**Note: We’ll now return to my recounting of the tale. Though I’d like to thank Neil for his contribution, even if some parts did seem unnecessarily hurtful.**
I wasn’t too surprised to find that Amy and Bubba were still awake. As a therian, Bubba’s natural resilience meant he could push himself for days at a time if needed; a trick that made doing long trucking hauls far easier. Add in his enhanced strength and stamina for the loading aspect, and it was no wonder that so many men and women hauling goods around our nation could shift into some sort of animal. Amy, on the other hand, had taken so many pills and potions that it was hard to say if her brain even needed sleep anymore (or to prove that she wasn’t somehow sleeping while she talked to you).
“Figured you’d be ‘round sooner or later,” Bubba said. He was laying on one of the cots—it’s meager frame struggling to accommodate his substantial size—with a small book of poetry cracked open.
“Yeah, can’t sleep unless the sun is out.”
“Even if it were shining directly overhead, I doubt you’d be able to get so much as a wink,” Bubba clarified. “You’re too worried about Albert.”
“Aren’t we all? No one knows what will happen when he uses that sword. He could get really hurt.”
“Highly unlikely.” Amy had been sitting on her own cot, digging through a bag for some misplaced object. She kept burrowing through her belongings as she spoke, not bothering to look up. “Though zombies may not have wielded a weapon of destiny before, there have been enough cases of vampires and Ghoul Lords doing so to make it unlikely that the sword’s magic would react badly to being in undead hands. Zombies are different, it’s true, but not so different that we should expect to see some giant reaction.”
“Oh. The way Arch and Krystal have been treating it . . . I just sort of assumed . . .”
“Krystal and Arch are agents, and neither of them have the knack for weaving magic,” Amy said, face still half-buried in her bag. I wondered if I’d be able to make out her words so clearly without my vampiric senses. “They see magic as some big, unwieldy beast. They know it can be useful, but they also know it can suddenly go wild and turn on them. Every time they encounter some new aspect of it, they’re immediately wary, which isn’t necessarily the wrong reaction for people tasked with ensuring others’ safety. But it means they tend to make mountains out of basilisk hills. If they’d bother to read the higher theories on necromantic displacement and theoretic—aha!”
Amy pulled a small stone—dark in color, with a clearly etched rune in place—from the depths of her bag. She deposited it into one of the many pockets on her strange jacket (which looked like a mix between a lab coat and a patchwork quilt), and snapped the bag shut. She looked at me for a moment, then to Bubba, then back to me, then finally around the whole room, before speaking.
“Sorry, what were we talking about?”
“You were tellin’ Fred why Albert will prolly be fine from using the sword,” Bubba reminded her.
“Really? I have the faint sensation that I was about to dive into some truly complex and meaty magical theory.”
“No, Bubba is right, definitely just assuring me that Albert will be fine.” Amy was a lovely woman in her own right, but she could go off on technical tangents that may as well have been in another language, for all the understanding we took from them.
“If you’re both sure . . .” Amy squinted her eyes for a moment, clearly trying to redirect that odd brain of hers toward the function of memory. After a few seconds, she gave a small shrug and abandoned the endeavor. “Anyway, the odds are that Albert won’t have any negative reaction to wielding the sword. That it chose him at all practically serves as proof.”
“Personally, I’m more worried about what’s waitin’ for him after the test,” Bubba said.
“You know about that?” I asked.
Bubba shot me a strange glance. “Course I know about it. I grew up with it. I’m a little surprised that you do, though.”
“You’re talking about different things,” Amy chimed in, producing a water bottle that I was fairly certain she’d taken from the plane and sprinkling in some strange powder.
“Are we? I was talking about how Krystal thinks Arch is going to try and recruit Albert into the Agency.”
“I think we all saw that coming,” Bubba said. “I was more talking about what life will be like for Albert after he’s free and clear to be a Weapon Bearer. It’s a hard thing, getting a lot of power and duty dumped in your lap like that. We have to run whole counseling programs just for newly turned therians to help them cope with the change.”
“Albert already handled dying pretty well,” I pointed out.
“That’s different. This is him being handed a mess of power, a sense of obligation, and no direction. Turning therian isn’t a perfect metaphor, but it runs close. We get incredible bodies, but also a tangled snarl of culture, etiquette, and obedience,” Bubba said. “Albert’s a good kid with his head on right, but that can be a real sticker bush for anyone to push through.”
“It’s curious to me how all of you are worrying in the wrong direction,” Amy said. She’d finished her sprinkling and taken a few sips of water. “But that might be due to the fact that I can’t remember how much I know versus how much you do. Either way, trust me: you don’t have to worry about Albert.”
“You say that, but you still seem a bit wound up yourself,” Bubba pointed out.
“Of course I’m wound up; I’m all kinds of worried,” Amy replied, her expression somewhere between confused and aghast. She added a few more sprinkles of powder to the bottle before twisting the cap back on tightly.
“I have to admit, I expected to see Neil in here with you, trying to find some way to get the sword to let go,” I said, trying to steer the conversation into waters where Amy made a bit more sense.
“He’s headstrong as a drunken bull, but Neil knows the right thing to do when it matters,” Bubba said. “My money says he’s over in their room doing all he can to make sure Albert feels calm going into the trial.”
“Should we go over and help?”
“No,” Amy said, voice strong and word quick. “Leave them be. This is important. Their bond needs to be as strong as possible.”
Though I had no idea what she was talking about, I trusted Amy’s judgment, especially when it came to her apprentice. She’d turned an overly ambitious sociopath into a tamed student, and from what I saw, she’d done it mostly with kind words and careful discipline. If she thought they were best served by being alone, then I wouldn’t be the one to break them apart.
“So, do we just sit around until it’s time for the trial?”
“Welcome to ‘hurry up and wait,’ the basis for every form of combat since the first caveman realized he could stake out a watering hole,” Bubba said. “It’s why I always keep a book on me, and I got a hunch it’s why Amy likes to have cards on hand.”
I had neither of those things, but I was carrying a smartphone preloaded with various apps and games. Though getting a signal in a place like this was laughable, I could still manage to whittle the time away with the things already on the phone. I pulled out my device and checked the battery.
“Over eighty percent,” I noted. “Well, hopefully that will last me through an hour.”
“That’s what I admire about you, Fred,” Bubba told me as he reopened his book. “You’re a damned hopeless optimist.”