Bushwhacked and then Bushwhacked Some More

Lee’s blue room spun together around me, quiet and unoccupied. I stood alone in the middle of her cluttered floor, waiting for the gut punch of the teleportation Glyph taking its toll, but nothing happened, much to my relief.

            The Phylactery pulsed cold against my hand, a still heartbeat. I silently thanked the trapped energies in the device and set about looting Lee’s cabinet of weapons and devices. I couldn’t rule out the possibility of Lee herself turning up and trying to stop me; I didn’t know who had been compromised by Tripp’s dark offering and I wasn’t going to be empty-handed when I found out.

            My only chance was finding Wylla, the Mender. I didn’t know where she lived, but I could make an educated guess that it was somewhere in the Nexus. When I’d been injured by the renegade Reader, Wylla had been at my side in what felt like minutes, meaning Lee had found her even faster. She had to be close.

            I ignored a pang from my empty stomach and busied myself with selecting gadgets. A shield bracer, several amulets with neatly handwritten labels, a couple of pocket-sized trinkets. I’d had a cursory education in their use, mostly muttered summaries from Lee while she was paying attention to something else. I was confident with exactly none of them, but I figured I was running on pure luck anyway and having them along couldn’t hurt.

            Well, there was the one that would explode if I fell on it just right, but I was trying not to think about that.

            Fully equipped, I carefully closed Lee’s wardrobe of doom and left the room, emerging into the empty, endless hallway of doors. I paused to wish I’d spent more time paying attention to my surroundings, shook my head, and decided to go left.

            Very little differentiated the many doors from one another, with only the odd nameplate or decorative symbol hanging on every tenth portal. Damn it. The fact of the matter was, I realized, that I had no idea where to begin looking for Wylla, and no idea who my enemies were, and no idea where they might be hiding. I was a shambling, starving wreck, only keeping myself on my feet by a steady trickle of energy from the Phylactery strapped to my hand.

            The Phylactery. Nick.

            I still had his business card.

            I fished out my wallet and found Nick the Necromancer’s card, only slightly crumpled. I envied it. Sure enough, there was a listing for his office. I could use that. If he was still on Earth, he was probably either in prison or on the run. I’d taken his weapons, and I judged that he wouldn’t have risked bringing a gun and a priceless magical artifact into a bank if he could fight without them.

            And if he was here at the Nexus, well, I had all of my weapons and his best one. I felt a momentary chill at the thought of even hurting a person, let alone killing him, but I would do what I had to.

            I stumbled down the hallway, assuming I would come to a set of light doors eventually, and after about twenty doors I was rewarded with the sight of an open frame next to a keypad. Carefully examining Nick’s card, I punched in the code for his office. With a sound like a athsmatic whale taking a breath, violet light poured into the doorframe, shimmering in place and waiting to be used.

            I took a deep breath and stepped through, arms raised, telling myself I was ready for anything.

            A sensation of falling upwards rolled through my body, lights flickered in my sight, and when the weirdness faded I found myself standing in a lavishly decorated lobby. Dark wooden furniture and polished, well-stocked bookcases dominated the room, with the slightly creepier features as accents.

            For instance, a few of the books appeared to be vibrating violently, and one was… I guess ‘oozing’ would be the right word. There was a discreet and tasteful little brass cup placed underneath that shelf, collecting the brackish fluid that was seeping from between the pages. Something resembling a polished femur lay across a custom-built shelf like a samurai sword. Things like that.

            I wondered how much of the décor was actually useful, and how much was necromantic flash. It didn’t take me long to decide not to touch any of it.

            “Already?” A voice.

            “Djakier!” I yelped, not even thinking about it, emitting a wave of invisible force from my skin that blasted back everything not nailed down. (With the creepy exception of a spinning top that just kept spinning.) There was a particularly loud thud and a male voice swearing loudly, and I spun in time to see a tall, middle-aged man in an expensive-looking suit tumbling against a bookshelf with a bewildered expression on his face.

            I leveled the Phylactery at him and braced myself to shield some horrific attack, but the man simply finished collapsing and then… I guess unfolded would be the word. His entire body sort of snapped straight like a slinky, leaving him standing among the wreckage with a bemused smirk.

            “You’re a wild one, aren’t you?” he teased, in a high, papery voice. “I expected something like this, but not so soon.”

            “Something like me, huh?” I began to back towards the door. I didn’t know who this guy was, but based on the Mr. Fantastic act and the stranger’s utter, perfect calm, it didn’t matter.

            Threat.

            “Something like. One of Tripp’s magic junkies, here to raid our place of learning. Oh, and I’m sure your situation is different from all the others to come- the Earth in crisis? A loved one, who you almost have the power to heal?” He smiled, a sight which bothered me for some reason. “Some emergency, no doubt, that justifies breaking in here and stealing repositories of life energy. Something to feed the monkey on your back.”

            I figured it out. His skin wrinkled too much, at the edges of his mouth. That’s what was creepy about the smile.

            Everything else was still confusing. “So who are you, then?” I tossed out, as I felt for the door controls. I refused to take my eyes off bendy man.

            He shrugged too hard, shoulders rising well above his ears. It was the sort of thing that took you five seconds to notice. “If you don’t know, you probably shouldn’t.”

            “Like jazz.”

            “Exactly.”

            We stared at each other for a moment. This guy was setting off alarms in my head in an extreme way- I felt like I was in the room with something that I just wasn’t going to be able to comprehend or deal with today. It’s not an optimistic feeling.

            “I have to be going,” I said, finally getting the light door to activate. Violet light whooooshed into being, inches behind me. Bendy man raised an eyebrow, a motion that drew his upper eyelid away from the eye, showing way too much sclera- and a little bit of what should have been an eye socket, but really just seemed like roadkill, shredded meat bristling with matted hair, jagged bone, a tooth.

            I must have made a face, because he grinned, very literally from ear to ear. That was even worse. “I’ll be seeing you,” he promised.

            He said it very neutrally, but I heard it as a promise.

            “I don’t-“ I started to say. I was interrupted by a ribbon of light, lancing out from behind me, splintering into a dozen gleaming tendrils, and wrapping around my arms and legs with boa-constrictor strength. The sudden apparition yanked me backwards through the light door, bendy man’s nightmarish face vanishing into a wall of light and a feeling of falling.

            I tumbled to a marble floor and was released by the light, which faded immediately. For a moment, all I could do was lay there and breathe, just thankful to be away from whatever that being had been, drawing deeply from the Phylactery to stop myself from passing out. The device grew ever colder against my palm, and I reluctantly allowed the flow of energy to cease when it began to hurt.

            So that had gone poorly. I’d hoped to rifle through some desk drawers or something, maybe get lucky and find the Necromancer’s laptop, but instead I’d just been ambushed by something horrifying in the lobby and gotten a little more beaten up. So no information, no Wylla, absolutely no energy left, no idea where I, or anyone, was, and to top it off, the Phylactery was freezing to the sweat on my palm and pulling painfully at my skin.

            So I figured it couldn’t possibly get any worse. Why do people do that?

            Cool fingers brushed my cheek, slender fingers wearing rings.

            Familiar.

            Through my eyelids, I was aware of bright light, and opened them to see more tendrils wrapping around me and flipping me bodily over, to lay on my back, dead-center in the middle of the floor in the Nexus center. High above, I could see the crescent shape of Earth through the magnificent glass window.

            A shape suddenly hovered over me, lowering slowly, hard to discern in my blurred vision. Couldn't focus so close.

            “Who’s that? What’s…”

            And then it got worse. The blurry shape  became an intimately familiar, perfect, heart-shaped face. Every other inch of her was wrapped in black, overlaid with a variety and number of devices that made mine seem pathetic in comparison. A blue book hung at her waist, on a golden chain.

“You’re not going to want to miss this,” Beck said.

 

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