by Harry Nix
“Oh, I know what I’m talking about, do I? So do you now agree that Air Bud is a modern classic because I seem to recall you saying otherwise,” Juno said, turning to Nia.
“Air Bud still sucks but when it comes to magic, you’re not totally sucky.”
“You come into my house and besmirch the good name of Air Bud? He’s a dog that plays basketball. You get that, right?”
Nia made the adult noise that went neena neena neena and then Juno poked her in the ribs.
Alex grinned to himself as he listened to them bicker and squeal as the argument got physical. He tried to keep half an eye on them as they played around behind the kitchen counter but the page of stats and spell information was too enticing.
He opened the Know Thyself spell and saw he could edit it... but immediately stopped. He still didn’t know what he was doing and this wasn’t like a computer program that you could run and if it was broken it didn’t matter. He could easily make something that drained him to death.
“I need more spells,” he said, breaking up Juno and Alex’s fight which had turned to vicious tickling and swatting.
“That’s how it works Wolfie – you become my apprentice and I’ll teach you... for a cost, of course,” Juno said, red-cheeked and grinning.
“Watch it Alex, this witch charges a high price,” Nia said, poking Juno again in the stomach.
“What kind of price are we talking?” Alex asked.
“Yeah Juno, what kind of price?” Nia asked, putting a hand on her hip.
Juno glanced across at Alex and then leaned over to whisper in Nia’s ear. Alex was tempted to shift into hybrid form so he could hear them better but knew that would be way too obvious. Nia had red cheeks from laughing and playing around and as he watched he saw a blush spread across her cheeks, down her neck and up to the tips of her ears.
Both girls glanced back over at him.
“Okay, deal,” Nia finally said.
“Can I know what this deal is?” Alex asked, although he suspected what it might be from how both of them were looking.
“Oh, you’ll find out. But first I’m going to teach you a simple Shield spell and then we’re going to retrieve your stuff that Nia hid in the city,” Juno said, and then gave him a wink that sent a flush down his spine that landed right between his legs.
10
“C’mon Boris baby,” Juno begged, pumping the gas before turning the key again.
The giant car rumbled but refused to start.
“Do we need to push start it?” Nia asked.
“No, Boris got over that phase. He just needs a minute.”
Alex was only half listening as he sat in the back seat of “Boris”, an enormous red car Juno had stashed away in her garage. It had no model badge but looked to be from the seventies and clearly solid enough to take a hit from an anti-tank missile and still come out fine. The seats inside were red leather, the radio had two knobs only and there was a hula bobblehead girl sitting on the dash.
Juno had a stash of men’s clothes in a cupboard (he didn’t ask) but the only shirt that had fit was Hawaiian, which matched the pair of surfer dude board shorts he’d been forced to wear. Whomever the owner of the shirt had been must have been enormous because Alex was swimming in it, despite his new larger size. There were no shoes and the stolen pair from yesterday were now too small so he was barefoot.
“Okay, c’mon for mama now,” Juno said. Boris finally started with a grumble and they got moving.
As they drove, Alex read code of the two spells he now knew. He’d spent the last hour learning a Shield spell from Juno. She’d called it a simple spell and maybe it was but to Alex it was pages of code and had taken multiple attempts for him to copy it over. Unlike a computer, his copy command didn’t have perfect fidelity. On the first attempt only about ten percent of the spell came over. He’d had to sit with Juno as she cast the spell, observing and reading it over and over, copying it each time until finally all of it was stored. It was like learning a song by listening to someone sing it – there was no way you’d get the lyrics right the first time.
Now he had a Shield spell. It took off half his mana to cast it and then drained faster than he was regenerating. As a result it lasted about fifteen seconds before canceling. It was, simply put, a shield from physical injury. Juno had demonstrated by hitting him with the frying pan in the face. The spell had surged and blocked the blow. Then the spell had canceled itself. This was the complicated block of code Alex was looking at as they drove. As best he could read, the spell measured mana level and loss rate and canceled itself when it got below a certain level.
“Why wouldn’t you put cancel stops in every spell you cast? That would stop you getting killed, right?” he asked.
“Sometimes it’s not possible. Plenty of magic users have tried, slipping in a dispel below level but many times it’ll just bork the whole spell. We don’t really know why. Other times it will still work but then fail when it comes to the critical limit. So it’s not a good idea to rely on it,” Juno said.
Alex returned to the code and read it over again. There were words and structures he was unfamiliar with... but there still seemed to be an underlying logic to it all. He’d studied plenty of programming languages and once you had one down it made it easier to understand others.
But he still needed many more spells, as many as he could get for comparison. Entire chunks of the Shield spell were essentially gibberish.
The dispel below code chunk, as Juno had called it, “borking” the whole spell sounded like a common computer programming issue to him. If a cut and paste bit of code failed the first step was checking if it used variables already in use elsewhere.
What that meant was he just had to work the problem, altering and iterating and massaging the code chunk into place until it worked. It also raised the idea that perhaps other magic users weren’t able to view their spells with the level of granularity he was, so they could never edit them enough to make them work.
Assuming of course he could work out a safe way to cast spells he’d written himself or edited.
“Hey surfer dude, Show me the hand gesture again,” Juno said, looking at Alex in the rearview mirror.
After he’d learned the Shield spell Juno had showed him how to connect it to a physical movement – in this case holding out either hand in a “stop” gesture. The code for that was intricate and convoluted too, a passive trigger waiting for a specific movement to activate. Alex couldn’t even tell where it was referring to his hands or how it was measuring their movement.
But it worked. Juno had tossed an apple at him and his instinctual blocking movement had activated the spell.
He did it now, raising his hand, pretending he was fending off something. The spell triggered, shielding him and held for fifteen seconds before dispelling. Without Know Thyself running he could only see a mana bar on his screen. He saw it slowly refilling once shield stopped drawing power. His best estimate was that he could cast Shield about once a minute to get fifteen seconds of shielding.
“Good! Now fulfill your destiny and take your father’s place by my side!” Juno said, putting on a voice.
“Star Wars, obviously,” Nia said.
“Pfft, everyone knows that. Which one?”
“Uh... the second one?”
“Ouch, another swing and a miss from the young werewolf,” Juno said.
“Dammit. It’s the third one when he fights that ballsack face dude, right?”
“That’s the one. He’s called the Emperor... but yes, he does look like that.”
“Hey, do you remember when Tony Leeson came to school dressed up as him for no reason?”
“Oh man, what was that about? Did you hear he got divorced?”
“Again?”
“Wait, did you two go to high school together?” Alex asked, suddenly curious about their relationship.
“We met there,” Nia said.
“I was the ultra-popular cool kid, she was the bookish n
erd with big glasses, my friends bet me to change any random girl into prom queen in six weeks. I took her to the prom where, quelle surprise, it turns out she’s gorgeous once she takes those glasses off and lets down her hair,” Juno said.
“Yeah, I saw that movie too. You did a poem with a hacky sack on stage?” Alex said.
“How did you know?” Juno said in mock surprise.
“She’s lying. I was the cool kid, she was the nerd,” Nia said.
“Was this like a supernatural high school? Everyone there was a witch or something?” Alex asked.
“Just a regular high school. But there are specialized schools for us so-called supernaturals,” Nia said.
Alex sat back and pondered as Nia and Juno went back to talking about Tony Leeson and his apparently “brutal” divorce. Although it had only been a single night since discovering he was a werewolf mage and the world was different to what he’d known, he’d been handling it okay.
But now this... for some reason it felt like the continents themselves were jolting about the place. The supernatural world wasn’t just a few surface features. There were schools which meant teenagers and children. There were werewolf parents having babies. How far did it go? Supernaturals embedded in society? Schools, hospitals, an entire separate Government?
Alex was still lost in thought when they pulled to a stop outside the Grease Trap. Seeing the familiar diner pulled him back to reality but his head was still spinning. He felt like a tourist without a map who’d foolishly set foot on a vast and unknown continent.
“How do people, normal people, not know about werewolves and witches though? There can’t be this perfect wall of silence,” he said as he got out of Boris.
“He doesn’t know about the Great Barrier?” Juno asked Nia.
“I was a little busy with other things,” she replied and got a poke in the stomach for her trouble.
Nia turned to Alex and waved him over to her.
“Okay, watch this,” she said, pointing to an old lady shuffling down the street towards them.
Nia shifted, but not all the way. Not even halfway into her hybrid state. A pair of wolf ears appeared and a long tail under her skirt.
“You don’t have to go full wolf girl? Can I do that?”
“If you train. Watch this woman though and tell me if you feel anything,”
The old lady looked right at Nia, her eyes glancing up at her ears and then down to the tail. Then she frowned and kept walking.
“She sees but she does not see, thanks to the Great Barrier. Did you feel anything?”
Alex shook his head. Nia pressed up against him had been enjoyable and the only thing he’d felt was the touch of her fingers on his arm.
“We’ll try again,” Juno said.
Alex saw a flicker of green screen above her head and a blur of code and suddenly Juno was holding a ball of fire in her hand.
Vague thoughts he’d been having about being to copy spells from other magic users suddenly vanished. There was no way he could do such a thing manually. Was there a way to automate it though?
A man in a business suit with a briefcase came walking down the street towards them. He did the same thing the old lady did – look, frown, look away. This time though, Alex felt a tug on him, different from when the magic pulled. This felt like tiny fishhooks embedded in his muscles. It was distinctly uncomfortable.
Juno extinguished the fireball with a snap of her fingers, the green screen flickering so fast Alex didn’t see anything on it.
“That feeling of discomfort you just had – that’s the Great Barrier. It prevents the normals from seeing us but don’t push it too far. You get down with some really magical stuff in front of enough of them and the Great Barrier will pull in other supernaturals to put a stop to you.”
“Unless you put up a sign saying like ‘street magician’ and then you’ll be fine,” Nia said.
“Comic conventions and places that do cosplay are awesome for supernaturals to hang out in their true forms. Everyone thinks they’re just in costume and so the Great Barrier leaves them alone,” Juno added.
“The alleyway is over here,” Nia said, leading them across the street.
“Is the Great Barrier a spell?”
“Yup, and it’s really old and really powerful,” Juno said.
“Don’t spells need someone to power them?”
“Congratulations, you’re asking the right questions. Yes, normally. No one knows who cast the Great Barrier or how they powered it. But it has been running for hundreds if not thousands of years, non-stop.”
Alex lapsed back into silence as they entered the alleyway. The day was much the same as the last time he was here – quickly getting warmer but cold once in the shade. Soon they reached the crossways. Alex was expecting old dried blood but the street was just dirt and grime, as usual. His coffee cup was crushed in a puddle of dirty water. The loose pile of metal was still sitting in place.
“Where’s all the blood?” he asked.
“Well, Juno cleansed ours and once that’s done it degrades and vanishes almost immediately. The mage running the weredog did the same,” Nia said.
“We need to get Alex’s stuff and go. I’m getting a bad feeling,” Juno said, hugging herself and then suddenly shivering.
Nia stripped off her clothes, passing them to Juno to stuff in her bag, and shifted into her hybrid form. Alex felt the pull of it but resisted following. He’d already shredded enough clothes and despite the Hawaiian shirt hanging off him, he still wasn’t quite sure it would be large enough.
“Shift and follow me,” Nia said, pointing to the rooftop above.
Alex quickly stripped off his clothes. Juno pretended to close her eyes but then clearly peeked from the color her face turned. Alex shifted, handing over his clothes, and soon found himself towering over Nia who stepped back to take a look at him.
“You must be nearly eight feet by now,” she said, stretching a hand up above his head.
“Explains why I’m so hungry all the time. Can we go to the Grease Trap after this?”
“Absolutely,” Nia replied.
“I don’t know about that... something is weird. Just hurry, I want to get out of here,” Juno said.
“Okay, follow me,” Nia said and sprung up the wall. There were boarded up windows and ledges all the way up and she virtually ran up the wall, like an expert mountain climber. Remembering how he’d crashed into the tree in the forest, Alex took careful aim for a ledge and jumped ... and completely screwed it up.
He shot past the ledge and kept rising, clearing the rooftop. Soon his upward trajectory reversed and he was falling toward the rooftop – and the large glass skylight installed over what appeared to be an empty warehouse.
“Claws!” Nia called out.
Alex gave a desperate swipe before he hit, managing to get a claw to the edge of a metal air conditioner that sat nearby. He heaved and his downward momentum became sideways speed, flinging him across the rooftop. He hit the brick wall on the alley side of the building hard enough to make it crack but thankfully came to a stop.
“Ooh, look at me and how high I can jump,” Nia said with her hand on her hip and a smile.
“I need to get used to these werewolf legs,” Alex said, pulling himself up. He was reasonably sure falling a good three stories into an empty warehouse wouldn’t kill him straight up but he was glad he didn’t have to test that.
“I hid your things over here.”
Nia had stuffed Alex’s bag into a ventilation exhaust duct on the next rooftop. Inside he found his keys, wallet, phone, water bottle and a very badly degraded ham and salad roll he’d made for his lunch days ago.
“Sorry, didn’t have time to dump that,” Nia said, wrinkling up her nose. Alex did the same – in his hybrid form his sense of smell was enhanced and many hot days sitting on a rooftop hadn’t done the roll any favors. He tossed it aside and then checked his phone, surprised to see it was still partially charged.
“
Eighty-two messages and forty-one missed calls,” he said, quickly scrolling through it. The earliest ones were Howey and Puzo asking if he was coming to work or giving him shit for being late. Then a missed call and more worried messages. There was a message from an unknown number from an Officer Monroe in the Baxter Police asking Alex to urgently get in contact.
“Man, this is a big mess,” Alex said to Nia, slinging the bag over his shoulder.
“Don’t worry, we’ll work it out,” she replied, touching him on the arm.
“Hey, wolves, we need to go!” Juno shouted out from the alleyway below.
They bolted to the edge and looked down. Floating down the alleyway were multiple wooden globes, the size of baseballs. Alex counted ten. Juno was down at the crossway with flames dancing on her fingertips.
“We need to smash them and get out of here,” Nia said. She leapt off the edge and got two of the balls on the way down, obliterating them against the cold cobblestones. Alex saw bits of crystal and circuitry spin across the alleyway.
Wary that he might accidentally launch himself in the wrong direction, Alex took aim for the largest grouping of balls and dropped off the edge. Like Nia, he hit two, breaking them into pieces. As he did, he felt a small burst of magic set free from them.
“What the hell are these things?” he yelled out as she swatted another into the brick wall.
His answer came as a bolt of lightning shooting out from the remaining balls, hitting a shield Juno had hastily summoned in front of him. For a moment he was blinded by the burst of light but then his vision returned, albeit filled with afterimages.
“The more there are, the more dangerous and mages can’t be far behind,” Juno yelled to him. She flung a fireball that engulfed a ball, dropping it to the ground where it continued to burn.
Alex sensed it before it happened – a feeling the balls were gathering power for another shot. He threw up his shield just as a burst of lightning shot out from the remaining four. His shield flared and died and he felt a zap in his arm as some of the electricity got through. He wasn’t blinded though – with the reduction in their numbers the power of the lighting was reduced.
