Storm Chaser: A Novel of The Black Pages

by Danny Bell

  “My name is Elana, and this is my friend Ann,” I said softly. “What’s your name?”

  “Kylie. Why did this happen?”

  The question stung. The real answer was that this is all happening because of me, but instead I answered, “It’s not your fault that there are bad people in this world, but that one isn’t coming back for you, I promise. Now, we’re pretty short on time here, so I need to make this quick. You saw my shield and you saw that guy do some snake stuff, right?”

  Kylie nodded skeptically, and I continued. “I’m not going to try and convince you that’s not true, you’re not crazy or hallucinating or anything. Me and Ann have literal, for real magic, and that guy wasn’t entirely human; that’s just the way it is. I’m guessing you’d rather have to deal with that particular truth now instead of second-guessing yourself and what you saw for the rest of your life. But we have a different problem to deal with now.”

  “What’s that?” Kylie asked in disbelief.

  “Most people don’t know about any of this, and I don’t know what the cops are going to say if you tell them a snake person grabbed you in the middle of the night. This is, weirdly enough, new territory for me as well,” I admitted.

  “So then…what do I say?” It was a genuine question, no defiance in it at all.

  “I can’t tell you that,” I said, spreading my hands. “The truth if you like or some of it. I’ll back you up either way, I’m just sorry this happened.”

  “You’re sorry?” Kylie asked with a sudden burst of energy as she stood up quickly enough to take me by surprise. “You just saved my life!”

  I stopped talking as I heard the distinct walkie-talkie hiss of a cop’s radio and the footfalls of wet feet trying to move silently. One of the cops, a forty-year-old former high school quarterback from the look of him, rounded the corner with his gun drawn, but put it away when he saw us. His partner, a six-and-a-half-foot, bald-headed, meat slab who I’d be hard-pressed to say was covered in rain or sweat, had holstered his weapon when he joined us a moment later.

  The conversation was a blur; there were reports of screaming, Kylie chimed in that the screams were hers, but immediately added that we came along and chased the guy away. The officers quickly asked for a description, and the meat slab radioed out the answer. James Van Der Beek tried to separate us, but Kylie sharply declined. He relented and spoke with us as a group. She was taking out her trash when that guy grabbed and threatened to kill her. She described the guy sans snake adjectives, and I confirmed them. Ann truthfully said she didn’t get a good look at him, something the officer seemed to chalk up to her glasses, a detail Ann didn’t correct him on. When we came along, he let her go and took off. He asked if any of us knew him and we’d said we’d never seen him before. He wondered why we were there, we said we parked here and went to the boardwalk, leaving out the why.

  After the statement, I added almost absently that my tire had been slashed and, as a matter of goodwill, he offered to have the car towed back to my place. I accepted, adding that we had someone on their way to come pick us up. The officers wrapped up and assured us they’d keep a patrol in the area. They asked us to call if we thought of anything else, and that was that.

  Ann and I exchanged information with Kylie, adding each other on Facebook to keep in touch. Secretly, I was hoping that she wouldn’t post about us and I’d at least, potentially, see it if she did.

  The cops left, Kylie shared hugs and promises to check-in with Ann and me, and we called Olivia to get us while Big Sister was being towed away. Kylie insisted on staying with us until our ride got there, but there was very little talking. I was thankful, I wasn’t excited about the prospect of anything she’d want to chat about given our recent encounter.

  Olivia’s embarrassing neon blue Jeep pulled up twenty minutes later, predictably without a soft top. I knew I had no right to hate this car as much as I did. My car might’ve been a relic that defied everything science understood about engineering every time I drove it, but at least it had a permanent roof.

  “You’ve got to buy a soft top,” I grunted as I climbed in. “At least duct tape some trash bags or something.”

  Olivia rolled her eyes. “It’s a Jeep, it can survive anything, a little rain is nothing.”

  Ann hopped into the front seat. “I don’t know, I’m with Elana on this one. Why do we have to have wet butts because you want to be rugged?”

  “Walking home at three in the morning would be pretty rugged,” Olivia countered.

  “It’s like something out of Barbie’s Jurassic Park,” Ann muttered.

  “It’s what the National Guard drives after hearing Synthwave once,” I joked.

  Ann turned to face me. “It’s from a mirror universe where you get cereal inside of your toy!”

  “It’s like if a Hot Wheels collector wished that their toys were real, but, like, in the Pinocchio sense and, you know what? Skip this one, it sounded better in my head,” I muttered at the end, embarrassed at how far it got away from me.

  “You’re both idiots.” Olivia sighed. “Any more or is it out of your system?”

  “I’m confident I have more if you really want,” Ann offered.

  “Nope, it’s cold and late, and we have the rest of our lives to laugh at this bro mobile,” I interrupted. “Home it is.”

  Olivia eagerly put the Jeep in drive and pulled off into the empty streets. “So why am I picking you two up?”

  “Snake person slashed Elana’s tire,” Ann replied.

  “And the snake person almost froze me to death,” I replied.

  Olivia was loud, even over the sound of the road. “Holy shit, are you okay?”

  I wasn’t ready to answer that question truthfully, even to two of my best friends; now wasn’t the time to let them see me sweat. Time to be General Elana, right?

  “I almost die a lot, no worries,” I answered instead.

  “Is that what happened?” Ann asked. “I only saw him running off and then the golden kid!”

  “Dude!” I shouted back. “She punched him, and then needed a nap. Ann! Listen to me! She needed a nap!” I emphasized the last word as if it were impossible.

  Ann was suddenly as ramped up as I was as we remembered the scene. “And she knows who I am! And, not to put too fine a point on it, but she loves me!”

  “I know! I might be a mom!” I shouted back. “Or a nanny! I don’t know, but I have taught her so many bad habits, Freyja is going to kill me!”

  “What the hell did I miss?” Olivia asked in amazement.

  “We did drugs!” Ann shouted over the wind of the freeway. “But all of this really happened! Elana’s gold rock is a person, and it hears everything we say!”

  “Like Alexa?” Olivia asked.

  “Without the CIA reporting, but yeah,” I answered. “I think Freyja birthed a golden baby from the ether and gave it to me, and I’m worried about the fact that I’m not more concerned about that.”

  “Wait, you did drugs?” Olivia shook her head. “If you did coke you better not shit on my seats.”

  “Not in front of my child,” I said jokingly, but immediately felt like I made everyone uncomfortable. There was an awkward, silent beat, so I followed up with, “In all seriousness, though, the kid offered me whiskey and one of her first words was butthole, but not butthole, the other word for butthole. We really do swear a lot in front of kids.”

  “Those little shits have to learn sometime,” Ann mocked and earned a mild punch in the shoulder from me.

  “I am very, very lost,” Olivia said.

  Between Ann and I, we tried our best to explain everything that went on that night. Olivia seemed especially intrigued about the part where Ann and I would have to go on a date to spy on Logan’s father and whatever else that was going to go on at that function, but I couldn’t exactly blame her for that. Mostly she was just relieved that we were getting in. Ann then suspiciously left out the true nature of the potions we took, and I decided to follow her
lead on it because, at best, Olivia wouldn’t worry before she drank it and, at worst, it would be funny. By worst, I meant my worst. I’m probably a bad friend for how much I was looking forward to seeing that reaction.

  We pulled into the parking lot of The Book’s End and the lights were noticeably off. Seeing that gave me a small comfort that everyone was safe and sound and asleep inside. I didn’t know how much more I could’ve asked for on that front.

  “Let’s get inside before we catch a cold,” Olivia said nearly the instant she killed the engine.

  “Oh, now you’re worried about the rain?” Ann chided.

  “Hey look, before we head in, a couple of things,” I said, mustering as much seriousness into my voice as I could.

  “What? Are you going to tell me you two also ran into a dragon when I left you alone for five minutes?” Olivia asked.

  “No, nothing like that, you’ve definitely heard the worst of it,” I answered, shaking my head. “It’s just, I know I’m trying to be better about trusting everyone, and I get that it’s been a problem, but maybe can we just not let the others know how close I came to dying tonight?”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t a big deal?”

  “Yeah, it is what it is and it sucked, but, like, there’s an obvious difference here, right?” I waited for a second to see if anyone would say it for me. “The three of us have magic, and that makes us both targets and active participants. We’re going to be out there actively trying to save the day, so it’s one thing that we know what can happen, but they don’t need to know the scary bits, do they? They know enough, they know to stay inside, I just don’t want them to worry about us more than they have to.”

  Ann nodded sagely after a moment. “Yeah, I get where you’re coming from.”

  I almost laughed at how big of an understatement that was.

  “Sure,” Olivia agreed a thoughtful moment later. “What was the second thing?”

  I allowed myself to laugh then, the tension leaving the air suddenly knowing what was coming next. I pulled out my phone and gave Ann a look.

  Olivia eyed us both suspiciously until finally, I said, “Remember to chug, don’t sip.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Olivia’s reaction was a hundred percent worth it and was easily the funniest one of them. Her jar soared up rather than down as if she thought she could hit the moon with it. For a moment, I thought she was shadowboxing, and maybe she was, but that quickly morphed into dancing and maniacal laughing.

  “Am I immortal now?” Olivia’s shouting and cackling continued to echo loudly off the buildings. “Is that immortality juice?”

  “Easy!” I hushed, loud enough that I hoped to get her attention, but tried to convey the reminder that our friends were asleep inside.

  “No! I’m running to Burbank!” Olivia took off in a sudden sprint toward the street wildly through the rain.

  “Olivia! No!” I shouted, no longer concerned about my volume. “You can’t win marathons!”

  “We didn’t get to that part!” Ann called out, but neither of us had a hope of catching her. We trotted after her, just trying to keep her in view.

  “Has this ever happened before?” I asked Ann, almost immediately giving up on running at all, pulling my hood on my coat as far forward as it would go.

  Ann shrugged. “Do you think she realizes that she’s running away from Burbank?”

  Super helpful, Ann.

  Our friend gave up on her journey an impressive four blocks later and was sort of waiting for us to catch up. “Why didn’t you stop me?” Olivia called out when we were within half a block of her. The rain was picking up ever so slightly now, and Olivia was starting to look like she stepped into a shower with her clothes on.

  “Why did you run?” I countered.

  “You two didn’t run?” she asked.

  Ann giggled first, then me, and soon the three of us were laughing inexplicably as Ann and I went under an awning to show Olivia our reactions on our phones. Ann revealed that once, a particularly wealthy client, someone she suspected was a minor fae royalty, chugged three in front of her and Wilma, then didn’t so much as burp. We laughed and speculated more, and Olivia commented that she could drink these every week and how worth it they would be. I agreed, considering the sheer amount of studying I could get done with four days of being awake without consequence.

  “Oh, there’s definitely a consequence,” Ann informed us. “We’re going to fall into a coma sometime after this wears off.”

  The laughter came to an abrupt halt.

  “A coma?” I exhaled.

  “Relax, it’s a light coma,” Ann assured us.

  “Dude, what the shit?” Olivia shouted.

  Ann faltered a bit. “Like, twenty-four hours, and you’re going to be super refreshed after.”

  “A full day?” I asked incredulously.

  “Two days tops,” Ann replied. “It’s fine. I’d worry more about the diarrhea.”

  “Oh my god!” I threw up my hands.

  Olivia studied Ann hard for a moment before she spoke. “Nope, she’s messing with us. Look.”

  I did as she asked and, once I knew what I was looking for, it was plain as day. Ann’s lip twitched as she tried to hold back her amusement. “I’m completely serious,” she said with a smile threatening to break out.

  “I’m going to hit her,” Olivia said flatly, immediately following through with a playful punch to her arm. I joined her and punched the other arm, drawing a yelp from Ann.

  “Stop!” she cried out, no longer holding back the smile. “You know physical damage is my one weakness!”

  Olivia went for some kind of wrestling takedown then, trying to lift Ann off her feet, and Ann shrieked and flailed at Olivia’s back, eventually losing the battle as Olivia hoisted her clumsily off the ground by about six inches.

  I suddenly stopped and realized I had a massive grin of my own spreading across my face. The past couple of days had been awful, and I knew that worse days were coming even if I survived this ordeal. Part of me knew that—everything else aside—having access to magic like we did, our lives would never be what they were, and I accepted that. I wasn’t complaining, but I also knew how badly we could be hurt. Part of me knew the worst was yet to come for all of us. These two goofballs, flaws and all, were two of my favorite people on the planet; there’s nothing I wouldn’t give to make sure they were happy and, at least for a moment, they were. Even drunk on magic diamond juice or whatever was happening, for a moment, it was like we were all eighteen again. We stood there laughing, oblivious to the dangers of the world, beautiful and invincible. Maybe it was fleeting, but I burned this feeling into my mind, filing it away as a memory I’d hoped to never forget.

  I noticed my friends were precariously close to about four inches of pooled water off the side of the curb. Without hesitation, I launched myself into the air toward it, ready to make my own mark on this memory with both feet.

  * * *

  Ann and I sat in the cargo van outside of the ludicrously titled Bob’s Tire Town. It was the sort of name for a place that seemed made up for a sitcom or something, like it could’ve just been called Bob’s Tires, but here it was. It maybe lacked the pageantry that the name implied—it was still just a nondescript used tire shop in mid-city—but I appreciated the attempt at whimsy.

  Pretty quickly, we realized the problem with our being unable to sleep in the middle of a rainy night. Our friends were asleep in the store and, energy or no, we couldn’t go in and make a ruckus. So, Olivia decided she needed a change of clothes and headed back to her place to kill a few hours, which left Ann and me to jack up Big Sister and throw the whole wheel, ruined tire and all, into the back of the van and take it to this magical place.

  The earlier mist and drizzle had become full-blown rain by now and, while it might not have been the end of the world storm that it threatened to be, the falling water was steady, and things were already getting worse. There were a couple of inters
ections we passed on the way here that needed to be taken extra carefully since they were on the verge of flooding. Sunlight was already feeling like a distant memory.

  Ann and I sat silently in the chilly van, neither of us particularly warm. My arms were folded tightly around my chest as I listened to the never-ending pit-pat of raindrops against the roof and windshield, the minutes until this shop opened stretching out into eternity.

  “Maybe we could’ve waited until the morning to take the stay up potions,” I offered.

  “Yeah,” Ann curtly agreed.

  “You know, because then we could’ve slept last night instead of sitting in a van for hours, acutely alert and aware of everything,” I added.

  Ann’s face tightened slightly, as did her voice. “Yeah.”

  My left leg bounced up and down rapidly after a moment, and I felt the need to say, “Just saying. I don’t know if this is potion related or regular restless leg syndrome, but maybe if we’d taken the potions in the morning instead of the middle of the night, maybe I’d have this extra energy in the middle of the day when I could do something about it. Just a thought.”

  I couldn’t be certain, but Ann might have been workshopping a new swear word under her breath.

  My phone buzzed a long moment later, it was Claire asking if I had her van before she reported it stolen. That drew a small chuckle from me. At least everyone was awake.

  Three men eventually opened up shop, none of whom were Bob, and I wondered to myself if Bob even existed.

  “So, when does Bob get here?” I tried as my tire was wheeled away.

  One of the men looked at me quizzically. “Qué?”

  “Me llamo Bob?” Ann chimed in.

  “No, that means—” I started to correct Ann, but gave up when the man smiled and gave us an enthusiastic thumbs up. I smiled tightly and returned it.