Chapel Orahamm's Blog, page 25

Kiss: A Short Story

An excerpt from the anthology: Beneath the Twin Suns

Embers and ash. Wild night creatures murmured at the door. Venerable Brother Hacnor took the last of his ruby mantle from the sky, dusting the horizon in amethyst and onyx swaths.  Esteemed Brother Armad preceded him beyond the boundary of the known to call the stars to rise. Teslin illuminated the ceremonial path through the phosphorescent glen. Bocaslin, visible through the hem of the thin curtain, mirrored his smooth face on the still lake beyond the tree line. Zostalin reached zenith to spill paleness through the smoke hole.

Cerulean paint on silver skin had dried tight, flecking and chipping away, leaving behind swirling stains and smudges. Prominent pointed ears throbbed under heavy new piercings of gold. Weeks of fasting. Months of meditation. Years of preparation. The little brothers were in alignment for the ceremony. He trembled, watching the pot come to a boil, three moons casting singular spots on the emerald brew before acolytes covered the smoke hole.

Coals glowed in the hearth, casting disturbed shadows across daub walls. He drifted to the beat of drums, the whistle of pipes. Dusk crowded in on the group as bowls were passed around, filled with the elixir. A heady aroma clouded the low thatched roof, weighing down their lungs, tingling in their appendages.

He brought the rim to his lips, drinking deep the bitterness. Vibration rattled through his limbs as he drifted to the warmth floating in his veins. Fingers took his bowl before it fell from his grasp. The chafe of rough clay tingled and dashed across his palms, bringing his focus to his fingers, cinder’s glow bending, warping, slinking across the webbing, cascading light and dark around the borders.

Flames jumped, baited, dipped and swayed. Dancing, thrumming, coaxing him to the sparks. Her melody snapped, demanded, enticed, intrigued. Blue seeped into white, into red, into orange. Tugged at his heart and skipped up his back. He reached for her. She dashed away, flickering, taunting. He stilled, drawing in her proffered heat, her curve skimming along his edges.

The bronze cape of dawn glimmered through her mosaic leaves in the mist. Brilliant flowers before they fruit. The call of mates in the glades and woods. He fell into her embrace. Cradled in her boughs, buried in her roots. She slithered across his skin, spiraled through his bones. Tendrils crept to hug his ribs. Earth after the rain coated his lungs in her perfume.

She wrapped around him, twisted, twirled, tugged at his locks and pulled in demand. Relenting, skittering, skirting, he trusted her, letting her take him over the cliff. Blanketed in a thunderhead, wrapped in a rainbow. Buoying him on gossamer wings. Gliding, soaring, he swiveled to find her elusive, hiding behind the mountains, climbing up the valleys. She whispered in the canopy, her cry of exultation whipping up waves of foam in the sea.

Her laugh burbled along the shores. Splashed against the sands. Her sigh, the clouds that brought forth gentle rain. Cool and smooth. Dripping elliptic rings in ponds. Worn stones in the river. A flip. A shine. Fin slicing through the current. She eased through his nerves. Circled, coddled, cooed. He dove after her, ever reaching, ever falling away from her. She came close, teasing, tormenting. Lips trailed across his shoulders. He spun to find her gone in the depths.

Daylight scorched the entrance curtain. Drums reverberated in his skull. He blinked, waiting for the evening to coalesce. Humidity coated him in a thin sheen of sweat. His hammock, scratchy beneath his skin, encouraged him to be up and out. He shifted, pulling himself from the swaying material. Combing back his fall of hair, his shoulders ached. Trailing fingers along it, he found a series of tender spots.

Emerging from his hut, he met his jubilant village in the midst of preparing a grand feast. He swallowed, looking to his elders. Smiling, pleased, they nodded their approval. Blazed across his shoulders in shimmering shades of the world, his brush with the goddess cast glimmering speckles across the walls and soaring trees. He survived her whims to be the next holy man.

To perpetually chase after her. To be caught by her capricious affectivity. To give her everything. To wait for her indulgence. To join with the ranks of the Great and Little Brothers to forever watch over her. To dance through the cadence of her seasons. To fall more in love with her every day, every sunset, every moonrise.

Chapel Orahamm (C) 2022-2023. All Rights Reserved.

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Dreams: A Short Story

I come to in the darkness. Sweat drips off me, causing my shirt to stick uncomfortably. I breathe a sigh out. Just a dream. I tell myself this as I pull myself from the tangled sheets. I’m always telling myself this mantra. Mom and dad told it to me. The babysitter said it. The therapist chanted it until it was the only thing I knew to say when I would wake up like this.

I stumble to the bathroom in the tiny studio apartment, cast off my damp clothes, and throw myself through a shower. It’s the scratches on my arms though, that get me. The bruises that show up randomly. The slashed sheets. They all say I do it to myself. Maybe I do. Hard to verify it when they had a 24-hour live feed on me in solitary back when my parents put me in a psych ward. The staff couldn’t explain the manifestations. They let me out a month later when they couldn’t figure out the marks, or make the nightmares stop. They tried. I had the scars to prove it.

Now, in a different city, in a different country, I was still running from my dreams most nights. A new job had done little to change the stress that they all blamed on instigating the nightmares. Like school, clubs, love life. Everything was stress. It was everything else that caused me to dream, to be weird. That’s what they kept saying. They’d say it to their graves.

Dried and clothed, minor wounds addressed, I strip the bed of its linens and toss all of it in the washer. I want to see them explain the green and purple goo that coated the bedding and stained my sheets weird shades of opalescent grey. Let them try to tell me the box of bizarre spears that shot corrosive pink bubbles, electric knives with glowing jewels I could not find the names to, and laser guns that shrunk to the size of my pinkie finger hidden under my bed were just my imagination. I want to see the expression on their faces when I finally drag the creatures into my world. When I had enough evidence to turn the world on its head, I’d bring it all out.

I smile as my gaze settles on the nightstand. A burnt-umber scaled appendage with seven talons rests in the plastic tray I keep there for my nightmares. I had learned, after numerous attempts to drag whatever I could from the other side, that I’d rather not have gross stuff all over my furniture. The talons twitched nervously.

The chest at the end of the bed produces a new package of sheets. With luck, I’ll be back to sleep before midnight has passed, and I’ll get a second chance. This time. This time I’ll drag it over, kicking and screaming if I have to. I finish assembling my bedding, toss the talon in a massive plastic bag, and deposit it in the freezer with the other bits and pieces I’d come away with before collapsing back on the mattress.

Time to dream big, kid. I tell myself. I force my eyes closed, and the nebulous turmoil behind my eyelids drops me into the wormhole once again. We’re going monster hunting.

Chapel Orahamm (C) 2022-2023. All Rights Reserved.

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Life of a Librarian: Ch 3

“You read ahead before you read aloud; that is my understanding, yes?” the main judge asked.  I gulped.  How is one supposed to concentrate on a conversation with a sword trained on their heart?

“You might want to answer the question,” the man named Simil smiled down at me, all the while pressing the tip of the sword ever deeper into my clothes.

“Y-yes, yes sir,” I responded timidly.

“Very good, very good.” The judge scribbling away at the bench.

“Simil, you’re opinion,” the judge didn’t even look up at the cotton-candy clown of death.  The pink and blue horror twisted his head this way and that way, like a chicken eyeing a lizard.  “They don’t have training yet.  It seems that the observatory triggered their Scholarship to Phase.  They can’t unRead.  Oh, and they likes blueberries.  I think we’ll be great friends.  Anyone who likes blueberries can be my friend.” His teeth were magnificently straight and white.  I realized that he was wearing a wig of copper hair over platinum blonde hair that he had pulled up and hidden underneath it.  His pink and black eye were real, though I wish they were contacts.  The star birthmark was makeup, same with the heavy eyeliner he had on. I thought my brain was going to implode.  They were letting a crazy man handle a lethal weapon and asking him his opinion.  Blueberries?  To hell with blueberries.

I could have been brave, or stupid.  I could have pushed away the blade and tried to make one of those heroic fight scenes like in my favorite anime, but I had only gotten to my high yellow belt in Tae Kwon Do before college and  sedentary life had taken over.  I wasn’t even going to attempt it.  My best luck was to quietly try to live out these proceedings and figure out what they were doing.

“You are a Library Studies Master’s student currently?” the judge asked.

“Yes,” I found myself in a staring contest with the pink and black eyed man.  It seemed to amuse him to no end.

“You live on your own. Your last relatives died – it says here in April of this year?”

“Yes.”

Simil’s eyes dart away from the contest to the judge, and the clown’s smile slipped for a second.

“You have a cat?” the judge continued with his meaningless questions.

“Yes, and he likes to be fed every day,” I made a point to emphasize that if only to hope someone would get the poor creature some food.

“Simil?” The judge asked again.

“Only child, cat, alone,” he muttered back.

“Something wrong, Simil?” the judge questioned.

“Nope, nope, nope,” he cheeped back.  Something was wrong though.  I had felt the tip of the sword come away from me.  I guess it wasn’t wrong, but I got a feeling that for this oddball it was.

“You’ve never had this happen to you before?” the judge continued with his questions, scribbling away at his sheets of paper.

“Aromatherapy paralytic-neurotoxin, crazy death clown, masked judges evaluating my literacy, and random things happening when I read.  Can’t say that I have,” I snapped back.  I guess I shouldn’t have done that.  Simil pressed the tip of the blade back down, but never hard enough to draw blood.

“No need for sarcasm Ms. Oppenheimer.  We’re just making sure the facts are clear for the court,” the judge grumbled, not even looking up.  The smile on Simil’s face had been replaced with a melancholy frown.  Apparently he actually had some kind of feeling, he at least didn’t like being called a crazy death clown.

“As I told Betty over there, call me Thaddeus or get me a bucket to puke in if ya’ll are gonna keep deadnaming me.”

“Betty?” The judge lifted his pen in confusion.

“Professor Hamilton. Yeah, that Betty.”

“You mean Boris?”

“Oh, no, Betty.”

“That’s not Boris’s name.”

“And my name has legally been Thaddeus Jaegar since May. Get it right.”

“Do you know what has happened to Chyril Englewood?”

I was becoming impatient.  Finally I tested sitting up.  Simil tried to hold the sword steady, making an effort at keeping me down.  This was probably a dumb move, but I grasped the flat of the blade between thumb and forefinger and carefully eased it aside.  It was a game of wills between Simil and myself.  He did not have the desire to see me cut, and I was going to use that to my advantage.

“Suggestion, stay still,” he whispered to me.

I spoke loudly enough for the entire court to hear me, “Let’s test the sharp of this thing. Ya’ll have put me in a self-destructive mood right now and as long as the stressball that’ll eat my couch get’s sent to some shelter, I don’t right now give a damn, seeing as none of ya’ll give a damn about me other than some weird magic shit going down.” 

Simil gulped and stepped back.  He glanced over at the bench where the main judge had face palmed and at least two others were trying hard to hide their laughter.  The female judge waved him off.  

“Chair?” he asked, slightly confused.

“She’s alright.  I don’t think we have to worry about her too much.  To be safe though, keep her seated,” the main judge told him.  Finally, sitting, I was able to gain a better appreciation for the judges’ attire.  They all wore robes in various jewel tones, but all of the masks matched, with bulbous foreheads, noses and cheeks.  The center most, the main judge wore a deep midnight blue, the female was in green.  The other five were in red, orange, purple, black and rose.  The room was filled with people in formal attire.  The men wore three piece suits and hats.  The women to my utter surprise were bound up in corseted, bustled dresses like that of the late Victorian period with varying styles of hats and parasol canes.  I knew I was gaping, but what was I supposed to make of the crazy clothes.

“I’ll repeat the question, Ms Oppenheimer.  Do you know of Chyril Englewood?” 

I focused back on the judge and shook my head.  “I’ll repeat the statement, Chair: Thaddeus. I was supposed to meet her today at the public library, but Ms. Krimshaw was there instead.  She said Ms. Englewood was out on an errand till the end of the month,” I responded.

“Huh.  Well, I believe that is the end of the proceedings.  Chair, does anyone else have anything to contribute?” he asked the rest of the masked people.

“I do,” the woman spoke up.

“Proceed,” the judge didn’t seem surprised.

The woman stood up and moved out of the bench.  She walked down to the square and walked around me once before standing in front of me.  “Do you see that up there?” she asked.  I looked at what she was pointing at.  It was a large banner hung up in a rafter of the ceiling that I hadn’t noticed before.  It had some kind of romance language on it; I suspected Latin.  I nodded.

 “You apparently can’t bring forth something you can’t understand, if you’re a silent reader.  Can you read it out loud?” she asked.  I think she was crazier than cotton-candy clown next to me.  I looked at the banner once again.  I had tried to say the words in my head granted, but now she wanted me to read them out loud?  Oh this was going to be painful.  “Mors ultima linea rerum est,” I spluttered out.  She nodded her head and walked back to the bench.  “What was that?” I asked scrambling to stand up.  I felt a blade at my throat.  Simil held me in check from getting up.

“Death is everything’s final limit,” Dr. Hamilton said as he walked forward.

“Boris?” the main judge asked.

“I have dealt with the woman for the last fifteen weeks.  I believe she is a good fit for the guild.  I would only ask one last question,” he bowed to the panel.

“Well, if you’re here,” the judge motioned.

“Did your family show these talents?” he asked.

“No.  Not that I’d ever noticed,” I said.  

The judge perked up, like a train of thought just reattached itself to its rails. “What did your parents do for a living?”

“Dad was an international linguist and mom did something for the French embassy, but I don’t know what that has to do with anything,” I responded.

“Were they ever home frequently that you would know if they could Read out?” one of the other judges asked.  I glared at Dr. Hamilton.  I had hoped these proceedings had been coming to an end.  It looked like now that the cat was out of the bag they would be chasing it around the courtroom for a while.  “No.  They traveled often.  Plane crash took dad when I was five. Mom and Uncle Tad died from the pandemic,” I hissed.

“You are sure?” the woman asked.

“Chair, I don’t see what the point of this is, other than traumatizing him,” Simil grumbled.

“Simil,” the judge warned.

“We just had to know,” the woman tried to sooth.

“Well, that’s brilliant for all of you,” I snapped bitterly.  

“We have seen that Chillmax is in a boarding facility for now.  We need to test the depth and breadth of your Scholarship,” the main judge informed me.  My heart sank.  They weren’t going to let me out of here.  The judge snapped and a pair of guards picked me up by the arms and led me out of the courtroom.  Simil stood in the center of the concrete square, sheathing his sword.

I found myself in a medium sized classroom.  There were about thirty childrens’ desks, a blackboard and an instructor’s desk.  An alphabet and number poster were tacked to the walls and a short line of bookshelves circled the room.  They were filled with thin hardbacks – young children’s books.  The guards left the room to stand outside of the door.

Well now, what am I supposed to do in here?  I asked myself.  I started browsing the books.  The room was full of them.  They all looked fairly new too, almost never used.  I picked up one of my favorites from when  I used to read to kids as a volunteer librarian.  It was a vibrant green cover with a python – Virdi.  I flipped to a random page, and I glanced to a line.  From the book poured a pile of snakes.  I shrieked, throwing the book as far from myself as possible and, against all good grace, clambered up on top of the instructor’s desk away from the slithering mass.  Tears burned behind my eyes.  I wasn’t terrified of snakes.  I rather found them to be somewhat cute.  I just couldn’t take it anymore.  Holes, chains, snakes…that was too much for one day.

I watched the clock slowly tick away the hour.  Finally, a light voice conversed with the guards posted at the doors.  In popped a young woman, maybe a tad younger than me.  “Hello!” the woman beamed as she pranced into the room, completely ignoring the mass of snakes.  She danced her way to the desk I was cowering on.  I stared at her, my headache growing.  She had a brown pixie bob with yellow and green stripes through her hair.  A cosplay school uniform clung to her tiny frame, and a pair of gogo boots didn’t hide how short she was.

“My name is Mindy. Nice to meet you,” she chimed brightly.

“Um, yeah, hi.  Thaddeus.  Nice to meet you,” I tried to answer back.  I didn’t have it in me to fight my will anymore.  I let my ingrained etiquette take over and left my answers on autopilot.  At least, that was what I really wanted to do.  It seemed though that these people just wanted to completely break me today.

“Well, sweetie, let’s have you come down from there,” Mindy offered me her hand.

“What about the snakes?” I pointed out the slithering, hissing turmoil of reptilian scales worming their way around the room.

“Oh, silly, that’s easy.  Here, what did you read?” She looked  at my hands for the book.  I pointed to the corner of the room where the pythons had set up camp.  The largest one had decided to make the book its rock, or den, or whatever a snake deems a new perch to be.  “Well now, that puts a damper on things.” Mindy stuck her thumb to her lip.  She nibbled on the pad of it for a second.  She was cute.  Snap out of it, I told myself.  

“Ok, this is actually a good place to start, Thaddeus.” Mindy sat on the desk next to me.  The heat in my cheeks rose.  She was cute, and she was being nice to me…let alone sitting next to me.  “What do snakes not like?” she broke through my mind’s wandering.

“Um…I know they like warm things, and some don’t mind water.  A few types will burrow in dirt.  Fire might be interpreted as warm.  Caustic chemicals would affect us too.  Cold.  It’s not like they don’t like cold, but it slows them down,” I stuttered, embarrassed. 

“We’ve got a copy of Call of the Wild in here,” Mindy perked up, pointing to one of the shelves filled with later grade school materials.  Mindy scrambled down and grabbed it from the shelf and handed it to me.  I read out a freezing blizzard that immobilized the snakes.  Mindy sent me in to get Virdi.  She wasn’t going anywhere near the big mother snake.  I didn’t blame her, I didn’t want to either.  Thankfully with the freeze, the thing was asleep, but it was still a snake and too big for comfort.

“It looks like you’re Scholarship for Reading aloud is just fine.  Thankfully you don’t seem to read silently all the time, though with work, you’ll probably adapt to it in no time.  Those guys you just find almost impossible to do combat with.  That and with an untrained, we’d probably have a snarling rabid wolf in with us at this moment too,” Mindy beamed.

“Alright, come back here and show me what you read to make the snakes appear,” she patted the instructor’s table.  I had gotten a hold of my emotions and sat down next to her like all was fine.  I flipped open the book and pointed to the line on the page.  “Ok, now then to unRead, concentrate on the emotions you were feeling when you read the lines.  Not the words on the page, but the feeling you put into the words.  What were you thinking about?” she asked.

“Um, well.  I was thinking about the kids at the library I used to volunteer at and how I miss those days when I didn’t really understand just how difficult my degree was going to be. Or how it’d land me in here.”  I blinked back the tears.  It came to me, “Begone oh vile creature that spreads upon the burning earth, for I am neither giver, nor taker, but watcher who deems necessary a leveling of this blight.”  The blizzard, the snow, the snakes, the chaotic mess was wiped clean from the room.

Mindy’s doe eyes widened.  “Well, you’ve got a pretty deep one-liner.  Where’d you find that one?”

I looked at her, confused.  “It kind of just fell out. I do that sometimes.” Honestly, I wasn’t sure where it came from..  “What was that?”

“That’s your unReading line, at least one of them.  Usually a first line that most Readers have is something along the line of Disappear, Undue, or Get Rid of It.  You’ve got quite the Silver line there.  Um, there’s different levels of lines.  Usually you begin with a blue or yellow line, those low level.  Those can undo children’s books.  That thing you just spewed.  That could undo existential texts – parables of the Bible, the Koran, the Lotus scripts.  You’re fun,” she smiled.

These people were just random.  Flat out random.  Simil and his blueberries.  Mindy and her random liking of me.  “What do I do with this?” I asked her.

“Well, if the Chair has anything to say about it, we’ll start you in on quizzes, pronto, probably.  It’s probably the best way to ingrain unReading lines into you early on.” Mindy jumped up and let herself out of the room, whispering something to the guards before her shadow against the hazy glass dashed off down the hall.

The guards let themselves in and motioned for me to follow them.  I figured it was easier and would end less painfully if I just walked with them.  Quizzes couldn’t be that bad, could they?

Chapel Orahamm (C) 2022-2023. All Rights Reserved.

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Fyskar: Ch 3

NSFW: prostitution

Fearchar led Eoin to the croft entrance as the first sprinkling of rain descended on the hillside. Swept and well kept, the sill stone gleamed beneath small autumn flowers, absorbing the leftover warmth of the sun. He noted a few simple medicinal herbs and cold-weather vegetables tucked under rambling grass heads and shrubs. A hook in the granite lintel held a hung stack of meat drying nets that Fearchar pulled off and handed to Eoin.

“She’s a green thumb.” Fearchar made off to the side of the croft in the direction of the byre. Eoin stood at the door, shifting from one foot to the other, unsure if he should let himself in or wait. His hired hand emerged from around back with a sling of peat. “Easier tae bring it in now, rather ‘an get a’ settled and be sent fur more later.” The hunter set the bundle down at the door and knocked.

Eoin turned from the man to the door and back. Why was he knocking? The door wasn’t capable of being locked.

A scattering of footsteps. A man came to the door, his face flush. He pulled on his greatcoat in a hurry. Fearchar picked up his bundle of turf before the man could tumble over them. “Nice tae see ye, Cormic.”

“Efternuin, Fear.” The man ducked, burying his pudgy face further under his hood. Watery eyes above a squished nose flicked to Eoin before focusing on the seed heads in the garden, his face going red into his receding hairline. Working up a bit of courage, the man stepped between Fearchar and Eoin and skittered down the path, pulling his hood further down around his ears.

Eoin shivered at the dragging chill of winter threatening in the autumn breeze. The rain descended quicker, turning to massive orbs that dripped from kilt and cloak. Fearchar flicked rain out of his braids. “He’s not much of one for talking, but he’s a gift with a block of wood and a chisel. Made the missal stand up at the kirk.”

The doctor brushed at the green glass lenses of his mask to deter water build up, trying to understand why the man rushing down the path had come from the handyman’s house. Fearchar whistled merrily, shoved the door open with his elbow, and took in the sling of peat with Eoin’s duffel. The doctor, ducking the torrential downpour that opened above him, followed the man inside.

A warm hearth and stone chimney in the ben end of the croft greeted them. Eoin stared at the area in confusion. It was filled with what he would expect of the butt end of the building. Near the door sat a large work table on top of cupboards. Pegs in the chink and rock held nets and baskets in the process of being mended. Fishing rods and thatcher’s needles clumped together with shovels and hoes in a corner. From the rafter drifted pots, cooking utensils, and drying vegetation. Baskets near the dwindling fire overflowed with embroidery and knitting. A rough door to the far side of the chimney promised more space, whether that be storage or where the residence of the house slept. There was no box bed or frame in the room the doctor stood in to indicate that this was the main living quarters rather than the receiving quarters.

Swept stone floor instead of packed clay raised Eoin’s suspicion. A single window sat prominently in the south wall, a casement of imported wood and a pane of warbled glass strew light across the cupboard table. A thick grey wool curtain hung by hooks above the window and a shutter sat beneath it, ready to be put up in case of cold weather. For a small croft and a handyman willing to take strange jobs, there were a number of architectural choices that told the doctor the people of the house had a good income.

His hired hand took the drying fish from Eoin and set them on a hook near the smoking fire to finish. “Seonaid! Brought yer sausage.” The handyman sidled to the door on the other side of the fireplace. Eoin followed him, not entirely sure where to set his box. “Got a guest.” His handyman strolled into the room. Eoin did a quick one-eighty and swallowed hard. Fearchar leaned down to kiss his naked wife.

The woman, sitting on the edge of a handsome box bed built into the chimney-wall side of the room, glanced at the cloaked figure and stifled an amused snort. “You didn’t tell him what I do for a living?” She had a distinguished accent Eoin had difficulty putting his finger on. There was a lilt to her vowels but a long drawl and a soft finish to her words. Memories of a different place, marble walls in a desert sun, scuttled behind his eyes.

Fearchar’s chuckle pitched low in the bedroom, a shared expression between lovers. “Was worth it.”

“Poor kitten, still wet behind the ears.” Seonaid put a finger to her chin, her lips coming together in a cherub smile. She didn’t make a move for her clothing.

“How’s yer mornin’?” Her husband left the room to stoke the fire.

“Good! Emerson and Cormic came over. You saw Cormic on his way out, I guess. Angus and Ethan are supposed to arrive later this afternoon.” She watched the man in the beak mask intently, a small foot swinging idly over a rag wool rug.

“Sounds tae be a busy day, Luv. E’eryone actin’ gentlemanly tae ye?” Fearchar stacked flats of peat into a bricked niche in the wall and tossed a turf under the large cauldron gently simmering with fish broth.

“Haven’t had any trouble with anyone. Not since you tossed Harold out on his ear. Seems you chased away anyone else who’d think of crossing me. Three others have skipped out on their schedule. It’s either that or the cough coming on this winter’s put them all to bed. We’ll see. Em left a bag of smoked haddock as payment. I already stored it in the cupboard for later. Cormic paid in coin. You wanna pocket it for lunch tomorrow, or should I toss it in our box?”

“Throw it in the box. Hepsibah told me thae Sarah, ye know Sarah? Seamus’s wife?”

“Yeah?”

“Sarah brought in a cone a’ sugar frae her brother’s travels tae England last month. Donnae ken how they afford thae, but word is she’s shavin’ aff chunks fur coin. Brought sausage if ye want it.” Fearchar handed the duffel to Eoin, who glanced at him and then to the man’s wife.

Cropped, tawny hair framed her heart-shaped face. Doe-like brown eyes stared up at him from under fine brows. Short and filled with curves, her presence added a glimmering bubble of laughter to the rough hovel. The woman wasn’t what a person would initially mark as gorgeous. She was what could be considered cute, though. They were an odd couple by Eoin’s considering.

“That sounds wonderful, dear,” she called after her husband. “Well.” She drew Eoin’s attention with a flick of shined nails. He shifted uncomfortably, not sure where to look now that her focus was back on him, what to do with his bags, and unable to communicate with his full hands. “So, a doctor?” She traced stitching marks on the homespun quilt under her. He nodded, trying to divert his eyes. “Nice to meet you, doc. Name’s Seonaid.”

“He’s mute, Luv. Name’s Eoin!” Fearchar called back to her from the fireplace where he had a pan and the sausages sizzling at a secondary fire next to the big cauldron. Eoin’s stomach growled. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and turned from husband to wife.

“A mute doctor? That’s different.” Seonaid rose, tucking a strand behind her ear, heavy lashes working seduction. She paced closer to better understand his costume and his height.

He stood stock-still, flicking glances through his lenses to his hired hand at the fireplace. The plague doctor could not fathom this attention much longer. He had made a bad decision in taking on Widow Magaidh’s proposition to house with the man. Eoin swallowed, his attention drawn to the soft undulation of flesh at the edge of his mask. He turned his gaze to the rafters, waiting for the woman to grow tired of her game and leave him in peace.

“Hard to tell what you’re thinking with that mask on.” She tapped the metal tip of the beak, drawing his focus away from the chasteness of the soot-laden thatching. He backed up a step and found himself pressed against the doorway. She pursued him, trying to see in through the glass of his mask. Soft breasts pressed against his leather cloak. He dry-swallowed. She glanced down his shoulders and chest she pressed up against, red cupid-bow lips lifting in an amused smirk. “Could be an interesting client?” she mused.

A shaft of sparks drove through his spine. Eoin blinked. He hoped she couldn’t see his face under the mask but feared she would feel his body’s reactions through the leather. He shifted, trying to escape the press of her skin against his cloak.

“He’s the high heidyin Aunty wanted me tae help. He paid upfront fur the services.” Fearchar tossed her the sack of coins. She eased away from the doc, gently rubbing her hip against him as she walked to her husband. Eoin breathed in a deep gulp of air and stilled the electric shock stampeding through his extremities. It was her house, and she could wear or not wear whatever she wanted. He dearly wished for salvation.

How she could walk around naked in the chill of the house was his guess. True, the fire created a palpable warmth, but he had not been able to warm up thoroughly enough to call himself comfortable since arriving in the isles. The short woman pulled the coin purse open and counted the gold inside. “Better than my month of work.”

“There’s enough in there thae we’d ne’er huf tae work again.” Fearchar sat back to admire his wife. “To not have to stack old Aiodh’s fence again because he can’t decide if it should cut across his pasture or leave it open. Or get up into the rafters to fix the thatch jobs Barclay leaves in his wake.”

“I like my work, and I know you’d get bored of doing nothing all day.” Handing the bag back to her husband, she leaned over and kissed the tip of his nose. He moved quicker than she expected, sliding his hand behind her head and pulled her down a fraction to kiss her more deeply. Eoin found himself entranced with the entire view before returning to the reality that he was in the couple’s house watching them.

Fearchar released her reluctantly. He flashed her a sly smile. “Too true, Ah’d get right tired a’ sitting about the hoose.”

She leaned in once more and kissed him on the cheek. “I don’t know. Could find some fun?” She stole one of the sausages off the pan and made off to the bedroom, not before he could pinch her butt.

“Oye! Don’t gae stealing’ me sausage, lassie!”

“Your sausage? I thought there was a clause somewhere in those marriage vows, good sir.” She wagged the sausage in his direction, chortling, before closing the door.

Eoin set down his bag and box. What…what is going on here? He demanded, making sure his signs were slow and precise. His head was spinning, and he needed clarification.

Fearchar watched him, steadily trying to follow his hands. “Ye cursing me out?” Fearchar pointed his cooking spoon at the doctor.

Eoin sat down on the floor, unsure what to make of the situation. May I find peace from this questionable situation by Walking into the Forest soon, he prayed to himself.

“I’m a hoor, doc. I take customers here. Simple enough? I bought the house on me own and tied the knot with Fearchar when he kept pursuing me.” Seonaid’s footsteps on the slate floor echoed through the bedroom door.

“Chased her around an’ around ’til she up’n caught me.” Fearchar clapped the wooden spoon against the side of his pan to displace grease.

“Best catch of my life, followed up shortly by that salmon last summer.” Seonaid, her chemise and wool stockings in place, opened the door, and tugged her stays into shape.

“Thae wis a pure barry catch.” Fearchar turned to Eoin, drawing his arms wide to indicate the fish’s length. “Swear’s thae creature ‘s a monster. Smoked it an’ ate on it fur the next three months. Have nae been able tae eat salmon since then.” He leaned back to stare up at the rafters, a smirk brushing his lips.

The fire snapped, returning his attention to a quickly diminishing flame. Taking up a stick from the basket of kindling, Fearchar broke it across his knee and tossed it in the fire. “Say, Seonaid, ye’re learned.” She popped her head out of the door, her eyebrow raised in a question. “Mind givin’ this a look-see?” He pulled the scroll from inside his kilt and handed it to her.

“Aye, let me pull on my apron.” The curvy woman came out the door and tied the cream linen bow at her back. Washing her hands in a bowl of lukewarm water, she dried them with a thin towel before taking the scroll from her husband. Skirts brushing the swept slate, she slipped into a chair at the dining table and pulled a shaded candle over.

Eoin picked himself off the floor, joints cracking in the silence. He slid onto a milking stool, now commandeered as extra seating for the worn table. Seonaid took her time with the scroll. After Fearchar added another turf flat to the fire, Seonaid set the scroll down to glare at the masked man and over to her husband. “Thae’s quite a commitment you signed up for, Fear, love.” She handed the scroll back to him.

“So wha’s it say? Ah ‘aven’t sold me soul tae the de’il, have Ah?” He opened the scroll to stare at the scribbles.

“Just about.” She set her head in her hand to regard Eoin. Fearchar glanced up at her, his cheeks pale.

“Uh…” He wanted more information.

“So, Mr Niloofar, you want my husband to help you murder Daleroch by ingratiating you into the community, bein’ a medical practitioner in the area, helpin’ you become guid with them, and killing them all? Then he’s tae help you find a missing chest buried on Daleroch’s estate?” Thin fingers traced worn wood as she laid out the basics for her husband. Eoin shrugged and nodded, his beak mask casting an oblong rectangle of orange light across the brick of the fireplace wall.

“Crivens! Get tae feck oot!” Fearchar set the scroll down, horrified. Eoin shook his head. “Fur why the Daleroch? Ah mean, Ah don’nae care fur him or his laddies, but tha’s a wee clatty if ye ask me.” Fearchar launched himself from his chair to pace the length of the tiny room. Twice up and twice down the distance saw him return to his seat to poke at the scroll once more.

If you don’t want in on this, give me my money back. Eoin tapped the purse on the table.

“Haud up there, Waerd. Gol’s got a shine tae it.” Seonaid waved him down. Eoin’s hand fluttered. He watched the woman warily.

“Have taken a wee bit a fancy tae it.” Fearchar nodded to his wife with a wobbly smile. A knock at the door sent Eoin’s heart racing. 

“Oh!” Seonaid huffed at the interruption. She drew in a frustrated breath and shook out her skirts as she went to the door. Eoin grabbed hurriedly for the scroll and rolled it up, stuffing it back under his cloak.

Another man, shorter than the last one, peeked in around Seonaid’s short frame and nodded to Fearchar, embarrassed. His ruddy features were marred by red patches of flaking skin on his cheeks and cracked lips. The cold could really dig in. Fear waved at the man before turning back to Eoin. The doc flinched as the door to the bedroom clicked shut.

“She’s raised in London. Da’s French, mum’s Scottish. ‘ad schule ‘n e’erythin’. Supposed ta marry some uppity prick ‘n bear him lo’s a’ bairns. She ran ‘way the day ‘fore her weddin’. Could’na stand ‘im, could’na stand ‘is family, could’na stand the idea a bein’ some broodmare. Din’nae ‘elp that she figured out she was barren later. Broke her heart when she realized. The guy would’a divorced ‘er and publicly ‘umiliated ‘er.

“She ended up near Edinburgh. She could’a been a governess, or a laundress, or a seamstress. Reputable work by the parish’s figurin’s. She figured out whorin’ paid better money, though. Found ‘er when Ah came through Edinburgh on my way out ta’ battle and found her on my way back. Took quite a few months. Convinced ‘er ta come along with me back to Skye. She followed along, not without more than a couple suitors after us ta keep her back in Edinburgh.

Not sure what Ah was thinking. Ah ‘ad been paid fur my services, but it was barely ‘nough ta convince a minster ta tie us. Ah didnae ‘ave na ‘ouse ta my name. She bought it. This is all ‘ers.” He leaned back in his chair to smile up at the roughhewn rafters and thick thatch overhead.

“She found she rather likes her chosen…profession, guess’n ye’d call it. She likes ‘aving independent money that she can bring in on her own, and she values ‘erself enough fur it. Not right. She was taught ta’ read ‘n write, even learned some signs for her deaf grandpap. Quick as a whip and knows too much. Would be better than the council in the village. None a’ them’ll listen though fur what she is and does, not what she’s actually good at. Learned as she is, she’d shame a king. ‘opefully she can ‘elp ye a bit more ‘an I can.” Fearchar stretched out on the table, laying his head down. A sense of relief washed over Eoin listening to Fearchar’s protective nature come out in his opinions.

Fearchar glanced over at the forgotten duffel and box. “So’s doc, what’d ye pack in that tube a yer’s?” 

Eoin rose and stalked over to the box and duffel. He took them to the one large prep table in the kitchen area of the main room. Fearchar got up eagerly and followed him. The box held a portable apothecary with many tiny drawers containing various unidentifiable ingredients. The smell from them permeated the room, washing the house with a heady, spicy scent.

Eoin extracted a second change of his Englishmen’s clothing from the duffel, this set in a smooth cream. Following the suit: a folded pair of finely woven white silk clothing and a wide, red, striped wool belt. A rug of deep red had been used to protect several wrapped glass vials filled with oil. A small waxed canvas wrapped package followed suit.

At the bottom of the bag were preparation tools and glass bottles of varying styles. With quick work, Eoin had his apothecary set erected and ready for use. He glanced back at the bedroom door, amazed that Fearchar was ignoring the sounds from within. “Don’nae bother me none long as she’s happy. Day she says she’s done’s the day we find something else that makes us happy. Money tightens the belt, but happiness feeds the soul, and without the soul, ye’re no more ‘an a wisp. Kind a’ comes with the territory.” Fearchar shrugged. Eoin looked up at him and tilted his head. He still wasn’t sure about the man he had hired for a goon.

“Well, i’s look’n like ye ‘ave the tools fur the job ye ‘ired me fur. Wha’s next?” Fearchar picked up a vial of green leaves and seeds in oil to swirl it in the light of the fire. 

Eoin thought for a minute before rummaging in his boxes. He levelled off a spoon of finely powdered dry leaves and another of what appeared to be splintered bark. A large pot containing refined tallow emerged from the duffel. He followed the tallow pot with a small, empty jar. Studiously he mixed the ingredients with a white powder, and pressed it into thumbprint sized container. He held it up for Fearchar’s inspection. The hired hand smelled the thick substance. It had a bit of a tang, yet sweetness to the aroma. “So…wha’s it?” Fearchar returned the ceramic and compounded tallow to the doctor.

A click at the bedroom door signalled the man leaving Seonaid’s room. The client peeked out, his cheeks washing a mottled red. He stalled, spotting Fearchar and Eoin around a strange set of equipment.

Eoin tossed the small pot to the man, who fumbled it before popping the tight lid off it to look inside. He looked at the plague doctor, unsure why he was now holding the whisp of ceramic.

“Doc says ta’ use that.” Fearchar pointed at it. Eoin motioned to where his cheeks would be over his mask.

“Uh…thanks?” The man dabbed his finger into the goo. He spread a thin layer of the medicated tallow on one of his cheeks and looked down at the pot in surprise. ” ‘s strong. Oye, d’ye ‘ave more a’ that? Me mate doon’a the dock needs this more ‘n Ah do,” he asked, walking over to Eoin. Within a minute, Eoin had compounded a second repeat batch of the tallow and offered it to the man. The man took a copper and silver from his pouch and glanced between Eoin and Fearchar, a bit confused.

“It’s on the ‘ouse.” Fearchar waved the coins away with an amiable smile.

“I couldnae. Stuff’s gotta be worth a bit a money if’n works this good.” The man pressed the coins into Eoin’s gloved hand. Eoin nodded, happy to help.

“Doc’s mute, dinna worry ’bout it.” Fearchar clapped the man on the shoulder, subtly shifting him toward the door.

“Ye’re actin’ as ‘is mouthpiece, Fear?” The man shoved the jar away into a pouch.

” ‘e ‘ired me ta’ ‘elp ‘im while ‘e got established. Seonaid and Ah’re ‘ostin’ ‘im ‘ere, ken?” The handyman’s grin widened, recognizing a deal when he saw one.

“Good ta’ know where ‘e’ll be. May ‘ave ta send captain up ‘ere fur ‘is goitre.” The man headed out the door, not before pulling out his new treasure to look at once more.

Sounds good, Eoin motioned after the man.

” ‘ll look forward ta seein’ ‘im!” Fearchar called after the man as the door closed. Eoin looked up at Fearchar. “Quick ‘s a whip, ain’t ya doc?” Fearchar smiled down at the mask. Eoin nodded happily.

Seonaid opened the bedroom door and dusted off her skirts. “So, I take it ye’re taking the job, Fear?”

“Think Ah can manage some a’ it, though ye might ‘ave ta’ step in fur translatin’ e’ery once in a while, Luv.” He settled back into his seat. Pulling out a knife and a chunk of wood from a small lidded basket on the shelf near to the table, he peeled away ringlets of bark.

“Long as ye don’t get yourself into trouble and need me while I’m working, ‘don’t mind helping.” She straightened her stays and put on her little over jacket again. “You’ve taken the one good seat in the house.” She stuck the tip of her tongue out at her husband.

Setting away the knife, he scooted back and patted his knee. “Even comes with a bit of padding?”

“Last time you said that, we broke a chair.” She scooted a set of nested baskets out from inside one of the cupboards and settled on the robust reeds.

Husband says you can read signs? Eoin asked her, pulling the two away from getting into a teasing match.

Seonaid furrowed her brows to watch his hands before carefully signing back much more slowly, struggling to remember simple shapes. She spoke for the benefit of Fearchar, “I learned to as a little girl, but I don’t find many people here who need it.”

Everyone know you? He matched his signs to her speed of translation.

“I go out about as much as Fear here does. I have to shop for things too. I make nice with the ladies and the men. Most everyone knows what I do. I tend to keep the younger unmarried men out of trouble and relieve the older women who can’t quite accommodate their husbands anymore. If a woman thinks her husband’s been sleepin’ ’round, she usually comes to me first, and I tell her honestly what’s going on. Honesty seems to work best with the village. Bless the little old ladies down at the market; they’ve somehow kept the preacher from storming up here though and pouring fire and brimstone on me.” She sat down at the dining table, finishing off one of the cold sausages.

Eoin nodded. It still felt like a strange situation to be in. Would the people trust you and your husband if you said I was working up here as a doctor, or do you think I need to rent a shop down in the village?

“Can you say that again, a bit slower?” Seonaid brushed the hair out of her eyes. Plucking up a blue silk ribbon from a peg on the mantel, she quickly bound away the brown strays. “You have a queer dialect to your signs. I can understand most of what you say, but some of it is beyond my knowledge. Let’s see. Yes. You can probably set up here for a little while. Gain some customers. If it starts getting too crowded, you might open up a shop then. It’s a bit of a walk for the villagers to come all the way out here, but enough men do it in a day that I think the only ones that won’t come out are the little old arthritic ladies.”

He pulled the scroll he had lifted off of Fearchar and motioned to it. What about the clan?

“We’ll have tae see. Ye’ve already made a good impression on Grannd’s youngest son.” She poured water from a storage pot to fill her hearth kettle. He dropped the coins like they had burned him. “Really don’t like ’em, do you?” She raised an eyebrow at the glinting, spinning metal.

He shook his head vigorously. Vendetta.

“I don’t recognize that one.” She nodded at his hands. He looked down at them, opening and closing his fingertips, trying to formulate a different sign. With a scowl, he shrugged. He had paid them well enough. All he needed to do was take out Grannd and his sons. He needed Fearchar there, and it appeared Seonaid, to get him close enough to the man so he could do his work.

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The Fire in My Blood: Ch 3

We left the building late into the afternoon.  Maria Mater sighed heavily with disgust.  “I hate dealing with the heads,” she grumbled as she led Cortex and I to a shaded spot in the courtyard garden.

“At least we don’t have to deal with them again for another year,” I offered, sitting down on the grass.  Maria Mater lowered herself down next to me, her joints cracking in the quiet.

“I doubt it.  Gemma’s more keen than usual.  To refuse her bid will just enrage her.”  She leaned back into the grass.  Cortex shifted from one foot to the other, having refused to sit.

“I’m going to head back.  Tempestatis set up a card game, and I still want in.  He said he’s got some great stuff up for wager tonight,” Cortex explained.

Maria Mater waved him to it.  “Go have fun.” She yawned as Cortex scurried out of the courtyard.  “At least he doesn’t seem all that worried.”

“New box of boots has him thinking of the here and now rather than the there and then.  It’s all right.”

“We should get back with him.”

“I’m in no rush.”  I could see she was drifting.  Her insomnia must have been getting to her recently.  Worrying about the meeting with the heads had probably not helped with her anxiety.  I could sit and watch over her while she caught up on some sleep.

An hour later and a messenger had arrived from Cortex explaining he had got home safe and that he had forgotten to ask if I had gotten the message he had given Maria Mater at her apartment.  I cringed as I headed back to base with Maria Mater in tow.  I had forgotten entirely that Requies had a job for me regarding Gemma.  I should have talked to her then and there while she was in front of me.  What had the Rubrum gone and done this time?  Why were they holed up at Requies’s?

These were all questions my left and right-hand men needed to answer quickly.  I wanted to return to my small room in the warehouse and go to sleep.  Was there any way I could send in Mercator or one of the others?  Boss my butt.  Some days I felt more like a janitor.

I pushed the heavy metal door open with a thud.  Well, talk about convenient.  Cortex and Tempestatis had set up with some of my other men to play an all hands-in game of cards in Clavis’s station.  At the centre of the table in all its dusty gloriousness was the fabled sealed box of boots.  A jar of preserved crabapples gleamed on top of it.  A couple mangled tools that could be melted down for metal were tossed in on the pile.  Someone was wagering high today.

“Requies in a hurry?” I asked as I walked up to the table and eyed Cortex and Tempestatis’s hands.  Tempestatis was going to win, no matter who had what on the table.  He’d be smiling in a new pair of boots.  If he had the guts to pull them right.  He was chewing on his lip nervously, but his face wasn’t his tell.  He and Cortex laid their cards down to wait for the others to figure out what they were doing.  Tempestatis always had a tell, but you had to be on the right side of the table to see it.  He had the only key to the guzzler.  He had a bad habit of petting the rabbit foot on the keychain when he was sure he’d win.  Amazing, the thing wasn’t hairless.

“He sent a messenger up early this morning.  Said three Rubrums been camped up there for five days now.  Four days ago, a van arrived, and a trio of people bunked down in the room with the other three, which was over the occupancy limit.  He said they’re getting edgy and quarrelsome.  So, he went up to ask them to git, and they shoved a shotgun in his face and told him to beat it.  He doesn’t want no trouble, and he’s got ‘better paying, more polite customers’ looking to rent rooms.”  Cortex leaned back to look at me.  His cards were crap, but he had the best bluff of them all.

“And he knows for sure they’re Gemma’s?” I started circling the table.  This made the rest of the guys nervous.  Always does.  Try having a pair of fangs at your jugular.  At least this would get a move on.  I leaned closer to their shoulders to eye their cards as I circled.

“He swears up and down one of them was wearing her flag on his jacket.” Cortex leaned back to watch me circle.  Tempestatis shared a smirk with him as he watched the other men start squirming.  One of them folded.

“What does he want done?  Just an eviction?  Could send Mercator?” I eased to the next player directly across from Cortex, who was having a difficult time repressing a laugh as the man beneath me shifted nervously.  “What do you say?” I breathed in the man’s ear.  He folded his cards.

“Dammit, boss, that’s creepy as fuck!” he yowled, moving his chair away from the table as I slipped to the next guy.

“I get a note saying that Requies needs help, and here I find you all enjoying a round.  Fine, I was running a bit late, but is this something that needs my attention?” I pulled a chair up between Tempestatis and Conscribo, straddling it backwards to watch the table.

“Requies asked for you directly.  Said one of the guys that came in the trio was chained.” Tempestatis flicked a glance my way.

“And he waited four days to call me in?” He had my full attention now.

“Said he thought they may have been deserters who had taken one of Gemma’s toys.  Said when they told him to beat it that he started reconsidering.  Said he had heard them talking about trying to take over Caeruleum territory.” Tempestatis offered.

“Everyone and their uncle wants Caeruleum territory,” I muttered.

“He made it out to be something needing your input directly,” Cortex leaned back from the table to look past Tempestatis.  I saw it.  He didn’t.  I reached for the jar of pickled crabapples as the table went up, and cards turned into confetti in the air.  His chair slammed into the concrete, along with the table.

“Teach you to sit in the joker chair.” I cracked the lid on the jar and bit into one of the apples. 

Cortex looked up at me in confusion as cards fluttered down around him.  “Why is this even still in here?  I thought Clavis burned this thing!” he defended.

“You sat on it.  How’d you not know you were in that ricketty contraption?” I passed the jar to Conscribo.  He pulled an apple out to eat while we watched Cortex pick himself up off the floor.  “Looks like ya’ll have to restart this wager for a good pair of boots after I drag Tempestatis and Cortex out to Requies’s.” I rose and brushed myself off of the shop dust.

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Polaris Skies: Ch 3

The trees that surrounded the area loomed over the site like ancient guardians protecting their tiny treasures Nat and his friends hunkered down into the snow-covered grass, bracing themselves against the chill wind that blew in from the north of them. It smelled of wood smoke and burning gas. They were far enough up on the side of the hill that the entirety of Jenton spread out below them. The wind gusting through the forest pushed the flames in the orchards on the south side of town  away from the group. Grey-white flakes descended as they observed the devistation; ash fell with the snow.

“There might be more fires to our backs.” Deck studied the piecemeal sky between the evergreen boughs.

“We should get moving then. Don’t want to get stuck in a wildfire.” Nat helped Zola get her backpack on.

“Benj, got a plan?” Deck’s voice muffled under the patter of snow. He pulled a hunting mask on over his face to cut the chill.

Benj prodded at leaves buried under white mounds. “Neo York.”

Sun Hee leaned against his arm, her hoodie pulled over her beanie. “That’s gonna be a walk.”

“Neo York?” Nat squatted down to hide behind a thick tree trunk to escape the wind. He observed his friend, or rather the pain running under his skin studied the memories Nat had of the man. Benj had been the butt of bullying for his antiquated clothing style and straight A’s and the way he spoke sometimes. The teasing had stopped when Deck and Yeller took him under their wing. That was after Benj let into the side of Deck for making a pass at Sun Hee. The man practised Muay Thai in an underground ring weekly. That was how he was able to afford most of his expensive science equipment and pay his way through college.

Nat’s stomach pinched at the realisation that his home would soon burn with the rest of the town. The wind sprinkled gritty snow in his hair and tugged at his coat before dying down once again. A tree limb snap. Side-eyeing the woods, he found no elusive shadows or monsterous forms hiding beneath the frozen foliage. He shrugged it off as the cold breaking a corroded joint.

The young man returned to the scene in front of him. He bit at the peeling edge of his chapped lips and brushed at his ears as snow flew into them. The pressure in his head had not ceased. He shut his eyes against the pain.

Itching deep in his chest, subtle, almost a tickle, prickled his skin. He coughed once to see if he could discourage it. The sensation gnawed beneath his sking until it burned. It slithered from his lungs to the top of the breastbone. Fingertips buzzed like white static, muscles in his forearms cramped. A deep chuckle bounced between his eardrums. Beads of sweat formed on his brow. Nausea built in his stomach. A roar in the base of his skull crumpled him to the ground. His vision blurred a crimson red.

“I think I remember where that facility was supposed to be, the one I mentioned earlier, Deck. It’s a research plant in Neo York that was specialising in RWE effect antidotes. They were a start-up, so I don’t know how far they got; even if they weren’t hit by a bomb, anything could have happened to them. There aren’t too many supplies along the Eastern Front right now. Too many bombs have hit that place to know…,” Benj collapsed as his throat closed off around guttural resonance. He put a hand to his throat. Eyes round, he gasped, struggling to breathe.

The world grew taller. Pain slashed unmercifully through Nat’s body, gripping and tearing at his organs and bones and flesh. The roaring increased, letting itself rip from his body. Fur pushed through his pores in a thick mat, wet and blood-soaked. Nerve endings pulsed and throbbed. His teeth sharpened into long canines. His jaws, in what felt like an eternity, extended in a crunch of bones. His tongue changed into a thin strip. In the last of it, his spine, humerus, and femurs cracked and shifted into a new, more compact wolf form.

Nat twisted, eyeing the wolves surrounding him. The creatures whimpered. A distinct sensation, a sliding unease sifted along his spine. He was not so much the driver of this wolf form, but more the passanger with no access to the controls.

Zola’s wolf shook, drawing the pack’s attention. Slowly, bones cracked and shifted into a human form. Nerves and blood vessels shifted, followed by her fur retracting into her skin, along with her black-tipped nails. She continued the long process until she was fully human once again. The woman doubled over, winded from the transformation.

Something lay inside them now. A mind not their own. Their DNA stank of difference. The tension wrapped around Nat, whispering to get out and run free. It bristled against his mind and snapped along his skin as another tree limb broke.

Zola stayed composed through it, a hunter in her realm, never to show emotion in front of confrontation. The hair on her neck stood on end, and a slight growl escaped her.

The wolves looked at her as if to ask her how she did it. “Think about being human,” she told them between pained breaths, pointing at her forehead. “All good anime tropes have that. You should have watched them with me when you had the chance. You have to command that animal down, to give up its possession of your mind.”

Soon Deck and Sun Hee joined her in human form, grabbing up clothing from the ground where they had fallen during transformation. Benj’s wolf took up his clothes and padded into the dense thicket to return as his human self, dressed and presentable. Yeller struggled with his wolf, snapping at the golden tale and biting at his paws. Transformation took it’s sweet time of torture.

Nat pulled for control, tried to do what Zola said, what his friends did. The weight of it settled about his shoulders in his mind. A brushing sensation left him unable to breath. Black inky fur against his neck. The form, though, that he stood in glistened white against the forest path. He reached, willed, bartered, plead with the creature. It was no use, a man against a mountain.

I need to be human right now. Not wolf. I need this more than breathing. Give me back my body and I will get you out.

A soft voice, a feminine lilt wrapped in black fur brushed at his subconscious. You’ve promised to give me form.

Nat sat naked in the snow, stunned at the swift transformation, at the fire burning in his bones. “Do we want to talk about what just happened or…?”

Yeller threw clothes at the frozen man. “We’d better get that antidote fast.” Sensitive ears picked up on leaves scattering and crunching under heavy boots. A low growl, like Zola’s, escaped him.

“What do we do? Walk all the way to Neo York?” Deck sneered. Benj might be able to read an analog map, if they could find one, but that was a long shot for getting across the country. Bombs had wiped out many of the cities and infrastructural decay left deep fissures into the asphalt and cement, making them impossible to drive. Many of the bridges from pre-fall had collapsed long before anyone in the group was born.

“Well, what do we do?” Yeller nudged his nose back to the forest in front of him, trying to clue Deck in that someone else was there. The man followed his gaze.

“For one thing, you can get off my land!” a tall, grey haired man pointed a shotgun in their direction. Everyone froze. “I’ve watched you guys here for the last two month. Didn’t you know this was my land? Git off.” The man spat, brown tobacco landing with a splat in the snow.

“Oh, crap, sorry, sorry, didn’t know. Thought it was one of those government fields.” Deck raised both hands and backed away. “Grab your stuff.” The group pulled on their packs. Sprinting, they skittered around trees and headed deeper into the woods, heading west.

“That settles it. We’re heading to Neo York,” Zola wheezed against a tree trunk. Snow gathered in thick drifts, threatening their progress through the forest. Her friends collapsed around her.

Nat slid to a wet frozen log, indifferent to the damp cold. He fought the beast wanting to rise under his skin. His vision continued to shift as the creature battled his will.

Benj leaned against a tree and studied the rest of the group. He watched them in earnest, waiting to see what anyone else had to say before pointing a question at Nat. “A wolf can run faster than a human, rightt?” He pushed his old-school glasses up his nose and bunched his fingers in front of his mouth, blowing hot air onto the frozen tips.

“Yeah, for a little while at least, as far as I can remember from high school zoology. Why are you asking the Post-French, Mr. Micro-Bio?” Nat retorted between deep breaths. Shaggy hair tumbled around his shoulders, hiding his face. Acid green eyes pinned Benj beneath the locks. The wolf watched them.

“Why a dead language? I have to ask that every time. Well, we’ve found our mode of transportation.” Benj glanced away to distract himself from looking in his friend’s direction.

Nat breathed hard, eyes dilating and undilating. His hands tremble with control. The beast beneath his skin edged to let loose. The raw prickle of sharing his body with another power, more deadly than him, was exhilarating, euphoric, addicting. Adrenaline pumped through his blood. There was something else to it.

The creature’s energy demanded he submit. It was a fight to keep his body his solely. The wolf, the animal, the monster, the bloodthirsty demon seethed and ripped through his body in retaliation. His voice rasped under the storm’s onslaught. “So, Post France was razed off the map with the Grey Monster. At this point, Gaelic and Korean are also dead. Been dead two centuries longer, so deal with my choices. It can be brought back as long as enough people know it. Whatever we do.” Nat pulled his arms in around his stomach to still the building anxiety. “We better do it fast.” He held Deck’s gaze, willing him to understand him. Deck swallowed hard and nodded his head.

“How do we get to Neo York, even if we do run. We live on the outskirts of Oregonia, for crying out loud.” Yeller pressed at his throbbing temples.

“Do you guys want to stay in the freezing climate up here and have a shorter distance to run, or head down towards Mexas and have a warmer run and more of a chance of being caught?” Benj pointed south.

“What do you mean by caught?” Nat pricked at the tone in his voice.

“Warmer climates, it’s rare to see wolves; coyotes and coywolves, on the other hand, are detested, chicken raiding vermin. We’d probably be mistaken for coyotes down there by the remaining preppers who survived.” Benj dug his toe in the mud. “We would become a skin for someone darn quick.”

“Oh…well… that’s very reassuring. What if we travelled on foot by day so that people wouldn’t know the difference, and by night we could run?” Sun Hee offered. Deck nodded his agreement.

Tears glittered at the edge of Zola’s eyes.“Good idea, other then, when are we supposed to sleep?”

Yeller tried to hush her. She glared him down then turned her venomous glare to Benj. The man recoiled under her burning stare, noting the flush of her cheeks.

“Another thing.” Sun Hee laid a calming hand on Zola’s arm and pulled her focus away from death glaring the men. “Wolves don’t have slitted eyes. Cats do, right Benj?” She chewed on her lower lip, worry wrinkling her brow.

“These people were messing around with DNA; they could have added anything to the mix, including some cat DNA,” Benj took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes in frustration..

“Let’s ask the scientists when we get there. I’m rather inclined to taking that information the painful way if I can. Come on, that weird guy is coming back,” Deck growled, the hair on the back of his neck rising.

They covered ground, looking back at intervals. The apparition appeared again and again, following them across the acreage. The old guy couldn’t have been that fast. Where was the end of his property line? They hadn’t run across any more barbed wire. How many miles did the man own? Even Nat, who was on the track team in college and had been a member of the basketball team in high school, couldn’t shake the creep following them. They dashed through the ice-encrusted woods, limbs snapping, icicles crashing. The sun slipped through the murky cloud-covered sky.

Zola and Sun Hee motioned for a break at the bottom of a gully. “Stop, guys, just – stop!” Nat gulped, balancing himself against a large juniper tree, gasping for air in the dry chill. Benj, Yeller, and Deck looked down at the three from halfway up the muddy embankment.

The roaring bled through the base of his skull again. The skyline spun. For a split second, he swore his brain had been cut in half and turned on its side, his vision going black in his left eye. The wolf paced under his skin and gnawed on his gut. Fire burned in his lungs, near his backbone, as it popped and groaned. The beast wanted out, and it was pushing. Blood lust coated his tongue. Nausea hung at the base of his ears, the creature’s craving so strange, so wrong. He felt like Dr Jekyll at the edge of wanting and hating Hyde. The euphoria of release held on by a thread, only stalled by a desperate desire to retain a thought of humanity.

“Cad[1]?” Yeller puffed.

Nat crouched low, pointing back the way they had come. “Shh. Éistimid agus feicimid[2].” Yeller crouched next to him, trying to see what Nat was seeing. “The man is still following us. Give me a second.” Nat inched forward, finger tips sinking in the snow. The demon beneath his skin gnawed at his bones, making demands for freedom. He stood from his crouch and eased his way into the woods, the scraping of leaves and snow giving away his position.

The group watched, waited. Then they saw what Nat was seeing. Just the hint of extra people in the trees. The hint of extra…Nats?

What he saw, though, was the old man that chased them off the first time. The waif crept closer to the man, getting used to walking silently in the snow. The farther he advanced, the harder he worked to muffle the sound of his feet on twigs, the sound of his breathing, the sound of his coat rubbing. He slowly erased his presence.

Close enough to the man, Nat boldly strode in front of him. The grey haired scarecrow disappeared, leaving behind a second Nat. His blazing green eyes burned through him, seeing the wolf transposed on the mirror, looking back at him, saliva dripping from dagger length fangs. It shifted, the fangs falling away, the muzzle pushing back to a dark humanoid form. Heart beating hard, Nat backed away from the image. The stringy man resurfaced in the mirror. Nat glanced around, spotting the tiny projector, wind turbine, and battery pack high up in a tree powering the thing. “Damn it.”

The wolf bit out at him, pushing hard to take over, stealing an inch of his brain, of his decision making. With a growl of irritation, the creature smashed his hand into the mirror, destroying the image that had been following them for the last two hours. Nat cringed under the physical blow as the wolf let go.

Blood dripped from a long, jagged gash across his hand. Shards clung to his jackets, small holes pocking the waterproof material. He chided himself for having fallen to the creature. Searching around, he found a low to the ground sensor that triggered the projector to turn on. It was connected to a rats nest of other wires buried throughout the leaves and undergrowth he suspected ran to the other mirrors in the forest.

“Nat!” Sun Hee rushed to him, tugging the scarf from around her neck and wrapped it around his hand.

“What the hell, dude?” Deck slammed his pack to the ground and ripped through the contents for the first aid kit.

“You know, if you stop taking such drastic measures, you could keep from getting hurt like that.” Zola averted her eyes from the flow of blood.

“Thanks for the pointer. At least we can walk from now on. We don’t have to pay attention to that old dude.” Nat ducked to avoid Sun Hee’s ministrations. He clamped down on his wrist, silently cursing the wolf.

“Yeah, but you didn’t have to break the glass. Yeller, best word for idiot if you would.” Benj walked over to help Deck with the first aid kit.

Yeller gave Nat one dismissive, displeased sidelong glare. “Gammy eejit.”

Benj snorted. “I actually understood that.”

“That’s ‘cause the English figured out that the Irish cuss the best.” Yeller took a roll of bandages held out to him.

Deck sourced a coagulant and an antiseptic. Nat, not having lost out on the topic at hand, and realising what his best friend had produced from his pack, was making for a quick getaway. “Yeller?” Deck beckoned toward the man with the scarf wrapped around his hand.

Yeller sighed, exasperated. “C’mere ye’ bleeden’ sap.” He grabbed Nat by the collar. “Suigh, fan[3].” The emo turned blond plunked the waife down on his knee, forcing Nat to extend his hand out for Deck’s dosage of foul liquid.

“I am not a dog,” Nat protested heavily, knowing that iodine was on the docket of painful medications about to be applied to him. He tried to pull away from Yeller, who wasn’t having it. Yeller caught him about the back of the neck and his side, pinning him with heavy arms used to wielding logging materials for his father’s firewood business. “Sure are acting like one. Hold still if you don’t want it to hurt as bad,” he muttered in Nat’s ear.

“Woof.” Heat crept up Nat’s face.

Deck carefully peeled back Sun Hee’s handywork. Contemplating the mess of a gash, he sighed, exasperated, and cleaned it out the best he could. For good measure, he liberally dosed Nat with iodine, his irritation abating at his friend’s cringing face.

“Hey, today has had me riled from the start. Can’t I vent a bit of this anger?” Nat grumbled. Though, truthfully, he wasn’t sure if it was the wolf or him that was riled more. They hadn’t been the ones to see the black and white wolves trying to eat his throat. Or the dark figure. They hadn’t seen the sheer terror in his eyes as he realised he was becoming a monster. They hadn’t seen his look back at them, to see their wolves, the immense size dwarfing his friends – death burning in their eyes. Two, a golden yellow and a red one, clinging to Yeller.

“Just drop it; we still have to find food and get out of this forest before sundown. We can’t deplete Deck’s MREs. It’ll get colder in the darker areas,” Yeller grouched, looking from one friend to another, trying to persuade them away from where they were headed. His heart had stopped at the blood dripping from Nat’s hand. He fought the memory when Nat’s blood had covered a tile floor. Yeller didn’t want to ever see that vision again.

Now that Nat took the moment to study at his friends, he saw a marked transformation from that morning. Zola’s deep brown kinky hair was highlighted with gold. A patch of beige skin against her natural light umber masked her eyes, now a yellow gold, the brown entirely erased.

Benj’s black hair shimmered with a stripe of salt and pepper at the temples. His deep brown eyes were almost entirely black. His birthmark, a white latticework on his left shoulder, grew to encompass the entire left side of the back of his torso. He had also gained an additional two inches, leaving his shirt and pants too short around his waist and ankles.

Deck’s hair lightened to an ash blond. Sectoral heterochromia gave him gold highlights to his blue. He had darkened from pale whitewash to a soft bronze. His musculature had thickened, filling out his quarterback physic to that of a bodybuilder.

Sun Hee’s black hair had gone auburn brown and curled into tight ringlets. Her nose had taken on a slight hook to the bridge, and she had also grown a couple of inches taller like her brother. It was disconcerting to see her dark eyes a brilliant shade of hazel.

Yeller’s skin had deepened to a ruddy tan, and freckles scattered across his arm in constellations. Nat cleared his throat, realizing where those arms were, grabbing Yeller’s attention. The blond looked down to Nat’s prodding fingers that brushed against the wrist pinning his neck. Yeller released him quickly, heat washing across his face momentarily.

Nat, hand cleaned and dressed, got up and held a hand out to Yeller. “This bleeden’ sap can at least be polite.”

Yeller took the offered hand and pulled himself out of the snow. “Sapling needs to learn to not drip so much or else the frost is gonna kill it before spring.” He dusted off his pants and coat.

They continued for several more hours in the snow-covered coniferous forest before reaching a highway. It was a long black tongue whipping out of a merciless white maw of fog. More rubble than road, it might promise a destination. The group hoped it led into a town of some sort, and hopefully not Jenton.

Dusk settled the road into shades of grey and black. They had eaten sparingly from Deck’s rations, all too aware of how hard it was going to be to find food. They were sore and tired of running and walking. Scratched from the underbrush and bruised from falling and slipping on the snow-wet rocks, they wanted safety.

The road looked deserted, and they hadn’t passed any stores or shelters along the way for the last hour. An overlook on the highway yielded picnic benches and a concrete block bathroom, now missing its roof. They set up in one side of the building. The structure had been used before by other travellers who had dragged in a pair of cement tables. The stalls, torn down haphazardly, and the toilets ripped out and cemented over created enough space to contemplate setting up Deck’s tent. The group hoped that whoever the prior occupants would not be coming back.

The table bore an inch of snow upon its lichen crusted surface. The guys brushed it off and sat for a while, discussing what to do next. The women disappeared to the back of the building for their own purposes. The cold set in quickly, and the men shivered in silence as an icy wind blew through the broken windows.

When the women returned, Benj and Yeller went out to bring back firewood and sticks while Deck and Nat created a burn barrel from an old old drum that had been used as a trash can at the rest area in a prior life.

There was only the one tent. Designed for a maximum of four people, the all-weather created an anxious sense of modesty. Eyes held glances around the circle of the burn barrel. Cheeks flushed pink as each individual in turn found themselves staring at the tiny structure.

The fog cleared to leave them watching the stars, their breath smoking in the cold. They looked at the moon and the base, Polaris, that marred its shattered surface. The crack straight down the middle of the orbiting satellite of rock cast shadows through empty tree limbs. Several chunks had fallen out of the surface. A skirt of rubble  off of its twisted around its surface. The sky behind it twinkled with millions of diamonds.

They crowded into the tent. Comfort was a foreign word with nonexistent personal space being the predominant theme of the evening. Deck curled around Sun Hee protectively while Benj and Zola tried to get over their bashfulness. Yeller slipped his way to the wall of the tent and tried to give Nat who had his back to Zola some distance, though his frame proved warm against the chill.

[1] What?

[2] Look and listen.

[3] Sit, stay.

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Firefly Fish: Ch 5

Coming to was like that morning after I was welcomed on board ship by Captain and the crew. Homegrown hooch with anchovies. Unstable, my stomach wanted to live outside of my body and my brain was wrapped around an anchor. The storm threw buckets at the windows of Jarl’s apartment. He had rolled towels and bed clothes at the seams to keep the seeping to a minimum. First time I had slept on a mattress in five months.

    “Marin!” Jarl jumped from his little dining table and newspaper to lay his hand on my forehead.

    “What happened? I was going to get water.” I blinked, the deep yellow of the kerosene lamp cathartic in a nostalgic way.

    “Fell flat on your face is what you did. Just as bad as mudkip in there.” Jarl thumbed over his shoulder toward the bathroom where the creature’s fin was escaping the threshold.

    “It wake up after that?” I pushed to have his hand off my head. I didn’t feel feverish. Maybe I did. An itch ran the length of my shoulder and down my sternum. Type you’d get dealing with sawdust in a wool sweater.

    “Not yet. Got that tub filled to almost overflowing. Weird creature you found there, Marin. Where’d you come up with it?” Jarl left me to dig out a pair of coffee cups from his cupboard. Setting up a percolator to boil, he took down his beans and started grinding. Nervous ritual of his.

    The rag on my shoulder fell off as I shifted to lean against the plaster wall. I grabbed for it before it could stain the sheets. A massive bite mark had left behind an off-coloured print on the cloth. Blue-black. I swallowed and pulled myself off the bed. The floor swayed beneath my feet as I fought my way to the bathroom to look in on our unexpected guest.

    “What are you doing, idiot? Shouldn’t be up yet.” Jarl got his grounds and water put together and set the pot on the heater.

    “I’ll lay back down in a minute, just checking something.” I waved him off. “Stephan Goodman’s house came down off the cliff. Know how I had that shack up on the face? Yeah, came down with me in it. Anyway, I wake up in a giant mud wallor and around a corner of rock I see this massive tail and heard this screech. Bad as when Omah’d cry about her calves when they’d be stillborn. Cliff came down a second time and figured it was time to skat.” I approached the creature, finally giving it a good once over. The fireworks had stopped, leaving it a pale grey colour dusted in dark red speckles of varying sizes. Poking it with a stick was an option.

    It had sunk deeper into the tub, its head resting on the rim. I had taken the humanoid form for grant it, a massive swath of navy blue almost green hair swirled around it in a cascade, drifting in the water and across the body. Hands wrapped around its stomach. It looked like my little brother when he’d fall asleep curled up in mom’s arms. “It has ears, weird ears, but something like ears, Jarl,” I called back. 

Papers rustled from the other room. “You just now noticed? Flip them a bit; there are gills behind them.”

The thing’s ears were larger than mine or Jarl’s by a long stretch. Rather pretty to be honest. A bit of a see-through grey, they were at least the size of my hand with little outbursts of spines, similar to the thin skin on fish fins. Like Jarl said, pulling the one I could get to up, there were deep red gills. The things I was calling ears didn’t have a canal though, like human ears. The gills ruffled at the disturbance, and the thing’s chest cavity enlarged. At least it was still breathing.

“Why would it need a nose?” I pointed out the protrusion so reminiscent of our own.

“To smell things?” Jarl’s papers flipped again. The pot was pinging from the other room.

“I thought that’s what the gills were for.” I traced what I could only qualify as a nose. The profile reminded me a bit of Gideon. The nostrils flared at my touch, opening and closing like some of the sharks I’d seen come up in our nets. I snatched my hand from the water, not keen on getting chomped.

“You look at its teeth?” I called over my shoulder.

“Looks like ours, just a might bit sharper.” Jarl’s chair slid back as a clap of thunder shook the building.

“Figured out what it is?” I asked, poking at the cheek. It was bony, not cartilaginous. Not sure what I was expecting there, but the skin was soft rather than the more scale-like feeling down its tail.

“There’s some fairy tale from a guy named Anson or Parkerson or something about some seafoam beast. Might be one of those?” He shuffled through his papers again.

“A mermaid? Seriously? Where’s the…the…you know?” I asked, bringing my hands up to my chest in emphasis, before realizing that was stupid and Jarl couldn’t see me anyways. I rubbed my hands on my trousers and stood up, slipping on the sopping-wet floor. A hand caught my wrist, keeping me from impaling myself on the chunk of wood still in the plasterboard near the basin mirror. Could it have let me impale myself? I could have dealt with death better rather than face it, I think. I swallowed, following the hand back to the creature in the tub.

Double eyelids. And they blinked in two different directions. I had brought a monster into my brother’s apartment. That realization wrapped around me like a wet flannel blanket. I was not going to scream. I did, however, squeak like a trapped rat. The pupils were massive as they travelled across my shoulders and back to my face. A sound emanated from it. Haunting, something like a smoothed-out note from a trumpet on the other side of the hills back home. If there was such a thing as heartstrings, it was playing mine like a well-tuned banjo. That was damn well uncomfortable and it made my skin prickle.

“The what?” Jarl asked, getting up to take the percolator off.

“Um, the maid part of the whole mermaid bit?” I gulped as it pulled me closer, the slash of its lips moving. Was Jarl not hearing the sound it was making? Not sure how it harmonized three pitches at once, but it ranged the baritone, bass, and tenor melody enough to overwhelm my senses.

“Maid part? What maid part? It’s a fish, not a housekeep.” Jarl’s tone was slashing on my nerves. Ceramic grated, and the sound of coffee pouring into the mugs slithered down my shoulders.

“Woman bits. Where’s the top?” I continued, both curious and petrified as it pulled me back toward the edge of the tub and touched the tender spot below the bite mark, its eyes flicking back to mine as it continued making noises. It was talking. It had to be. No, that was ridiculous. Dogs could do the concerned look too. Just because it looked humanish, didn’t mean it could have the same intelligence. Right?

It tugged gently. Don’t ask. I got in the tub. I was not keen on getting bit again, but it was either get in the tub or have the enamel-coated cast iron jam into the lower section of my thigh right above my knee, and no thanks, that hurts. The thing took up the whole space. That weird fixation with getting into a single tub with a woman that I heard whispered behind barn doors. That’s a sick joke. My kneecap rolled, and my other leg got pinned. Not comfortable, and this was the worst part of sitting on a horse walking in a flooded gorge wither high.

“Woman bits? Really? What are you, twelve? Have some class.” Jarl tugged his chair back out, wood on wood screeching. He set the mugs down with a clunk. “Fifteen and it should be drinkable. Probably should stop staring at it. Most likely won’t be happy with you if it wakes up.”

Wakes up? It was already awake and conducting an inspection of my shoulder in a close contact way I wasn’t sure how to handle.

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Subject 15: Ch 4

Faded off white plastic. Rubbing alcohol. Scratchy fabric. “Sergeant Anson?” a female voice crackled over the speaker, pulling him into reality Fane woke to the inside of a scanning bed, his head strapped into a white cage.

“Yes, ma’am?” He tried to flex his hands but discovered both of them had been strapped down. An IV pinched in his bicep. The tops of his hands pulsed hot. They probably blew the veins before giving up and calling in a pick team.

He pulled at his memories of the doctor’s waiting room. There was a blank between it and the cell. He had dozed off there, but he had no recollection of having left the white room. Did they sedate me? His heart hammered in his chest. Black rings circled his eyes. His hearing turned to white static.

“If you would please hold still, that will make this process go more smoothly,” the voice chastisted his futile attempt at escape.

He sucked in air and counted down from one hundred. His scars burned. The buzz of the machine richocheted . His hands grew damp and the texture of the sheet sent spiders up his nerve endings. He reassured himself that he was still in the hospital, but that did little to ease the tunnel vision, or the unsettled weight in his chest. There’s most likely a good reason that they have me strapped down. He clenched his hands to stop fidgeting. For all his fighting with his inner demons, he could not still the trembling in his legs.

“Now that you’re responding, we are going to measure your cognitive abilities to make sure you are processing visual images properly and connecting their associates correctly. We are going to show you a series of images and ask you to define them. Do you understand?” the woman’s voice instructed calmly.

“Yes, ma’am. You will show me images. I tell you what I see.” He battled with sickening nausea that threatened to engulf him, made worse by knowing he couldn’t roll over if he had to puke.

Images flashed on screen, food, military regiments, flags; it was a wide variety of pictures that made no real sense to him. There was no method to the photographs, but the more they showed him, the more his scars ached, his heart pounded, his hands itched. He gripped the sheet to dry his sweating palms. Why was he having such a reaction to innocuous images? Maybe there really was something the red room woman had given him that was doing damage. A sharp heat wrapped up his spine and spread a burst of numb desire across his stomach. And they can bloody well see my reaction to this. Go away. Down. Stop. Where’s some cold water when I need it? He stared at the pictures in confusion. He was looking at fruit and office supplies. What has happened to my brain?

He lost count of the images that passed by on the screen. The muscles in his back seized up. The thrumming clunk of the machine and vibration of the bed threatened bruises. His stomach growled and pinched painfully. He had not eaten since the party, having missed breakfast, which was regularly served after the annual test. The solitary room and here did little to provide him with a clue as to the time. I could have been here for a few hours. It could be the next month for all I know. I just want to go eat and go back to my bunk and go to sleep.

“Thank you, Sergeant Anson. Nurse Gilbert is going to come help you out of there,” the woman’s voice crackled through the headphones clasped around his ears. The images left the screen. His body went hollow as if something essential had ripped a hole in him. He was on the verge of tears and could not explain why.

Time stood still with the tick of the clock in the next room slowing to a maddening rate. His heart beat fast and hard in his chest in the darkened chamber. Trapped and strung tight he breathed deep on ever other tic of the clock.

“Anson?” a deep baritone caused him to flinch. A button depressed, and the bed finally shifted from inside the machine. He looked up in relief at the open space and a large nurse in black scrubs.

“Hi?” Fane greeted the nurse.

“Hi. I’m Nurse Todd. Let’s get you out of this. Hold still a minute.” The nurse unclasped the cage from around Fane’s head, unbuckled the restraints and gave him a hand to sit up.

“That thing just likes to try beating you to death, doesn’t it?” Fane averted his eyes while Nurse Todd pulled the lines from the machine that injected dyes into the IV and capped the line.

The nurse pressed a mic on his collar. “Hey, can we take his IV out yet, or do you need it still? The edge around it is bleeding.”

“We don’t have him schedule for anymore testing. You can take it out. Is it heavy?” The woman’s voice crackled back on Nurse Todd’s mic.

“Not more than a pressure bandage won’t fix.”

Fane, free of the room and a plaster over the spot on his arm, was lead down a hall to a waiting room. The door clicked shut and a bolt clanked in place. They locked it. What the hell?

Stuck once again in a locked room, he paced from one end to the other. It is better than being strapped into that blasted machine, at least. I’d be happy about not being naked, but they don’t have the decency of giving you a gown worth crap. I’m practically hanging out here and it’s freaking freezing. What happened?

He tried to sit calmly in one of the ten chairs crammed around the tiny room. The cheap upholstery squished with an unsettling sound. The legs wobbled unevenly on the sticky linoleum. He got up and shifted to the next chair. It was the same. He continued this process. The room was too small to pace in. He picked up the chairs and stacked them so that there was two to sit on and eight in a corner. He circled the tiny room, memorizing the sound of the air conditioning system’s whine.

“I believe it is as you suspected.” A woman in a lab coat turned to Dr John. He looked over her shoulder at the images of Fane’s brain scan. Graphs corresponding to the pictures spiked with green oxytocin, yellow dopamine, and blue vasopressin release. Time-stamped images of a large upright metal ring in a warehouse showed a murky algal liquid bubble throbbing with bright citron starbursts in relation to the graphs. 

Dr John pointed to a particular set of high spikes. “Show me the image-set that resulted in these.”

The woman in the lab coat tapped a couple of buttons, and a series of twenty thumbnails popped up on the screen, each one marked to different levels on the scan. Each of the high spikes corresponded to a picture that Fane had not been aware of seeing. Short nanosecond flashes of images of Prince Orlov in various states of activity in between longer intervals showing the fruit and office supplies that Fane had identified.

“Professor?” Dr John asked on a comlink.

“Yes, Doctor?” A staticky female voice echoed over the line.

“Did you see what I saw?” Dr John leaned over the screen once more and tapped on the image of the massive ring in the warehouse. The live feed pulled up to take over part of the screen.

“There was an activation spike and a connection line, but it wasn’t powerful enough to open the door,” the woman answered. The doctor nodded his head in wonderment.

Zephyr shifted out of the shadows in a dark corner behind the terminal banks. “What now?”

“Tell him that he hit his head with something, that he’ll be fine in a little while. Get him dressed to impress and have the Prince meet him. With any luck, we’ll get that door opened yet,” Doctor John answered.

“Looks like you needed a Red Room guy, not a woman, Doc. Who would have thought?” Zephyr tossed a wave to the room on his way out the door.

“He seemed to know his way around her well enough!” The Doctor shouted after Zephyr.

“He taught me a few things I didn’t know could be done.” Zephyr pulled the door shut behind him.

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Firefly Fish: Ch 4

“Jarl, I need a room!” I demanded as the door pulled open beneath my fist.

“Marin, what is with banging on my door in the middle of-” my brother’s eyes settled on what was draped on my back.

“No time, let me in!” I pushed past him and into the little bathroom attached to his one room apartment. Quickly pulling my slicker off the creature, I dropped it into the claw foot tub, its tail taking up most of the tile floor. Brilliant patterns speckled in iridescent rainbows across the breadth of the body.

“Did anyone see you?” Jarl squeaked, looking over me as I settled the mercreature in.

“If they did, most they’ll think is I caught a damn big catch and wanted to share it with my brother. Stop yelling!” I hissed.

“This is a fish story to beat all.” His eyes were going as glassy as my last dinner.

“Yeah, and there won’t be much left if I don’t get it to stop bleeding. Help me!” I tore off my shirt and yanked Jarl down in the crowded room to have him hold hard to the base of the creature’s tale to staunch the flow of blood while I contemplated the massive rusted pipe embedded there. “Got a kit?” I glanced around at the basin stand and peaked out the door.

“Most I’ve got is a sewing kit for buttons.” Jarl shook his head.

“Damn it. Should I get a doctor? I don’t think I can make this stop!” I pulled the tourniquet from my shirt tight on the tail. The creature grunted at my effort, the tail flipping limply. A crack had me looking up. The enamel beneath its grip had cracked on the cast iron tub.

“If it doesn’t die, it’d fetch an awful handsome coin for a sideshow,” Jarl nodded.

“Hell no, I’m not letting some yahoo put this guy in a traveling tub.” I dislodged myself from the nest of slick scales and rooted out the sewing kit and a couple sticks from near the wood stove.

“I don’t think splinting it’ll fix this, Marin,” Jarl hedged at the reprimand.

“Not splinting.” I shoved the stick between the creature’s teeth. It spat it out. I put the other sticks in its hands as it went to strangle me and shoved the first stick back in its snarling trap. “Don’t fucking break the tub before I get water in it, shark bait!” I pointed to the crack in the enamel. “‘Bout to drown you in several gallons of gin you keep this up ‘n I’m not partial to pickled herring.”

It threw the sticks. One impaled in the wall next to the basin stand mirror.

“Why did you bring this thing here?” Jarl demanded as he helped me hold the squirming mess down.

“Because you’re the only person I knew who had a tub and I could count on to not dissect the beast in two second flat. You want to wrestle it while I pull the pipe or do you want me to keep the creature of the deep down? One or the other!” I hissed as I grabbed for wrists that could have rivalled a black smith’s.

“You won more prizes riding bucks at the fairs every summer. Keep it from going for my throat and I’ll see about mending!” Jarl shoved me in the tub with the writhing disaster while he dove to straddle the thing’s tail.

“ ‘ll do my best. This ain’t no eight second ride.” I got the beast’s arms crossed, pinning the wrists to what I would qualify as a chest. Massive grey eyes stared up, incredulous. It thrashed out, escaping the hold.

“You gotta do better than that, Marin. It’ll bleed to death on the floor if it keeps that wiggle up!” Jarl warned from behind my back. Thunder crackled, shaking the floorboards and windows.

“Damn it!” I tackled the thing, getting its webbed hands back down to its chest, putting it in a bear hug if only to hold it still. Lightning had me gasping as my right hand shot through with hellfire, followed by numbness.

“Marin! Marin! What happened!” Jarl yelled as the metal pipe hit the tile with a clank.

“Got its fangs sunk into my shoulder. Get it done. It’s entertained for the moment.” Tears crowded and I buried my forehead into the thing’s clavicle, breathing through the pain as best I could.

“You’ve gotta be joking. This thing ain’t worth you getting some infection. You’ll get just as dead as it’ll be!” Jarl turned, his hand grasping at the waistband of my trousers.

“Get it done, Jarl! I’ve got this!” I gasped, clamping down hard around the beast. It moaned low in my ear, whimpering with the snipping of scissors echoing in the tiled room. One hand snaked across its chest to grasp onto my left shoulder, the grip sending stars into the back of my eyes. “Let up, let up, shark bait,” I breathed the command. I could take the teeth or the hands, but not both. I loosened my grip and shoved the initial stick I had back into its hand to get it to let go. It hunted out the other stick when it got its fangs out of my shoulder.

“You’re bleeding!” Jarl’s voice cracked.

“Of course I am. I’d be more worried if I was dripping glitter!” I clamped down on my shoulder to staunch the flow of blue-black blood. The creature beneath me whimpered more as it tried to push its back against the tub, working to raise itself up. “Don’t freaking eat me and I’ll help you.’ I settled a hand at the arch in its back and behind its arm to lift it. It wanted to see what Jarl was doing to its tail. Now able to see what was going on, it willingly shoved the stick between its teeth and grabbed onto my arm. Jarl nodded at it as he poured out the pitcher of water over the fist-sized hole in its tail. The stick snapped. Thank the morning tide it hadn’t been my arm that snapped.

I pushed another bit of kindling into its mouth and dislodged myself from the tub to kneel next to Jarl to quickly start patching what we could by the lamplight in the deluge of the backside of the hurricane.

“What the hell am I looking at here, Marin? It’s all freaking dark red. That’s not natural!” Jarl demanded as he got deeper into the wound.

“The thing in the tub ain’t natural,” I quipped back. Jarl wasn’t wrong, though. It had the same flesh patterning as some of the marine mammals we had caught in our nets before. “It has to be part dolphin or something. It can breathe air just fine or else it would have already died by this point.”

“With this colour show under its skin?” Jarl demanded, pointing to the starbursts of circles radiating across its skin.

“Fish fairy?” I suggested, heating needles through lamp fire as Jarl meticulously found every tendon and ligament he could. The poor beast in the tub whimpered like a beaten dog up until my brother found a spot, and all the sticks clattered to the tile floor. It had passed out. Probably for the best that it finally succumbed. It would take us another hour to finish the gruesome task.

Exhausted and in pain, I sat back against the bathroom wall, Jarl on the other side of the great beast’s tail. “Need to get everything cleaned up,” he muttered, his glance calculating damages.

“Take it out of my lockbox. I’m the one who’s putting you out doing this.” I pulled myself off the ground.

“The hell do you think you’re going? You’re in no shape to be moving with that bite. Creature might be venomous!” Jarl pushed to have me sit back down.

“It needs water or else the skin and scales will dry out and get infected.” My head was spinning, though.

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Subject 15: Ch 3

Blinking, the white room came into focus. His head throbbed, and the abnormally bright florescent lights were not making the black rings in his eyes better. He raised his hands to his head, pressing against his temples. “Where am I?” Fane asked the room. It was rather a useless question, the padded cell vacant except for him.

Dropping his hand, an itchy, puckered texture different from his smooth shirt met his fingers. He looked down at himself. He was in a short blue-spotted hospital gown that barely reached his mid-thighs. “Shit. She must have given me one hell of a bender for them to have me in here. No, that’s not quite it. They’d have told me if I had something. Did something go wrong? Are my plates all right?” He tried to pull his gown tighter around him.

The clock’s ticking in the darkened room did not help ease the tension of the men gathered around the green-lit table. A topographical map spread across a high-resolution screen, small pawns, tanks, and ships sporadically dispersed. A knock at the door echoed in the chamber. An assistant let in Zephyr.

He eased over to the table and sat with the rest of the men, taking a pawn from his jacket pocket, he set it in the middle of the table. The screen flashed, picking up the pawn, and dropped a digital pawn onto the map. Zephyr returned his physical pawn to his coat pocket.

“As you can see,” the doctore pointed to a set of papers laying partially fanned out on the map, “from the labs we drew this afternoon, Subject 15 has finally found the triggering mechanism.”

“Doc, were you able to determine what the catalyst was?” Zephyr reached for one of the sheets.

“Well, it wasn’t anything he ingested from the night before.” The doctor pulled the page out of Zephyr’s hand, stacked all the sheets together and handed over the pile. Zephyr took it and pulled out a very long list of lab tests and graphs. He scanned them over and tossed them on the table.

“What was he doing when he first started exhibiting these symptoms, Abbadelli?” A muscular, bald man asked.

Zephyr shrugged, chewing on his lip as he thought back. “We were assembling for the bi-annual physical test. We had just started roll call, General.”

“What was different about today’s roll call?” another man asked, this one short, thin of face, and sallow against the green of the map table.

Zephyr leaned back in his chair, observing the men who all leaned forward in anticipation. This project had been a financial drain on the military, and it was due time that it started panning out. Zephyr knew it, his own pot having been drained as it was. “We had a party for the men last night. I had him get completely plastered on a doped joint to drop his walls. Subject 15 hooked up with a red room woman Doc had me point out to him. Her room had been set up with observation equipment. Nothing of interest occurred that affected the triggering mechanism immediately. I have my doubts about his claim of having been a virgin, though. He may not have been really into it, but kid’s got talent that you only learn – ehem, sorry.” He caught a censored look the general threw at him and moved on. “As that file says, though, nothing he took or did from the party influenced his mood outside of a mild hangover. When I met with him before coming onto the field, though, he appeared to be acting perfectly fine. It was only after roll started that he began acting differently,” Zephyr replied.

“That tells us what we already know. What was different about today?” the man slammed his fist on the table, the map flickering.

“Colonel, I don’t know what to tell you. You know as much as I do at this point. I’m not the doctor. I’m his handler,” Zephyr snipped.

“Abbadelli,” the General reprimanded testily.

“What was his emotional state?” the Colonel pressed.

Zephyr pinned him with a glare. “In a word, depressed, I’d say.”

The men around the table all mumbled dismissive comments. The doc spoke up, providing his opinion that summarised everyone else’s, “that’s not the right emotional state for the hormone catalyst to start.”

“And tigers don’t dance,” Zephyr snapped.

“Zephyr Abbadelli, I’d ask you to show some level of respect,” the General growled.

“Sorry, sir,” Zephyr replied. Directing his apology to the doctor, “Sorry, Doc John. I’m aware that isn’t the emotional state that is supposed to get things moving.” He paused for a moment to fiddle with a tiny plastic ship on the map while he tried to think of something worthwhile. “I don’t know. Maybe his roommate invited him for tea or some lager after the test, and he felt like he was finally being included in the comradery, and that made him happy. Who knows? You know, we had a guy from New Punjab come in to scout today during the test. I’d say that has to be the only new thing that I would know about,” Zephyr mused. Not like there had been more than two seconds of interaction between the two, and it sure as hell wasn’t a pleasant one.

The General snapped his finger at the attendant standing at the door. The attendant shifted over to the table, the green light illuminating his face grotesquely. The General whispered to the attendant, and the man dashed out of the door like demons had come to personally drag him to hell.

Zephyr watched the general closely. “Sir?”

The General waved him off as the group waited in silence.

The Colonel, uncomfortable in the quiet, turned to Doctor John. “I’m sorry, sir. If it’s a bother, how exactly is Subject 15 supposed to bring about the TDC exactly by his emotional state? As you are aware, I took over the post from the late Colonel Jinkins this past winter, so I haven’t had to deal in this matter often, if at all.”

The doctor shifted in his seat and glanced over to the General. The man shrugged. “He should know some of the background on Subject 15. It’ll keep us all from looking like idiots later.” He poured himself a glass of water from the sweating pitcher on the buffet behind them.

The Doctor reached over to Zephyr for his file. Zephyr pulled the document back together before handing it to him. Doctor John snatched it from him and vigorously riffled through it for a sheet. He handed the paper over to the Colonel, replying, “The most challenging thing about all this was finding a guinea pig with enough psychic talent to take the stress load. Subject 15’s brain structure has been modified to amplify a series of signals into a secondary plane of existence, a parallel universe if you must.

“These signals can, in theory, pull over objects, even sentient beings. You will have to speak with Doctor Glauson on the exact details of this transference. I was only there for the neural surgery.”

The Colonel paled, glancing over a CT scan of a brain with several small points embedded throughout the folds of the lobes. “You’re joking. Is that really possible? Psychics? You’ve been hitting your own joints a little too hard.” He handed the image back to the doctor. The doc shoved the page back in haphazardly.

Zephyr chewed his tongue, appalled by Doctor John’s dismissive nature to the man in question. “I’ve honestly been wondering if it is a failed experiment, doc,” he goaded. The Doctor snapped a fiery eye at him.

The General held up a pair of placating hands. “I think we have all had some doubts, Zephyr.”

The doc turned to the General, all bustle, but he deflated as he leaned back in his chair, knowing that deep down, he had also doubted the effectiveness of the experiment.

The Colonel, still trying to come to grips with the situation, continued with his questions. “So, this Subject 15’s brain has been rewired to be able to bring someone from another dimension over here. How’s that supposed to help us with this war?”

“Not any person, Colonel. We have found a transdimensional creature, or TDC for short, at the moment, that could crush cities, decimate countrysides, and end this war without a need for nuclear firepower. Then, when the enemy’s willpower has been completely levelled, we’ll send the creature back. This’ll work better in the end than bombing, gassing, and nuking. Think about it. We won’t have any radiation poisoning,” the General supplied.

“General,” the Doctor whispered a caution to the man next to him. “We still are uncertain of how to get rid of said monster when we are finished using it. Subject 15 will only be able to bring it over.”

“Shut it, John. Our men can put it down easily enough. Our scientists say they have determined it’s weak spot,” the General boasted heartily.

Then how is it supposed to go up against whole cities? Zephyr asked himself.

A rap at the door had all the men turning in their seats. The attendant scurried in to whisper to the General. “Well, man, let him in,” the General exclaimed. The attendant saluted and went back to the door to motion in the New Punjabi scout.

The scout strode in, purposeful but a note of hesitation lingered at the crease of his eyes.

“Prince Ishan Orlov, sirs,” the attendant announced to the rest of the room. A larger man watched from outside the hall, unhappy about having been left out. Ishan bowed deeply, “May I be of some assistance to you?” His voice gently seeped through the room.

“Prince Orlov, nice to finally meet you. We were meaning to have a nice chat with you at the banquet tomorrow night. Were you able to attend this morning’s fitness test?” the General asked warmly. Zephyr glared at the General’s pandering tone.

“Yes, sir. A rather splendid sight to behold. I must commend you on the fine assortment of troops you have at hand.” Orlov raised himself back to a proud standing posture.

“I am pleased to hear that they were to your expectations, Prince Orlov,” the General smiled. He motioned Orlov to a seat at the table next to Zephyr.

Orlov hesitated, flicking Zephyr a studied glance. The man had never come back to the physical assessment test to finish administering it. “Thank you.” Orlov eased into the cushioned seat. Zephyr passed him a glass of water, if only for the sake of courtesy. The scout took it and placed it on the table in front of him.

The General cleared his throat uncomfortably. “I don’t wish to seem impertinent-“

“Sir, you needn’t be so formal with me. Today, I am a lowly scout looking for a few good men willing to train my own troops.” Orlov’s teeth gleamed mercilessly in the table’s glow.

“I’m sorry.” The General apologised. Orlov waited patiently. “Have you, by chance, encountered one of our sergeants, Fane Anson?”

“Fane Anson?” Prince Orlov frowned. “No. I can’t say that I have, sir.” Folding his hands in his lap, he watched the assembly of men.

“You met him this morning,” Zephyr informed him quietly, “I took him to the infirmary.”

“Ah, the stoned kid. I haven’t met him before this morning,” Orlov dismissed.

“What gave you the impression that he was stoned? If I might ask Prince Orlov?” Doctor John broke in.

“His eyes were dilated, his face was flushed, and his breathing was fast. He was hot to the touch but did not look like he had a cold,” replied Orlov. What were they on about? Had the kid done something while he was in the infirmary? Surely he hadn’t died; that would put a damper on the rest of his day.

“Fair enough,” the doctor shrugged.

“Is there something wrong with this Fane Anson?” Orlov pressed.

“We did test him, and he did not have anything in his system to indicate a drug usage past 12 hours before showing up for work this morning. Those in him were not liable to cause the symptoms that you noted and had been administered by qualified personnel for a prior established medical condition.” The doctor mentioned, pulling another page out of his file to look over.

Zephyr flicked a contemptuous glance at the doc. Qualified his butt, he had been informally trained to inject the guy whenever the doc got the desire to use Fane as a guinea pig. For the most part, Fane had only ever been told that Zephyr was giving him a sedative for anxiety that was liable to crop up when dealing with tight spaces. The doped joint had come from the doc’s delusional pharmacy for screwed-up mad scientists. He was nauseated at the thought of what all he had subjected the guy to at this point.

“Would you be willing to meet with him once more?” the general asked Orlov.

The Prince sat back for a second, a little put off at the request. If the man wasn’t dying, then was there a reason to be granting him the privilege of speaking with a man of a far superior position than himself? “Sir?” Orlov asked.

“It is a matter of some urgency, Prince Orlov, between allies, that we find out what is wrong with Fane Anson,” the general explained.

“I understand that every troop member is of importance to the cause, but is he of that much importance that I must demean myself to dealing with subordinates?” Orlov protested.

The General regarded him for a second before waving over an attendant to see Orlov out. “More than you think, my boy,” the general added as Orlov found himself being dismissed from the room.

“What are you thinking bringing in a scout to the map room, sir!” Zephyr came up to his feet when the door behind Prince Orlov clicked shut.

“We had nothing on the board today that mattered.” The General waved off Zephyr’s protest.

“Then explain why he was in here.” Zephyr dropped into his seat, teeth on edge.

“A minor suspicion. One from Prince Orlov’s files.” The General snapped a finger. The assistant went to the filing cabinets at the end of the room and extracted a manilla envelope. He set it in front of Zephyr.

Wrinkling his brows, Zephyr untwisted the cord holding the packet together and slid out the papers to read it. “You’re gonna bait Fane?”

“We’ll see. Doc, have an imaging study done on him.” The General took the file from Zephyr and passed it over to Doc John.

“Do you have someone who can pull pictures?” Doc John nodded after a cursory glance.

“I’ll have a notice sent over to my boys in Department D to have some made available to you. Call them in about an hour or two.”

Chapel Orahamm (C) 2022-2023. All Rights Reserved.

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