by Danny Bell
Freyja didn’t make it easy for me. Yeah, there was the number for the specific container I was meant to open, but I had no idea where to start looking for it. Seeing just how much stuff was in there, though, made me feel bad for whoever got rerouted there as distraction just for little old me. Everything there presumably came there because someone needed it. These could be the products that stocked the shelves of a store or packages from loved ones overseas or, maybe, it was knockoff bootleg items from China. Honestly, I had no idea, but it was interesting to think about.
The lighting in here might’ve been reduced, but that wasn’t the reason I had to read the list twice. Yata no Kagami was on the manifest, sure enough, but the remaining items made me scratch my head, like “car engine.” Just an engine. Then there was a wardrobe large enough to be sufficient for a basketball team, which was listed in excruciating detail, down to the individual socks. An assortment of gemstones, herbs, and other assorted odds and ends that I immediately recognized could be used as components for any number of rituals or worse, which meant there was a chance this whole thing was on its way to someone looking to do some severe magic in my town. Or not. Just because you had the pieces to a puzzle didn’t mean you knew that they’re supposed to go together. There were also eight live snakes, which really felt like it had to be a violation of some sort of shipping rule that I could only pretend to understand. It probably had an exception as this was a shipment with a governmental tag on it, I don’t know. The crates of guns not listed on the manifest definitely felt like they’d be a bigger problem than the snakes at customs. There was also an obscene amount of sake that my mind began to picture as being used in some hedonistic embassy bash. Hedonistic embassy bashes are totally a thing. Okay, I don’t know if that’s actually true, but if the TSA has taught me anything, I found the biggest no-no on the list—a wild assortment of fruit. Some things I recognized, like plums and pears. I’m worldly as hell, I’ve definitely had more than one plum in my life. I could figure out what a white strawberry was from context, but I had to admit I was curious about what yubari and shikuwasa were. Maybe I could try some at that embassy party that was definitely happening and that I would definitely be invited to.
I wandered for the better part of half an hour, trying to make sense of the numbering system, but it was when the Singasteinn began to shudder in my bag that I found the container. Something about those two events was too coincidental, and I shared the fear coming from the chunk of gold. I was so confident that there was no one else in here. I was so sure of it, but now? Now, I was starting to realize I might have made a mistake. Something was spooking the Singasteinn, and I had the feeling we weren’t alone anymore.
“You’re right,” I whispered to my bag. “Let’s get Mommy’s plate and get out of here.”
There was more than one shipping container to the shipment, but thankfully, this part was numbered. I was even more grateful that the containers had been unlocked, but I’d never opened one of these before and it was weirdly something that I needed to figure out. Though when I did, the screeching sound of metal against concrete that echoed throughout the warehouse was something I was sure could have been heard as far away as downtown.
It was pitch-black inside the container and more than spacious enough for me to walk around, but I’d need a light. I considered using my rod, channeling some of my magic through it and creating a torch. I’d done it before, but right about now, I was concerned about waking something up. There was something unstable about the magic around me; I could feel it like the memory of a bee sting, but it repeated all over my body. You could probably fill the Grand Canyon with Post-it notes of all the fun facts I didn’t know about magic. The last thing I needed to be doing here was casting a spell around energies I didn’t understand just to see what would happen. That sort of behavior got me in trouble in ninth grade chemistry, and I didn’t see this going any better.
That’s what cell phones were for, right? They’re basically flashlights that let you bother your friends anywhere on the planet with cat pictures.
The tiny but more than sufficient beam of light lit up the container, and the first thing I saw immediately tapped into a fear I didn’t realize that I had. An aquarium nearly the size of a bathtub had been unboxed in the middle of the container and an entire side of it was shattered, broken glass littered the floor. Instinctually I knew that snakes were loose somewhere in the container and, with the remaining crates looking undisturbed, that meant I was literally in a snake pit. I hoped they weren’t venomous. I hoped even more that I didn’t see them at all.
Thankfully, the package I needed was clearly marked with a tool to pry open the boxes not far from it. With a little effort, the crate opened and inside, on a bed of straw, was a cherry wood box that looked surprisingly modern for what it was supposed to contain. I thought for a moment that I must’ve had the wrong crate, but opening the box left no doubt that I had found what I had come for. The plate had to be ancient, but the eight-pointed star in the middle, housing inside of it an eight-pointed leaf plant, looked as clear as the original artist must’ve intended it to look. There were other smaller designs on the plate, but staring at the intricacy of its patterns hurt my eyes. Without thinking, I pulled it from the box and began to examine it a bit closer, trying to focus on just a section of it. It was metal, though I couldn’t tell you what kind. That surprised me; I guess when I think of plates, it’s always ceramic. Or in college, paper—well, paper towels.
Even in the dim light, the instant I tilted the plate in my hands it shone unnaturally lighting up the contained with what I assumed had to be a reflection of moon light, impossible as that seemed. And, for a moment in that pale light, I glimpsed a distorted reflection of my face. I shook my head and remembered why I was there; I replaced the plate in the box and closed it up. As I turned to leave, a thought crossed my mind. The magic I felt wasn’t coming from the plate. I was sure it had to be, because, if not the plate, then what?
“Hey, over here!” a voice whispered from beside me as I stepped out of the container. Hearing another person in the room with me at all was nearly enough to make me jump out of my socks. But turning my head and realizing that I was maybe an inch away from white clay mask hiding all but intense, penetrating eyes? That just about gave me a heart attack. My whisperer turned assailant, shifted into an attack stance I’d recognized as one that I’d seen Chalsarda use—almost identical. I knew immediately I couldn’t protect against it. Reflexively, I poured energy into my gloves and raked at my attacker’s face.
They moved fluidly, and by luck I grazed the top of their head. That’s what my attack earned me. Theirs fared a bit better. Before I could see what happened, my legs gave out, and my back slammed hard onto the concrete floor. Even with my protective coat, nothing could account for the sheer surprise of it all—my wild flailing didn’t help matters.
My brain screamed that I was in danger. My rod! I reached for it in a panic, but a boot intercepted my wrist and stomped down hard. The coat kept my arm from an immediate crushing, but the sheer force of the stomp kept my arm in place. The added strength in my arms from the gloves was worthless; whoever had me under their boot was inhumanly strong.
“Well, I got what I needed,” the voice behind the mask said. It was impossible to apply a gender to it, and the lithe figure above me, in what looked like a black wetsuit, didn’t give me any clues who they were either. There were, however, two very distinctive things I noticed about them. One was the white clay mask. It was painted with delicate red lines to resemble maybe a dog or some other kind of animal. The other was that the cherry wood box was now in their hands. It hadn’t even registered with me until then that I no longer held it.
“Tough luck for you, though,” they continued. “How do you think Freyja’s going to feel about you returning empty-handed?”
I stiffened as they said that. They knew Freyja was sending someone here and had been waiting for me. “Who are you?” I asked coldly, studying that
mask as hard as I could, looking for anything on it that could help me.
The boot came off my wrist as the person walked backward into the darkness of the warehouse. “You have eyes, take a good look. I’m the one who gets away. If I were you, though, I’d concern myself less with who got the better of you and more on how you’re going to deal with what’s happening outside.”
I wanted to ask what they meant, but the question was answered for me—it was gunfire.
Chapter Six
I scrambled to my feet, opening and closing my fist from the arm that had been stomped on to get some circulation back into it. By sheer luck, I’d managed to snag a couple of hairs on the exposed buckle of the glove. It probably wasn’t enough to track my assailant, but I didn’t have time to consider it. I plucked the hairs and jammed them into my coat pocket, shaking a blister shield out of my wrist and gripping the rod with my opposite hand. I dashed for the exit where I’d heard the rifle shots, fearing the worst. If something followed us here and Freyja’s people paid for it because I was taking my time, I didn’t know what I would—
“Give us the artifact!” a pair of voices hissed directly in front of me, seemingly out of thin air. I barely caught a glimpse of the lifeless Japanese man’s face and the snake coiled around his neck and registered that the voice was coming from them both as he lumbered towards me out of the dark.
“Shit!” I screamed, swinging my rod in a panic. I could feel the last little bit of power in my gloves surge into my strike as I caught the snake flush on the side of its head. Unfortunately, my forward momentum sent us both crashing outside through the front doors in a heap as the rest of me wasn’t prepared to throw around that kind of force. Our bodies crashed with thud that lacked dignity, and inches away from me was the snake, dazed and possibly concussed. Its eyes rolled back into its head, and it went limp.
Very heroic, that’s me. I am Elana Black, monster swatter.
The man was equally out of it, though alive at least. In the brief glimpse I got of him before he went down, his expression screamed zombie. Now that the snake was off of him, some color was returning to his face.
I scrambled to my feet as quickly as I could, but before I could make out my surroundings, the crack of a pistol being fired echoed out into the night air. The bullet being deflected off my blister shield made me jump hard enough that I very nearly ended back up on the ground. Not from the impact—my blister shield was strong enough now that I could’ve probably withstood rifle fire, not that I was in any hurry to test that theory. No, I jumped because someone shooting at me was, thankfully, something I still wasn’t used to.
“Hold!” another reptilian voice hissed and, for the first time, I could take in the scene that I’d literally stumbled upon. All four members of Freyja’s security team had been taken captive, fingers interlocked behind their heads, guns pointed at the base of their skulls, execution-style, all of them on their knees. None of them looked roughed up at all. They’d been surprised and outnumbered before a real fight could get underway, but I couldn’t say why they’d been left alive. Though, with the number of people surrounding us, it was easy to see why they’d been overrun so quickly.
I’d counted three black SUVs and at least two dozen people in varying degrees of carrying too many weapons. Most wore plain black suits with white button-down shirts, while others wore what looked to be some kind of stealth suit body armor thing that I wasn’t educated enough to identify correctly. I had a hard time focusing on them; the two dead-eyed looking men with snakes wrapped around their necks currently had the majority of my attention.
“Where is it, Witch?” one of the men hissed along with its snake companion.
“Umm, Wizard, actually—I think.” It was the best I could come up with, though admittedly not my best work.
“Where is Yata no Kogami?” The voices were equally impatient, even if the expression on the man’s face didn’t change. I caught the original snake in the corner of my eye as it seemed to wake up and slowly slither away from the man I clubbed over the one currently speaking.
“So, it’s probably not going to do me any good to pretend that I don’t know what you’re talking about?”
“If your next words do not satisfy me, one of your accomplices dies.”
It wasn’t an empty threat; I could tell that much. “All right! Relax!” I shouted. “You got us, okay? I came here to steal it, but someone got to it first, seriously!”
“Who?”
My eyes darted to the security team and back to the snake. “I don’t know, I swear. Someone in a dog or a fox mask or something, they seemed to know me, though. You can search me if you like, I really don’t have it.”
“We would know if you were carrying it,” they hissed impatiently, though the mention of the fox mask did seem to get a reaction out of some of them. “And you will retrieve it for us. I have a message for your master on behalf of my master. Your actions have insulted him, and retaliation is within his right. You will retrieve Yata no Kogami for us within twenty-four hours or he will make his displeasure known to you.”
“What about them?” I asked.
“We will be fine,” Kisi said dismissively. “We know who these people are.”
“I wish we’d known before we came,” Bilyana muttered sardonically.
“They’re not going to hurt us. If they were, we’d already be dead. She gave you a job to do, right?” The way Kisi said “she” implied she knew more than the others. “Then you know you can’t let her down. Get out of here.”
I looked around; in no scenario in my wildest fantasies did I see a way for us all to win. It pissed me right the hell off. For everything I’d accomplished, it once again came down to a matter of power or, more accurately, how I didn’t have enough. I never did. I’d clobbered one of the snakes well enough that I knew blunt force trauma would do the trick, but there were two more of them. Snake people, I could probably take, but all of those guns and who knows what else? Even if my blister held, and even if my jacket didn’t give out under a hail of gunfire, I didn’t bring enough candy to share with the whole class. Even this assumed they focused their fire on me and ignored the team; the reality was they’d have probably been dead just as quickly as I would have been. I wasn’t strong enough, and now someone else was going to pay.
I tried to push Kisi’s advice out of my head. Good advice or no, I wasn’t ready to concede just yet. “How do I contact you when I have it?”
“We’ll provide you with contact information,” the snake and man answered flatly in unison, leaving me no wiggle room.
I licked my lips, staring at all the guns, the talking snake, and the four people who maybe weren’t my friends exactly but probably didn’t deserve to be left here like this. I didn’t know what to do, and there was no time to calm myself down. “You said you know my master, yeah?” I challenged with less confidence than I was hoping for. It was the only play I had. “Then you probably know who I am, as well. If you know anything about me, you know what I’m capable of, and you know I’m not going to leave these people here with you.”
“You may take their corpses to their loved ones if that would content you.” Admittedly it was hard to pick up on a tell on either the face of a snake or a lifeless, animated puppet body attached to said snake, but I could tell my bluff didn’t play.
“Shut. Up.” Luis seethed just loud enough for me to hear.
“All right, god damn! Look, one of them, okay?” I asked, stopping just shy of pleading. “In good faith. Same master, but our tasks are separate. One of them needs to report back if you want our sides to communicate, right? So, give me one. That’s still three hostages. The outcome is the same on your end with three as it is with four.”
“Staring down a hundred guns and you’re still here? You are not in a strong bargaining position,” they hissed.
“I’m not, but come on, this makes sense. Consider it positive reinforcement. I’m going to be a lot more motivated to get you what you want if yo
u show me that you’re willing to keep these people alive.”
“It doesn’t matter and I need a drink… and a proper host,” the other snake said, finally speaking up. The voices were indistinguishable on their own, but this one had an impatience the other one didn’t. The first snake’s person made a gesture with their hands that might have conveyed some meaning or emotion if it hadn’t moved so sharply.
“Take the big one,” the second snake continued, and the man who held Bilyana at gunpoint moved to kick her towards me and seemed embarrassed by the amount of resistance he discovered. Bilyana stood on her own power and walked in my direction, eyeing me with an unreadable expression. “Good enough?”
“It’ll have to be, right?” I said, letting my blister shield pop as I glanced back at the remaining members of the crew. James remained stoic, but the others looked outright annoyed with me, and I decided to forego any promises of rescue at that moment. One of the men in suits provided me with a cell phone number on a business card, and the impatient snake reiterated his threat of twenty-four hours, which I ignored by this point. It’s probably not going to be twenty-four minutes before I get it from Freyja.
Bilyana almost didn’t fit into Big Sister, as my station wagon predated adjustable car seats—probably. I wouldn’t be confident in my answer if that was asked on a game show. Either way, my car didn’t have them and I was worried she might need to lay down in the back. By the time we started to drive away, the scene behind us had grown busier by the second. No one was wasting any time. They stormed the warehouse, but needn’t have bothered. I could’ve told them they weren’t going to find anything.
