside so she could take over holding Mom in place.

  Mom’s feet kicked at the wheelchair’s footrests. The chair clattered and rocked. The pink saliva foaming from her mouth turned a darker shade, going close to red.

  “I…” I looked down at the paper cup in my hand, then crushed it in my fist. What could I tell this nurse? That I had given my mom a magic potion that was in the process of killing her? “I don’t know.”

  The lie tasted like ash.

  Something in my voice must have keyed off the nurse. She glanced at me with a suspicious look in her eye. But my mother’s seizures demanded her attention back, so the nurse didn’t question me.

  Another nurse in a similar flowered smock showed up beside me seemingly from out of nowhere. Connie, I assumed. She pressed a hand against my chest. “Back up, sir. We’ll take care of her.”

  I opened my mouth, but didn’t know what I wanted to say. To object? For what? There was nothing I could do for Mom. Odds were, there was nothing these nurses could do either.

  My mother’s fate was in magic’s hands now. And magic had its own rules.

  Chapter Four

  I sat on a padded bench down the hallway from the nurses’ station. My eyes felt like they had hot coals in them. The back of my throat hurt from a trickle of phlegm left behind by the short crying jag I’d indulged in while hiding in a stall in the men’s room. Nothing loud or especially wet. But, yeah, I shed some tears. Most of them were from guilt. A few were from relief, as just before I finally broke down and ran for the restroom, one of the nurses told me they had managed to stabilize Mom and that, while unconscious, all her vitals appeared normal.

  So, I hadn’t killed her.

  Lucky fucking me.

  Now I sat on the bench, hoping to hear more. I had watched them roll Mom out of the activities room on a gurney shortly after the nurses had taken over for me. I was told to sit tight.

  So I had sat tight.

  Then I was told she was stable, and if I wanted to go home and get some rest, they could call me when they knew more.

  So I sat tight some more, because there was no way I could get any kind of rest until I knew for sure that she would come out of this, at the very least, the same as when she had gone in.

  By this point, it was the best I could hope for. I had little faith that the potion would work. I didn’t have a whole lot of faith in anything.

  I felt the bench’s plastic-coated padding shift and realized someone had sat down next to me without my having noticed. I almost smiled when I turned and saw who.

  “Fiona,” I said.

  She was one of the orderlies at the home, a pretty blonde with one of those fresh, girl next door faces that didn’t need any makeup to look good. She wore a pink smock and tan slacks that nicely hugged her hips. Fiona had taken a special liking to my mom from the start. She doted on Mom, would hold one-sided conversations with her like I did, and genuinely seemed to enjoy them, like I did. I had entertained asking her out on several occasions in the past, but life as a sorcerer and demon hunter was a little too complicated for dating uninitiated mortals.

  Best to either date insiders to the supernatural world, or not date at all. Since most insiders were of the non-human variety, I stuck to no dating. Not that there was anything wrong with going out with shifters or gnomes or elves. Hell, some even got off on turning themselves over as blood bags to vampires and calling it love.

  To each his or her own, right?

  Just not my scene.

  Fiona touched my arm, and my skin prickled at the contact. “How you holding up?”

  I shrugged. I was afraid my voice would sound like the growl of a drunk uncle, so I kept quiet.

  She rubbed my back in an overly familiar way. I didn’t object.

  “She’s gonna be all right. Judith is a tough old bird.”

  I couldn’t help it. I smiled. While Fiona knew next to nothing about my mother’s true nature or history, she somehow seemed to know her just the same. Tough? Yes. Old bird? For sure, by mortal standards. My mom was one-hundred and forty-two years old. Spring chicken in the world of sorcerers. Having kids at one-hundred and ten w
as almost as scandalous as a teenage pregnancy among sorcerers.

  If only Fiona knew.

  I chuckled to myself. Nice thought, having a girl as sweet and pretty as Fiona knowing the truth about it all.

  “What’s funny?”

  I swallowed and dared use my voice. “Not funny in a ha ha way,” I said. “Just something I thought of. Something nice.”

  She smiled. “Good. Positive thoughts.”

  “Yeah, positive.” My voice sounded like an oil streak, and my tongue tasted like one, too.

  Fiona caught the tone and gave my back another rub. “Hang in there, Sebastian. She’ll pull through.”

  Maybe. But she would still be lost to me, as lost as ever. This potion had been the last option I could find to try and undo whatever had been done to her. And since I didn’t know exactly what had been done, I had little more to go on. I had run into a dead end.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “I feel like…”

  “What?”

  I dropped my hand in my lap, shook my head. “I dunno. Helpless. It’s not a feeling I’m used to.”

  “Oh?” She rose one eyebrow. “I feel that way all the time. I thought everybody did.”

  Mortals, perhaps. But those of us with the amount of power afforded most sorcerers had an unfair advantage. It made a lot of things come easy. Maybe too easy. I stood slowly. My arms and legs cried out. I had sat too long in the same position and all my muscles had cramped up.

  “You heading home?” Fiona asked and stood as well.

  “Do you know anything more about her condition?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t. I’m just a lowly orderly. I can fetch things and comfort distraught family of patients. That’s about all I’m good at. Oh, and cleaning up bodily fluids. I’m a pro at that.”

  I laughed. Amazed. How could she do that to me? Make me laugh when I would swear it impossible? She was a pro at a lot more things than cleaning up messes and playing gofer to doctors and nurses.

  The urge to ask her out struck me again. What terrible timing. Could I actually ask her out on a date and not come across as a total creep after what just happened with my mother?