The geyser was still coming. It was smaller, it was weak, but it was a category-2 hurricane instead of a cat-4. It was still going to cause a lot of wreckage if it was allowed to rip through the city.
Hurricanes. I could stop hurricanes… I have got to do a lot more studying.
She took a breath and squeezed Ethan’s hand. She lifted the shields to exactly where they needed to be, she braced her feet, and she pushed back against the wave of power. Continue reading
“Not now, I just need a little more time. And maybe a little tea. Maybe a lot of tea.” Nitya hadn’t even looked up. From the crick her neck, she thought maybe she hadn’t looked up in quite a while. Hours? Weeks? No, obviously not weeks.
She stood and stretched, keeping her eyes almost entirely on manuscript in front of her and the notes next to it.
“You know you can’t eat over the manuscripts, Nitya, they’re ancient. Besides, come on, there’s something you have to see.”
Suula tugged on her roommate’s arm, but Nitya wasn’t moving. “I’ll come eat in a while. I got some duplicates made; I can drink some tea and have a couple, oh, I don’t know, energy bars while I look over those. Suula, I’ve got it figured out. It’s an eclipse.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Nitya! Come on.” This time, Suula put some muscle behind the tug. “It’s an eclipse!”
“What?” Nitya blinked at her friend. “Suula, you’re an astrophysicist, when’ve you been reading ancient proto-Sumerian?”
“What? Nitya, you need to get out of this basement once in a while.”
“It’s not a basement, it’s a climate-controlled reading room-”
“That’s three stories underground. Nitya, come on, or I’m going to carry you. Bring those duplicates, sure, you can tell me about it on the way up. I promise you, I promise, I’ll bring you dinner in the cafe on the first sub-level after that and buy you the good tea, but come out. Come on. Come on, please?”
It was the please that did it – that and the promise of Suula’s cooking. With a guilty little twist in her gut, Nitya realized she hadn’t been holding up her end of their shared-home agreement very well lately (Suula cooked and stocked the kitchen; Nitya cleaned). “All right, all right. So, the piece of the document I’ve been having trouble with? The part that was copied over in, I think, early Roman era? It’s talking about an eclipse of the sun. Which should have been obvious, but the way they described it – it sounded like – like it came with some weird, ah, side effects. Some tidal shifts that changed where the moon was in the sky. Which, of course, I don’t have to tell you isn’t the sort of thing a solar eclipse does-”
“Ah. Say that again? Tidal shifts and a solar eclipse?” Suula had stopped on the stairs and was staring at Nitya. “Anything else?”
“Well, ah.” She pulled up her copy on her phone. “Let’s see. There’s the solar eclipse – it’s talking about the darkest day growing darker – and there were earthquakes, which I thought had to be poetic; the region that it’s talking about here-”
She caught herself as the floor shook. It didn’t shake much, but she could hear something falling in the floor above them. “Suula-?”
“You were saying?”
“-that the area it was talking about isn’t on a fault line and isn’t known to have earthquakes at all. So I thought it was like – well, it was referencing a great screaming and wailing, and -”
She didn’t even bother commenting this time, because even a story beneath the ground, they could already hear the screaming and wailing.
“So. Ah. There’s an unpredicted solar eclipse going on outside. But maybe, uh. We should find someplace safe instead?”
So, I’ve been watching StarGate…
All around the town, the pixies and the Zippies were zooming, their high-pitched, tiny voices trailing behind them like streamers of sound.
The First Snowfall of the Year – which was differentiated from the constant snow of the town, from the steady white-ness of their landscape and the piling drifts, by a certain glint to it, a certain sharpness to its edges, and a certain extremity to everything about it – was coming down very late in the day, and it was coming down with particular intensity.
For the pixies, and especially for the Zippies, who were (so said the experts, who might know, although others argued) a very small sub-species of kobold, this was very important. While every person in the town wanted to read their fortune in the First Snowfall – because that was another thing that differentiated this snowfall from all the others that fell all the time; it was very good for divination – the pixies and the Zippies, being wee, were especially good at snowflake divination. And dressed in their special Cold-Weather Suits, they could handle the individual flakes without fear of melting the flakes – or of freezing their tiny selves.
The train station, especially, was alight with the tiny creatures, such that one couldn’t move to or from the p Continue reading
The thing about black cats – as with the thing with mirrors (broken or otherwise), the thing with ladders (and going beneath them) and the thing with salt (generally, but not always, spilled) is that black cats are, by their nature – by several of their natures – accretors of energy, at least, of certain kinds of energy.
Black cats, you see, are children of the Void in a way no other cats (there is some argument here; some people would like to point out that specific other cats are also children of the void, especially specific Persians). They carry within them a spark of magic, a spark of belief, a spark of the mystic.
Not specific black cats, not familiars, not the black cats who live in bookshops – every cat born black as midnight, black as coffee, black as a moonless night in a coal chute. Every black cat is born with the spark of magic in them, more so than any other cat, because they have been touched by lady Nyx herself. They have been touched by the core of the walnut tree, the blackest ink. They have been touched by the depths of the sea. All of this, every black cat knows, somewhere deep, deep in her little fuzzy soul. (And you can tell this, looking at them, if you look exactly at the right moment.)
So what does this mean?
This means that you never treat a black cat with disrespect, of course, because it will bounce off of them like so many laser dots off a mirror and it will stick to you like you are glue.
But it means more that that.
It means that if you spend time around a cat, especially a black cat, all of your actions, all of the, ah, vibes, that you send out into the world, they start to accrete. The cat acts as a holder for all of that, while not taking any of it into herself (or much; a black cat will become as nasty as any other angry cat if she spends too much time around the wrong sort of vibes). They accrete, and then, like cat hair, those actions shed off onto you.
So a black cat is not inherently bad luck, no.
A ladder one walks under is not unlucky, either. A mirror does not hold your soul, and salt – well, salt is best left for its own story some other time.
But a child of the Void will always reflect one’s actions back on one. Of course, the world itself will do that, in time, it’s just that the process is faster with cats (as most things are).
For a kind-souled person who is giving, a black cat is a loving purr machine, a warm look at the night-time, a pool of darkest hot cocoa puddled on the foot of the bed.
I think you can guess what a black cat can be, when she crosses the path of that other sort of person.
“You were born on a full moon as the new year turned over.”
Uther had heard this story a thousand times, maybe a million. His mother told it to him a certain way, usually on nights when the full moon shone bright in a clear sky. His grandmother told it another way, usually when Uther had annoyed her – or when Uther’s father had done so, or when Uther’s grandfather or uncles or, sometimes, Uther’s mother had irritated Grandmama.
His father told it to him once a year, on his birthday, with a big sip of the celebratory wine, and he told it a different way.
But this was the Priestess, and her way was different still.
“You were born on the Occluded Moon, the Full Moon we cannot see. The skies were black as you came into the world, child, and the old year winked itself out like a candle at its end, and the new year, like you, were born into darkness. The rains fell hard and nasty that night, ice sticking to everything, and your mother cried as the moon refused, even in its fullness, to look at you. You were born to a dark moon, child, to a dark year, to an ending rather than a beginning.”
It was more like the way Grandmama told the story than the way either parent did, but there was a malice in the Priestess’ voice that even Grandmama could not quite match. Continue reading
It was time. They needed to get set up; they needed to get ready.
Lina squeezed all three boys’ hands in turn and let Jackson steer, around to the side of the plant. “If we hadn’t been willing to do this, if we hadn’t been here,” he murmured, “I’m pretty sure they’d have let it blow again, without telling the city where they needed to evacuate. Because that simulation, that tells people they knew this could happen and how bad it could be, and they don’t want to admit anything like that.”
“Sounds like business as normal,” Ethan muttered grimly. “Are we sure they’re not related to us?” Continue reading
We weren’t ready.
We’d been training for weeks – months – learning our companions, learning to use the reliquaries we carried with us, learning to use or own strengths and weaknesses. We’d nearly fallen to a much less important enemy more than once.
We were in no way ready when the Devil walked into our training session.
He laughed at us, though it sounded friendly. I could see both of his faces – the handsome dark-haired man with the charming smile, and the huge red-skinned demon with the horns so big they defied belief. I could hear both of his voices, the friendly businessman banter and the smoky growl. Continue reading
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“This part of the Library is open to the general public without an appointment, and, as such, it’s almost entirely benign,” Amanana explained, as they moved through an area full of shelves and books that looked almost like a normal, albeit rich, library; the shelves were cherry, the signs on the ends of each aisle brass, the floor marble mosaic. “Of course, the parts that aren’t benign can be very sneaky – we once had a patron end up possessed by a spirit that had been loitering in the modern fiction section for weeks just looking for the right sort of person. So you do still have to be a bit on your guard, sad to say.”
“I do believe that’s the story of every part of this place, isn’t it?” Veronika tried to sound chipper and not a little tired. Continue reading
Lina wasn’t sure she recognized herself anymore. She sounded like some rich woman, telling people they had to do what she wanted. Looking at this exec – she was pretty sure that was a very expensive suit – as if she’d personally disappointed Lina.
Either the force shield or the tone of voice, maybe both, made the woman falter. “You can’t be here. The plant is undergoing routine maintenance-”
“It’s a little late for that lie, don’t you think?” Ethan sounded surprisingly smooth. And sharp. “After what happened to the West Side. We came from there, by the way.”
Dylan picked up from him. “What did your extrapolations say should have happened? Because we can tell you exactly where the surge stopped. And why.” He tilted his head at Lina.
The woman went ashen. “Listen, kids,” she managed. Lina was impressed. “For safety and legal reasons, we’re going to have to ask you and your, ah, field trip – Senator?”
“I believe the woman has told you that she needs to be here.” Senator Whistler was amazing. Lina suddenly wanted to be her when she grew up. “And I believe we all know the time frame we’re working under. So either tell us which way we’re blocking so we can be most effective, or get out of our way so we can circle the plant. Now.”
“Blocking?” The woman raised her eyebrows. “You-” She looked down at the force shield. “You think you can hold off a power plant explosion with a little magic trick?”
“No.” Lina snapped it out. She was going to get panicked or angry, so damnit, it was going to have to be anger. “No, I already did hold off one power plant explosion. So tell me which way I’m blocking right now.”
She considered a threat, decided it made her think less of herself to even think it, and instead waited.
The woman huffed. “If you are harmed in any way, our corporation nor none of our daughter corporations are in any way liable…”
“Except the part where you let your plant blow in the first place, yadda, yadda, yes, I understand. Now. We’re running out of time.”
“Yes, we are, and you really ought to clear out right now… but you’re not going to, are you?” The woman shook her head, pulled out her phone, and tabbed through – three thumb-print authorizations, Lina noted – until she was showing them a simulation.
“Jackson,” Lina snapped out.
Who was she? What was she becoming? Did she even know anymore?
Jackson looked at the simulation, nodded, then hissed softly. “Show me again,” he demanded.
The woman did so.
“I’m going to say one more time, this is crazy. You need to leave.”
“Got it.” Jackson nodded crisply. “Ma’am, if you can stick around – safely – and show us the rest of that simulation, it will save time later. For now -” He looked at Lina, bowed slightly, and gestured. “I’m ready to get us set up for you.”
“Then let’s do it.”
They hadn’t needed The Fathers. She found herself in more than a little shock over that. They hadn’t needed The Fathers, they hadn’t needed – anything but themselves.
Want more?
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It only took Amanana a moment to recover from the surprise Veronika had given her.
“Time travel.” She chuckled, although it was a bit weak. Then she nodded her head slowly, as if in acknowledgement. “Indeed. You’re more clever than I thought, and that is definitely saying something. You’re quite good.”
“The clues are all spelled out in the testing, though,” Veronika protested. “I was supposed to figure it out, wasn’t I?” Continue reading