on my speeddial. Did this mean they'd march me straight back to the cell and forget the key?
Someone knelt beside me. “We're going to do a little trick, and it's going to hurt you, but you're going to take it in silence. If he doesn't come, we'll put you in front of a judge this very night who thinks you got off too easily. Not a punishment great enough for you. Understand? Good. Now get up.”
They turned my wrists up and I felt hot steel slide down my forearm. Liquid trickled after its wake, wrapping around my arm before dropping to the ground. Blood, I knew, but preferred not to think about. I heard soft murmurs of spell-casting. Cloth rubbed up and down my arm, stinging with how hard he squeezed.
“Give me another one, she's making a bloody mess.”
The other man sounded annoyed. “You shouldn't have cut so deep. There's enough here for three summonings.”
A wave of dizziness made me want to wobble, but I doubted I was weak from blood loss. More like from imagining that it was worse than it truly was. Nevertheless, I still jerked when a cloth wrapped around my arm. It wasn't the tug and criss-cross that a trained medical personnel would have done, it was the tie-at-the-top, spiral around the limb, tie again at the bottom procedure that any adolescent would think was a good job.
Smoke filled my nostrils, then was gone. In place of the murmuring voice, there was animated chatter. The summoning was complete.
“If it was that easy, why didn't you do it the first time around?” I asked.
“What?”
My guard had not been paying attention to me. Pity I had wasted the opportunity to run. I said, “If it was that easy to call him, why didn't you do it all those years ago?”
“We didn't have his name.”
“Nor the untainted blood,”someone else added.
“There's a way to taint blood so it can't be used?” I asked.
“No. You have come down in this world considerably, to ask things like that,” my guard said, and then the men stopped talking altogether.
There was a way to taint the blood. Imps knew the secret, that's why volunteer imp's blood was so rare. They didn't like to give it up. An image of an imp wavered in my mind's eye, at first I thought it was the one I'd met at Devil's Canyon, but that wasn't right. This imp, the one I remembered, didn't run a candy shop. This one fished all day at the lake, where she'd thrown her bottle to its frigid, black depths so no one would ever again possess her powers and compel her to do their bidding. I'd learned how to taint my blood from her one sultry summer afternoon, the both of us casting baited hooks out to hungry redfish and reeling in plain trout instead.
I'd been doing that one afternoon, hiding from the heat of the sun away from the railroad town, when the town watch had come. A transmutation, they said. My favorite horse had run out of time. So I'd gone. We'd set up the spell, prepared for what came next by polishing up the boots and folding the trousers, laying out the shirt and all else that he'd come with. A matching set of revolvers, nothing fancy but sturdy nonetheless. A hunting rifle. No rodent traps, no skins, no stiff lasso. No mining gear, either. As the other two assembled, the apothecary woman said, “They found what was left of the horse he said he had. Right nasty black bear got it a'right. Old Snaggletooth, that was him that did it.”
The horse. In a dreamy, cottony flow of rationalization, I remembered that the horse had been why the man had come into town. Couldn't pay up enough for a fresh mount, so he'd gotten into a card game, high stakes. Fool was caught cheating.
“You don't cheat cards at this town,” I'd said to the poor, shivering horse who had once been the stranger who'd walked into civilization with a saddle tossed over one shoulder and all his equipment over the other. I'd warned him not to, too, when I saw him first of everyone and pumped him fresh water and left him to wash up.
He hadn't listened.
I'd watched him transform as his sentence came to an end and he changed from horse back into a man. His bare shoulders had shivered under a cool breeze, as wet as I'd seen that first day when he'd dumped water down his chest, washing away the road grime. His eyes were half-wild and alert, not at all confused the way men's eyes usually were once they were back to being human again. Those brilliant eyes had met mine and he'd straightened his back, then stretched out an arm for the wash basin which awaited him.
Despite myself, I felt it then as I felt it again, the way those eyes took my breath away and I saw mirrored in him the other half to my wild spirit, a spirit which could not be tamed nor contained. Though the rest of the townsfolk stayed well apart from the maverick, I gave him the sponge, held the bar of lye and coal tar, and at last passed him his clothes item by item until he stood before me as a decent man all shaved and dressed.
The man he'd cheated came forward and the sheriff asked in a drawling, bored way, “Well, son, what you got to say to the man?”
The stranger spat on the ground and said, “I'm no one's son, Sheriff. And the only thing I'm sorry for is getting caught.”
Another person would have been offended, but Thaimon had grinned—Thaimon, had it been Thaimon? In any case, now it was his face which filled my memory—and put his arm over the stranger's shoulders. Thaimon said, “You're my guest, comrade. What name are you going by this time?”
The man had refused to leave until I began to walk alongside them. As if to me rather than to his host, the man said, “They call me Nicholas.”
I startled in physical surprise, brought back to the parking lot with its asphalt ground and the pain in my feet, the distant scent of fries from some burger joint working late in the night. The men around me were still talking, getting impatient. Thaimon hadn't appeared yet.
The spell occupying my time had broken. I couldn't imagine myself back into my memories, I couldn't see the way Thaimon had looked back then. Nor could I do anything except create a fiction which jarred ever-so-slightly with the way I knew things had been.
“Where did you see it?” one man asked another. Something had happened, something which had startled me and put my captors on edge.
My toes had gone completely numb. I hadn't felt the warmth of the sun, and it hadn't gotten the slightest bit warmer since we'd arrived. Hunting a wraith by moonlight. It seemed ominous. “It's night,” I said. “I don't think this is a good idea.”
“Thinking isn't your role here,” someone with a gruff voice said and pushed me. I stepped to catch my balance, my foot landing onto the edge of a curb. I felt the skin burn off the arch of my foot and ankle. I gasped, then hushed myself before they could get upset.
“Stop that whimpering!”
“Easy there, son, what do you think you're doing to the little lady?” asked a wheezy old man as bony hands stabilized me, holding me in a way which was just a little too familiar. I stiffened, not daring to utter a single sound as the maybe-familiar maybe-not voice continued, “Why, she's done got a sack on her pretty little head.”
“Go away, old man.”
“Son, if I was a little less old I would say that you was going to hurt this baby.”
I reached for the hood but brawny hands stopped me.
“I said, this does not concern you. Move along, we're the law.”
“I'd say you were right, Brandy baby,” said the voice as it morphed into one I recognized. The hood yanked back off my head, tugging a few hairs out of my scalp. Thaimon touched my shackles. They shifted beneath his fingers and dropped to the ground, rattling together as if they were the tail end of a snake, the only sound which echoed across the parking lot for a long second. “It was unwise to hunt wraith at night.”
Exactly the same way that the shackles had stifled and overwhelmed me when they went on, they stunned me again when they came off. All around me, the world burst into brilliance, hurting my eyes so they watered and it all became a smudgy haze of colors. I felt the star-kissed silver sheen of light reflecting off the grass behind the curb, breathed in the tickling mist of lawn sprinklers as they popped out of the ground, hissing and clicking; and far off, the
hum of cars on a roadway softened the hollow emptiness of a place so unloved and so forgotten that it seemed everyone would have been happiest if the place would just up and demolish itself.
My guards were not an ugly lot, the way I'd imagined them to be. One, the shortest one, was on the boy side of adulthood, full of himself and cock-sure, appearing oh so mighty as he stopped squashing bugs with his boot and saw the shackles as they came to a rest on the ground. Another curled his fist around a foil-wrapped energy bar, eyes wide, already reaching for the gun at his hip. Last of all was the one who stood closest to me, drawing back a fist, a pure white bolt forming in his palm.
I watched as it morphed into a spear. Before it could finish forming its shaft, I cried out and leaped backwards onto wet grass.
The spear slipped through the air, fast as a flash, and I felt it nip my right earlobe and continue onward along with a sharp command at the same instant the spearhead touched Thaimon's outstretched palm.
“Thaimon!” I yelled, then went quiet, watching in amazement as the spear dissolved at the first contact with his flesh, the white washing over his arm and leaving him completely unharmed.
“What!” the shortest youngster said, ducking and cowering away from Thaimon.
The man with the gun slung into a low shooter's stance and said, “I have incendiary bullets and I'm not afraid to plug you full of them. Both of