by Chloe Garner
Jason drove his sword through the demon’s back - just a human, for everything Tridium looked like - Valerie watched with astonishment as the creature turned from flesh to gray powder and slid to the floor in a pile. The room was completely silent for just an instant, then the blond woman gave Jason an annoyed look.
“You drag me all the way here for a nerd demon with nothing to go on but human-level magic, and then you take the kill? I should have just gone home.”
Jason shrugged.
“I don’t like to play with my food,” he answered. “Get out of here.”
The woman nodded and started walking for the hallway again without looking back. Jason walked over to Valerie and knelt.
“You okay, kid? Put up one hell of a fight, from what I heard.”
Valerie was shaking.
“Ethan,” she breathed, and he shook his head.
“Nope. Not your problem right now. You aren’t in one piece, so you let someone else worry about him.”
“Sasha?” Valerie asked, and here he nodded.
“Girl’s got a good head on her shoulders. That’s the one on the PA, right? Yeah, that was her name. Smart kid. Good one to have on your side. She and the big kid are both fine. Well, the other big kid. You’ve got some big friends, as they go.”
Valerie sighed, remembering how much her chest still hurt and whimpering involuntarily.
Jason nodded.
“You hold it together and we’ll get you out of here, okay? I just need to know it’s okay to move you, and we’ll be gone.”
She nodded, and Susan Blake rushed around him, looking Valerie in the eyes.
“What did he cast on you?” Susan asked.
“Like I would know,” Valerie answered. Her hands were still shaking so hard that if she moved, she was likely to slide back onto the floor. What that had to do with her hands escaped her at that moment.
“Blood?” Susan asked, and Jason shook his head.
“Haven’t been able to find any.”
“What hurts?” Susan asked.
“My chest,” Valerie said. “My stomach.”
Susan shook her head.
“I need to get her out of here and get my stuff. I don’t know where they put it.”
“Ethan,” Valerie said again.
“Your dad has him,” Susan said. “He was breathing but he was under some stuff. I don’t know.”
Valerie would have lied to herself, and it surprised her that her mother told her the truth.
“Can I get her out of here?” Jason asked, and Susan paused, then nodded.
“I don’t think you’re going to make anything worse. The magic field in here is… gone.”
“I burnt it out,” Valerie said. “I think I burnt everything.”
“For a long way out,” Susan said, nodding. “I wish I’d been here to see it.”
“Are the scientists dead?” Valerie asked.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Susan answered. “Their people can come get them if they want them.”
Valerie didn’t like to hear her mom talk like that, the stony cold tone in her voice, but the aversion really wasn’t all that strong as Jason put his arm around Valerie’s chest and shifted her to get the other arm under her knees.
Before she could think or stop herself, Valerie wrapped her arms tight around his neck, burying her face into his chest and sobbing.
He lifted her without strain, strong, safe, and she cried for a long time as he walked.
She didn’t even care where they went.
She could hear her mother’s footsteps, feel Susan’s hand on her head now and again, and Jason just felt safe.
There was bright sunlight and the sound of a car hatch opening, and Jason set her down sitting in the back of the giant SUV.
“I haven’t got everything you could ever want, but I travel with Sam on and off, and she’s stocked a lot of stuff. You’re welcome to use anything you find. I can’t promise they aren’t going to have reinforcements turn up,” Jason said.
“Oh, I welcome them to come challenge me right now,” Susan answered grim, dark, and Valerie looked at her mom.
“What happens now?” she asked.
“Your dad is making sure that your friends are okay. I think the man with the sword…”
“Jason,” Valerie said, and Susan nodded.
“Jason will probably go get Sasha and Hanson to make sure they get out okay. I’m going to figure out what happened to you and do what I can to get you fixed up, but I may have to take you to one of my friends who is a healer and let her look at you.”
“Sasha can help,” Valerie said, and Susan gave her a slow look, then nodded.
“I don’t know how much training she’s really had, but she can watch.”
“They’re doing a seminar at school,” Valerie started, but Susan shook her head.
“I’m not going to fight with you right now. When your friend with the sword showed up…”
“Jason,” Valerie said again, and Susan gave her a look that said that she was intentionally not picking up his name.
“When he showed up, the building emptied, but it’s not a guarantee they won’t have more reinforcements coming. We need to get you patched up well enough to travel and then I’ll take you back to our car and we can go fix this someplace else.”
“Mom,” Valerie said as Susan rifled through a crafting-style piece of furniture made entirely of small drawers, pulling one thing out and then another. “Mom, what’s going on?”
“Your friend put us straight in the way of an ambush,” Susan said. “And then he let you show up in the middle of it. He was supposed to keep you safe, if he was ever on our side at all.”
“That’s not how it is,” Valerie said.
“Isn’t it?” Susan replied darkly, looking out the back hatch for a moment, then returning to the drawers.
“No. I’m the one who sent you into an ambush. The Council told us that Gemma was in danger, remember? They knew that if you thought that they might know about her, that you would come running, and I figured out that it might be an ambush and Ethan and I decided to come get you.”
“You decided to come get me?” Susan demanded, her voice about as loud and as angry as Valerie had ever heard it. “You almost threw your life away today.”
“I didn’t want them to accidentally kill the whole world,” Valerie answered. “Or you.”
“You are a student and you are my daughter and you are a teenage child. You do not belong here in the middle of things like this. I brought you out here in the first place so that you could see what it was like, so you could see what both sides of the world thought about each other and about the rest of the world, not so you could get it in your head that you are ready to fight. That demon could have…” She stopped moving, sitting down to face Valerie. “That demon could have killed you. Easily. We saw him attack you on the monitors, where Gemma showed them to us, and there was no way he would have failed to do it, without one of us showing up to save you. Do you understand that I was mere minutes one way or the other from watching you die on a tiny television screen?”
Valerie paused.
“No. I really didn’t have any idea what was going on at that point. What did happen with you guys?”
Susan shook her head, then set to work forming a cast out of the ingredients she’d pulled out. Valerie reached under her shirt and took something out reflexively, not even noting what it was. Susan looked at it for a moment, then at Valerie with the kind of anger that had always told her she was about to get grounded, but she went back to work wordlessly.
“Mom,” Valerie said.
“You tripped every alarm and every security device in the entire place. Our guards stayed until they were sure where you were, and then they went to help catch you. How did you know that would work?”
Valerie shook her head.
“I just knew I couldn’t blow up the lab and get you, one after the other, so we split up. And I was hoping that Ethan,
Shack, and I would be the first ones to get noticed, because Sasha and Hanson… They’re not fighters.”
Susan nodded, working through things with more careful fingers now.
Maybe she was calming down and maybe she wasn’t, but as she had to be more delicate, her voice went back down to its normal pitch.
“They just walked up and opened the doors,” Susan said. “Got us, got Gemma, and… We didn’t have any idea where you guys would even go, so Gemma took us up to the security office. The casts you did… They were very good. Very good.”
“I’m glad,” Valerie answered, and Susan nodded.
“It doesn’t make any of this any more acceptable, but I was proud of how well they worked.”
Valerie nodded, willing her mom to go on.
“We fought our way into the security office, and we saw you down in the lab. Saw you burn out the whole thing, and then most of the electronics went dead. The security cameras and the PA system both stayed up, but all of the other computers just died. You did that. Did you know?”
Valerie shook her head, and the corner of Susan’s mouth went up wryly.
“You burned the knowledge out. Everywhere it was. I expect there are other magic designers around the city who suffered just as much as these ones did, when it happened. An incredible cast.”
“Did they die?” Valerie asked. “I didn’t mean to kill anyone.”
She was still unpredictable and dangerous, and she didn’t like the idea of it at all.
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” Susan said. “The things that they were playing with, they deserve it.”
“Mom, I don’t want to kill people,” Valerie said. “That wasn’t why I went.”
“You created casts that were very capable of killing people,” Susan said. “Did you think about that?”
“I did,” Valerie answered softly. “But I had to.”
Susan nodded.
“I would agree, except that you shouldn’t have been here at all.”
“Why?” Valerie asked. “You were in danger. We had to do something.”
Susan sighed.
“I hate that you’re right, but it’s going to take me another few days to admit it. So just… let it go.”
Valerie frowned, then nodded. It was enough. Her mom was going to be mad for a while, but there was a promise that it would end eventually.
“What about Jason?” she asked. “When in the world did he get here?”
“After you blew up the magic,” Susan said. “All of the defenses on the building went down with it. And I mean all of them. They tied too much of their physical security into the magic security, and you went down into the very center of all of it and burned it out. Your friend with the sword, and his blond demon friend - did you know? - just came barreling in and everyone bolted. We saw Tridium show up, and Gemma said that she would stay with Sasha and Hanson while we went to save you, and your sword friends had no idea how to get to you, so we went and got them and came to bail you out. He could have killed you in that time. You know that.”
“I know,” Valerie said.
A floating lab table could have killed her pretty easily, at any point in that time, not to mention what the demon might have done.
“All right,” Susan said. “I need to figure out what he did to you. This might feel weird.”
Valerie nodded, and Susan shifted Valerie’s shirt out of the way.
“What are you… What’s going on here?” she asked. “These are robecloths.”
“I told you that we went in front of the Council,” Valerie said. “They’re kind of comfortable, and you can fit anything in them. I like them.”
Susan frowned and shook her head, then shook her head more dismissively.
“Where did he hit you?” she asked, and Valerie parted the elastic wraps, indicating the spot in her chest where the still-sharp pain would have exited.
It would have been at least gratifying if there had been a mark, but there was nothing at all to justify how uncomfortable Valerie was.
Susan nodded, putting a poultice cast on the spot and watching it as it slid slowly across Valerie’s skin.
“Is that it?” Valerie asked.
“Ungrateful child,” Susan answered, a familiar enough voice to make Valerie smile.
“I can’t fix this,” Susan said a moment later, scooping the poultice off of her and rubbing in what bits remained on her skin. It was cool and comforting, but it didn’t do anything to directly engage the sharp pain. “I’m going to need help. At least I can say that it isn’t going to get worse and it isn’t going to shift around, if we’re careful with how we move you and we get to it quickly. I have friends I can take you to, once we get you moved over to my car…”
“Mom, he saved us,” Valerie said. “He saved me and he saved all of us. Didn’t he?”
Susan looked at her, then shrugged.
“I suspect that he did. Your father and I haven’t fought Tridium directly, before, and I’m not sure whether we would have won in a direct fight with him, but your friend and his demon accomplice… They might have saved us.”
Valerie nodded.
“Then you should involve him in the conversation about what happens next. He might know things that we need to, rather than just rushing off and going back to what you normally do.”
Susan snorted.
“There is nothing normal about anything I do,” she said.
“Yes, there is,” Valerie answered. “And I’m not saying you’re wrong. I think you’re more right than any of them. But as soon as you get away, you run off and take charge of everything, you and Dad, I think, and you don’t listen to anyone else.”
“No one else is thinking about everything,” Susan said, and Valerie raised her eyebrows.
“I think that he might be, if you’d hang out and find out,” she said. “He went to go rescue a friend, and that was why we were on our own when we came. Someone needed him a lot. He couldn’t stay with us because there was no one else to go. He made sure we got into the house before he left, but it wasn’t any different from you and Dad leaving me and Sasha at the apartment that night.”
“That’s low,” Susan said, and Valerie nodded. She’d meant for that to be the case.
“He turned up here, even though they told us that this was your fight, not theirs,” Valerie said. “He came here. He deserves for you to give him the benefit of the doubt that he might be on the right side, too. And… Mom, they’re powerful. You get that, right?”
“Of course I do,” Susan said dismissively, but Valerie shook her head.
“No, like there’s this big war going on and both sides suck and the one side is threatening to destroy the entire human race, and she’s just like, yup, that’s a problem and I’m going to go help fix it. Like she does this every day, you know? Maybe they know some stuff that we don’t? She told me the history of the entire war, mom. Like, probably some stuff that maybe you don’t even know. Please. Will you at least listen to them?”
“I’m here,” Susan said, shrugging. “Don’t know what you’re asking me to do.”
Valerie nodded.
She wasn’t sure, either.
It just felt like Ethan and Shack and Sasha and Hanson and her dad and Jason were all going to walk out of that building… and Gemma. And Gemma. That they were going to walk out of that building in a second, and everyone was just going to split up and go their own ways and Valerie wouldn’t see Jason ever again, never know what had happened here or in New Orleans, never understand what Samantha Angelsword was, or why Daphne had sent Valerie to her…
She wanted to know what was going on, and the one person who had finally sounded like they knew was Samantha Angelsword.
She didn’t want to just let everyone walk away, it didn’t matter how bad her chest hurt, just then.
It really wasn’t that bad, anymore.
She was okay.
A lot of it had been the fear of the moment.
Though.
She realized she might have a hard time looking Jason in the face after she’d cried on him that hard.
“I want to know what they know,” Valerie said.
Susan shook her head.
“I don’t really care what they think they know,” she answered. “I’ve had too many people lie to me and change the facts around to suit their version of things to really be interested in listening to anyone’s words.”
“Mom, do you know who Samantha Angelsword is?” Valerie asked, and Susan shook her head.
“I don’t know. She’s not a part of our war.”
“Do you know who Daphne Leblanc is?” Valerie asked.
“She’s French,” Susan said, as though that were the only pertinent fact about her.
“She knew who Samantha was,” Valerie said, and Susan looked at her.
“Where are you going with this?”
“The way she talked, Mom. She just knew things. I think things are bigger than we know.”
“They always are,” Susan answered. “Especially to people from outside of our world. They have no idea what they’re talking about. But everything is always bigger, according to the person telling it.”
“Mom,” Valerie said. “I trust them.”
It was true. She hadn’t realized just how true until the words were out of her mouth.
“You’re a teenager,” Susan said.
“Mom, they were there,” Valerie said. “We ran away from the Council and we went to them and they protected us without even knowing who we were. And then they gave you the information you needed to blow up the lab.”
Susan looked at her hands and nodded.
“I’m grateful for that,” she said. “If they really didn’t know that there was an ambush there. But it doesn’t make them our people. They fight demons with swords. They fight alongside demons. You don’t know anything about them or their politics. From where I sit, anyone fighting with a demon beside them is more like the Pure than I’m ready to throw my lot in with. And you… You just don’t have the experience to understand that.”
The doors opened, and Jason and Grant came out carrying Ethan between them. Hanson and Shack came out behind them, Shack holding himself up with an arm draped across Hanson’s shoulders. The door closed and opened again as Gemma and Sasha came out.
