Blissed Season 1 Episode 7
Silent Sentinels
by
Nicolette Jinks
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed are either products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2015 by NICOLETTE JINKS
NICOLETTE JINKS asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
You may contact the author via email:
[email protected] or check in at Twitter, Facebook, Google+, GoodReads. To follow the author, her blog is www.nicolettejinks.wordpress.com, where she writes about writing and life.
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doing business as Standal Publications
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Silent Sentinels
Girl's night involved take-out Tex Mex and tissues by the gas lights Kayla kept fawning over and the fireplace Willow kept avoiding. Kayla had found a folder containing my old illustrations and my mouth was too full of a shredded pork and bean burrito to tell her to leave the drawing alone.
“Oh my gosh!” she exclaimed, thrusting it beneath Willow's wide eyes. “Look at this. It's exactly like the flower growing outside.”
“Yes, it is.”
Suddenly Willow appeared just a bit concerned, but Kayla was oblivious to it. Hyperactive was the best term for Kayla at the moment. In the next minute I anticipated another bout of crying. The resident doctor had said to expect it given the medications provided to her. Speaking of medications, I had my own to take. Annoying, but it kept me feeling normal, if a bit stuffy.
Kayla's very first act after inspecting her room had been to open the window to her bedroom and snap off the purple passionflower. It now had a place of honor in a drinking glass on the mantle and as much as I tried not to inspect it for blood, I couldn't help myself. The memory of the blood mage lair was too strong.
We'd arrived home from the slavers earlier that day after spending a night and a morning driving down the interstate and sleeping in a parking lot when Wraithbane had been too tired to continue. The exact reason we used conventional means instead of a portal had something to do with shaking off any trackers. Since he had followed targets through all manner of magical means, I tended to not question his logic too much.
“I did that one years ago,” I said in an attempt to soothe Willow's concern. Kayla took the comment as permission to dig deeper into the pile until she brought out a charcoal sketch.
“Ooh, it's so moody. Big, angry, vague swooshes and things.” She turned it upside down then right-side up again. “I don't know what it is, but I like it. What do you think, Willow?”
This time when Kayla thrust the drawing under Willow's distracted gaze, Willow responded with a scream that chilled me and made Kayla jump. “What is it? What's wrong?”
Willow stopped screaming bloody murder and clutched her sweater tightly. “Nothing,” she said. “It's lovely.”
She started to leave the room.
“Willow?” Kayla called after her. “Where are you going?”
She gave a weak smile. “Nowhere. I'm here. I just had to stretch my legs.”
“Is it because it was scary? I should have thought—” Kayla stopped talking and swung into full-blown tears, becoming a sobbing mess in a matter of five seconds flat.
Once again, Willow was back in her usual domain and she conducted the motherly behavior absolutely perfectly, comforting and quieting Kayla's guilt like a trained professional while I made my way awkwardly into the kitchen and tapped my finger on the new oven. Next to it, the counter was pitted with the burns from the Bliss brewing which had ruined the first oven.
How could I be there emotionally for Kayla when I didn't know how to do it? Communal living wasn't a thing I'd ever been comfortable with, which was all the more awkward because for all the ways that I could understand people and even get their life story out of them, I hadn't a clue what to do the moment tears made their appearance. I used to think that Kayla's presence as a housemate would benefit us both, but now I doubted. A pillar of strength I could be, but a pillar didn't make a very good reassurance partner. Manipulation came second nature to me. Give me Thaimon and I could wrap him around my finger. Give me Kayla trying to stay awake until a decent bedtime and watch me slink away.
“I heard screaming,” Wraithbane said, having apparently entered without being heard.
Willow answered, “It was me. I wasn't expecting to see this.”
At the shuffle of papers, I hung my head a little bit in shame. It sounded like he was going through the whole stack. Belatedly I wondered if I'd kept any of the live model figure sketches from that one art workshop I'd taken ages ago. Not that it should matter if there were any nudes in there. I sighed. I should have taken the folder away from Kayla.
“A detailed likeness,” Wraithbane said from the doorway to the kitchen. He held the loose scribbles which had scared Willow. I doubted he was teasing me, but it was far from detailed.
“Is it? I didn't even realize I'd kept it.”
Wraithbane couldn't keep from staring at it, his finger skimming over the surface of the paper, following the pencil strokes. “I couldn't have done a better job of it myself. It seems so alive. Where did you see this?”
I glanced at the bottom corner, checking for a date. In my usual fashion, it was neither signed nor dated, but I could remember how my desk had looked when I'd drawn it. “A recurring dream. I did that three years ago.”
Wraithbane nodded but said nothing.
“You know what it is.”
“Yes. It's a wraith, in its real form between bodies. Rare sight and impossible to remember, but also impossible to forget.”
I bit my lip and lowered my voice to the softest level I could. “Do you think that it was real? Or that it was, well, you see, sometimes I get these memories and it's not something I should have.” I sighed. “Or maybe it's all imagination. Just me filling in the blanks.”
Laying down six drawings next to me on the counter, Wraithbane said, “These did not come from your imagination.”
There was the wraith, an early rendition of a cavernous laboratory which I now recognized as a malformed attempt to replicate the blood mage lair, the nearly perfect replication of the image on Meg's Shackles card, some symbols which had plagued me forever, a thing which I now knew resembled a revenant, and a silhouette of an owl in a tree.
“I don't know the significance of these two,” I said, pointing to the owl and the symbols.
“This one is on the seal of the White Wizard Council,” Wraithbane said of the owl. He hesitated over the symbols. “And this is a transfiguration spell.”
“What?”
“One that I've heard of but never seen. There is no reason it shouldn't work, but I suggest that you not replicate this for anyone unless you want them to become four-legged and herbivorous.”
“What's it, from human to cow?”
“Human to horse.” Wraithbane lifted the page and inspected it closer. “It puts the old witch's bridle to shame.”
The hair rose on my neck. “Can you tell if it's Old West era?”
“Might be. Why?”
I shook my head to clear it of the distant memory I had. “No reason. Just wondering.”
Wraithbane passed his hand through his hair. “These are vivid.”
“Do you think I should get rid of them?”
“I don't know.” Wraithbane stacked them again. “I really don't know.”
Willow cleared her throat behind us. She said, “Brandy, can you see?”
It took me a second to realize what she was asking. With a bit of effort, I could make out spell residue that was lingering around Wrait
hbane. “Well enough, why?”
Willow met Wraithbane's eyes. “It's Caleb Lowe. Jane Dell has reached the checkpoint without him. They were pursued, but she didn't know what it was by.”
The names took a minute to find a place. “Harvest Court. Charlie team, is that right?” At Willow's surprised expression, I added, “I met them at Devil's Canyon.”
Wraithbane filled a glass with water and chugged it. Then he wiped his mouth and said, “Brandy, do you want to find out why you don't use portals while you're on the run?”
I couldn't help but to smile at the invitation, even knowing that Lowe might not be in such a good state when we did find him.
Our very first act was to take my front door portal to leave behind all too curious listeners. Then we took two more before Wraithbane found a bench outside a lonely bus stop. He pulled from his pocket a heavily creased piece of paper which threatened to fall apart at the seams.
“The first thing to understand about portals is that they're like a downhill tunnel. Once you're in them you have no choice but to keep going, and you can't stop midway. Typically portals are only stable if they have one destination.”
I raised a brow at him, which he continued, “Yes, the portals at the Kettle are not your typical portals. We have people who dedicate a great deal of time into ensuring that they can go nearly everywhere. The engineers aren't patient enough to explain it even to someone such as myself.”
“Do they say that? They aren't patient enough?” I asked.
“Yes. Don't you believe it?”
“No,” I said, “I think that if it really is that unique and unusual, it means that they have a lot invested in being impatient towards anyone who expresses an interest.”
Wraithbane laughed. “Touche. But it does not matter. A few portals can go in perhaps three directions, but what is more common is to place three one-direction portals right next to each other so a slight slip in which portal you enter means you end up someplace else entirely.”
“So what you've done here is kept record of various portals, where they start and where they go.” I examined the map. “There are no street names or landmarks.”
“In case this map ends up in hands which aren't mine.”
“You could still suss it out by taking a few portals and cross-referencing your place of arrival with the points on the map.”
“Assuming that you didn't walk into a portal which I either didn't record or hadn't been in existence yet at the time of map making.”
“Or in case you simply hadn't noticed the portal in the first place. I see where this can get sticky.” I considered. “And how someone could use similar knowledge of the portal system to follow someone else.”
“Unless you can dedicate the time and effort to making your own portal, you would have to go to one of these areas with lots of options in order to get to your desired destination. With a little knowledge of which one is closest, it makes it very easy to beat a target to the so-called station.”
“Am I going to have to make up my own map?”
“No, I'd rather we collaborate. If we ever get parted, we can make to the same station. It could take too long for you to find them on your own.”
“Right. So where did Lowe go missing at?”
“He was separated from Dell here,” Wraithbane said, pointing at a remote area of the map. I leaned in close and we worked out a plan.
Perhaps to humor me, Wraithbane had taken the path which I had suggested. It took us through two more tunnels before we nearly lost the third one, which I later found hidden behind a dumpster. Wraithbane didn't tell me where any of the portals were, leaving it up to me to sniff them out on my own. It was intimidating at first, until I realized that he was making me independent—and marking a couple of new ones on his map, things that would take him a lot longer to find than it did for me to see.
There was one portal which was no longer in existence, so we had to backtrack and re-route to get to an old hospital which had not been in use since the 80's. Despite all the years and the decay which afflicted the drywall and any plastic surface, the place still had the distinctive sting of disinfectant and the unnerving air that was inherent to any location where a lot of people had died. I shivered at little electrical impulses running through my skin, then we turned a corner and saw bright bubble-shaped rainbow after bright bubble-shaped rainbow.
“Wow.”
I didn't need to ask if we were in the nearest portal station. The entire place was filled with glowy bubble doors, some more glossy and vibrant than others.
“I take it this is quite the sight to behold?” Wraithbane asked.
“You sound jealous.”
He held up thumb and forefinger just a little bit spread apart.
I smiled, then shuddered. “I still hate hospitals, though. All those viruses confined in a pressure negative zone, waiting for their next host. And don't tell me I sound paranoid.”
“You sound like someone with a cold. Did you take everything you should have?”
“Yes.” I glanced up and down a corridor. “Where do you think Lowe would emerge from his portal at?”
“The cafeteria.”
We found our way to the cafeteria, passing rooms which weren't empty enough for comfort. The rooms were filled with torn up chairs and those rolly bed things and giant lights like they use in the dentist offices, everything set up for surgery but coated in layers of dust and broken windows, walls tagged with paint from amateur street artists and idiot kids. There was even a plastic skeleton standing in the doorway to one room, an airline stewardess's hat on its head, its own disembodied arm jammed between its jaw bones. One corner even had a tangled nest of blankets, maybe from a packrat, maybe from a hobo.
Then we were in a big open room with too many cheap tables, the kind that fold up like an accordion. Their laminate tops were peeling and the benches that went with the tables were stacked up on one wall as if barricading it.
“There's a portal over there, but it's dim,” I said.
“The word 'dim' in this case meaning what?”
“Meaning I wouldn't chance going through it.”
Wraithbane hesitated, for the first time looking as though he was not so sure that doing this was such a great idea.
I asked, “You don't suppose we got it wrong? They had a lot of a head start, shouldn't they be here by now?”
Though he was frowning, he said, “No. I make excellent timing by myself, and you expedited matters. We got here first, I'm sure of it.”
“But what if they can't get here?”
Wraithbane stroked the back of his neck. “If they aren't here in a half hour, we will have to track down their portals and see where they stopped at. But if they're just delayed, this means we will miss them in transit.”
The portal brightened, and no sooner had I pointed than it swelled and slid off an arm. Hunched over and gasping, two people emerged from the portal and made a dash towards the tables. One of them limped, favoring their knee, and the other was red-faced and sweating.
“Hurry, come!” the sweating man said, trying to drag his companion by the elbow. The other man shook his head and collapsed on a table.
“Caleb Lowe,” Wraithbane said, startling both of the people so that the one who must be Lowe formed a fire ball in his fist. He was a man with a broad face and dark hair, one whose fists I wouldn't want to be on the connecting end of. Seeing the two of us, Lowe clenched his fist and stopped the flames.
“Wraithbane. You've wasted no time, I'm glad. We're followed.”
His companion was a slightly tall fellow, one who was dressed for work in a corporate office. According to the stains on the cuffs of his shirt and sweat down his back, he'd have been better suited dressing for the gym.
We approached the two men and I froze when the other man raised his gaze to me. One eye was absolutely bright red, as if the whites had been replaced with burst blood vessels, and the other eye was a mottled mix between normal and bloodshot. His chee
ks were sallow and there was something about him which gave me goosebumps.
“What happened?” Wraithbane asked. “What are you followed by?”
Lowe shook his head. “Don't know.”
I stepped nearer to the injured man and saw that his dress pants were torn just above the knee and wet. When I parted the rip, the sight of black veins and a small mass of roots made me draw a deep breath.
“I got a thorn,” the man said. “It hurts, that's all.”
When I tried to touch the roots, the way I had once removed a similar thorn from Wraithbane, the roots snagged the fine lines of my fingerprint. I withdrew, remembering a caution I'd heard about touching these things.
“What can you tell me?” Wraithbane was asking Lowe.
“I tried everything. I'm glad to see you, Bane,” Lowe said.
I was about to ask the patient if he'd been coughing or had been punched in the eyes, but instead decided to not see magic. Like that, I was staring at a different person entirely. A man with flushed cheeks and a sweat-sheened brow, one with a small scratch above his knee. This was far from reassuring.
Thaimon had panicked when he thought I'd been injured by the blood vines, and a wraith like Thaimon wasn't going to panic unless he had a very good set of reasons to do so. The problem was that I didn't know what those reasons were, or how Thaimon might have prevented the trouble from getting too bad. Much as I wanted to help this man in front of me, sheer instinct was urging me to get away.
Meanwhile, Lowe was saying, “It's been everywhere we have been. I don't know how it could have done it. You know how slippery I can be. This whole thing makes no sense at all. We run and we're fine for a minute or two, then it catches up despite everything and there's nothing that seems to work on it, nothing at all.”
The man must have become uncomfortable with me, because he covered the rip with his hands. His fingernails were dark, dead purple. I avoided letting our fingers brush and stepped back. As I did so, I tugged on Wraithbane's sleeve.
Wraithbane didn't leave Lowe immediately, but he did come to where I stood.
“What do you think?” he asked, softly.
“The other man with Lowe is a witness?”
“Yes.”
I licked my lips and decided to continue. “Don't touch him. I think he's met a blood vine and I think he's contagious.”
Wraithbane frowned. “Blood vines aren't an offensive weapon. They're to keep people out of a place.”
“What about to keep them in?” I asked. Wraithbane didn't reply. I said, “What if his previous location was marked and someone set up blood vines to keep him there? Or one of their portals dropped them into a mess by sheer chance?”
“It's possible.”
“But what?”
“But I hope you're wrong. If you're right, we'll have to take him back quickly. There is access to a sealed containment facility five portals from here.”
“Why?” I shivered with a touch of a cold draft.
Wraithbane lowered his voice so he had to whisper in my ear, “If you're right—”
“It's here!”
I jumped and whirled around to find the witness pointing at the air by the portal, where a dewy black mist was gathering. For a brief instant, patches darker than the rest of it formed two vacant eyes and a gaping grin. Quick as a jolt of fear striking my spine, the apparition was gone, melded once more into the shadows.
“Lumin.” Wraithbane had a spell in hand, a blush-hued clam shell with a brilliant pearl made of the warmest ivory light. It illuminated the room but deepened the color of the shadows.
Lowe said, “I can't believe it's still here. Any time we stop to rest.”
“We will take the Sleath Junction to reach the Marina Center. Brandy?”
I double-checked Wraithbane's map and located the desired portal at the entrance of Hallway 4C Radiology and Surgery. If Wraithbane was afraid, if he had seen the apparition or cared about the frigid chill of the hospital, he made no sign of being unnerved. His demanding authority comforted when it otherwise would have chafed.
As Lowe got the witness to his feet, I murmured to Wraithbane very softly, “It didn't follow them. The portal has been inactive.”
“So it came from one of them.”
I nodded.
“They'll know what to do at the center. All we need to do is get them there,” Wraithbane said.
“Don't let him touch the shadows.”
Wraithbane held the lumin spell to create light between the victim and everything else as we crossed the cafeteria. It felt as if the hospital was waiting, as if those who had died in these walls were watching us as two injured men crossed the void of the room and at last stood before the portal. Distracted by pointing out the fringes of the portal so we didn't accidentally go through one very nearby, I didn't see the mist building until it was too late to do anything except yank Wraithbane away. I'd thought the problem hid in the shadows and that by isolating the victim, it would keep him safe. But no, he wasn't safe, because he was the source.
Whenever he exhaled, a dark dewy ghost took shape in front of his face. It clung to his skin and turned it transparent, the way oil does to a leaf of paper.
My eyes opened wide and the victim's expression changed, becoming excited. Before I could speak a word, the victim clasped Lowe's shoulder, yanked him close, and bit his ear.
Lowe acted so fast I wasn't able to see his movements individually. There was a punch, a tackle, then Lowe was kneeling over his charge's prone form, arms in a tangle, cuffs slapped on the thing's wrists. The other man wriggled and let out a moan, that was all. As Lowe heaved him to his feet, the victim became entirely transparent. First his skin, then the glossy muscle and bone faded into nothing. Before Lowe's astonished eyes, the handcuffs clattered to the floor and the ghostly apparition receded into the dark.
“That,” Lowe said as he picked up the cuffs. “That was a revenant.”
Wraithbane nodded.
The air had definitely gotten colder, so cold now that my breath misted silver in front of my lips. I rubbed my arms through the light jacket, astonished at what I'd seen. Not because it was a brand-new sight, but because it itched. The sight itched me mentally, stirring up feelings of deja vu. Worse than this, I felt stupid. As if I should have known that this would happen. Determined, I shook off the feeling.
Leaving a revenant loose in a decrepit portal station did not seem a good long-term plan, but getting out of here sounded like a good thing to do now. I began to migrate us all towards the portal again.
The revenant cut me off, taking his ghostlike form between us and the portal. For a second it stared at me. Then it screamed and swooped.
Previous experiences with revenants had taught me that there was one true defense against them. Gerald's defensive spell had no influence on revenants even when it worked against other things that went bump in the night. In fact, there was only one thing a living person could do when faced with a revenant: run.
Lowe started us off like a track sprinter on the hundred meter dash. Adrenaline thudded through my veins and my pulse soon hammered in my ears, drowning out the yells that the men used. Soon I was panting through clogged sinuses and my legs trembled and it felt as if my feet were floating over the grime-coated floor. Despite being the second to run, I was last in the line-up by the time Lowe wrenched open a door to a surgery and waved us in.
Dizzy, I thumped into the wall and gasped for breath before looking around. We were in one of those rooms with an operating table below and an observational deck above. The glass was, miraculously, intact. Wraithbane urged us into the operating room and slammed the door.
Lowe scuffed marks into the dusty floor. “Here.”
Out of breath, I started to ask, “What?” but the revenant hit the glass. I jumped, stunned to see it pressing its face against the divider, hitting it with all too real hands.
Wraithbane said, “We need to trap it.”
“But?” I pointed to the glass w
here the revenant was now withdrawing. Last time, in the bone mine, the revenants had gone through solid stone just fine.
“Glass will confuse a new revie for a short time. Now, this. It's hard to create a ward to keep revies out, but simple to entrap them in.”
Lowe added, “If you can bait them into the trap to start with.”
Without being able to cast magic myself, I could only watch and learn, and try not to flinch every time the revenant rammed against the glass. Glass screeched as he drew claws against it, leaving behind long white marks in the surface. Then the circle became alive, a faintly shimmering mauve swirling with tiny white moths and stars.