Ryk E. Spoor's Blog, page 25

Princess Holy Aura: Chapter 22

They'd survived the night, but there were some more dangerous waters ahead...

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Chapter 22.

     "Seika's been looking forward to coming over so much," Mr. Cooper said, with a broad smile. "She could barely wait to get into the car. Thought she might just run over here herself!"

Holly smiled back, as did Trayne Owen. But inside, Holly felt roiling nervous tension that was taking everything she had to hide. I'm so worried . . .

Worried that Seika would run away when she learned the truth. It shocked Holly how much that thought hurt; as Steve he'd been close to Dex, and losing Dex had been painful, but that had still been . . . oh, a sort of parental thing, or at least a big-brother interaction. The anguished worry that was burning in her gut now went way beyond that.

Still, they managed to get through the usual parent-dropping-off-kid discussions. The two girls waited, listening, until they heard Dave Cooper's car pull out of the driveway and head off down the street.

Words burst from Seika in a torrent. "Guys, guys, you have to tell me, that was all real, right, I wasn't dreaming, because, O-M-G, I went to bed that night and when I woke up I couldn't be sure, but then there was the damage at the school and all the rumors going around and—"

Despite the sour tension in her stomach, Holly laughed. "No, Seika, it was real." The smile faded; she couldn't keep it going, not as things were. "Too real."

The other girl's smile didn't disappear, but it did shrink, and she toyed with the huge poofy ponytails on the right side of her head. "I . . . guess I get it. I think."

Trayne Owen made her jump by shrinking to Silvertail. "I believe you do . . . to some extent, at least. Seika, you are now bound to the destiny of the Apocalypse Maidens."

"You are a magical animal! Wow. And . . . yeah, that bit with the transformation was weird. I mean, seriously freaky, I even knew what to say without knowing it."

"Yet you seemed . . . ready to go along with it."

Seika gave the white rat a look reserved for very stupid people. "Who turns down the chance to be a superhero?"

"Many people, in fact, and of those who would accept it, even fewer are suited to the role. And perhaps when you learn the entirety of the situation you may understand why."

"Seika, I really wish we could've told you everything before—"

"—But that's not how it works, right?" Seika's eyes were narrowed in concentration. "That . . . thing, it was like every slasher movie squished into one. And the new mahou shoujo getting chosen in the middle of a battle, that's . . ." The eyebrows came up. "Holy fuck," she said in that high-pitched affected voice, "it's a fucking battle of the memes."

Holly glanced at Silvertail, whose furry face echoed her own surprise. "You've . . . kinda nailed it, yeah. It's more complicated than that, though."

"Tell me."

"We might as well sit down to dinner while I tell you," Silvertail said, morphing back to his human form. "It will not be a short tale."

They were well through most of dinner by the time Silvertail finished describing the background—Lemuria, the original Apocalypse Maidens' creation, their enemies, the cycle. Seika looked deadly serious by that point.

"H. P. Lovecraft? That creepy old writer was right?"

"Say rather that he learned much of the truth, but it was of necessity filtered through his own knowledge and experience. And—as we saw a few days ago—as our adversaries adapt more and more to the current zeitgeist, their manifestations will be farther and farther from those imagined by your prior generations."

"Boy is this going to be hard to keep secret," Seika said after a moment.

As good a segue as I'm going to get. "We don't actually want to keep it a secret. At least, not from everyone, not from your family—or the other Maidens', whenever we find them."

Seika screwed her face up. "What? I mean, isn't that part of the whole meme?"

"It's one of the really problematic parts of the meme," Holly said. "I mean, really, we're not adults, and our parents worry about us going out alone to the store down the road, so don't we think they'd like to know if their girls are going to be fighting monsters?"

"I . . . guess, yeah. But you said we're stuck with this, so what if my dad or mom says, 'No way!' You can't just switch me out for a substitute, right?" Seika's anxiousness was almost funny; obviously the idea of having the awesomeness of being Radiance Blaze taken away and given to someone else really bothered her, and in a lot of ways Holly couldn't blame her.

"No, alas, I cannot," Silvertail admitted, returning to his normal form. "And choosing this path means it is difficult and potentially perilous. But in addition to the fact that your parents obviously have a right to know about your activities, there is also the fact that as time goes on, it is possible the rest of your family will be in peril as well. Our adversaries are not at all averse to attacking the Maidens through their friends and family. Holly and I agreed that they also must know this so that they will be alert to the danger and possibly even be able to avoid it."

"It's kinda like the way we finished Mr. Stalker back at the school," Holly said. "We're taking the parts of the meme that we know are stupid or dangerous and punching them in the face first."

The smaller girl bit her lip, then nodded. "Okay, I get it. So we're here to figure out how to break the news?"

"Partly," Silvertail said. "But also to let you in on all the truth. Some of which may be disturbing, even frightening, in a way that you do not yet guess."

Seika looked suspiciously at Silvertail, then to Holly. "We're not really working for the bad guys, are we? Or stuck in some terrible time loop where we're all going to get killed?"

"No to the first," Holly answered, then paused. "But . . . the second . . . maybe sorta kinda? Not the going to get killed part, but sort of a time loop. I mean, we could get killed. Those monsters aren't playing games, Mr. Stalker would've cut us in half if he could."

"But a time loop, yes?"

"More a . . . side branch in time, if all goes well," Silvertail answered. Holly let him summarize the situation.

"So I might help save the world and I won't remember it? That sucks!"

"To an extent, yes. But on the other hand, you will not have to recall encounters with terrifying beings that truly do not belong in this reality—and neither will any of the less-well-protected victims. If people die in this continuity due to their direct actions, then they will, unfortunately, die in the main continuity as well. But if they have suffered any consequences other than death, those consequences will be undone if the Apocalypse Maidens are victorious and Azathoth of the Nine Arms is once more banished to the other side of eternity. Your world will return to what it was . . . only better, not merely for you and yours, but for a considerable time better for many others associated with you and even this area of the world. You in particular will find your life following a path of your dreams; each of the Maidens will have a life that rewards them for their risks."

"Still not sure I like the idea. But I guess if I don't remember, it won't be bothering me then."

"Yeah," said Holly. Time to bite the bullet. "But there's one other really important thing you need to know." Seika looked at her, and the concern in her eyes showed that she could hear Holly's tension. "This whole deal—about telling your parents, not hiding stuff from them—comes from Silvertail and I agreeing we had to do this right—that we couldn't take kids and throw them into life and soul-threatening danger without their parents even knowing."

Seika nodded. "Right, I get you. And . . . ?"

". . . and that's partly because Silvertail decided when he started this cycle that he was very unhappy with the whole mahou shoujo thing where he was taking half-grown kids and making them weapons. So . . . he decided that for at least one of them, the first, he wouldn't do that."

Seika froze. Then her gaze drifted around the room, looking at pictures, displays; she got up without saying anything and looked at the weapons, posters, and other things displayed all around the house. "These . . . most of these aren't Mr. Owen's. Silvertail's. They're yours."

Holly swallowed. "Yeah."

She turned back slowly. "You're . . . you're a lot older than you look. Right?"

"Well . . . yes and no. The person Silvertail chose to be Princess Holy Aura is a lot older. But the longer I've been Holly Owen, the more . . . well, I really am fourteen, just with really strange memories added in. But I feel fourteen. And I'm not . . . I was never pretending around you. I mean, pretending to be your friend."

Seika looked nervously around. "Really?"

"Really. They're . . . I mean, I have all the memories of the other me, but the feelings are different. It's been . . . pretty scary, actually. I've been moving away from who I was to begin with ever since I started, and sometimes I'm terrified."

"Which is part of the reason for Holy Aura's strength. And, I believe, will contribute to yours as well," Silvertail said. "One of the key factors for the power of magic, especially the magic the Apocalypse Maidens wield, is willing sacrifice—the ability of the Maiden and those around them to accept that they must give up or at least risk something vastly precious to themselves in order to achieve the goal of defending the world. If your parents accept your destiny, for instance, they are willingly risking their own child for the sake of the world—a very powerful symbolic sacrifice and one that echoes through the enchantment to reinforce your power as Radiance Blaze."

"Well, wait, just hold it a sec, if you did that with her," she pointed to Holly, "why didn't you choose some adult for Radiance Blaze? Ms. Vaneman, maybe, if you're stuck around the school."

The white rat's whiskers drooped. "As I told . . . Holly, I wish sincerely that I could. But while I am permitted—even, to be accurate, required—to select the one who will be the vessel of Princess Holy Aura, once that selection is made the enchantment proceeds of its own accord to trigger the selection and, at the right moment, activation of the other four. I have no ability to control that, or I assure you I would have done so in this era."

At least she's not panicking . . . yet. Or freaking out too much. But we can't keep dancing around. "So he got to choose me," Holly said. "And decided he wanted that selection to be the right person for the job. I . . . still sometimes think he chose someone not nearly as awesome as he needs, but what he wanted was someone who could handle the demands of protecting the world, fighting the monsters, and adult enough to really, really understand what Silvertail was asking them to do. And, if possible, someone who if they agreed would be sacrificing as much as possible in order to do it, so that they'd be the strongest possible Princess Holy Aura."

Seika's eyes widened. "No . . . way. You're . . ."

Jesus, she's smart. "Yeah." She stepped back, to the other end of the room, so as to be as nonthreatening as possible. "He chose . . ."

A blaze of white-crystal light enveloped Holly, and suddenly he felt the height and mass returned. ". . . me."

Seika stared at him, immobile. He stayed where he was. "Steve Russ. That's my . . . well, real name. The name I was using before Silvertail chose me, and what I'll be using afterward. If we win. Holy shit, now it feels weird being . . . me." The voice he used to accept sounded completely wrong in his ears. The way his body felt—slow, heavy, ponderous—was actually repellent. "Dammit. But . . . you needed to know the truth. We decided that if the whole point of choosing me was to make the right choice, then we had to make the moral and ethical path we took the right one all along, as far as we could manage it. I . . ."

Steve concentrated, and felt the weight and mental heaviness fade away, replaced by the lightness and far heavier worries of Holly. "I . . . hope you can understand, Seika."

The other girl said nothing for long moments, and Holly swallowed. It could all fall apart right here, right now. And yet she'll still be the second Apocalypse Maiden, and how will we ever deal with that?

"Holly . . ." Seika finally said. "You . . . you're real, right?"

"Now? I think I'm more real than Steve right now, and that scares me. But that's part of the sacrifice thing, I guess. I'm risking . . . me. All of me. All the choices I made, the person I was."

The black girl's gaze suddenly transferred to Silvertail. "So a guy becoming a girl is a big sacrifice? Isn't that pretty sexist, rat?"

Silvertail gave a squeaking snort. "In a sense, I suppose—because there is still much sexism in your society. But in truth, no. The sacrifice is in what you perceive as your self. If Steve had possessed a desire to be a woman, it would be less of a sacrifice. Had I chosen a transgender man—one who was born a woman, physically, and was forced to present as one, but who preferred to be seen and thought of as a man despite this—the sacrifice would have been equally strong, because their self-image and personal identity was in opposition to the one I asked them to take on. Yes, as a culture there is still a stronger stigma against a man choosing to take on feminine traits, but the sacrifice is purely a personal one, not a societal one. Steve has of course internalized some of the societal attitudes, but this simply makes his sacrifice of his own self-image, and even his physical form, as well as the respect and position granted by being an adult, more powerful."

Seika took a slow, hesitant step forward. "What about the power—strength, all that?"

Holly grimaced. "It's sort of a sacrifice and sort of not. As Holly Owen, I'm basically what you see. I'm pretty strong for a girl my age, but compared to Steve? He could tie me in knots without even thinking much about it. But . . . Princess Holy Aura could kick his fat ass even easier. Steve gets none of that."

Seika toyed with her ponytail again, then looked back at Silvertail. "And you can't take this away from me."

"No. Even if you were to reject Holly because of what she was and leave this house, never to speak to us again, you would remain the living vessel of Princess Radiance Blaze. That would of course carry with it the risk—the inevitability—that our enemies would eventually seek you out. And while Radiance Blaze is powerful indeed, I believe you understand that, alone, you would eventually fall."

Seika looked searchingly into Holly's eyes. "You . . . you're really my friend, right? I mean, I said you were my BFF before, but—"

"No but!" Holly heard her voice come out sharp, tearful, pleading. "Seika, yes, you're my friend. What Steve . . . was, is, whatever, it scares me but he's not really me anymore. I'm not him. I'm Holly Owen. And I'm your friend, I've . . ."—the truth slowly dawned on her in wonder—"I've been happier the last few weeks since we've been friends than I think Steve was in like years. I'd . . . I'd miss you totally if you left."

Seika stared at Holly for a long, long moment . . . and then without warning her bright smile flashed out again. "I'd really miss you too."

Holly was suddenly crying, feeling a fear she'd barely understood seeping away, relief bursting through her, as Seika gave her a hug and she returned it fiercely.

Seika pulled back and looked at Silvertail. "I've seen weirder stuff in some of the things I like reading, you know. But you think this was a hard thing to tell me? Let me tell you, if we can't figure out how to do this just right—my dad's gonna kill you!"

 

 

Princess Holy Aura: Chapter 21

Well, they'd beaten the monster, but sometimes that's just the start of the problems...

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Chapter 21.

     "Daddy!"

Holly jumped up from the stiff-backed plastic chair that sat on one side of the simple table and leapt into Mr. Owen's somewhat startled embrace with such force that even the much taller man was almost knocked over.

She was disconcerted to realize how little of her joy and relief was feigned, and how much of it was real. For a moment . . . it was like having my father show up when I needed him most.

She couldn't dwell on that now; this was a good reaction, the right reaction for the circumstances. Too bad he couldn't have just stayed with us, but there was no reason for Dad to be at the school, and every reason for Silvertail to head back home as fast as he could so no one else saw him.

"Holly, are you all right? When the police called me I thought—"

"I'm fine, I'm fine, but oh, God, Daddy, Mr. Jefferson, and there was a man with an axe, and—"

"Slow down, slow down, Holly." Trayne Owen looked up at the detectives with what seemed genuine confusion and worry. "An axe?"

"I'm sorry, sir, but you did come down here without even waiting for us to explain everything," said the redheaded woman.

"I suppose I did. My apologies. Trayne Owen, and you are . . . ?"

"Detective Dana Kisaragi," she said, showing her ID, and shook Mr. Owen's hand. "And my apologies for having to call you down here, but this is a serious matter."

"Can you explain? Is Holly in trouble somehow?"

"No, nothing like that," Detective Kisaragi said. "Please, sit down. Coffee?"

Holly studied her covertly as her father accepted a cup. Despite the name, Dana Kisaragi had no sign of Japanese ancestry; she did have a wedding ring, though, so probably she'd married someone with the name. Tall—maybe a hair over six feet—her hair was clearly pretty long but was pulled up and tied well back, out of her way. Suit was immaculate even though she'd been here since the police had first showed up to get the girls out of the school. Sharp grey-green eyes; using a small recorder, not bothering with physical notes.

Holly's gut sense was that this was a very competent officer . . . which made her really dangerous for the masquerade.

"First, Mr. Owen . . . I assume you have heard of the two . . . rather extraordinary events that happened near here in the last few months?"

"You mean the reports of . . . well, some sort of monsters? One in the mall? Yes, I could hardly miss them."

"Well, it appears—I have to emphasize appears—that another such incident has happened at this school. Unlike the others, this one has resulted in at least one fatality."

"Fatal . . . someone's been killed? In my daughter's school?"

"Yes, sir. Which is why we need your permission to interview your daughter. We're interviewing all the girls who were in the school at the time in hope of making sense of what happened. Something happened there, and it wasn't just an ordinary murder."

"How do you mean?" Trayne Owen's eyes were narrowed, studying Dana Kisaragi as though she might be responsible for endangering his daughter.

"I am not at liberty to discuss details with anyone at this time," she said. "But it is vital that we get information from all the witnesses as quickly as we can, before memory fades or they start talking over what they saw between each other—as they inevitably will once they go back to school."

Trayne turned to Holly. "Holly, I don't know what you saw, but . . . are you up to talking about it?"

She swallowed. She still was a little shaky, even after an hour or so, so it didn't take much to emphasize it. "I . . . I guess. You'll stay here?"

"I certainly will." He looked at the detective. "I trust you have no objection?"

"I would prefer to interview her alone, but if you insist—"

"I do. You will speak with my daughter in my presence, or not at all."

"Very well." She sat down across from Holly at the little table in the interview room. "Holly, do you need anything? More water? Something to eat?"

She shook her head. "Nothing to eat . . . I'm not . . . hungry yet. A little more water, maybe."

One of the other detectives—Hughes, she thought his name was—opened a small fridge and brought out another bottle of water. "Thank you, Hughes," Kisaragi said. "You and Gilbert can wait outside. No, wait. Go check on the others and see how the interviews are coming; maybe the two of you can take a couple of the other girls or we'll be here all night."

"Yes, Detective," said the one named Gilbert, while Hughes just said, "Yes, ma'am." The door closed quietly behind them. A distant rumble of thunder echoed through the building, showing that the storm had not yet passed.

"Now, Holly, I need you to tell me everything that happened tonight. Start with what you were doing before you noticed anything odd, and then go from there."

"All right. Um, we were sitting around one of the cafeteria tables—"

"Who was 'we'?"

"Oh, our Steampunk Club. Me, Seika Cooper, Nikki Hand, Tierra MacKintor, and Caitlin Modofori."

"Got it. Go on."

"Well, I was running our game . . ."

She told the truth up to the point that they finally made it to A-Wing and the front doors. There wasn't any reason not to tell the truth, after all. "All right, so your club, along with the girls from the sports teams and two other clubs meeting that evening, arrived at the entranceway. What then?"

Damn. I can't talk to Seika and our stories have to match.

Trayne Owen touched her hand. "Relax, Holly. Just think about what happened and tell the detective."

Suddenly she was aware that there were memories of that time—strangely phantom memories, but clear, and she knew somehow that they accorded with what the other girls would have seen and heard. "Well, um, we all tried to get the doors open but they were locked. A couple of the bigger girls grabbed one of the big benches near the office and tried to break the glass in one of the doors, but it didn't work no matter how hard they hit it."

"Really? Do you remember which door?"

She thought a moment. "If you're looking from the inside out, the second door from the left-hand side."

The redheaded woman nodded, looking thoughtful. "So what next?"

Holly consulted the ghostly recollections again. "Well, they'd just given up on beating on the door, and even Devika and the older girls were starting to look scared for real, when we hear this voice shouting from down B-Wing."

"A voice? What kind of voice?"

"A girl's voice, I guess. But it was . . . really powerful, like it was through a loudspeaker or something. But it wasn't—not through the school loudspeakers, anyway. You could tell it was coming from down B-Wing's hall." Boy, this is freaky. I'm remembering this perfectly . . . except I know it's not a memory at all.

"Could you hear what it said?"

"Not all of it, but at the end of the first time, I'm sure it said something like 'Princess Holy Arrow'." Close enough, anyway.

The faintest quirk of Detective Kisaragi's eyebrow showed that she recognized something. "I see. You say the first time. The voice spoke more than once?"

"Oh, yeah. Right after that there was a little pause and, well, it sounded like this princess was threatening something, I guess the . . ."—she shuddered, remembering now as an ordinary girl the hideously creepy sing-song voice—"the . . . killer, the stalker? Anyway, I couldn't make out the whole speech but she definitely said that the thing was going down."

"Interesting. And then?"

Holly related what those shadowy memories told her—fragments of words, bomb blasts of distant combat shaking the room, the screams of the girls near her. This must be Silvertail's doing. Of course he'd have made sure we knew what the others had seen and heard. I just have to hope Seika catches on and plays along.

She was sure Seika would. The smaller black girl had shown she was sharp as a box of razors already, and she'd had the courage to come help her friend even before she'd found out she was an Apocalypse Maiden; Seika wouldn't lose her head in interrogation.

". . . and then the doors just suddenly opened, after everything we and the fire department outside had been trying before had failed, and we got out and you guys picked us up and I guess that's it," she finished.

"Yes, that does bring us up to date," agreed Detective Kisaragi. There was the slightest flicker of her gaze, as though she was considering saying something and then reconsidered, or as though she had thought of something and wanted to hide the thought.

Trayne Owen had been staring from one to the other with an appearance of increasing perplexity. "Detective, does . . . I mean, is what she saying true?"

"Do you think she isn't telling us the truth, Mr. Owen?"

"No! No, of course not. But some of these . . . things she describes—"

"It does seem to fit with those prior anomalies. What it means—why these events have started happening, why here, and what the ultimate purpose of these monsters or this 'princess' may be? We don't know, sir, and at the moment I can't even speculate. But we've kept you long enough. We may have to interview her once or twice more, but we'll call you well in advance. Will that be all right?"

Trayne Owen nodded after a moment. "Someone's dead, and something tried to kill my daughter and her friends. I assure you we will cooperate with whatever's necessary to put a stop to this."

"Thank you, sir." She got up and opened the door. "Let me show you out. And Holly, thank you. You've been a great help."

"Thanks, Ms. . . . er, Detective Kisaragi. Umm . . ."

She raised an eyebrow. "Yes?"

"Well . . . is the school closed? I mean, will it be closed?"

She and Trayne Owen shared a small chuckle. "It may be closed tomorrow, but we will try our best to do all our work and clear out before morning. If not, the next day for sure."

"So it'll be bedtime for you after we get home," Trayne said. "Sorry, Holly."

"Do I . . . have to go?"

"No," Trayne said immediately. "That will be entirely up to you. And I am sure the counselors will want to see all you girls anyway. But we'll talk about that later."

"Good night, Mr. Owen, Holly," the detective said, letting them out of the police station door.

"Good night, Detective," Trayne said.

They walked quietly to where Trayne had parked the minivan and got in. Mr. Owen started the car, put it in gear, and pulled out onto the road.

Holly saw him making a few tiny gestures with his hand and murmuring something very, very quietly.

After another minute, he leaned back slightly. "Holly, you did very well. That was a very dangerous situation."

"Dangerous? You mean, if they learn too much they could get killed, right?"

"To an extent, yes. But I sensed . . . some odd indications about our interviewer. My senses, as you know, are not limited to human, and the smell of her identity card was slightly different—too new, for one thing. And some of her reactions to the story were less of surprise or puzzlement than I would expect."

"You think she's one of the enemy?" Somehow Holly found that hard to believe. Detective Kisaragi struck her as sincere in her concern.

"Enemy? Not . . . precisely. I believe she is with the OSC."

"OSC? The Office of Special Counsel?" Holly was confused.

"Eh? No, no. In this general era I believe they have used a number of aliases, but in actuality it is the initials of their organization's motto and goal: Obtain, Secure, Counter."

"Obtain, secure, and counter what?"

"Supernatural or super-normal threats," Mr. Owen said.

"Oh, crap. One of those groups you mentioned."

"Yes. I cannot say I am very surprised. There was no subtlety in our enemy's first two assaults, as they are uninterested in stealth as such, and such high-profile paranormal events would naturally draw some of their investigators. With luck, however, the events of this night will actually serve to eliminate you and Seika from consideration as candidates for the two Apocalypse Maidens."

"Dad? I mean, Silvertail, they don't know about the Apocalypse Maidens and all that, right? All that gets erased when the Maidens win."

He was silent for a moment. "I cannot say for certain, honestly. If they were a purely mundane organization, no, they would not, but they are not purely mundane. Over the centuries they have captured numerous paranormal objects, beings, and so on, and some they are capable of controlling and using. So they may possibly have some idea of the existence, though not the details, of the Cycle, and possibly of the fact that there is truth behind many of the worst legends."

"But they're not our friends, either?"

Trayne's face was grim. "No. Their position is that such powers are threats in and of themselves to mankind and must be captured and neutralized, regardless of how those threats might regard themselves, unless and until the OSC decides how they may be used 'for the greater good' . . . without revealing too much to the world."

"And so if they catch up with me—"

"—you will be just one more paranormal phenomenon to be Obtained, Secured, and Countered."

"But they can't actually do that . . . can they?"

"Can they truly overpower Princess Holy Aura? No, not as things stand. Magic has not truly, fully reentered the world—and we hope that it never will. So their ability to act against the one remaining full manifestation of mystical power, the Apocalypse Maidens, and of course our adversaries, that is severely limited."

She remembered a prior conversation and shuddered. "But they don't need to defeat me. Just interfere with me at the wrong moment—"

"—and these well-meaning defenders of Earth will cause its utter, and final, destruction."

 

 

 

 

Princess Holy Aura: Chapter 20

Holly was in a battle...

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Chapter 20.

     Take care of Seika.

The words had been thought to Silvertail simply, but he was used to seeing what lay behind the words; Holly would not tell him to do, or not do, anything else, but she knew, or thought she knew, what had to happen now. Count on me, he replied, and knew that she understood completely.

Seika cooperated by backing away quickly from the two combatants, placing her back against one of the classroom doors. It was simple to use his magic to cause the door to unlock and open; the stalking-monster's magic was focused on Holy Aura now.

The door popping open caused Seika to stumble backward, off-balance; she managed to recover and came to a stop leaning against one of the desks, pushing her springy hair out of her face, shaking, staring . . .

"But not running," he said.

She jumped away from him—a creditable leap, which shoved two desks onto their sides. "Shit! I mean . . . Ohmigod, you can talk? You're her . . . spirit animal, familiar, I mean, the cute animal that guides the mahou shoujo to their . . ."

She trailed off, but the disbelieving wonder in her face showed she'd already made the leap. "No. No way. Not me. Not fat, slow, clumsy—"

"Holly—Holy Aura—needs help," he said simply. "You came here to help her. You did help her, despite what must have been absolute terror, because she was your friend. You are not running. You are a warrior at heart, Seika Lynn Cooper, and your 'slow clumsiness' has already served to rescue Holly once. Will you take up the sword for real? Will you become one of the Apocalypse Maidens and fight at her side?"

"Will I?" She opened her mouth with a shaking joy writ clear across every line of her young face, even as the building shuddered to another clash of light and dark.

"Wait!" Silvertail wished he could simply take her obvious acceptance . . . but he had agreed with Steve on the course they must take. "If you do, there is no going back, Seika. Lives will depend on you. And your family and friends may be in more danger until the ultimate enemy is overcome."

Seika hesitated. She is very bright, this one. Even in these circumstances, she understands what I say . . . and I think even some of what is meant beneath the words. But then another crash, a muffled shriek and curse from Holly, reached their ears. "If I don't . . . she's going to lose, isn't she?"

"I cannot be certain. But . . . yes, I would guess so. That is the way of the enchantment, the course of destiny. The second Apocalypse Maiden is now needed."

"Then do your magic, rat! My BFF is getting whaled on out there!"

"My name is Silvertail Heartseeker, and you, Seika, are one of the Hearts I have Sought, bearer of the Courage that is needed, the Will that is eternal. Take you up the Apocalypse Brooch and become one of the Maidens who will stand against the ending of all things!"

Seika's brown eyes were wide with wonder, a touch of fear, and a hint of anticipation as the broken-pointed star materialized before her. She swallowed so hard it was audible in the empty classroom, even with the echoes of the battle reverberating through the air, and then reached out and grasped the Apocalypse Brooch.

Ruby-bright light flared from the brooch, and Silvertail knew now who was being called forth. Seika raised the brooch over her head and the light blazed like a fiery star; her eyes reflected both realization and shock as the enchanted necessity took over.

"To avert the Apocalypse, and shield the innocent from evil, and stand against the powers of destruction, I offer myself as wielder and weapon, as symbol and sword!" Seika said, and her voice was the roar of a bonfire. "Mistress of the flame, bane of winter, I am the Apocalypse Maiden, Princess Radiance Blaze!"

Fire ignited around her body, floating her up, and she spun—or the world rotated about her, as she remained still. The luminance burned away her clothes, her body, and formed them anew, Silvertail now seeing a taller figure with hair that enhaloed her head like a dark sun, a figure bound in chains of flaming light, chains thick and heavy enough to restrain an army, not one mere girl.

But beneath the heavy mane of hair, the new face was undaunted, filled with certainty and joy; she strained against the bonds and the chains parted, shattered under the obdurate and irresistible power of fire unleashed.

Dark hands caught the silver-glowing chains, spun them about, and they answered her call, became a writhing circle of flaming steel into which she settled. Like Holy Aura's, Princess Radiance Blaze's armor was brief and stylized, but it shimmered with reds and oranges and golds like the fire that was her power.

Scarcely had her feet touched the ground, though, and she was off, a blur of crimson light almost beyond Silvertail's ability to follow.

Holly—Princess Holy Aura—was in trouble; the implacable stalker refused to give her room, a moment to focus and find the key to power she had learned in the depths of the shoggoth's embrace, and as Silvertail looked she was being forced backward by the thing's immense strength.

But a red-gold meteor streaked through the hallway and slammed into the creature with such absolute might that it flew straight and true down the rest of the hall to smash with earthshaking force into the door at the far end. Had its own power not sealed the doors, Silvertail was certain, the monster would have continued on out and across the rear parking lot like a cannonball.

But even that impact barely slowed it. The stalker-thing rebounded from the door, staggered, then reached out, and its axe slid across the floor to its hand.

"Hippity-hue, hippity-hee

     You need more to finish off me!

     Hippity-hee, hippity-hue

     Who the hell are you?"

The magic bound Seika to answer, but she showed none of Steve's initial reluctance; she whirled her chains eagerly as she answered, "I am the one you fear, monster! Apocalypse Maiden the Second, Princess Radiance Blaze! Reborn from the fire, mistress of the eternal flame, defender of life and ruler of the inferno below!" She grabbed one of the chains and snapped it tight between her two hands. "You've hurt my friend and threatened innocent lives, and for that, this Apocalypse Maiden says that you are going down!"

Silvertail could see that Holy Aura was rising, staring at the cocoa-skinned warrior of flame in awe. Silvertail . . . is that what I am like?

Exactly like that, yes. You are an Apocalypse Maiden, and so is she. Now, Holly, do what you both must—for the sake of the lives that even now are trapped within this building!

"R-Radiance Blaze, thanks for joining the party!" Holy Aura said, and her smile was more than a greeting.

For the first time the stalking monster gave vent to a sound other than the macabre singing, a growling, hollow snarl; it was a threatening sound . . . but the very fact that its pattern was breaking showed its uncertainty. It must not escape, Maidens! It knows enough to report who you truly are to its mistress!

It did not seem in the mood to retreat, however, for it raised the axe and began its metronomic stride again.

"He's not going down with one hit," Holy Aura murmured. "I need time to get focused."

"You mean your super-attack's gotta charge," Radiance Blaze whispered back. "So I have to keep him off you, right?"

"He could kill—"

"—everyone here, Holly, and you know it, so now that I've got it, let me do my job, right?"

Silvertail could feel the pained reluctance echoing from the core that was Stephen Russ, the fear that he would be sending a child to die as a distraction. But as Holy Aura, she knew her duty . . . and could see the eyes of Seika, Princess Radiance Blaze, shining at her with a fearsome eagerness.

"Then . . . go. But watch out!"

Radiance Blaze leapt forward, arm curling back, then whipping forward, and silver-flaming chain streaked from her hand, straight and true as a rifle shot. The chain's heavy links battered the monster full in the face, and the axe rebounded from the chain. Its eyes were narrowed, squinted in pain and fury, and it made no more taunting songs, but shrank away from the rattling metal that was yanked back to its wielder and then cast forth again, an arch of blazing iron flame that almost twined around the handle of the axe and did catch one hand, sent smoke up from the leathery skin.

The manifestation of stalking horror growled again and tried to charge, to close the distance, but in a flash of fiery light Radiance Blaze was behind him, wonder writ large on her face as she realized that the speed of fire was beyond human realization, wonder that became a fierce joy.

The creature's own inhuman speed was now put to the test as it began to dodge a barrage of battering chains that zigzagged across the floor and through the air like bolts of volcanic lightning. But dodge them it did, and Radiance Blaze began to back up, looking uncertain, as it dodged or parried, one to the left, one to the right, front, back, each one allowing it to take one more step, and its dead clown face grinned anew.

"Hippity-hend, hippity-hosst

     Now for sure your battle's lost!

     Hippity-hosst, hippity-hend

     Then I'll finish off your friend!"

Radiance Blaze suddenly straightened, and the tight smile beneath the huge halo of hair was chilling. "Well hippity-hong and hippity-hap, you've just stepped into my trap!"

The monster froze, aware only now that it had not been repeated strikes of two chains but a succession of many chains it had deflected . . .

. . . chains that now surrounded it.

"Radiance Blaze—CIRCLE of FIRE!"

It tried to raise its vicious axe, to protect itself, but eight separate chains rose, arcing up like fiery cobras, and struck, twining themselves together around the monster and igniting into a metallic inferno. The creature screamed and struggled, but for a moment it was held fast, unable to break the chains, unable to slip free.

Unable to dodge.

Holy Aura's voice chased after the echoes of her fellow Apocalypse Maiden, and the pure white light eradicated all shadow from existence. "Light of Apocalypse—SOLAR FLARE!"

The world went pure white and a ripping, gargling growling scream was torn from the thing. Like a doll in a blowtorch it sizzled and burned, still struggling, snarling, desperate to escape and destroy its attackers, but it was weakening, decaying visage turning to ash, leaving bone, and even the bone scorching, melting away, skeletal hands crumbling, the axe itself tumbling to the ground and blackening before the imperative force of the Apocalypse Maidens.

The light faded away, the chains clattered limply to the floor, and both Holy Aura and Radiance Blaze sagged against the wall, holding themselves up, staring tensely at the remains of the thing: a half-crumbled skeleton surrounded by ash, wisps of smoke slowly trailing up from it.

"That's . . . got it." Holy Aura said finally.

"Yeah." Radiance Blaze stared, then her face lit up. "Yeah! Booya! Kicked your ass, huh! Teach you to pick on this school!"

"Oh, god, school. Silvertail, by now they'll have noticed we're gone, and if—"

"Holly, Holly, trust me, I already have taken care of those issues," Silvertail said, hopping to her shoulder as the two girls started to hesitantly make their way up the corridor toward A-Wing. "Temporary simulacra of both of you have been with the group, and of course we already discussed the cam—"

Without so much as pause or warning, Holy Aura and Radiance Blaze spun around, and a twin blast of flaming spiritual power roared down the hallway, catching the axe-wielding, only half-healed form and slinging it back to the fire door, pinning the screaming, writhing thing against its own immovable barrier. "Do you think we're idiots?" Holy Aura demanded, and Radiance Blaze finished, "The monster always gets back up for one more shot after you think it's dead!"

A thundering stream of apocalyptic energies kept the thing irresistibly trapped between its insubstantial hammer and the fire door's mystically-sealed anvil, and the being's furious screams grew weaker as the combined power of Princess Holy Aura and Princess Radiance Blaze eroded it, turning it to ash and the ash to dust and the dust to a mist that dispersed into shadow that faded to nothing before their luminance. The two Apocalypse Maidens kept the power streaming out, their bodies shaking from the strain, faces tense and growing white with the effort, until a final, whispered scream rose and fell to silence and the door blew apart, the spiritual cannon continuing thirty yards before boring a hole straight through the rear parking lot.

Silvertail managed to clear his throat. "Um, yes. Well done, and well read. The memes, that is. You knew it would rise once you had declared it dead?"

"Like there was ever a slasher movie where that didn't happen," Seika said.

"Of course. As I was saying, we already discussed the cameras. Now, if you two will change back . . ."

"Oh." Holly reappeared in a flash; after a moment, Princess Radiance Blaze also disappeared, replaced by Seika.

"Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod that was so cool," Seika said immediately. "Holly, my God you were so totally awesome it was like—"

"I was awesome? You kicked so much ass and you were—"

"AHEM!" The two girls jumped guiltily. "My apologies, both of you, but we do need to get you back quickly. The doors will all be opening in moments as the rest of the enchantment fades, and you must be back with the crowd." He looked at Seika. "You must come and visit Holly as soon as you—"

Seika's jaw suddenly dropped. "That voice . . . Mr. OWEN?"

My goodness she is sharp indeed. "Yes, Seika, you have penetrated my disguise. But listen, please. You must come to visit as soon as you can. There is much we have to tell you and discuss and, at least for now, you must keep this secret."

She nodded emphatically. "Count on me, Mr. . . . Silvertail? God that's going to be so weird. But yeah, I can keep the secret! I promise!"

"Good enough, then. Let's get you back to the group. Now follow my directions carefully and you will merge with your doppelgangers . . ."

Two Maidens awakened, and they already work well together. He felt himself starting to relax, then cursed at himself. That is well and good, but this is still but the beginning.

     And now . . . now the enemy knows where to look.

 

 

 

Princess Holy Aura: Chapter 19

The girls' game had been gruesomely interrupted...

-----

 

Chapter 19.

     The first thought that came into Holly's head after the shock was a crushing sense of guilt. There was no doubt in her mind now that this was the next manifestation, and that meant that Mr. Jefferson was dead in either reality. I managed to stop the first two without deaths. I . . . I hoped I could save everyone.

"OhshitOhshitOhshit . . ." Nikki was mumbling from behind her. Caitlin was simply frozen, staring in utter shock.

"Let's get the hell out of this place!" Tierra hissed.

Even as the five of them turned back toward the hallway, the kitchen doors behind them flew open and a shadowy figure strode out, an unhurried, implacable stride clicking menacingly on the polished floor beneath it. Lightning flashed off the edge of a red-dripping axe.

"Run!" Holly shouted. She was already trying to think how to deal with this. I don't know if any of these are Apocalypse Maidens yet. I can't just change in front of all of them; "three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." Got to buy time somehow . . .

Seika grabbed one of the last chairs as they passed it, dragging it with her rattle-banging up the three steps to the cafeteria exit.

"What do you want that for?" demanded Caitlin. "That's not going to stop his—"

"The doors," she said urgently.

Holly suddenly understood what Seika meant. "She's right! If we can take it apart we can use the legs to bar the doors! Come on, everyone, help break this thing!"

The figure was halfway down the cafeteria aisle, boots rapping out a remorseless countdown, as the girls hammered the chair violently against walls and floor, yanked at it.

A quarter of the way to go, but there was suddenly a sharp metallic crack and the weld holding the front pair of legs to the underframe snapped, leaving a U-shaped piece of metal—two chair legs formed of a single tube of bent steel.

"Shut the doors!" Seika said, voice cracking in panic. Holly and the other three yanked the cafeteria doors—hollow steel with small windows—around, forced them shut.

The metronome precision of that stride altered abruptly, hurrying, not a run, but the sound of someone understanding that a situation has changed. Seika tried to slide the steel curve through the two metal door handles, but something struck the doors heavily, almost forcing them open. Nikki screamed but pushed harder, Holly following suit; on the other door Caitlin and Tierra shoved with all their strength, and the doors closed once more—

—and Seika slipped the steel U through the handles.

The door rattled viciously, but the steel held it firm; more, because of the U shape, it couldn't dislodge from someone just jostling it. The five girls grinned at each other for an instant.

Then a tremendous thudding chop echoed through the dark hallway, and the door dented outward.

"Come on," Holly said. "We've got to get the hallway doors open somehow, before he gets out!"

"Who is he?" Caitlin demanded in the panicky tones of someone trying to hold onto a thread of sanity. "Why's he doing this? That . . . that was a real body, wasn't it?"

"Maybe it wasn't!" Nikki said, grasping at a thread of hope. "It's a prank, like that murdering clown-thing we saw on YouTube!"

"Trust me, that was a real body and this is no prank," Holly said. "That axe was real and he's actually chopping through the lunchroom doors. You think anyone pulling a prank here is going to wreck the school like that?"

The doors to the central hall were still closed, and as the five girls ran toward them, they suddenly shuddered with a crashing bang that made all five skid to a terrified halt. What the hell? How'd he get ahead of us? Or are there two of these things?

But even as they stood frozen in indecision, there was another tremendous crash and the doors flew wide.

Framed in the doorway were two extremely tall girls; one was so dark-skinned she was a shadow against shadows, but her brilliant chunni headdress, visible even in the dim light, outlined her clearly.

From that, Holly recognized her instantly: Devika Weatherill, captain of the girls' basketball team. With that hint, Holly could make out that the lighter-skinned, brown-haired girl next to her was Tori Murstein, likewise captain of the volleyball team. Silhouetted behind them was a crowd of other girls, presumably the teams that had just finished practice.

Seeing their expressions, Devika grimaced. "Let me guess, doors down there are locked too."

"Never mind doors, run!" Tierra said. "There's a psycho with an axe back there—"

"What?" Tori looked amused. "Are you joking? I—"

She was cut short by an echoing impact from down the corridor, an impact that combined with the shriek of ripping metal.

"Not joking! Run!"

Reverberating down the shadowed hallway behind Holly and the others, rhythmic, unhurried footsteps were approaching.

That sound—calm, purposeful, and utterly out of place—convinced the others that something very bad was coming, and the slow backing up turned into a jog, and then a run as something sang out from the darkness,

"Hippity-hey, hippity-hop

     Who's next to get the chop?

     Hippity-hop, hippity-hey

     Who's getting the axe today?"

The voice was a cracked tenor, the sound of madness on the edge, and the tune was a cheerful one . . . in a minor key that turned its macabre cheer to a graveyard threat.

"We have to get the front doors open somehow!" Holly told them. "This guy's locked everything!"

"Shouldn't be possible," said someone from the volleyball team. "My dad's a fire marshal and he told me that fire doors can't be locked from the inside!"

"Well, they are," Tierra snapped. "We tried!"

"So did we," said Devika. "But let's get these doors open!"

The front doors of the school looked like they should be easier to open, glass fronted as they were—but Holly was pretty sure the glass was thick and reinforced.

But everyone's focused on the door . . .

Without giving herself time to think, Holly backed quietly away from the crowd, and headed down the B-Wing corridor (whose doors showed where the teams had come from). One girl separated from the rest. That's the trope, right?

She prayed to whatever powers there might be that she was making the right decision. If I'm wrong . . . an axe-wielding monster's going to plow right into a crowd of high-school girls. And monster will be literally correct.

B-Wing was silent, her footsteps and the faint echo of her breathing the only sounds. It suddenly struck her that it was unnaturally quiet; she wasn't so far away that she shouldn't be able to hear the others trying to get through the front door—or their screams, if the thing caught them. They'd been able to vaguely hear the noise of the teams coming back into the school all the way over in C-Wing!

It's here.

From somewhere—she couldn't tell which direction—the singing began again:

"Hippity-hi, hippity-ho

     Who will be the next to go?

     Hippity-ho, hippity-hi

     You're the one about to DIE!"

She drew a breath and reached up to touch the Star Nebula Brooch—

One of the classroom doors slammed open scarcely ten feet from her, and a towering figure came forth, seemingly born from darkness and thunder, a long coat flapping behind it, axe rising for a strike, lightning flashing off the white-grinning clown mask. Her breath caught in her throat and she knew that she had no time for the invocation.

No time at all.

But even as the axe began to descend, a small form barreled in from the left and slammed into the axe-wielding figure with a diving lunge just at the knee. The figure gave a grunt and lost its grip on the axe, the weapon spinning through the air to thunk harmlessly into the wall a foot to the right of Holly's head.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" demanded Seika, even as she scrambled to her feet and the figure rolled to a halt, starting to rise. "You never break up the party!"

She came to save me. And there's no one else here but us and . . . it. That's got to be my answer.

The two girls were backpedaling as the thing rose to its full height and strode toward its weapon. "Seika," Holly said, "I hope you can keep a secret."

"Huh? What? A secret?"

Holly's fingers gripped the brooch and the invocation came to her now without conscious thought. ". . . Mystic Galaxy Defender, Princess Holy Aura!"

The pure-crystal light detonated like the Sun in the dark hallway, and the monster threw up a hand to shield itself, momentarily cowering before the Light. Seika, too, tried to shield her face from the light, but Holy Aura could see an expression, not of fear or incomprehension, but wonder and understanding. "Wow," she whispered.

"I am the one you seek, monster!" Holy Aura said—for the Challenge, too, was inviolable. But it would not end the same. "You have slain the good and brought terror to the innocent, and for that, this Apocalypse Maiden says that you," she pointed straight at the shining clown mask that suddenly looked much less terrifying, "are going down!"

It gave a mad giggle and suddenly whirled its axe so swiftly that it became a silver and red circle of death.

"Hippity-how, hippity-hill

     That's what you say you will

     Hippity-hill, hippity-how

     Time to die for you is NOW!"

It swung and Holly parried with the Silverlight Bisento, and a shockwave shuddered out from the point of impact, rattling doors, cracking windows. Crap, this thing is strong, she thought as she felt her arms give a fraction under the blow. I thought something this much smaller would be weaker than the others!

But it was still a lot taller than she was, and she ducked the next swing and rammed the bisento's blade straight through the creature. She heard Seika backing away with faint murmurs that were probably curses. But she wasn't running; she was trying to stay out of the way, yet remain close enough to see . . . maybe close enough to help.

It gave a keening snarl and a backhand blow with the axehead sent Holy Aura tumbling away, feeling blood trickling from her scalp. Crap! It's a good thing he couldn't turn the blade around that fast, or he'd have split my head in two!

But even though she felt a little dazed and her weapon was still stuck in the thing's body, she rolled to her feet with more confidence. Silvertail?

I am here.

Take care of Seika.

An impression of a nod. Count on me.

The thing ripped the Silverlight Bisento from its chest and hurled it at Holy Aura, but she caught it easily. "You can't hurt me with my own weapon, monster—" she began, but cut off when it sprinted forward, axe swinging in a dizzying and lethal geometry of cuts that drove her backward. She managed to catch the weapon with the shaft of hers momentarily and bring the ball of the bisento around to smash it full in its masked face.

The mask split.

Holly found herself screaming, backing away from the thing while desperately raining unaimed but powerful blows at it to keep it back.

To call what was revealed a "face" was an offense to the word. Yes, there were eyes—glaring, gleefully mad eyes, one green as poison, one red as blood. There was a mouth, with broken, yellow teeth raggedly sharp in an insane grin. There was even a nose, half eaten away by acid or fire. But the repellent, monstrous whole was hideous, ridged with scar tissue, living maggots wriggling through the pus-oozing flesh, holes in the cheeks showing the muscles and fangs from the sides as well as the front, and despite the decaying appearance there was no impression of weakness, of frailty, but of unnatural, unquenchable, abominable life. It stank of old blood and rot and rusting steel, of gangrenous wounds and creeping infections and burned flesh, and it smiled with a crazed good cheer that infused it with even more horror than a savage grin or implacable immobility would have.

And it was moving fast. Holy Aura could barely fend off its blows, even as she managed—with the help of ancient power and the stabilizing memories of Stephen Russ—to gain control over herself. It's no worse looking than the shoggoth was. That wasn't quite true, but Steve had seen plenty of horror movies—including the slasher films this thing was drawing on. This was worse . . . but only because she was letting the thing's aura, its essence, bring home the reality of its malevolence.

She somersaulted backward, vaguely conscious of Seika and Silvertail now to the side, in one of the classrooms—got to keep it focused on me—spun her weapon around, concentrated, saw the corridor brightening with white-silver radiance. "Ginhikari no Bisento!"

The broad blade of the immense weapon caught and carved through the haft of the bloody axe, and continued its irresistible course through obscene head, neck, and body, cleaving the stalker-manifestation almost entirely in two. The thing collapsed, arms twitching, eyes rolling in their separate sections of skull, the pieces of the axe tumbling to the floor.

Now, I just have to finish it off. But even as she reached within her, looking for that transcendent connection to the power beyond, the slasher-monster's body pulled itself together, the horrific head sealing itself, and even the axe mended itself, wood fibers reversing their sundering and merging to become, impossibly, whole again.

Holy Aura parried, but her arms almost buckled.

It's getting stronger, and I haven't been able to kill it!

She needed time, and that was one thing her opponent was never going to give her.

Princess Holy Aura: Chapter 18

Holly had made a friend, so let's go forward a bit in time...

 

 

Chapter 18.

     "I push the door open slowly," Seika said, miming the action across the broad table. Her voice echoed in the mostly deserted cafeteria, giving an appropriate overtone to her words.

Holly glanced at the other three members of the Steampunk Adventure Club. "Any of you doing anything while the Countess opens the door?"

Caitlin Modofori shrugged. "Iron Jake's got his flux baton ready, but other than that he's just watching."

"By my calculations," said Tierra MacKintor in a deliberately hollow, flat tone, "there is a ninety-two point six percent chance we are about to enter combat. The Argent Automaton is prepared." The startlingly redheaded girl pushed back the gear-encrusted silvery mask and shifted to a more normal tone. "That means I'm holding my speed boost ready for action at the first sign of a fight."

"Got it," Holly said. "If there's combat, you'll start already at full speed. Good thing you told me; I'd assumed you would be going with the strength boost."

Tierra grinned. "Speed kills."

The third member, Nikki Hand, closed her eyes. "The Mystic is opening the Third Eye!"

"You'll get a chance to see any supernatural influences. Good thinking, if it turns out there's something beyond the mundane involved.

"As you open the door, you can see a huge, shadowy figure at the far side of the room . . . an immense, monstrous statue. There are many robed figures in front of it . . ." Holly continued describing what the Countess could see, and saw the others exchanging glances.

The fact that both she and Seika liked role-playing games had suggested the possibility of forming a gaming group to both of them. The school required a minimum of five people for any club that met after school hours, and though they'd found both Nikki and Caitlin fairly quickly, they'd been stuck for a couple of weeks looking for a fifth.

Holly knew, of course, that Dex would've been willing to join in a flash, but she honestly wasn't ready to take that risk. Sure, visibly there was nothing to link her with Steve Russ, but long-term social interaction was a lot different than just passing someone in the hallway.

Finally, though, Tierra heard them discussing a Spirit of the Century adventure as a possibility and immediately spoke up about the art and fantastic costuming possible. Once she agreed to join, the Steampunk Adventure Club began meeting.

Just as well that we chose this genre, Holly thought. Steve never ran anything in this kind of setting, so I had to invent a new world. If Dex ever does join, or even hears about it, this isn't going to remind him too much of what we used to do.

But there still were similarities—in the group, if not in the campaign. Seika was by far the smartest, though she wasn't nearly as loud or clueless as Dex; Nikki was the cheerful supporting player who would take whatever role the others left open, reminding Holly poignantly of Chad; even her brown hair and broad figure echoed Chad's own. Caitlin was more serious and thoughtful in play, a strange maturity that echoed the vastly older Eli—although her wavy honey-blonde hair looked nothing like Eli's close-cropped black-and-silver. Tierra's constant support of the campaign with little sketches, bangles, and costume props was certainly a lot like Mike, who used to make portraits of everyone's characters.

Are these four the Apocalypse Maidens? Are any of them?

The thought always intruded, whenever she was talking to a girl near her own current age: Are you one of us? And she was never sure if she wanted the answer to be yes or no. As she was getting more used to being Holly Owen, the strain of being the only person who knew the secret was getting worse.

The players started discussing the tableau Holly had described, deciding how they wanted to approach this. Holly looked up, saw that the windows were almost pitch dark. "I think we'd better stop it here, everyone."

A faint murmur reached their ears, and Seika grimaced. "Yeah, the teams are all coming back in."

The girls' sports teams practiced on the same days that the Steampunk Club currently met—as did a couple of other clubs. That was partly for the very good reason that if the teams were practicing, there were enough kids to justify keeping some of the buses available, saving parents trips while still getting the students home safe.

They started packing up the dice and books—or, in the case of Holly and Caitlin, tablets. "Darn, I was looking forward to kicking some heads in!" Seika said.

"I know you were," Tierra said. "But it can get tedious. I'll be glad to start that battle completely fresh."

"Tedious? But . . ." Holly bent and picked up her backpack as the two began arguing mechanics versus dramatics and, Holly thought, preferences. Heh. You can't please even all the players all the time, all you can do is hope to keep them happy MOST of the time.

"Come on, guys, we'd better head to A-Wing. Get better seats in the buses before the whole volleyball and football teams get in."

Tierra had just opened the cafeteria door when the lights went out.

Nikki jumped and gave a tiny scream. "Sorry! I just . . . really hate that."

They waited a few seconds, but the lights didn't seem to be coming back on. They could hear the distant protests of the athletes. "Come on," Tierra said after a moment. "It's not that dark, and the buses won't care. I just hope it's not out back home. So boring."

A bright white light appeared; Nikki had activated the light on her phone. "It may not be 'that dark' but isn't this easier?"

They all laughed, and started down the corridor, steps echoing loudly in the deserted corridors. "There's the door to A-Wing," Caitlin said. "Why's it closed, though?"

"I don't know—ooof!"

The "ooof!" was forced out of Holly as she'd tried to push through and the door had refused to budge. "What the heck . . . ?"

"Some idiot's locked it?" Tierra shoved against the door, but it wouldn't move. "They know we're here, right? We'll have to go all the way to the other end and out the fire doors—and that'll set off the alarm."

Hurrying their steps so that they could still (hopefully) beat the teams to the buses, the five girls headed back toward one of the red fire exits; these were never locked, but any attempt to open them would set off a loud-screaming alarm (something that, invariably, someone would do at least two or three times a quarter). Holly saw the dully-gleaming bar come into view, strode forward, and—

"OOOF!"

She bounced off the door so hard she sat down on the cold granite floor.

"What the fuck?" Seika demanded in her Karkat voice.

Holly rose slowly to her feet, and suddenly the darkness around her was sinister, filled with amorphous menace. A chill stole down her spine. A bunch of girls locked into a place with the power suddenly out . . .

"There's a back door through the cafeteria," Caitlin said, sounding a little nervous. "We could go through there."

"Fine," said Nikki, "But I'm calling my dad anyway. It's illegal to lock a fire door on the inside! People could get killed!"

She lifted her phone a bit higher as they walked. "Huh. I'm not getting any bars. How about you guys?"

Wow. It's true. The hairs on the back of my neck are starting to stand up. The gooseflesh marched down Holly's arms. "Shouldn't Mr. Jefferson be in back of the cafeteria anyway?"

"Duh, of course. He'll have the keys."

     Holly had been concentrating furiously, but apparently Silvertail couldn't do his telepathic-talking trick to mere Holly Owen. Still, he's gotta be nearby. He'd follow me. I'm not actually without any backup.    

A rumble of thunder came from outside, and a flicker of lightning vaguely illuminated the hallway for an instant; they could see the black square of the open cafeteria doors up ahead. The tapping hiss of rain on the roof became audible.

"Wow, this is creepy!" Tierra said, in a cheerful voice. "Maybe we should be telling ghost stories or something." They headed across the empty floor of the cafeteria. "Mr. Jefferson! Mr. Jefferson! Someone's locked the doors to the wing!"

"Is the roof leaking?" Caitlin demanded. "It dripped on me!"

"Boy, I hope not," Nikki said, turning the white light upward to look.

All five of them screamed, a sound that momentarily drowned out the growl of thunder.

Directly above, at the very peak of the ceiling, Mr. Donald Jefferson was spread-eagled, hands and feet impaled by something that glittered, a wide-eyed silent scream of horror showing above a red, dripping gash in his neck.

 

 

 

Princess Holy Aura: Chapter 17

Well, Holly had made a new friend...

-----

 

 

Chapter 17.

     "Wow," Seika said, looking around. "Nice house!"

"It's a little big," Holly said. "I mean, for me and Dad. But everywhere we've lived we ended up finding some way to fill the space, so Dad said—"

"—this time we'll make sure there's always enough space," Trayne Owen's voice finished.

"Hey, Dad," she said, noticing how that phrase was actually becoming normal, and trying not to let the Steve part of her freak out, "This is Seika, Seika, this is my dad Trayne Owen."

"Hi, Mr. Owen! Thanks for letting me come over."

"It's my pleasure, Seika. I'm glad to see Holly's made a friend already. Holly, have you got homework today?"

"I did it all last period, Dad, so I didn't have to worry."

"We both did," Seika confirmed. "Otherwise Mom wouldn't have let me come either."

"All right. You two go have fun; I've still got a little work to do before dinner."

"So what does your dad do?" Seika asked as Holly led her toward her room.

"Technical consultant. Means he comes up with ideas to make things work that aren't, mostly. He's really good at it."

Seika paused, staring at the wall of weapons in the living room. "Wow, are those your dad's?"

Holly almost corrected her, but caught herself. Remember the cover story. "Mostly. A couple are mine, but most of them are Dad's. Same for the posters and a lot of the books."

"Pretty cool."

The wall wasn't set up identically to the way it had been in Steve's apartment, and Silvertail had in fact added some keepsakes of his own which looked very exotic. The extra space had also allowed Steve to unpack pretty much everything he owned; someone like Dex might have noticed some similarities, but the setup and number of items was different enough that it probably wouldn't immediately set off alarm bells. Not that I'm going to be bringing Dex here anyway. He's not part of this and he doesn't have any need to know.

The latter was a good thing, despite the fact that Steve occasionally really missed Dex. If Dex had a flaw, it was that he wanted things to be magical and special so badly that Steve suspected it's be very difficult for him to know the truth and not really, really envy Steve, despite the . . . challenges presented by becoming Princess Holy Aura.

"So, um, Holly, can I ask you something?" Seika said as they came into Holly's room.

Why does she sound so nervous? "Sure, what?"

"Well . . . you've never mentioned your mom, so I was just wondering . . ."

"Oh." She found herself dropping her gaze to the floor, without even thinking about it. "I . . . well, we lost Mom back when I was pretty little."

"Lost? You mean—"

"She died. She'd said she was feeling 'funny' and out of breath, and then she . . ." Holly heard her voice trembling, and swallowed, stopped.

"Oh. Oh, fu . . . I mean, I'm sorry!"

"It's okay," she managed. Using the truth the right way works. Doesn't make it hurt less.

Because that was the truth, even though it had happened to Stephen Russ, not Holly Owen, and almost thirty years ago, not seven or eight. But thinking about it now, as Holly, he saw it all too clearly. He could remember watching his mother just collapse to the kitchen floor, and the paramedics arriving, and eventually having his father take him aside to tell him that Mother wasn't ever coming home.

She blinked hard, wiped away a couple tears. Convincing, anyway. "'Sokay," she repeated. "Just don't talk about it in front of Dad."

"I won't! Promise!"

"I guess I'd better be ready to explain for a while," Holly said after a moment of thought. "I mean, that's a question people are going to ask."

"You're probably right," agreed Seika. She looked around the room. "Wow again. I think your room's bigger than our living room. And is that a Powercom Shine Pro?"

"Yeah, maybe you can help me learn more about it. You use Powercom computers, right?"

"Yeah, but we don't have a Shine Pro!"

Holly began to relax again. Seika really was a geek of the kind she knew well. They spoke the same language. There were still hidden verbal landmines all over the place, of course—evading the discussion of why she'd been previously using a computer ten years out of date took some mental gymnastics, for instance, given that Trayne Owen could obviously have afforded to buy her a new computer every year if she wanted.

With a little effort, though, she kept their talk mostly focused on learning about the geeky subjects that interested young members of that intellectual group. Homestuck had been a stroke of good fortune, but Holly was all too aware that she didn't have a clue about most things the younger crowd did as a matter of course.

I'm really going to have to practice my texting, she thought. Even while we've been here, Seika's texted three different people. It's completely habitual with her, and I guess everyone else our age.

"So, Holly, what do you think about this Princess Holy Aura?"

Holly started and barely got hold of herself. Don't look guilty, for chrissake! "Princess who?"

"Well, that's what people say her name is. You did hear about the two monsters, right? That rock-worm and the huge blob-thing that people saw at the mall?"

"Oh, that! I didn't hear about this princess thing, though."

"Well, look!" Seika expertly tapped out searches into the computer.

Wow. Even more stuff than I thought. That's not a half-bad picture of Holy Aura, either, though it's a little blurry. "Dad was wondering if it was some kind of weird publicity stunt for a movie or something."

Seika gave her a look reserved for idiots. "What's your dad on? The one parking lot was totally trashed, there was damage to half the mall, and people like my friend Alyssa are in therapy after what they saw!"

Holly raised her hands defensively. "Hey, I was just saying what Dad said! I didn't know anything about it!"

"Then it's time to teach you how to get the truth out of the Web! Never listen to the news—I'll bet your dad thinks they tell the truth! Look, here's what I do . . ."

Holly was impressed. When I was a kid, I don't think teenagers knew what politics was. She's fourteen and already looking for her own news sources. And boy is she sharp. This just reinforced her conviction that trying to hide the truth from anyone who did get involved would be worse than useless.

"Dinner, girls!"

She glanced up, startled. Light had faded to twilight as they talked. "Coming, Dad!"

"What's for dinner?" Seika asked.

"Sushi. I hope you like sushi?"

"I love it. So does my little brother Van, so he's gonna be jealous."

They came into the dining room where there was a variety of sushi on elaborate display. "That's really pretty, Mr. Owen. I didn't hear the delivery guy come, when did it get here?"

Holly saw Silvertail's human form give a broad grin. "No delivery guy, Seika; I made these myself."

Seika stared as Holly shot Silvertail a "seriously?" look. "You made this? Awesome."

As they sat down, the phone on the wall rang. Trayne picked it up. "Hello, Owen residence. Who? Oh, Mr. Cooper. Yes, we were just sitting down to dinner. They've been getting along just fine. I could bring . . . certainly, if you'd rather . . . That would be fine. It's a Friday so I don't require a fixed bedtime for Holly, so the time's entirely up to you. Of course. Thank you for calling!"

"That was my dad?"

"It was. He says he will pick you up at around eight-thirty to nine; they're going to watch a movie with Van."

"Great!"

Time passed quicker than Holly liked; she was genuinely sad when she heard the bell ring downstairs. "That'll be your dad."

It was indeed Seika's father; in contrast to his at-best-average-height daughter, Dave Cooper was a mountain, at least six foot three and built like a linebacker. "Hey, Sei, you have fun?" he said as they came down the steps.

"Lots of fun! Dad, this is Holly, Holly, this is my dad –—"

"Hi," Holly said. Crap, I'm still not used to being this small. Shaking his hand feels like I'm a kid shaking hands with my Uncle Pete.

"Hello, Holly, nice to meet you," Dave said, then turned to Trayne. "So, did Seika behave?"

"I sincerely doubt you ever have a problem with her behaving. I hardly heard a peep from either of them except at dinner. Oh, here." He handed Mr. Cooper a snap-top container. "Seika mentioned others in her family might want some, so I've packed the leftover sushi in there."

"Oh, now, I can't take—"

"I insist. Consider it a hello present from someone new to the neighborhood who's glad to see his little girl's made a new friend."

"Well, that's kind of you. Have to reciprocate next time, then. Seika, would you like to have Holly visit us?"

"Can she? Tomorrow?"

Mr. Cooper laughed. "That's short notice, so I'd have to check it with your mom. But if it's okay with Mr. Owen?"

"I have no objection."

"All right, then I'll give you a call tomorrow and let you know."

After a few more goodbyes the door finally closed. "That seemed to go well," Silvertail said, reverting to white-rat form.

"Were you worried?"

"Of course I was. You are hardly a professional at deception, Steve, and in fact your basically honest nature makes it difficult for you."

"Not much deception," Holly said. "I'm . . . well, not really Steve so much anymore. He's there—it's not like I'm forgetting him—but the longer I live as Holly the more I am Holly. I just have to watch for the places where Holly's . . . blank, filled only by whatever Steve has."

"Yes. But I must give you credit, Steve—Holly. Your decision to spend considerable time accustoming yourself to being Holly, even at the risk of more attacks, was indeed the wisest possible course of action. You can pay attention to what is happening around you without risking betrayal of your basic nature."

"Good thing, too. If I was still really thinking as Steve all the time, I don't think I could possibly have relaxed around Seika."

"I suppose not." He looked at her, beady red eyes suddenly narrowed. "But you have something else to say."

"Yeah. Remember how you said these adversaries are shaped by the modern perceptions and beliefs? Would it be more likely to be things relevant to, well, my age group? My peers? Or to the adults?"

The little rat's face became visibly thoughtful. "An interesting question. In many prior civilizations the . . . memes, so to speak, were less fragmented. While children might have different interests, they rarely had completely separate mythologies, so to speak. Are you saying there is a separation?"

"Ohhhh yeah. Millennials and younger kids have a whole new set of, well, urban legends, stories they tell each other, invent whole cloth and pass around. Some of them don't go anywhere, others go viral. And after a while, some start to be less stories and more actual internet mythology. Seika was touring me around all the sites she visits and where her online friends hang out, and boy, there's a lot of this stuff. Tumblr legends, creepypastas, all sorts of stuff that's . . . well, partly ironic, partly just stories, but you can tell reading some of the forums that some of it may not be."

Silvertail shimmered, becoming Trayne Owen again. "Show me."

She watched as Trayne skimmed page after page, and saw his expression growing darker every moment. Finally he closed the web browser and turned toward her.

"What is it, Silvertail?"

"I am very much afraid," he said after a moment, "that your generation's fascination with the insidious and macabre may serve as the foundation for the most horrific and implacable manifestations ever faced by mankind."

 

 

 

 

Princess Holy Aura: Chapter 16

Well, Holly was finally going to school...

-----

 

 

Chapter 16.

"Hey, um, Holly?"

Holly looked up to see another girl looking uncertainly down at her. Black girl, average height, just a little heavy, big poofy hair she's forced into two huge ponytails . . . dammit, brain, give me her name!

Steve knew he was usually bad with names, so he'd been working on trying to do some mnemonic associations with the classmates he'd heard the names of. Hair wasn't tied back, looked like a starburst first day, name was strange, and like stars . . . Japanese name . . . "Hi . . . Seika, isn't it?" Let me be right, please . . .

The dark brown eyes lit up. "That's me! Look . . . um, this might sound a little weird . . ."

"I've heard weird before, I'm from California," she answered. And you have no idea how much weird I've heard.

"Okay." Seika glanced around the library almost guiltily, then sat down in one of the chairs near the computer terminal Holly was using. "My parents . . . well, they keep bothering me about, you know, talking to people at school, having friends? And they made me promise to talk to three new people this week."

Holly burst out laughing, then immediately cut off. "Sorry! Sorry, not laughing at you, just . . . that's so parents, isn't it?"

Seika, who had looked momentarily mortified, gave a relieved grin. "I know, right? But I promised."

"Totally okay. So why me? I mean, there's lots—"

"Your shirt, really."

Holly looked down, to see the colorful assortment of human and trollish characters splashed across her current T-shirt. "You're a Homestuck?"

"Yes!" Seika looked almost unreasonably overjoyed.

"I just got into it," Holly admitted. "It's, well, like one of the only new things I'm into."

"Really? Why?"

She rolled her eyes in what she hoped was a properly embarrassed fashion. "This is the first school I've been in and I didn't know many other kids before now."

"First school . . . oh, you were homeschooled until now?"

"Right." Holly-Steve was proud of that idea. Homeschooling would easily explain most of the gaps in Holly Owen's "teenage-ness" and any inconsistencies in the kind of knowledge she had and whatever media or books she liked.

"I wish I could've been homeschooled. At least then people wouldn't bother you for reading books all the time."

"Well, yeah, but I sometimes wish I had been going to regular schools. I wouldn't have been so, um, freaked at my first day."

"Religious homeschooling?" Seika asked, then suddenly clapped a hand over her mouth. "Ohmigod, I'm sorry, I shouldn't poke into things like that, it's not my business—"

Holly grinned. That's actually pretty sweet. "Don't worry, it's cool. No, my dad moved around a lot and didn't like regular schools much, so he decided he'd rather make sure I was educated at home and not have to worry about yanking me out of schools every couple years."

"So why're you here now?"

"I kinda insisted once he said he was staying here for at least five years. And he agreed that I had a right to at least try public schooling and see what I thought about it. Dad's pretty reasonable, actually."

"So you got yourself into this mess?" Seika suddenly shifted her voice to a high-pitched, rough, angry tone: "What the fuck kind of fucking moron would fucking choose to come to a fucking high school?"

Holly instantly recognized the voice and its pattern of constant swearing. "Holy crap that's a good Karkat, Seika! Oh, wait, I should say that's a good fucking Karkat!"

Seika giggled delightedly and looked a little embarrassed. "I practice a lot of the Colab Let's Read Homestuck voices, but that's the one I do best."

Holly kept talking with Seika through the period (Well, there's some more work I'll have to do at home!) and learned that she really was a lot like Steve's usual friends, a science-fiction and fantasy geek who even did role-play in her spare time. Have to ask her if she's got a gaming group or something. That's a social activity I understand, and if I can get a social "in"—even a very geeky one—that'll be a big help in establishing myself here.

Silvertail, currently in his Trayne Owen form, shared her enthusiasm when she got home. "That really is a stroke of luck. Or fate, I suppose, in that you will need to make friends for this to work at all." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "You know, I think as your father that I would recommend you follow Seika's example. Speak to three new people this week."

She squirmed uncomfortably in her seat, but unwillingly came to the conclusion that Mr. Owen was more right than he knew. "Okay, yeah. I guess. With the homeschool excuse I can even be straight-up curious about stuff that I've read about but never was clear on."

"Speaking of that, how was your first gym class?"

She felt her face go red. "Embarrassing, but not anywhere near as bad as I thought. The class isn't the problem, of course, it's the changing rooms and showers. There's stalls you can use to change clothes and you're not forced into a big communal shower like they used to do when I was a kid in school. So I didn't feel quite so much the pervert as I thought I might be. Still . . . there's not much chance to avoid sometimes looking in the wrong direction, no matter how shy I make myself, especially since I'm not pretending to be some weird religion that would give me an excuse for running in first and waiting until everyone else is gone."

"You actually are a fourteen-year-old girl, of course. It is not like you will somehow get caught and arrested."

"Sure, but *I* still know that I am, or was, or will be—you know, this is like totally hard to talk about!—a thirty-five-year old guy. Who remembers being a teenage guy, so I can't completely ignore the whole situation. Even though I'm not a guy right now."

Mr. Owen's smile had a wry edge to it. "I understand the problem, Holly. And undoubtedly this will be an uncomfortable conversation to have at points in your career. But your cover depends on being a teenage girl, and I cannot think of a reasonable excuse for you to not be included in the general run of physical education activities."

"No, I know there isn't one."

"The fact is that it is not possible to prevent you from looking, nor from thinking things that may be inappropriate for your society, given your most unique situation; even if Holly Owen is inherently interested in the opposite sex, you have twenty years of learned responses in an entirely different direction. The question is whether you act on those thoughts. I know you now well enough to be certain you will not. And that, Stephen—and Holly—is all that matters."

She gave an embarrassed snort of laughter. "Stop it, you make me sound almost like a saint, and that I am not."

"No saint. A basically decent person—which in some ways is better. Someone who can be completely detached from temptation and corruption has a great difficulty understanding it, and understanding is vital."

"I guess that makes sense," Holly said, picking up her plate and bringing it toward the dishwasher.

"Speaking of which, I understand now some of your reasons for wanting your room and mine well separated, but I still have the hearing of a rat. The soundproofing may require improvement."

"SILVERTAIL!"

 

 

 

Princess Holy Aura: Chapter 15

Holly had had a bit of a jolt at the end of her first day of school...

-----

 

 

Chapter 15.

"Holly, calm down and tell me what is wrong!" Trayne Owen struggled to keep from losing control and reverting to Silvertail. "You walked in the door and started talking so fast I can't make heads or tails of—"

"Dex is at my school!" she said, voice unsteady. "He was right there, getting on the bus, my God I was so lucky he didn't look at me, but he could have and someday he will and—"

"Holly!" he shouted. She jumped and fell silent.

"Thank you, Holly. Let's look at this slowly, please. You said that 'Dex' is at your school. You refer to your—to Steve's—friend Dexter Armitage, yes?"

"Yes. I—" At his glance, she managed to stop with great effort.

"I see. An interesting coincidence, if it is indeed coincidence. Though it is, in honesty, not that surprising a chance; there are after all only five high schools in reasonable distance of your old residence, and your friend Dexter walked from your house."

"Yeah. Yeah, I should've thought of that. Never asked him exactly where he was going to school, or if I did it was a couple years back and it never sank in. But—"

"But? Try to focus on your thoughts, Holly, not your feelings. Why were you so panicked, so 'freaked out,' by this discovery?"

"It's a secret! I don't want him to see me like this, it's not . . ." She trailed off, and flushed a deep rose. "Oh, God, I'm being an idiot, aren't I?"

"I wouldn't say idiot, but you—"

"He couldn't recognize me unless I came up and introduced myself—and then I'd have to give him some real evidence before even Dex would start to believe it. As far as he's concerned I'm just one more freshman in the sea of students. I could've done a 'crash-into hello' with him and he'd never have a clue." She smacked herself on her forehead. "Idiot, moron, clueless—"

"Holly, stop it!" He put a hand on her shoulder, feeling how small it was—especially in comparison to the massive shoulders Steve had once had. "You have two . . . personas, I suppose we could say, and it is inevitable that the responses of both will cause you problems at times. Dex is a very important friend to you-as-Steve, and it is thus only natural that you might find the idea of him unexpectedly discovering this secret upsetting, and not recognize the other aspects of the situation.

"Add to that your new body and mind's hormonal changes and your lack of experience in controlling a set of responses that are very different than those of Stephen Russ, and this reaction is entirely natural. This doesn't make you stupid, it makes you human, despite whatever superhuman capabilities Holy Aura may have."

He watched as Holly closed her eyes, hands balled into fists at her side, and stood there, breathing, not moving, for long moments.

Finally she opened her eyes and looked up sheepishly. "You . . . you're right, Dad. Silvertail. As usual, I guess. I remember being a teenage guy and my impulses getting all mixed up and out of my control. This is like that. But it's not the same."

"Of course not. Each body reacts differently, and as the proportion of hormones is different, it will cause different general responses. But I suspect you would find it nearly as difficult to deal with even if you were a teenage male. At your age you have memory but a long, long interval in which there has been little experience of the process of puberty."

Holly grimaced. "This part of being suddenly younger I could really do without. Along with the whole 'go back to high school' thing."

"I suppose that includes homework?"

"Yeah, there'll be a lot of that," she said with a sigh. "I can probably whip through a lot of it faster than most people, but still, it's gonna take time. Don't have much today, but I can see it coming." She sniffed the air. "Wow, what's for dinner?"

"Pot roast," he answered. "Something warm and filling after the first day, and I think you'll need it."

"I love pot roast. Hardly ever got a chance to make it myself, though."

"So anything relevant to our mission today?"

Her smile wasn't reassuring. "Oh, yeah." She told him about the security cameras.

"I saw them at the open house," Trayne Owen said.

"I'll bet you didn't quite get how extensive the system is. Every single hall has a two-way view, and the long halls have cameras spaced close enough together that they'll be able to identify anyone in the images. All the big spaces—gym, auditorium, and the outside areas of the grounds—have 'em too. The only places they don't have cameras are the bathrooms and the regular classrooms. If I have to change anywhere in the school, they'll either see me transform, or they'll know what classroom I came out of."

Trayne nodded. "You are correct; I was busy trying to understand the operation of the facility and the people I was meeting. This does pose a considerable threat to your anonymity."

"So can you do anything about it?"

"With this advance knowledge?" He thought for a moment, recalling both long-ago studies of enchantment and far more recent investigations into the workings of technology. "Yes, I believe so. There are several possible ways of addressing this problem; I may go there in my less-obtrusive form and test a few ideas."

"If there's a chance of our enemies already being around there, is it going to be smart of you to go anywhere near the school like that?"

He laughed. "It should be perfectly safe, Holly. I am no match for them in combat, true, but I am very experienced in avoiding detection and escaping threats. And I do not expect them to be terribly active there yet."

"All right. Just . . . be careful. I'm sure not going to make it through this mess without you."

"I appreciate the concern."

Past her crisis, Holly picked up her backpack and headed to her room, while Trayne Owen went back to the kitchen to see to dinner.

An hour and a half later, they sat down together. Trayne hadn't finished two bites when Holly asked, "So what's your problem today, Silvertail?"

"My problem? What do you mean?"

"Your expression hasn't changed much since resolving my silly panic attack; you still look really worried. So I figure there's got to be something else bothering you."

She is perceptive—as she must be, I am afraid—and a human face is, alas, much easier to read than a rodent's. "I had hoped to leave the subject for later," Mr. Owen said slowly. "But . . . yes, there is no point in dissembling. There is another matter of concern. Your people's investigative forces will become an element of increasing challenge to us."

"Huh?" She looked honestly puzzled. "I mean, sure, I get that the cops will be looking at these things and there's a lot of buzz after the first two events. But they don't show up until way after."

"They have not yet done so, no, but they may respond more quickly than we have seen thus far. Your own description of the school tells me that you have at least two law enforcement officers present on-site."

Holly bit her lip. "Oh. Hadn't thought about that before. You're right. But if our opponents are going to be things like the shoggoth or that rock-worm—"

"They will not," Trayne said, with conviction born of too many ages of experience. "Our adversaries will manifest in a variety of forms. Ultimately there will be battle, yes, but that battle may be presaged by far more insidious and subtle attacks and manifestations."

"But," Holly said after a moment, "they're still mostly going to be things that the cops can't find easily, and when the fighting starts most of 'em won't be things they can fight, right? So basically the police aren't really any different than civilians in this."

"In one sense you are correct, but in another you are terribly wrong, Holly. Physically, in many cases, they will be no more capable of acting than the ordinary people, but this era is vastly different than most of those which have preceded it. The interconnection of communications, the ability to instantly transmit information from one point to another, and—most worrisome to me—the organized and powerful ability to collate and analyze in detail masses of information, all provide a tremendous power for not your police as such, but more pervasive organizations such as your intelligence agencies, to use in ferreting out our identity and location. I do not believe our adversaries have grasped this as much as I, and will have relatively little hold on such organizations at first."

"Crap," Holly said, in a voice that somehow echoed Steve's. "But once they do get a clue, they'll be actively trying to use those agents to find us."

"I am afraid so. It was unlikely, though imaginable, that such agencies would drop investigations into the first incident, as isolated oddities are extremely difficult to probe and the nature of the event is so far outside of normal experience that they have few even speculative scenarios to deal with such an investigation.

"Now, however, they have a second data point, and one showing significant commonality with the first—a close geographic correspondence, the appearance of a creature both hostile and utterly unrelated to anything known to your science, and the defeat of the creature by what is obviously the same individual or one of a group of very nearly identical individuals."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm getting the picture, and my gaming brain doesn't like it any more than the rest of me. Forget surveillance cameras, we have to worry about their ability to monitor the net—phones and stuff. Shit, shit, shit . . ." She repeated the word several times like a mantra. "Silvertail, we're going to have to figure out how to keep them from tracking us down that way. I have to use the net for all sorts of stuff, and I'm sure that for some of our missions I'll be doing research that way—or maybe one of our Apocalypse Maidens will be a hacker. It'd sure fit some of the memes. But that big whistle-blowing on the NSA showed they can sort through a lot of traffic to get what they're after, and now they know to start looking around here."

He nodded. "Yes. Which drastically reduces the amount of information they need to sort, and thus increases their chance to extract relevant information. Fortunately, of course, supernatural beings generally are not communicating via cellular networks or e-mail, but in this era . . ."—he smiled wryly—"in this era I would expect that the Apocalypse Maidens may well be texting each other about crucial information. Yes, Stephen . . . Holly, this is the problem that has concerned me."

"Well, like they say," she said with a grin, "at least now we know. And knowing is half the battle!"

He found himself laughing aloud, knowing precisely the reference of memes so relevant. "Precisely so. The simpler half, unfortunately."

"But," Holly said, waving her fork as though raising her finger for emphasis, "we haven't done much to draw attention to us yet. As long as your ID work will hang together—"

"It will. Oh, if they for some reason truly develop a suspicion of you and me personally, a physical background check will show a mysterious lack of people recalling our existence, but there should be no lack of researchable details . . . and such people are often very satisfied by paperwork that aligns properly." He thought for a moment. "However . . . hmmm . . . yes, that will be a problem. I may have to find a way to insert some sort of prior indicators of electronic communication into their databases, ones that show, at least, Trayne Owen as having been sampled as any other citizen by their data-collection systems."

"Jesus. That's . . ."

". . . ambitious, yes." Despite that thought, he felt his heart lighter than it had been in a few days, and smiled. "Yet while their reach is great, and I am but one man . . . I also am a man old as all of them put together, and with subtle and powerful magic they suspect not at all." He nodded decisively. "You are right, Holly. Now that I know, I can at least cover our presence well. It will be up to us, going forward, to hide ourselves from these agencies."

"What's the real problem if they did find us, though?"

He blinked in startlement, as she went on, "I mean, if we fail, the world's gone blooey, and if we succeed, all that stuff gets erased and set back. So even if they do get a file on me a foot thick, it's gone once we're done."

He felt a frown creasing his face. That is an interesting question. But I know that this is a problem.

After a moment's thought he had the answer. He also suspected that in his original form, Steve would have quickly come up with the answer, but as Holly, Steve's memories were somewhat separate, and the trains of thought different. "The concern is that if they do manage to figure out, for example, that Holly Owen is associated with Princess Holy Aura, they could try to take you in as a 'person of interest.' The excuse—or rather, in this case, the fact—that you may be a threat to national security would justify doing so, and they would have no requirement to do so publicly or with due process."

"Could they hold me? I mean, I am Princess Holy Aura, right, and they can't shut that off, can they?"

"Without help from our opposite numbers, no. But they may well get such assistance, and even without it . . . Think about it."

He could see her expression go from puzzled to grim. "Oh. Sorry, I wasn't thinking along the right lines. Sure. First, all that'd have to happen is bad timing—them grabbing me up and having me, say, flown to Washington, just when the bad guys decide to unleash their next monster in downtown Schenectady or something. You said people killed by these things are going to be really, really dead in both timelines."

She glanced at him, and he nodded gravely. "And . . . ?" he prompted.

"Aaaand . . . if I have to bust out of their custody, I'd probably have to hurt people, which is like the opposite of my job. And I'd become a criminal from their point of view."

"Worse, you would represent a power they cannot control."

"Bugger, as one of my friends used to say. Sure. And if they can't control me, even if they accept I mean well, they can't be sure how I'll act. What if Princess Holy Aura turns out to be a radical activist? What if she decides to take her superhuman powers out to intervene in some foreign country or whatever? She's one teenage girl; she could do something perfectly well meaning and still trigger a war."

"Indeed. And of course that assumes that such agencies are basically benign. Some try to be . . . but there are others, or organizations within such agencies, that are far from benign. Those, especially once contacted by our adversaries . . . those will be malevolently interested in either securing and containing you, or manipulating you for their own purposes."

"Whoa. Are you telling me that there are actually evil intelligence agencies? I mean, yeah, I don't trust ours and they do things I'd consider evil, but—"

"There are, in fact, very old organizations—some tied in sidewise means to our adversaries, others quite independent—whose nature is secretive and whose goals are very much what you would consider evil. While magic, as such, is very weak in this world when the cycle has not come, it cannot be banned from the world entirely."

"Great. So not only am I going to be looking out for the monster of the week, but I have to worry about the cosmic Illuminati?"

The comment brought a brief smile to his lips. "Something of that nature, yes. Though even they, for the most part, would not want the triumph of Azathoth of the Nine Arms. And there are other forces of lighter motivation."

The smile faded. "But all of them have the potential to interfere . . . and even a small interference, at the wrong moment, could spell disaster—not merely for us, but for humanity itself."

 

 

Princess Holy Aura: Chapter 14

Today, our hero Holly faces her most daunting challenge yet: High School!

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PART II: AWAKENING THE MAIDENS

 

Chapter 14.

     She stood in the cool September morning, watching as the yellow school bus grumbled its way up to her driveway, and felt an eerie sense of frightened déjà vu. It had been almost twenty years since the last time Stephen Russ had boarded such a bus, and the memories of that and earlier bus rides wasn't a pleasant memory to recall. Maybe I should've talked about that with Silvertail.

The faint whiff of diesel washed over her along with the muffled crunch of gravel under broad tires and the pneumatic hiss of the door opening reinforced the memory; she looked up, half expecting the blue-eyed, wrinkled face of old Bill to be looking back.

Instead it was the brown eyes of a woman in her thirties, looking—as most bus drivers do—somewhat harried, but she gave a bright smile. "You're Holly Owen?"

"Yes, I am. That's my dad," she pointed to where Mr. Trayne Owen stood at the door, waving.

"Good. Get on, Holly."

She waved back to Mr. Owen and then climbed up the steps.

Thank God it's not too crowded yet. She looked up and down—sure her nervousness was visible—and chose an empty seat. I'll have to make some friends somehow, but right now, I have to get through the first couple of days and figure out what it's like to be in high school now. There were the usual faintly curious glances from the other passengers at seeing a new face. Some of the boys looked a hair longer—again, no surprise.

She sat down and the bus started with the same lurch she remembered from two decades back. And still no seatbelts. Some things never change. The massive size, height, and cushioned interior of a modern schoolbus were supposedly safer than any other vehicle, but Holly had Steve's ingrained expectation of a seatbelt in any vehicle, and she found herself unexpectedly nervous at the unsecured swaying as the bus continued its rounds.

Okay, that's probably just fine. Be nervous. Lots of the other students will be. You've just gotten here, you don't know anyone, you don't even know the area well since you came from the West Coast. That will probably be my big stumbling block. Can't be too familiar with this area.

The bus arrived and disgorged its passengers. Holly paused, looking up at Whitney High; as Steve, he'd had a friend or two that had gone there, but Whitney had become the center of the district; with the other three high schools shut down, it had undergone a major expansion and refurbishing a couple of years back and looked nothing like it had back then.

Well, almost nothing like. The central part of the school was still the massive, respectable three-story brick with an old-style belfry that looked something like a watchtower above the columned entrance; that, and the tall chain link fence that had always surrounded the grounds, had given it a prisonlike appearance which led his friend and others to refer to the school as Whitney State Correctional Facility.

That unified and intimidating appearance was gone, however. Extending to either side were two-story expansions in brighter, glass-and-concrete materials; from the quick tour she'd taken with Mr. Owen, Holly knew there was a third extra wing behind the visible front. Behind that were the sports bleachers and tracks and other phys ed–related spaces.

Entering the school was a lot different. The doors were thicker, heavily reinforced, with cameras observing everyone coming and going. And an actual couple of police officers on duty. Steve remembered people just coming and going from his old school—old students visiting their favorite teachers, parents dropping by to pick up a kid for a sudden appointment, and so on. Here, anyone entering who wasn't a student had to go through a separate screening entrance.

The intimidating security suddenly made his friend's old joke much less funny. Boy, if one of the attacks happens here, I'll have a hell of a time keeping it off the video, especially if Silvertail's not with me.

As she made her way to her homeroom—A207, which meant in the right-hand wing, with Mr. Coyne—the impression grew stronger. The cameras weren't just at the front of the building or the entrances; there were cameras watching the hallways, too. I definitely need to sit down with Silvertail and see if he can put some kind of, I dunno, contingency on the cameras here, so that if I need to transform it'll blank all of them. Our enemies will know Whitney High's the center soon enough, but if we can force them to have to keep guessing which of the thousand students is their target, it'll help.

It was a tiny shred of relief that there were no cameras actually in the classroom. Yet. And while there were more high-tech screens and such, the classroom didn't look that different from the ones she remembered from Steve's pass through public education.

Mr. Coyne was a tall dark-haired man with a long, lined face that held the weariness of the career teacher along with a still-present humor. "All right, sit down, quiet everyone, I know it's just after summer and we'd all rather be outside, but there's going to be a lot to go through."

Holly chose a seat and listened with half an ear to Coyne's quick summary of the way things would work in the school. Silvertail—as Mr. Owen, naturally—had attended an open house and gotten the summary then, so she was aware of the schedule and how everything was organized.

She was much more interested in trying to guess which of the students might be the other Apocalypse Maidens—although admittedly there was no reason to assume they were all going to be in the same classroom, or even necessarily in the same grade.

Still, the tropes practically demanded that at least one or two of the other Maidens be in classes with her. Who would it be? The shy-looking pale girl with uncontrolled curly brown hair sitting in the corner? The tanned girl with a stack of books next to her that nearly reached her pin-straight hair dyed deep purple with white edging? Maybe one of the two Latina-looking girls who were busy in a whispered conversation on the far side of the room? Or the black girl with poofy black curly hair, whose face was almost completely obscured by the book she was reading?

Holly got no sensation of rightness, or wrongness, from any of them. Inwardly she shrugged. Silvertail said there probably wouldn't be any way to tell until a crisis. Might as well stop thinking about it and focus on being a fine young student.

It was true that ultimately it didn't matter if she did well, or poorly, in school; after all, either the Apocalypse Maidens would succeed and send the bad guys back to the darkness, at which point Holly would become Steve again and no one would remember any of this, or they'd fail and the world would fall to Lovecraftian horror, at which point no one was going to care about her grades in history. But Steve's pride wouldn't let Holly screw this up. I did pretty well the first time through; with almost twenty more years of living I'll be damned if I'm going to do anything less than the best now!

Her schedule turned out to be annoying as hell. My first class is in B-Wing, then I go back to A, then to C, then I get lunch, and then A, B, C again. That meant that she would have to walk very fast to manage to get to all her classes on time—and they emphasized being on time a lot. Being late anywhere could have consequences up to and including suspension, which didn't make sense to Steve-Holly. So I'm late to class a lot, so you'll punish me by taking me out of the classes I'm apparently not wanting to go to? Brilliant plan, guys.

On the positive side, the crisscross scheduling, from Biology with Mrs. Rizzo to English with "Doctor, not Mister" Beardsley, Social Studies with Ms. Vaneman, and so on, made sure that she would get really familiar with a lot of the school, and see a lot of the students every day.

And boy, did I make the right decision to get a big backpack. I'm almost never going to get a chance to get to my locker, unless I do it just before homeroom or during lunch.

Homework was going to be a pain in the ass. Holly, seeing through Steve's memories, could tell she could probably do a lot of it faster than most people would ever manage, but still . . . They're saying they'll assign a lot more stuff than I remember from back in the day, and boy, they're hardass about it. No more handwavy extra-credit slide for me.

Suddenly she realized the last class was over, the bell had rung. Okay, first day, fine, but I've got to start talking to people. I've been just half-here all day.

The students filed out to where the buses were waiting, a huge line of idling yellow boxes. She looked around, figured out where hers should be, and started over. As she did, she glanced idly around, still surveying the people, her eyes skipping over most of the boys, since they—

She froze so suddenly two people bumped into her and she staggered and fell. The hot, rough burning sensation of a hand scraped raw on pavement shot through her. "Ow!"

"Sorry!" said one of the two apologetically. The other muttered, "Why be sorry? It was her fault she stopped like that!"

But Holly barely registered the apology or cynical retort; automatically she said "It's okay, I'm fine, sorry, my fault," but she was rising, backing away at the same time, trying to find a route that didn't take her past that next bus, but really, there wasn't any choice, was there?

There wasn't. She had to continue, her bus was just on the other side of the one she was approaching. She kept her head down, looking from beneath her hair. There was no mistaking the tall, slender form, the long uncontrolled fall of gold hair.

Richard Dexter Armitage.

 

 

Princess Holy Aura: Chapter 13

Even heroes can get a case of nerves before a big day...

 

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Chapter 13.

"Holly? You need to go to sleep!" Mr. Owen said, looking in and seeing her sitting at her computer.

Holly sighed, tried to smile and failed. "I can't sleep, Dad . . . Silvertail." The confusion that had made her change the name she used threatened to overwhelm her. Sometimes I almost forget being Steve Russ, and that terrifies me beyond words.

He sat down in one of the other chairs, pushing back the graying black hair that needed a trim. "But you do need sleep, Holly. Big day tomorrow."

"Why do you think I can't sleep, Silvertail? I know what tomorrow is. Tomorrow school starts. Tomorrow I'm a fourteen-year-old girl in her first day of high school, trying to look perfectly normal while I secretly scope out my classmates to figure out which of them is going to get thrown at a shoggoth or a dhole or whatever hideous thing our enemies bring out next." She looked down, saw she had the armrests of her chair in a deathgrip.

His dark eyes showed lines of pain and sympathy. "Holly . . . Stephen . . . believe me when I say I understand."

She was silent a moment, realizing the truth of that gentle reminder. "Yeah. Yeah, of course you do. You've done this so many times. How did you manage it, Silvertail? Because I've been around you long enough so I'm sure you're not faking it; you care what happens to us."

Silvertail's human guise dropped its gaze to the floor. "How? By constantly reminding myself that if I do not, those exact children—and all they care for, all they are, all they could ever be—will be destroyed as well. The only way to save them . . . is to imperil them, much as I—as we—hate the very thought. I have done all I can in choosing you. All I can do is pray this was the right choice. But it never becomes easier, and I pray also that it never shall."

His eyes came up and there was a clearer look in them. "But something else bothers you as well."

He's sharp as ever. Guess you have to be if most of the time you're a white rat. "More than one. See, I called you Dad. Not the first time. But it's gotten . . . more natural. I think of you that way, sometimes, when I'm really comfortable as Holly."

"Ah. And that frightens you?"

"Hell yes!" she said, heard her own voice just a tiny bit too high, too nervous. "I'm starting to think like a teenage girl. Like I really am Holly Owen. Okay, sure, that's great for our cover, I'm not, like, going to screw it up so easy now. But that's not the real me, and I . . . I really don't think it should've changed for me that fast. It's that . . . template thing again, isn't it?"

"I'm afraid so, Holly. All the previous Holy Auras were teenage girls, no more than your current apparent age. It is, in all truth, necessary that you become, at least to some extent, Holly Owen as the world will see you. I explained to you the symbolism that made choosing such a person, standing between childhood and adulthood, a vital part of the weapon that is the Apocalypse Maiden."

"Yeah. You did. I'm just . . . scared. And scared like I was when I was little, not like when I was Steve." She got up, walked to the bed, hesitated, turned around, sat down, got up. "See? I can't even figure out where I want to be when I'm talking. Too nervous."

"I wish—"

"I know. I know." She closed her eyes, concentrated. Now to the hard part. "But there's something else."

Mr. Owen nodded. "I rather thought as much."

"It's about those other girls, what we're going to do. Now I get it, we need all five Apocalypse Maidens to do the full job of kicking these monsters back where they came from and locking the door behind them. We have to find them, we have to awaken them, we have to work together. I got that. But I've been thinking . . . you remember what you told me about why you chose me after all this time?"

"How could I forget?" The front teeth flashed in the smile, reminding her of the incisors natural to a rat. "I was tired of choosing children for this job."

"More than that. You were trying to do the right thing by not forcing this on a child. And you were right. But what that means is that we have to do the same thing here."

"We can't choose adult—"

"Right, right, I know, we went over that; the enchantment's already engaged, it will have already found the four others, even if they're not active yet. But what I mean is that you made a moral, an ethical choice, to not dump the leadership, the key of the whole world's salvation, onto a girl who shouldn't have to deal with it. So that makes it my duty—and yours—to try to keep the whole thing as ethical as we possibly can."

The narrow gaze was as piercing as it had ever been from the beady eyes of a white rodent. "Yes . . ." Silvertail said slowly, "of course. But exactly what are you getting at?"

"I mean that maybe they'll have to get it dumped on them in the middle of combat—I know the memes, believe me—but after that? We can't drag a fourteen-year-old girl out into this and keep it secret from her family."

"Lemuria's Memory, Stephen! You cannot seriously mean—"

"I mean exactly that. How can we be doing the right thing if what we're going to do is make children lie to their parents and sneak out to maybe get themselves killed—or come back broken in their heads? Sure, I'll bet these Apocalypse Maidens are supposed to be strong and all, but half the people who were in the mall that day are probably gonna be in therapy for months or years; at least I had thirty-five years of life to help me deal with that fight. These kids aren't going to have even half of that."

"And what if their parents say no? Or try to have us arrested? Or shoot at us? Steve—Holly—your current culture is highly protective of your children, in some ways stultifyingly so. You know what sort of reaction any threat to children will create."

She ran her fingers through her hair, realized she had better brush it again before going to bed, then shoved that trivial thought aside. "Yes. I know. But I know this is the only way I could do it."

The form of Mr. Owen wavered, and suddenly Silvertail was sitting on the chair, staring at her with desperate concern. "You know we have no choice in this war, Holly. Even if they say no, we would have—"

"If they say no, it's no." Seeing the half-furious, half-panicked twitching of the whiskers, she forced a smile and went on. "But I think we have to assume there's some way to convince them. After all, there really isn't any going back, from what you said. The meme demands the super-team get formed, I just have to try to work it so our super-team has super-duper parental support. And between Holy Aura and you, Silvertail, we've got quite a lot of force of personality and evidence that we're not crazy."

The silver-white rat paused, tilting his head, seeming to contemplate. Then a tiny hop of assent. "You . . . make excellent points, Holly. Yes, the imperatives of the enchantment and our ultimate confrontation will tend to smooth our way through such mundane problems. But it will still not make the results certain. We still run a great risk."

"But risk and sacrifice, that's part of the power of the spell, right? And if the families are aware—"

A squeaking laugh. "Stephen Russ! For that is your mind at work, I will swear to it! Indeed, you are correct; if—and I emphasize if—we succeed in convincing these families to support us, it will symbolize a great deal of willing sacrifice and faith. All the Apocalypse Maidens will be stronger for that." It was astonishing how the little furry face and body could manage to convey such a wide range of emotions; now Silvertail looked at her with a wry cynicism. "However, to achieve that will also require an astonishing amount of faith, possibly sacrifice, and most certainly luck."

"But it's the right thing to do."

Silvertail took a breath so huge his sides visibly swelled, then sighed explosively. "Yes. Yes, Holly, Stephen, you are completely correct. I began this cycle with a determination to take a higher path; I can hardly fault you for insisting I hold to my course. I cringe at the thought of how much danger we may be placing our cause in, but I will not argue."

With a flash, Mr. Owen reappeared. "And now, having convinced me of your correctness, can you please relax enough to go to bed? The last thing either of us need is for you to try your first day in school as Holly with half a night's sleep."

Holly felt a small loosening of the tension in her stomach. He agreed. I was right. Or I hope I am, anyway. "Yes . . . Dad, I'll try."

"Good. Then . . . good night, Holly." He watched as she turned off the computer and got into bed, then switched off the light.

Holly rolled over, and tried to relax. I think I can, now. Her eyes were feeling heavy, and she drove out thoughts of the future. Tomorrow will take care of itself. Now that I know Silvertail's supporting me . . . She smiled. This just might work after all!