Episode II: Groovin’ with the Rattlesnakes

In retrospect it was almost hideously easy. Like many cults, the Children were very interested in expanding their membership, and all it took was being at the right place at the right time. They were hardly subtle about it, wandering the Santa Cruz boardwalk with printed handbills and trying to drum up interest among the summer beach-goers.

Restored to normal, no longer bound to a windsprite or rendered invisible by Hades’s magic, I simply placed myself in their path.

I was looking a little rough around the edges, my hair a bit shaggier than it had been in years, the three days of stubble on my cheeks and chin a testament to how single-minded I’d been in pursuing this bunch. The way I saw it, the only path home was to do what Radiance wanted, and that meant finding and disrupting their agenda. Whatever that was.

The two young women who approached me were both quite pretty, and struck me immediately as terribly naïve. I doubted either of them had seen their twentieth birthday. One I took for an ugly duckling who hadn’t quite realized she’d become a swan while she wasn’t looking. The other struck me as a child of privilege who’d walked away from her life without a backward glance. Idealistic, but not the brightest bulb on the tree.

I knew all of this within a minute of meeting them. Whatever Radiance had done to my mind, it had increased my perceptiveness a hundred fold. I still wasn’t sure that was a good thing. I’d long accepted the idea of being a freak by association—I couldn’t decide whether I was ready to become one for real.

Of course, it was far too late to worry about that now. Radiance hadn’t asked my permission ahead of time. 

I was leaning against the pier, a straw hat I’d bought at one of the vendors shielding my eyes from the sharp glare of the sun off the water, when they walked up to me. The newly-minted swan spoke first, a little hesitantly. “Sir? Are you out of hope?”

I turned to look at them and smiled wanly. “Hope? That’s in pretty short supply these days.”

She flashed me a dazzling grin, only the slightest dart of her gaze away from mine revealing how little she realized the effect of that smile. “It doesn’t have to be,” she said.

“Would you like a little hope?” the other asked, holding out one of their handbills.

Feeling a bit mischievous, I cocked my head and looked at her. “Is your name Hope, by any chance?”

She blushed fiercely while her friend, the Swan, smirked. Grinning at her, I plucked the handbill from her companion’s hand.

The Swan was a brunette with streaks of reddish highlights. I couldn’t tell if it was natural or chemically induced, but it was attractive nonetheless. Her eyes had a vaguely Asian cast to them, I noticed. 

The other girl was a blonde—very California, if you get my meaning. Tanned, a little too thin, and chock full of patently artificial cheer. Even my come-on didn’t seem to faze her for long.

“I don’t know what good reading this is going to do me,” I snorted, making as if to crumple it up. 

The Swan laid her hand on my wrist. Her fingers were smooth and cool and her smile almost intoxicating. “Then don’t. Come with us. We know someone who’ll be able to help.”

I dialed my best suspicious look. “What do you mean? How can someone help me find hope? I ain’t going to no church.”

::Jack. Be careful. That’s my pilot::

What? I thought you said she was a prisoner or something.

::Or something is more like it. She’s been altered somehow. Give me a few seconds…there::

She blinked at me and I realized her eyes were a shade of gray I don’t think I’d ever seen on a person before. Almost silver. She frowned, but the expression wiped away as her eyes seemed to glaze over for a second.

I knew that look. I’d probably worn it myself from time to time when Radiance was communicating with me.

“Gwen? Are you all right?” the other girl pushed at her slightly.

Is that her name? Gwen?

::It’s Dylan—but don’t use it! Sirius has obviously renamed her::

I nodded, then caught myself. Dylan glanced toward me and smiled again, the expression looking a little forced around the edges, but actually coming across as more authentic than the smile she’d worn when she’d first approached. “It’s not like a church. It’s like a family.”

I grunted. She was one hell of an actor. “Well, God only knows I could use one of those.”

::Be very careful, Jack. She tells me that Sirius is Ranger’s Pilot. Her memories are rather hazy, but she’s pretty sure about that one::

Still waiting to hear a better plan, I replied silently. “What do you need me to do?” I asked the girls, with a pointed look at Dylan.

I have to say, my swan was one hell of an actress. “You just need to come out to the ranch with us to meet Sirius.”

“Serious?” I nearly smirked. “Is that actually someone’s name? What the hell kind of name is that?”

Dylan gave me a hard stare while the other girl looked scandalized. 

“Sorry,” I muttered, smothering a grin. Sometimes I just can’t help myself.

I was one of three people they’d picked up to take back to the ranch. There were three ‘recruiters’ from the cult—Dylan, Jaime, and a rather large, clean-shaven young man with blond curly hair cut tight against his skull. They didn’t introduce him.

He eyed all three of us from the front seat like we were wearing live cobras around our necks and might decide to throw them around the van at any moment.

My fellow “recruits” were a young surfer punk and a sweet-faced woman of about thirty. The weirdest thing was that neither of my companions had deigned to say anything to me or each other from the point we left the boardwalk until the van was grinding its way up the winding road to the compound. Then the guy turned to me and said, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

I glanced at him and shrugged. I didn’t see how he could. “I don’t think so.”

“Sorry. You looked familiar for some reason.”

He then went back to staring out the window.

Very weird, I mused.

The whole scenario struck me as strange. Why were they going down into town and picking up people at random? What was drawing them to those people in the first place? I spent a few minutes studying my fellow passengers and came to the conclusion that both of them seemed somehow out of place, a little disconnected from their surroundings. Addled, somehow.

My first thought was drugs, and over the course of the trip I saw nothing to disabuse me of that notion. The surfer kid was murmuring something out the window while the woman was rocking gently and singing something under her breath.

Great. Somehow I got picked up with the goofy squad. What were they trying to say? That I looked like I was a few sandwiches short of a picnic?

What the hell was Sirius up to?

Stephanie, who was driving, pulled the van up to a large garage-like structure and touched a button on the dash. The bay door slid upward, revealing a dark, gaping maw. She let the vehicle idle for a few minutes, then as the overhead lights slowly came on, edged the van onto the concrete floor.

We all climbed out of the van. The guy, whose name I hadn’t gotten, turned to regard us with renewed interest as we stood there on the bare concrete. “So…how ‘bout you tell me about yourselves,” he said slowly.

::Jack! That’s Sirius!::

This kid? How?

::I don’t know. But I’m telling you—by the fates. He’s not human. He’s a djinn::

A what?

::A human being who’s been broken and re-made as a spirit. A living expression of a spell. Like an imp. It’s very rare because it takes an awful lot of energy. But I’m telling you, that is a djinn::

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I shrugged. “I’m Jack. Until about two weeks ago, I had a nice life. Until the government—or, shall we say, a zealous government agent—took it all away from me.”

He didn’t ask how. He probably didn’t care. “Well, this place offers hope to the hopeless.” He stepped forward and extended a hand. “I am Sirius.”

I did my best to appear shocked and reluctantly took his hand. His grip was cool and firm and his eyes seemed at first blue, then green, as they met my own. “I know what it’s like to get screwed by the government,” he said.

Yeah, I thought, I’ll bet you do.

::I don’t think he suspects anything, Jack, but if he scans you or Dylan, he may notice what I’ve done. Try to keep him talking—keep him too busy to think of scanning you::

Great advice. Now how in the hell was I going to manage it? “Nice place you got here,” I told him, looking around the garage. And I wasn’t lying. This was a well-maintained shop, containing a few cars, an assortment of motorcycles and ATVs, and what looked to be enough equipment to support an auto repair business.

He smiled, but it wasn’t a real expression. It bent his lips upward, but went no farther than that. His eyes, now a cold blue-gray, didn’t show even a hint of it. “Thanks. A few of us like to tinker.”

“The girls said it was like a family here,” I said. “How big a family?”

He frowned. Had I asked too much too quickly? “Not too large yet,” he answered after a long pause. “But we’re working on it. There are a lot of people out there who’ve lost hope. We can give it back to them.”

“Not to be disrespectful or anything, but how?”

“I’d rather show you than tell you. Come with me.”

 

Rio

Stormchild seemed pensive. It wasn’t like him and it worried me. We both sat on a large rock outcropping farther up into the hills above the Children’s compound, on the edge of what should have been an idyllic, peaceful meadow.

“Spill it,” I told him finally. “What’s eating you?”

“I’ve just got a bad feeling about all of this,” he said. He didn’t elaborate.

I hate it when he gets like that. “What do you mean? About all of what? The time travel? The rogue mageship? The fact that Jack’s walking around in the lion’s den wearing a suit of sirloin?”

He chuckled at that last one. “Yeah. That’s it.”

People consider Storm a bit on the shallow side, and I suppose, compared to most immortals, he is. If you’re expecting the wisdom of the ages, you’re looking at the wrong guy. That’s one of the things I like about him. What you see is pretty much what you get. He isn’t at all pretentious, though his rock-n-roll persona often comes across that way.

I happen to know that this—the 1980s—had been one of his favorite eras. This was when he became a rock legend. “It feels weird to be back in this time,” he said, after a long silence. “I was thinking it would be fun, but it’s not. Not really.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s just because the stakes are so high this time. We’re not here to have fun.”

Was my Storm finally growing up? It seemed impossible. “Oh, I’m here to have fun,” I told him. “But my idea of fun and everyone else’s is light years apart.”

He chuckled. “Maybe so. I’m worried about Jack, Rio. He’s pretty damn vulnerable down there.”

“Yes, but Jack’s a big boy. He’s smart, creative, and has resources he hasn’t even realized yet.”

“What does that mean?” he asked me suspiciously.

“Nothing in particular. It’s just a feeling I have about him. I don’t think any of this is a coincidence, really. Not his time traveling, not Jaz approaching him to run another version of the Magitech Lounge, or even the mageship choosing him.”

“Okay, so if it isn’t a coincidence, what the hell is it?”

“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, now isn’t it?”

 

Hades

I really didn’t like Jack being in that viper’s nest. Not at all. There was no good reason for him to be the one to go, and I’d told him so. He ignored me, of course. Jack’s one of the most stubborn people I’ve ever met. And, if you consider how long I’ve been alive, that puts him in a rather exclusive club.

Steph disagreed with me on one point. She thought he was the perfect choice to infiltrate the cult. If their leader was a mage, any of us would’ve stood out like a troll in a beauty contest. Even had I expended the effort to change my skin tone and deliberately unraveled all the spells in my web, there was still a chance he would’ve recognized me. Or, at least, his mageship sponsor might have.

It wasn’t a chance we could take, regardless.

But I still thought Boneyard could’ve gone in. Lycanthropy isn’t immediately obvious, and even a mage couldn’t tell one on sight. Some people could sense ‘thropes, but we had no reason to believe this Sirius fellow was one of them.

Jack was the boss, though, and he did what he wanted no matter what the rest of thought about it.

But if anything happened to him, Sirius would find out exactly what this Dark Lord could do.

 

Kevin

By the time I finished transporting the rest of the crew to a good spot in the hills, I was exhausted. Hades probably would’ve been a better choice for that sort of task, since his tattoos gave him access to a hell of a lot more mana than I could pull out of the ether at any given time, but he flat refused to leave the area. I’m still not sure what he thought he could do if hell broke loose, but I was smart enough not to spend too much time arguing with an immortal of his stature.

I flopped down in a patch of hardy grass and watched for a moment as the others found someplace to settle in for the wait. The only ones not on the scene were the vamps. They’d be doing their death sleep until they rose at dusk, after which Steph had already agreed to transport them here.

Vex and Kate plopped down beside me, both looking as though they’d eaten something they didn’t like. “Jack’s going to be okay, isn’t he?” asked Vex. He was very fond of Jack and the idea of him putting himself in danger like this didn’t sit well with him at all. The only one less pleased about it, in my opinion, was Anya, who’d pretty much refused to talk to anyone since she’d heard the news.

Sometimes she still acted like a kid. I guess this was one of those times.

“I hope so,” I told the goblin with a shrug. I wasn’t going to give him pretty lies. I respected Vex, as far as it went. He was a really decent sort, for a goblin. So was Kate, for that matter, though she was about the least goblin-like goblin I’d ever met.

He nodded. “Why do you think the ship contacted him?”

“You don’t ask easy questions, do you, Vex?”

He looked a little abashed. “It’s been bugging since all this started. Why Jack?”

“Maybe it’s as simple as him being a former time traveler. He knows how to blend in no matter what era he’s in.”

“That makes sense.”

“I think it’s more than that,” Kate interjected. “I think there’s something very special about Jack—something we can feel, but just can’t identify.”

She wasn’t the first one to suggest such a thing, but I’d be damned if I could figure out why people believed that. Jack was just Jack. An all-around good guy.

“Something else that’s been bothering me since all of this started,” she continued. “We’re taking an awful lot on faith, don’t you think?”

Vex frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

“Well…we already know that the mageship Radiance lied to us about where we were going. Why isn’t anyone wondering if it’s lying to us about why?”

Yes. That was the elephant in the room. The question none of us had asked out loud. I’d been wondering that myself, to tell the truth. Why wasn’t there any sign of the other mageship, the one that had allegedly gone rogue? Sure, it seemed as though this cult really existed, but what if none of what we had been told had been the real story?

I have to admit I hadn’t spent too much energy worrying about it because it made my head spin. I didn’t think we had any other choice but to take Radiance at its word. We were all in too deep to back out now—especially Jack.

My hope was that our suspicions would be unfounded.

Here’s to hoping.

 

Jack

The first impression I had of all of this was that it was an updated version of an old hippie commune. I was shown no cache of weapons, or plans for world domination written on a blackboard in a back room in the basement.

Not that he’d necessarily need weapons anyway, I told myself. A djinn wouldn’t need such things. I still wasn’t completely sure what a djinn was, or what it could do, but Radiance seemed pretty disturbed by its existence.

Something about his demeanor rubbed me the wrong way too. It wasn’t anything specific—he seemed genial enough—but I wanted to get away from him after about twenty minutes of his tour. To my amazement, he finished his quick circle of the gardens and outbuildings beside the garage and summoned Dylan over. She’d been talking with a couple of unfamiliar cult members, and assigned her the job of getting me “settled in”.

I wasn’t completely sure that wasn’t meant as a euphemism for something else. Pleading pressing business elsewhere, he left me in her capable hands, much to my relief.

The others had vanished when Sirius had called her over, so for at least a few moments, we were alone. She looked around surreptitiously before speaking. “My first instinct is to get us both out of here and as far away as we can get before Sirius catches on,” she said without preamble. “But Radiance tells me that you’ve got an army waiting in the wings to take this place down.”

“I guess.” I met her gaze for a moment, then shrugged. “Not sure what there is to take down, though. This isn’t exactly the Branch Davidian compound, after all.”

She gave me a disgusted look. “Appearances can be deceiving. You’re a newcomer—he’s not about to show you everything that’s going on under the surface.”

“So why don’t you tell me about it? This place looks pretty harmless from what I’ve seen so far.”

“Well, if you discount Sirius meddling with my mind, I guess it does.”

I wasn’t discounting it, but I was dealing with the physical evidence around me, not something we wouldn’t be able to prove to anyone. I had only Radiance’s word that her mind had been altered, though I hadn’t seen any reason to doubt it. “That’s not exactly obvious, now is it? What else you got?”

She shot me an incredulous stare, then burst out laughing. I grinned back at her.

After a moment, she sobered and shook her head at me. “I honestly needed that. Sorry I got so bitchy. All of this is pretty hard to swallow.”

“You’re telling me? I was dragged backward from the twenty-third century against my will, along with about two hundred of my closest friends. Our only chance of getting back home at this point is to do what your ‘ship is telling us to do. Which involves somehow disabling or killing something I’m not sure we can kill.”

“You can’t. Djinn are nearly as impervious as imps. I can’t believe he’s a djinn. We went to school together.”

“Radiance said something about a djinn being a human who’s been deconstructed and rebuilt using magic. What does that mean?”

“You’re kidding, right? You’re not a mage, Jack. It would be like explaining particle physics to a caveman.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Don’t take that the wrong way,” she sighed.

“What—the way you meant it? Now why would I do that?”

“You don’t have any frame of reference. I’d lose you in the first thirty seconds.”

“Try me. Just give it to me as simply as you can.”

“You know what a mana thread is, right? And how they’re used to construct spells?”

I had some idea. “A mana thread is the energy of probability, unused. Right?”

“More or less.”

I held up a hand to stop her from saying anything else. “A mana strand can initiate one effect of any kind, pretty much limited to the imagination of the mage, right?”

“More or less. Go on.”

“By weaving several effects into a single pattern, a mage can create a multiple-effect spell.”

“Right. Not bad, for a normal.”

“Who said I was normal?”

She chuckled. “C’mon. I’m getting nervous standing out here. Let’s go in the garage. At worst they might think we’re messing around.”

“And that’s okay?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think Sirius cares one way or another. If it doesn’t mess with his ultimate plan, he just ignores it.”

I followed her into the garage and leaned against the side of the van. “So?”

“Magic can be used to trap a soul…you know that, right?”

“Sure. Necromancy.”

“Well, a powerful enough mage—and most human mages aren’t anywhere near this level of power—can weave a spell so complex, it can trap a soul forever. And I’m talking about the two main parts of the soul here. The oversoul and the ka. Everything that makes a person who he or she is. The spell traps both of them and becomes self-perpetuating. In other words, the sigil renews itself, drawing upon ambient mana to do so.

“The power of the djinn is dictated by the number of threads initially used to create it. It takes around fifty to trap the souls, and if you create one with just that many, you end up with a creature that’s damn hard to kill, but one that doesn’t really have any magic. Every thread beyond that point added to the total gives the djinn permanent access to that mana and the ability to manipulate each of those additional threads at will.

“I’m not completely sure, but I think Ranger’s pilot refused to go along with whatever it had in mind, so it killed him. He destroyed his body, but trapped his soul. And then deliberately re-created him as something entirely subject to its will. Part of the spell’s intent, if you get what I mean.”

I was starting to and a wave of cold fear ran through my body. That was insane. “How can we stop him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. My own magic is feeble next to his and I can’t afford to construct any spells he might see floating around me. One whiff of my newly restored self and there’s no telling what he might do.”

“Why doesn’t Radiance just reach down and fuck him up?” I wondered. “It’s not as though a mageship doesn’t have the power to do it.”

“Radiance is trying to keep a lid on Ranger. He’s lurking up there near the moon, monitoring what’s going on down here. As long as Ranger’s pinned down, we only have to deal with Sirius. If Radiance lets her attention waver for even a second, Ranger will take advantage of it and we’ll be in a world of hurt in a heartbeat.”

I hadn’t noticed at first, but she used gender-specific pronouns for the mageships. Radiance was she and Ranger was he. I thought that was a bit odd, and said so.

She flashed me that amazing smile once more, tinged this time with a hint of bitterness, and shrugged. “The ships are infused with some of the persona of their pilots. Therefore, in a way, they take on the gender identity of them. Radiance is female and Ranger is male.”

“What about the others? Radiance told me that the rest of the ‘ships were in on this. She also told me that we’d be going to another Earth, not back in time.”

Her innocent expression wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all me. “The others aren’t involved, are they?”

Embarrassment flashed briefly across her face and she quickly shook her head. “Ranger went rogue and Radiance decided to follow him. Against the advice of her fellows.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Is there no sense of community among the mageships? Any sense of obligation to one another?”

“It’s complicated. The mageships believe that their primary duty is protecting the Confed from outside threats. The fact that one went rogue is of some concern, but it doesn’t change their first obligation. Losing one ‘ship weakened them and losing yet another as Radiance went in pursuit was a bit more than they were willing to tolerate.”

“Which is the real reason Radiance didn’t want to go to the Confed itself for help. Chasing down Ranger could be, in fact, seen as dereliction of duty.”

“I’m sorry she lied to you,” she said, actually sounding sincere about it. “I had to teach her deception. It doesn’t come natural for her. For any of them, actually. I just wonder where Ranger picked it up.”

“You did a good job with that,” I said, not intending to be sarcastic. Sometimes deception is necessary, after all. A being unable to lie is at the mercy of those who have no such inability. 

I found myself wishing I’d met Dylan somewhere—anywhere—else. Someplace where our lives weren’t on the line. I’d have liked to have gotten to know her better. I knew now she was older than she looked. Mages tend to age slower than normals. She was probably my age, if not a little older. And she was the first woman I’d really felt something for in quite a long time, a hesitant attraction that I wasn’t sure I wanted to pay any attention to whatsoever.

Beautiful, smart and dedicated. Okay, bound to a creature—for I do consider a mageship a living thing—that was entirely too comfortable with deception for my taste, but still… She was definitely the kind of woman I found attractive.

Now I guess the question was whether I wanted to do anything about that attraction. Assuming Sirius didn’t catch on and blast us into our component atoms before I had the chance. If that isn’t screwed up, I don’t know what is.

Not to mention that for anything to arise between us, the feeling had to be mutual, and I wasn’t sure about that at all. And this was definitely not the time to find out.

“Someone’s coming,” she murmured. She grabbed the sleeve of my tee-shirt and pulled me along behind her and then dragged me through without another word. Once outside once more, blinking in the harsh light of the sun, she eased the door shut and glanced back at me. “I’m really hoping you have a plan.”

I shrugged. “Kick his ass?”

She rolled her eyes. “I hope that’s not what you consider a plan.”

I grinned back at her. “I’m more the improvisational type.”

“This is no time for improvisation, Jack.”

“It’s always a time for improvisation. Plans can be disrupted, but if you’re playing it by ear, you can jump whichever way you need to at any given moment.”

She shook her head at me, smiling grimly. “I’m not sure that’s the best option right now.”

“It’s the only option we have. Unless you have a proposal of your own. Remember, I was thrown into this with no idea what I was getting into.”

Dylan nodded. “I see your point.” Frowning, she glanced up at the door leading into the garage and then motioned for me to follow her. We crept along the wall and stepped quickly around the corner. “If we’re going to do something,” she said, “I want to do it soon. The longer we give him to recognize the changes in me, the more chance Sirius will do some checking and we’ll all be screwed.

“I’ve got a couple questions. How many mages do you have with you?”

“I don’t know. About ten. One of them is Hades, though, so he should count as at least three.”

“More like five,” she said with a curt nod. “Hades, eh? I’d heard he’d been reformed. Do you have any way to communicate with your people?”

I shook my head. “We’d had to modify our PCDs, and figured that Sirius might be able to detect the magic we had to use.” Then I paused. “I might have an idea. I don’t know if it’ll work, though. Is there a short message you’d like to convey?”

“How resourceful are your people?”

“You’re kidding, right? I’m assuming Radiance picked us for a reason.”

“Fine. I want them to steal about twenty police cars and come up the drive like they’re planning on raiding the place at somewhere around midnight tonight.”

I’d always thought the whole jaw-dropping thing was just an expression, until mine hit my chest. “What?”

“It’ll provide a handy mundane distraction,” she explained. “We’re going to have to hit Sirius with all our magic at once, and it’s best if he doesn’t see it coming. There are no mages on this world, and while the cops don’t really pose much of a threat to him, they could interfere with his plans—whatever they are.”

I caught the gist of her strategy. “I can’t guarantee this will work,” I told her. Then I faced the hill rising behind us and started to speak in normal tones. “Stormchild—I don’t know if you can hear me, but this is the only means of communication I could come up with. I need you to pass the word…we need you folks to go out and steal a whole bunch of police cars and show up here around midnight. Make Sirius think the local authorities are raiding the place. We also need all the mages, including Rio, to launch a concerted attack on him when he’s most distracted by the apparent raid.” I took a deep breath. “If you can hear me, try to give me some sort of sign.”

Dylan was looking at me with the oddest expression on her face. “Stormchild? He’s here?”

I nodded. I must’ve looked puzzled because she laughed aloud. “Do you know how big a crush I used to have on him when I was a kid?”

I laughed too. “Well, don’t let his girlfriend know. I’m pretty sure she’s the jealous type.”

She flashed a quick grin. “Who’s his girlfriend?”

“A vampire named Rio.”

Dylan flushed white. “Oh,” was all she said.

I took that to mean she’d heard of Rio. That was sure interesting, since I hadn’t myself until they’d first walked into the Lounge. Maybe she had more of a reputation in the mage community than I knew about.

Possible, I suppose. I didn’t exactly have my ear to the ground in that world. I wondered what she knew that I didn’t.