Chapter Six

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“Why are you here?” It wasn’t the most elegant or sensitive question all things considered, but the fact that I was forming words into phrases at all was a minor miracle.

Any annoyance Ann may have felt at the question was drowned by her concern for my well-being. “You called me, remember?”

“Early days,” I replied sheepishly, squinting to keep the beam of Ann’s flashlight out of my eyes.

“I rushed out here as fast as I could! You sounded like you might be dying or drunk. Or both,” Ann continued. “And I think it was a J.C. Penney, not a Montgomery Ward.”

I hadn’t remembered calling Ann, but sure enough, I found my phone in my hand, now completely drained of its battery. “How long?”

“Just about two hours ago,” Ann confirmed. “You’re lucky it’s a warm night, and you had that sweater otherwise you might have... Ignore that. What the crap happened here?”

An excellent question and one I wasn’t entirely prepared to answer yet, though it was all coming back to me in waves now. I was in an abandoned mall, looking up through a hole in a ceiling at a clear night sky, stars obscured from my vision by the surrounding city lights. I was also sitting in a shallow puddle of stagnant water that threatened infection should any of it seep into an open cut. I tried to sit up, and I was introduced to significant stiffness throughout my body, and that’s when I remembered the entirely one-sided fight. ‘Fight’ might have been generous. But nothing was broken, so I’d have to count that as a win.

“I was tracking someone,” I stammered, still not ready for more complex sentences. “There was a fight.”

“Okay, well, who were you fighting? And why?”

Just a moment longer and I’d be good to stand. “A Battle Born. For you.”

Ann nodded as if she was starting to understand. “This has to do with Alistair. And what’s a Battle Born?”

“You met one,” I explained, gingerly getting to my feet. “Whatever I just fought, I felt the same energy in Roger’s office last year. They’re very powerful, born of gods, but they’re not gods themselves. It is difficult to explain.”

Ann gave me an understanding look, and I knew that memory was still fresh in her mind, though our potentially meeting a Battle Born was likely the least memorable moment of that encounter. She’d had her mind transferred into an echo of a memory of the life of an old friend of hers, she watched Elana get punched through the window of an office highrise by a child with super strength, something Elana managed to walk away from, and the footnote would have been the Battle Born.

“Well, next time maybe you don’t fight it then.” Coming from Ann, it came out as obvious and sarcastic, rather than a suggestion.

I shook my head at that. “Might not have a choice in the matter. If I ever see it again, that is.”

“Well, whatever you’re going to do, we need to do it somewhere else. I wasn’t subtle when I ran in here, and security is probably calling the cops.” Ann was beginning to lend me her shoulder in case I had trouble standing.

“Wait!” I exclaimed, startling her and echoing my voice throughout the corridors. I knew immediately that waking up something in here would be a remarkably stupid thing to do, but the thought came to me so suddenly and urgently that shouting was the only reasonable reaction. “Shine your torch ahead of me and stay close. It should still be there!”

“What? What do you need that badly?”

“Blood.” The bluntness of my reply visibly took Ann off guard. “Oh don’t look at me like that, it’s not mine.”

Her face contorted at that, but she nodded in agreement, handing me her light and holding onto the back of my sweater as we negotiated our way up the decommissioned escalator. It took a couple of precious minutes to make our way to the room I’d encountered the Battle Born in, but it was still there, plenty of it in fact. In the spot where the Battle Born had been wounded was a fair amount of blood. Most of it had dried and would be useless for our purposes, but luck was on our side as much of what had pooled into a spot on the floor missing a chunk of concrete. The combination of the cold night air and the sheer amount of it may have very well been our salvation.

My sweater was off in an instant, and one of the dry parts was pressed into the pool, sopping up what I could into the absorbent cotton. “I guess your monster had a sweet tooth?” Ann asked, examining the refuse. “And what are you going to do with a blood-soaked hoodie?”

“Not me,” I replied with a grin. “You. You are going to find her with the blood.”

“Like I’m going to follow the literal trail of blood out of the building or like an augury?”

I shook my head, pressing the sweater into the ground. “No, an augury would be a waste. We already know that finding her portends a bad day for anyone. No, you’re going to scry for her.”

“Me?” A genuine surprise came from that response. “I’m still super new to the whole magic thing, and besides, it looks like we could really use the extra help with whatever we’re dealing with. I really think we need to get Elana involved with this, maybe just the whole crew.”

“Absolutely not.” I stood now to face her and said it more sternly than I intended, but I’d had a rough night. “Suppose we do as you suggest and involve Elana. What do you think she will do?”

Ann was at a loss for words but finally gave it a guess. “Magic?”

“And a lot of it, no doubt. But this is not a problem that can be solved with magic, not entirely. Allow me to tell you what I think Elana will do with the news. Upon hearing that her friend has been poisoned and that I need to capture a godling to find your cure, Elana will shake her rod over her head with righteous fury, making declamatory statements about beating up all the bad guys, and then run headlong at the problem. And probably die.”

“Harsh.”

“Perhaps, and I don’t say it to disparage her character, but she is not what we need right now. More to the point, she’s not prepared for what we are to face, and neither are we, quite frankly. But we are involved one way or the other. If anyone else gets hurt after we involve them, their blood will be on our hands.” I looked at my sweater and realized what I was holding. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

“Okay.” Ann seemed to be musing more than conceding. “So just what are we facing here? Why did you of all people, run headlong at your problem and you know, almost die?”

The hypocrisy of my own words stung now, however justified I felt in making them. “Alistair is a traveler, like Elana. He also has just a bit over two hundred years of experience as a wizard on Elana which makes him extremely dangerous. But his weakness is not wanting to get involved directly. He’s stayed alive all of this time by manipulating others into doing his heavy lifting, as he’s done with me in this scenario. Alistair has decided that there’s a bounty he wants to collect, one on a Battle Born, and I need to do it before anyone else if you are to get your antidote.”

“Okay, that sounds bad.” Ann began to lose her calm by inches as she continued. “Like, all of it. Hopeless even. I mean, a two hundred-year-old wizard? He could do anything he wants! And even if you manage to capture this person, and no offense, but yeah, we don’t have any promise that Alistair will give you the cure. Or that I’ll get it in time, or—”

“That’s enough!” I snapped. It wasn’t gentle, but gentle wasn’t going to hold her attention. “This situation is a lot of things. It is ethically questionable, it is grim, and it is desperate. But it is not hopeless. Never that.”

Ann’s face flushed with anger for the briefest of moments at that, either from the tone of my voice or the embarrassment of being seen as afraid—likely both—but in that moment I could see the type of person she would grow into one day. I could see her standing up for herself and others. I saw her as someone who would refuse to give in when all seemed lost, and it filled me with pride. I didn’t need to be a Sibyl to see that; I just hoped that she didn’t lose the more innocent parts of her being in the process.

She wasn’t going to respond, which left it to me to bring the conversation back down to earth before it rose to a level neither of us would be comfortable with. “We just have to be smart. Neither of us is dead yet and the Ann I know wouldn’t give up this early, would she?”

Ann huffed at that. “Of course not, that’s not what I was saying!”

“Good, because just as badly as I would like to win, I want Alistair to lose. We will survive this; we just need to be smart and decisive.”

“I get what you’re trying to do, and I appreciate it,” Ann said after a breath. “And I’m onboard; we go down swinging. Awesome. But let’s be honest with each other at least. I’m going to be useless against an honest to god full-blown wizard, and after I heard about what happened with Freyja, you’re lucky to be alive if you just fought anything even remotely god related. And if I’m reading you right, there’s something else you haven’t told me, isn’t there?”

There was, but it could wait. Instead, I opted to address our most immediate concern. “She may have the blood of a god running through her veins, but she is still just flesh and bone. If she can bleed, I can kill her. Believe in me; I can do this.”

There was a palpable stillness in the air as I said those words. Ann’s breathing stopped as she stared at me with eyes that even in the dark were clear enough to fill me with guilt. “Why would you kill her?”

It was a fair and pointed question, and there was no way around it. “I’ve seen what they can do. I doubt I can capture her, and your life depends upon her return.”

“Does she deserve to die?”

My stomach fell at that. “No. However—”

“Is she guilty of any crime that you would deem worthy of death?”

“No.”

Another breathless pause. “Okay, I have one question for you, just one. And I know you can’t lie, but as my friend, will you promise to answer me without trying to twist the words? Just a yes or no, that’s what I need from you.”

I hesitated, just a second, and I believe she was aware of what that pause meant. But I gave her the answer she wanted, and I’d hoped that counted for something. “I promise.”

“Have you killed before? People who didn’t deserve it?”

“Yes.” The word came out of me softer than I thought possible, and it carried with it an enormous amount of shame. Memories I had wished to keep locked away forever.

Ann nodded a couple of times, more for herself than for me, I suspected. “I’m not judging you. I swear I’m not, and I hope you know that. You don’t need to talk about it. I understand that for a long time you may not have had a choice, I get that. But you do now, okay? So if we’re talking about my life, I don’t want you to kill anyone you don’t have to. I mean it, that’s not what my life is worth. Whatever happened before, this is different. You can be different. You can be better.”

Real tears formed before I could stop them, and I hoped they wouldn’t be visible in the dim illumination of moonlight and streetlamps filtered through a roof in disrepair. Ann didn’t know what she was talking about; there was no way she could have because if she had, I doubt very much she would have said that to me. I managed to say the only words that I could. “That’s not fair.”

“I wasn’t trying to be.”

I felt a rise of anger well up inside of me at that, the sort of instinct to bring harm to someone in the instant after they’ve hurt you. I wanted to use words like ‘ignorant’, ‘ungrateful’, and ‘child’, but that desire faded into the darkness around us as soon as it had appeared. Ann was treading over my past with all the delicacy of a military parade, and to make it worse, she was choosing now of all times to impose her values on me. But then again, if not now, when? After I killed in her name? If this meant that much to her, she would bear the guilt of not speaking up when she had the chance. Either way, I was too tired to argue the point any further. Tired and drained.

“Let’s just get to your car.” My words were heavy and left no room for debate. Not that I’m sure that anyone wanted to.

* * *

The two of us reached the street without incident, either from the local authorities or anything that may have been hiding in the shadows. Perhaps they had seen what I just fought, and the fact that I wasn’t dead served as a warning to anything that may have seen us as fast food. Those things are few and far between, admittedly. Most things are smart enough not to draw attention to themselves and where they sleep. Kill one mortal, you attract the attention of the police who suddenly want to check every nook and cranny, and for creatures whose continued existence requires living in shadows, a forty-acre abandoned mall is about as good a home as they’re likely to find. Still, that doesn’t mean that something hungry enough or greedy enough to abandon common sense doesn’t exist, which meant that in my dazed state I had invited my friend to take a stroll straight through a dragon’s cave.

Not a literal dragon, of course, I doubt one of those would be caught dead in a place like this, but when you’re squishy enough, there’s no real measurable difference between a dragon and anything else with claws and teeth and the ability to rend your flesh before you can react. Maybe the lack of fire, but that was academic at that point. I decided against telling Ann how much danger she had been in or, bloody hell, how much danger I had been in with my extended break out in the open like that. She had enough to worry about for the moment, and something told me that she wasn’t planning on going back in anytime soon.

We needed to secure a map of the area—a real one that is, not something on a screen, a task that proved more difficult than it ought to have been. Seven gas stations later, we tried an auto parts store a mere fifteen minutes before they would be closed for the evening, and we lucked out with our prize. It was a good thing too, as I was equally likely to throttle the next person who laughed at the idea of paper maps in the era of GPS as I was to burgle an arts and crafts store and create my own from memory. Ann must have sensed my discomfort as she took me home wordlessly.

The ride home was uncomfortable and silent; the weight of the situation had put a space between us for just a little while, where no conversation could survive. I had been beaten and forced to relive some of my darkest memories, and Ann had been forced to discover her friend and instructor looking like death warmed over and then immediately confronted with simple truths that she did not know she was not ready to hear, no matter how much she may have suspected. Once we entered the house, however, it was a different matter altogether. Ann was immediately her inquisitive self, perhaps believing that the long drive back was enough for me to get over our uncomfortable moment, or maybe that coming to my rescue and acting as chauffeur had earned her the right to answers when we were in the privacy of my temporary home. If that had been her thought, of course, she’d have been more or less correct. I wasn’t keen on staying upset, and she’d dropped everything and run into the dark to help me. Of course, I was willing to speak with her.

“Okay, we have our Hercules blood, and the best cartography Triple A could afford on an entry-level salary. So what do you want me to do with it?”

“Getting right to it then?” I asked. “No time for a drink?”

Ann tapped her fingernail brusquely into her necklace, creating a sharp tapping sound as acrylic met ceramic. “In the past day, one of us was nearly pummeled to death, and the other was literally poisoned by an evil wizard, so how long of a break do you think we should take?”

My mouth opened in surprise at that, and I needed a moment to formulate a response. She wasn’t being unreasonable by any stretch, but she had caught me off guard. “You are, of course, right. I don’t know what I was thinking, let’s get started.”

Impatience gave way to frustration on Ann’s face. “No, I didn’t mean that, I just... ahhh!” Her shout wasn’t exactly a battle cry, but it conveyed her meaning well enough. “I’m sorry, it’s just been a really long night. I know you’re doing all of this for me, I’m just not, I don’t know, handling it well.”

“It is as you said. You’re trying to assist an elf in defeating a godling and along the way perhaps outwit the centuries-old wizard who poisoned you.” I began, placing a reassuring hand on her shoulder, giving her the kindest look I could muster at the moment. “I’d say you’re doing just fine.”

Ann smiled timidly at that. “Well when you say it like, I sound stupid.”

“Come on then, one more task for the night before we rest. We’ll be no good on the hunt if we pass out.”

I unfolded the map of the greater Los Angeles area in the middle of the living room, and I instructed Ann to bring the blood-soaked hoodie over to it. “We have one secret weapon at our disposal here, and that is you. I personally find Thaumaturers distasteful, but we’re not using your blood, and this is not Thaumaturgy. Just, try to avoid working with your own blood. I’m not trying to be a mother hen about this, but—”

“I do solemnly swear not to cut myself open to perform magic unless I like, really need to. Now, what’s the deal?”

My lips were pursed involuntarily at the notion that I’d become sidetracked, but also that my well-informed caution had been summarily dismissed. Now was not the time either way. “You’re going to attempt to scry. As I mentioned, an augury won’t tell us anything we don’t already know. The extraordinarily violent person who doesn’t want to be caught will do violence if we catch them. But with their blood, you should have no trouble finding them, and if we know where they are, we can plan accordingly.”

“I mean, I can try, but I’ve never done this for real, and definitely not with someone’s blood.”

Her voice was unsure, but all the same, I encouraged her. Not just because I knew she could do it, but because it was the only play we had at the moment, and the fresher the blood, the better her odds. If she couldn’t perform the scry, we would be back at square one, but I didn’t anticipate any opposition to the scry. The being wasn’t strictly magical by nature, and I doubted anyone would bother or have the means to provide any interference. Maybe an important task completed and a step in the right direction would be precisely the morale boost we both needed.

Ann began the ritual, and in watching her, I was reminded of just how little magical talent she actually had. Others had a well of magic inside of them; she may very well have had a puddle. Nothing close to someone like Alistair or Olivia; even Elana looked considerable next to her. I have no magical talent of my own, but I’ve been around it long enough that I can see it on someone, and my friend didn’t have much. But Ann understood the process almost preternaturally; the mechanics of magic came to her like a second nature, and often times I’ve seen competency win where raw strength failed.

I watched in astonishment; maybe thirty seconds had gone by, and the scry was already working. I’ve seen them take hours to perform, so either Ann was exceptionally gifted at this task or the materials made it easy. A drop of blood formed from my ruined garment and floated lazily to the map before coming to rest in a community I was all too familiar with. For her part, tears streamed down Ann’s face involuntarily, and she exhaled something like a relieved laugh. “I—I think I did it!” she panted, looking down at the drop of blood on the map. “But what does it mean?”

I studied the area, making sure I was absolutely certain of what I saw before I answered. “You know how I tried to tell you what I was up against, and you said there was something else that you were sure I wasn’t telling you?”

“Yes?”

I sighed, holding the map up in front of my face with both hands. “Well, there’s something else I wasn’t telling you.”

***