Chapter Ten

––––––––

Ann’s expression remained sour as we left The Gem and The Moon, but I suspect not for the reasons I might have typically had. Doubtless, the idea was that she walked away with less of her pocket money than she anticipated. Wilma hadn’t even so much as given Ann the chance to barter, or even given her illusion that bartering was an option. In truth, for the amount of money Wilma had received, she may as well have just given us her stock for free. An owed favor from either of us would have been worth far more to her than mere money, but I suppose she was looking to make an example for the future. Still, Wilma wouldn’t have to deal with Ann’s pouting the rest of the day, so maybe this was her subtle punishment to me as well. Two for one on her end, I suppose.

“Oh, come now,” I began to say to my friend as we began out onto the boardwalk. “It’s really not that—”

Hands clutched to her chest with white knuckles, Ann’s face flushed red from strain, and she tensed and began to fall. I planted my feet into position on instinct and managed to catch her before she could hit the pavement. She left out a small cry of pain, and just as quickly her body began to relax, and her breathing seemed to resume. The whole event lasted no more than a second; I didn’t even have the time to ask Ann what the matter was before she managed to tell me she was okay.

“Your chest! Let me see it!” I demanded.

Ann withdrew her hand to reveal the necklace. One of the petals looked to be drained of all color and now held a dull black finish akin to a charcoal briquette. And as if the direction of the petal was pointing the way, a jagged scar of raised skin about three inches in length marked her chest. The ruined petal crumpled and fell away as I watched it.

“No! I’m not ready; this is too soon!” I swore under my breath.

“Is it? That’s good news, I suppose.”

I looked into Ann’s face, and she smiled weakly at me, waiting. “I meant... the poison is spreading faster than I would have hoped. It would appear Alistair was telling the truth, at least. I recognize this.”

Her eyes lit up at my response, but her reply was still weak. “Rad. If you know what type of poison this is, we can maybe just get the antidote on our own.”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid not. This abrasion is a death line. Or a dead line, depending on who you ask. Whatever caused this is exotic and not of this world. Chasing after the source is a fool’s errand, I’d wager. But on the bright side, this is just the second petal to fall. We have time. Are you sure you’re okay to continue?”

Ann collected her notebook from the ground and stood up straight with a thick, reassuring breath and said, “Peachy.”

I’m a fool. I was so wrapped up in our immediate task that I had managed to lose my sense of urgency for her condition. Well, if it wasn’t real before, it indeed became real to me now. Ann’s life was in immediate danger, and if we could assume that the timing of each petal would hold constant, she had maybe a week until it was too late. Something told me that the Battle Born had less time than that, one way or another. I regarded my friend for a moment, and for whatever her words told me, she was not, in fact, peachy. What she needed was a distraction. Something to take her mind off her impending doom.

“Ann, what do you say to a little fun?”

Ann looked at me with mild disgust that I could tell was more for our situation and less for me personally. “No. Thank you, but no, let’s just get this over with.”

“Come on, trust me,” I coaxed. “And if it helps, consider this a lesson from your teacher and mentor that will just happen to be a little more fun than having your ear pulled for insubordination.”

“Fine,” Ann said, resigning herself to my suggestion. “What do you need me to do?”

“Just follow my lead,” I said. “And for goodness sake, try to have fun with it. That’s an order.”

The Venice boardwalk was a beacon if nothing else. Like moths to a flame, the very nature of the area attracted all sorts. You’d never find a stranger class of citizen anywhere else in the area for one thing. Some were just trying to make a quick buck and didn’t know where else to go; some just didn’t know another place where they might be accepted. It certainly attracted merchants. Just about anything you could think of to purchase was available, often hidden in plain sight. Looking for a weapon? Try an incense merchant. Drugs? Maybe the henna artist. A lovely, aromatic candle? Sorry, I couldn’t help you, I’ve always made my own. Maybe Wilma?

If there was one thing Venice attracted in abundance, however, even more than tourists, was its hustlers. Some were more criminally minded than others. There were the pickpockets of course, though an outright mugging was rare in the area. Then there was the “damaged” street art. If you touched or otherwise moved too close to a street artists work, they would claim you damaged it and would demand money, going so far as to make a scene. The ring scam still happened as well, the idea being that some poor soul would be approached by someone, usually speaking poor English, who would give the tourist a ring, claiming they dropped it. Before the tourist could protest, the seemingly good-natured individual would run off, and a moment later the mark would be confronted by the apparent rightful owner of the ring, who would make a big scene about how they’d been robbed by the tourist. Of course, the tourist would have no recourse. If they weren’t the thief after all, why were they holding the ring? Or phone. This was also used with phones nowadays, too. Anyway, give up some cash or answer to the police.

It didn’t take me very long to find something a bit more common and lower on the complexity scale of common scams, but an effective one all the same. I watched as a man standing in the center of the boardwalk with a stack of cheaply produced compact discs handed one without a word to an obvious tourist as he walked past. A few steps away was a much larger, much more imposing man insisting that the tourist hadn’t paid for his purchase of the CD, and currently owed them twenty dollars. The man with the stack of discs now approached the other man from behind as a means of intimidation. This was where I came in.

I fell forward into all three of them, making as big a scene about it is as I could, knocking the disc out of the tourist’s hands and forcing the larger man to either absorb my weight and catch me or nimbly leap aside and allow me to fall onto the pavement. The more massive man was not nimble. “Oh gosh!” I exclaimed doing my best impression of a clueless and earnest teenager, bending at the waist to pick up the disc and giving the tourist a wink as I did. “I think you dropped this!”

I handed it to the man with the stack of discs, interposing myself between the two men and the tourist, who decided that my two-second distraction was enough of a reason to leave immediately. The hustlers looked incredulous as their mark escaped but before they could say anything, I feigned surprise and continued with the same mock voice, “Wait a minute! Oh gosh, you two weren’t trying to scam that poor man, were you? You know, my Daddy is a police officer, and he told us about something like this! Saffron, don’t you remember?”

Ann chimed in from behind them, and they both turned in her direction. “Lavender! Oh my god, are you okay? Did they try to steal your phone?”

Ann’s voice screamed ‘Rich kid’ even worse than mine, and I had to suppress a smile at how quickly she caught on. “No! But I think they’re running like, some kind of con or something!”

“You two better knock it off! My pop-pop works at the DA’s office, I know like, the law or whatever! I’m going to call him right now!”

Ann pulled out her phone and began to dial. I pulled out my own phone and held it up like a camera. “I’m recording you! I’m recording you!” I loudly announced.

The pair of them never saw us coming and were off in a panic before they ever had the chance to offer a single word of protest. A second after it had happened, the boardwalk moved on as if nothing had happened. I kept my composure until I was satisfied they were out of sight and I pulled Ann around a corner, where I allowed myself a sharp laugh. “Lavender? That’s what you decided was a good name for me?” I asked, still smiling at the absurdity of it.

“You called me Saffron!” Ann protested.

“Well, either way, it worked.”

“What? Saving some poor Midwesterner from having to listen to some terrible mixtape?”

“No,” I responded, tossing her a billfold. “Distracting the thieves long enough for me to do my own thieving.”

Ann caught the money and examined it in disbelief as I continued. “I have his wallet as well, but I wouldn’t hold onto that. I’d hang onto his ill-gotten gains and quit while you’re ahead.”

“You mugged him?” she asked, her mouth agape.

“Technically, I robbed him. I think mugging involves the direct threat of violence.”

Ann looked as if she were prepared to protest, so I stopped her. “Ann, you have three choices as far as I see it. You can return the money to the two men who we both know have been steadily stealing from people who don’t know any better. You can spend the rest of the day looking for anyone with a CD in their hands they don’t want and give them a twenty-dollar bill. Or, more practically, you can accept the money as an offset from your recent financial setback.”

She pursed her lips, knowing she wanted to keep it, but felt guilty for reasons she didn’t understand. “You should have told me what you were planning.”

“Yeah, but where would the fun have been in that? Besides, this—”

I almost didn’t see him out of the corner of my eye, but there it was.

“Besides what?” Ann asked.

“Not now. Stay close,” I instructed my friend in a hushed whisper. “We’re being followed.”

Ann blinked twice at that. “Followed? Are you sure? Who’s doing the following?”

“I’ll give you three guesses,” I replied tersely. “Come on.”

The quickest way to discover if you were being followed was to take three left turns. Anyone still behind you after that was following you. That method, unfortunately, didn’t apply to a boardwalk, and even if it had, my general sense was that with the Abbot’s network of spies, it would have been a fruitless gesture all the same. Wilma may not have seen the prying eyes on her side of the fence, but she didn’t have my eyes. And our little stunt made sure anyone looking for something unusual was sure to find it. I’d been careless, and the only thing for it now was to get off the boardwalk and make our approach before anyone else could join them.

With a companion in tow, however, exiting the boardwalk didn’t afford me many options. All we could do was walk straight ahead until a path back out to the street opened up. We would be easy to follow until then. I considered a distraction, but that would only draw more attention and Ann wasn’t particularly fleet-footed besides. So at the first chance we had, I dragged Ann into the speedway and made an immediate second left onto an alley barely wide enough for a car but somehow given the name Westminster Court. The suddenness of it all would put the young man on high alert, but it would provide us with a precious few seconds to ready ourselves.

“What are we—?” Ann began.

“Play with the bag and make yourself nice and noticeable. You are, unfortunately, bait,” I remarked quickly, scaling the backside of an apartment building. There were plenty of windows here, but people rarely looked into their alley for the view. And being a good thirty feet above the ground or so gave me the advantage of seeing the young man make his approach. This was as much privacy as we were going to get.

“Oh boy, I can’t wait to try out all this magic stuff!” Ann remarked unconvincingly and louder than needed. I watched then as the young man quickened his pace and removed a blade from behind his back, which had been tucked into his jeans. Ann saw the blade and something like an inability to process the moment crossed her face. My face went hot at that, and before I realized it, I was upon him more viciously than I had initially considered. I brought my full weight down on his right shoulder, feeling it crumple into worthless meat as I did. His weapon fell to the ground instantly, and to his credit, he neither went down with it nor did he make much of a sound. All the same, I was furious, and he was no match for my speed besides. With my left forearm, I moved to pin him to the wall while I kicked the blade up into my right hand in the same fluid motion and moved to drive it into his head.

“Ahh!” Ann bellowed, something that had meant to be a word but only came out as a sound. Either way, it caused me to stop in my tracks half a moment before I ended this poor bastard’s life. “Jesus Christ, Chalsarda, what are you doing? Look at yourself!”

I caught a glance of myself in the reflection of a car window. My face was twisted in anger in a way that I couldn’t remember ever seeing ever before. A glance back at the young man showed no fear, despite the fight being driven out of him. At that moment he should have been afraid.

“One chance!” I growled at him. “How many others are with you?”

His expression never changed, not even as I gave a swift jab of the blade’s handle into his forehead, rendering him unconscious. He was making it clear that he wasn’t going to talk and this was no time for a lengthy conversation. “I’m keeping the knife,” I swore under my breath, only just then realizing how heavily I’d been breathing.

“What happened to not killing anyone?” Ann asked in a huff.

“Does he look dead to you?” I sneered.

“Almost, kind of, yeah!” Ann retorted looking at the young man’s broken body. “And if I hadn’t—”

“If you hadn’t what?” I suddenly snarled. “Hesitated? Maybe you could have beat him up with magic? I saw you; you were just going to let him gut you open if he’d been so inclined!”

I couldn’t have reproduced that expression on Ann’s face if I punched her in the stomach. “That’s... that’s not... I didn’t expect him to...”

Ann stammered the words out, and a wave of regret crashed over me. “Oh gods, Ann, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean it. It’s not you that I’m upset with, it’s just...”

My excuse remained incomplete, and Ann, nearly puffy eyed now, shot back, “Just what?”

“I can’t watch you die, all right?” I shouted back. “It was different before. I was in service, I could detach myself from the situation. But now? Now I owe nothing to no one, and yet here we stand. We have chosen each other, and every time I allow myself to have a friend, they all leave me, one way or another. I have been teaching you to defend yourself. Because you asked me to, certainly, but also because there is so very much in this world that can take you from me and I am not ready to see you leave. Not yet.”

Ann took a moment to respond. “So when you saw me freeze up, you lost control.”

“Yes. Quite.”

“But you don’t lose control,” Ann remarked softly. “You’re supposed to be the one in control.”

I let the unasked question hang in the air, in no rush to answer it.

Ann spoke first. “It’s fine. We both lost our heads for a moment. It happens. I just don’t understand how you can get to a place where you’re ready to kill someone without a second thought.”

“As I recall, you drove me here,” I answered wryly.

“Not funny,” she said coldly. “I’m serious. You are stronger than most of us. Faster. And you have entire lifetimes of experience to draw on. In many tangible ways, you are better than most of us, and you have a responsibility to act like it. I need to know that you’ll find a better way, even if that way is more difficult. I didn’t ask this before, because I didn’t think I had to, but I’m asking you now. I don’t want anyone to die just so that I can live. No killing. Will you promise me you won’t kill anyone while we’re doing this?”

My blood ran cold at that. An impossible question. One I desperately didn’t want to answer. But if she wanted me to be in control, then so be it. I squared my shoulders, facing her directly now. She craned her neck slightly to look up at me as I looked her dead in the eyes and delivered my answer.

“No.”

***