OvidLemma

This story is the sequel to my novel, On My Best Behavior. Reading it first isn't strictly necessary, but I recommend it.

Chapter One: The Best Two Weeks of My Life

Cold fingers held me down. I couldn't see or hear or breathe.

"We cannot kill this one - not yet. Too powerful is the Storm, too powerful the force that binds her to the prophecy - and yet, we may unravel it."

I woke up with a shout, gasping and scrambling from my bed. I padded to the bathroom for a glass of water, taking a glance in the mirror. I looked like hell - bloodshot eyes, my hair a mess, and I needed to shave. My life was going as well as I could expect - better than I had any right to expect - and yet I felt miserable and alone. Something important in my life was missing, something crucial and vital, and I had no idea what it was. I glanced to my phone: 5:45 am. I might as well get up.

I'd gotten a promotion at Vobis Finance, got a nice fifth-floor office, and even secured a nice condo for a good price a mere ten minute drive away. By any metric, I should have been happy, and yet I wasn't. Whether it was the dreams or whether I was just depressed, it seemed like everything in my life had the emotional content of wet cardboard these days. And, just when I wondered at what might cheer me up, I saw a text message from last night, from my Sigma Ep brother, Andy Shaw:

--Hey, bro! Got a big part coming up!
--*party
--Need an 'Elder' for the proceedings. U game?
--Beta nu gonna be there

I knit my brow and proceeded to shave. A frat party sounded like about the farthest thing from what I wanted right now. I combed my hair, frowning as another red hair fluttered off from the comb. That was about the fifth one this week. The hairs certainly weren't mine - they were deeply, almost violently red, over two feet long, and impossibly glossy. I would have remembered if I'd gotten lucky with a girl with hair like that. Hair had always been one of my things… I considered growing my own out… Where had that thought even come from? I'd always kept my hair short. Hadn't I? For some reason, I caught a momentary vision of a busty amazon of a woman washing my hair. My long, fiery-red hair. And she was huge - as massively bigger than me as she was in that little flash of fantasy, she must've been north of seven feet tall!

I texted Andy back:
--Hey Andy, no can do
--Work stuff - got a promotion, u know?
--Sorry about that. Want me to ask Vince?

He replied:
--Nah it's good
--Totally understand, bro!
--Maybe next time.

Yes, I'd gotten a promotion. Now I had a group of four guys under me, three computer programmers and a math guy working on projections, automated investment algorithms, and fitting those projection curves to the market to adjust on the fly and change buy, sell, and short orders accordingly. They were really bright guys, too - at least on paper. It seemed like I was always explaining programming to the programmers and math to Ben Lee, who had a Master's in pure math. I had four guys under me, but I still only spent maybe forty-five hours a week in the office, which gave me a lot of free time to feel sorry for myself. And a lot of time to study math.

I have no idea how or why it started, but it seemed like I was developing an obsession with mathematics - I'd heard of guys like Gregor Cantor driven to madness by math before, but I'm not sure I'd ever heard of the reverse. And yet there I was, like a moth to the flame, studying topological tensors, Deligne cohomology, and another half-dozen topics that should have been way over my head. It was maddening - it was as if there was a pattern I was being driven to find, and yet it would always elude my grasp. And I was about to be late for work - was I going crazy?

+++++

I shaved, threw on the first clothes that I saw, and headed out the door, annoyed that my attire didn't quite match. I almost never wore a tie, but I usually wore a jacket, and today it was a gray jacket and gray pants. Both of them were nice, but the heather texture of the jacket didn't quite go with the texture of my slacks, the brown of my shoes didn't quite match my belt, and… why did I even care about this? Nobody was going to notice. I could probably show up in clown shoes and a diaper and, as long as I kept on nudging our efficiency in the right direction, Markus Vobis was going to keep me gainfully employed. Though, I suppose, he might cover up my office window.

Work was the usual - a slightly-frustrating distraction. Debbie Cruz sat with me at lunch and chatted me up… and, about ten minutes into it, I realized that she was hitting on me. I should have been so lucky - dark eyes, dark hair, and a winning smile, her snug pinstripe slacks doing all sorts of favors for her lower body. And yet I was disinterested. Sure, I found her attractive, and even disgusted myself a bit when I realized I was getting stiff just thinking about her naked. Why that would have disgusted me, I couldn't tell you - I'd long since resigned myself to the fact that my Mr. Warner often had a mind of his own.

"You alright there, Martin?" Debbie asked.

"Yeah, sure," I said. "Just thinking about our one o'clock. I think I need to finish some slides to get to Nambiar."

"Ugh. Nambiar," Debbie said with a roll of her eyes. "Hey, we should do something sometime."

"Yeah," I said. And then I realized I'd just agreed to go on a date with her. It must have shown in my expression.

"Um… we don't have to if you don't want to…"

"No, no, nothing like that." I chuckled as convincingly as I could. "I just realized that I'm supposed to meet up with my cousin tonight." That was an absolute fabrication - though I did want some words with Vince. And, even though I had no interest in doing anything with Debbie, I knew I should have an interest in doing so, so I forced myself to throw an offer out there. "Anyhow, maybe this weekend, if you're free?"

"I'll free up some time." She winked and handed me her business card, her finger grazing the back of my hand a bit too casually. "Message me!"

I flipped the business card over in my hand. Debbie Cruz, CPA, Financial Advisor. It still smelled faintly of her perfume. Not the worst perfume in the world, but not one that I would ever wear… which should have been a given. Why would I wear perfume? I sighed and finished my salad. Since when had I become a salad guy? Thirty minutes later, it was time for my one o'clock.

"Martin, did you send me those slides?" Vijay Nambiar asked.

"In your drop box, Vijay," I said. "Uh… under 'Warner Slides'?"

"Ah, yes. I see it. Thank you."

We were in the big seventh floor boardroom overlooking the high-rises, palm trees, and hotels of downtown West Palm Beach. The boardroom was sleek and modern, just below Markus Vobis's penthouse office. Sometimes, the big man would show up to our meetings himself, but today, he hadn't deemed it worth his time. Jessica would have one of us sum up the meeting and send it to him in an email, which he'd probably never read but would sure as shit yell about if you didn't send it. Such was life at Vobis Financial. I zoned out as Nambiar went on - I already knew everything he was going to say, so there was no need to pay attention unless something sparked a discussion. I rolled up my sleeve to check the time…

My sleeve looked way too big, and my watch was so loose it almost clunked right off a dainty wrist. My arm was very slim, very smooth, and almost hairless. And had weird, complex tattoos slowly twisting about it like a living beast.

"Ah!" I yelped.

"Martin, is something the matter?" Nambiar asked.

I blinked and looked to my arm: all systems normal. "Sorry, no… I just noticed that those graphs haven't been updated with the last two days' market data…"

"It's a six-week rolling average, so I doubt it matters much," Nambiar said.

"Right you are. Sorry about that."

No, my arm was its normal moderately-muscular, moderately-hairy self… except my watch had somehow slid right over my hand and was wrapped around my four fingers now. That wasn't even geometrically possible… well, not for a solid in Euclidean space. It must have somehow come unclasped and then re-clasped itself, because nothing else made any sense. Unless my arm had somehow become dainty and feminine for exactly two seconds. But that sort of thing just didn't happen.

+++++

At six o'clock, I ambled out from work and met up with Vince at the Reef Mariner. It was a seafood place, obviously, but they had good mixed drinks and hosted happy hour until seven o'clock, so we mostly went there for that. Not that either of us had to pinch pennies anymore, but old habits die hard. I ordered some conch fritters and a strawberry margarita, which earned a raised eyebrow from Vince. Normally, I went for snooty microbrews, but my beer intake had gone way down of late. I still liked it as much as ever, but it always made me feel weird and bloated afterward, and there was something nice about real berries in a decent margarita.

"What's up, Martin? You sounded… I dunno… distressed, I suppose. Is something wrong?" Vince locked his dark eyes on me - you always got his full attention. But he seemed genuinely concerned, too, which was a bit weird. Sure, I was freaking the fuck out on a daily basis, but I didn't think I'd given him any cause for concern.

"I'm not sure," I said, running my fingers through dirty-blonde hair. "I think I'm going crazy… or maybe I'm just depressed."

"Depressed? About what?"

"I don't think depression works that way," I said. "It's not about anything beyond feeling like shit. But I guess I have the feeling that some chunk of my life was taken from me and something inside is mourning that it's gone. That I don't know how to get it back. Does that make sense?"

"It makes sense to you," Vince said - not exactly a confidence-builder there. "Have you thought about seeing a psychiatrist? Or a therapist? You're not suicidal, are you?"

"God no," I said. I wasn't suicidal… was I? No… I hadn't been. But too much longer feeling forlorn and utterly unhinged and I might be. "I mean… hey, I have a date with Debbie Cruz."

"Debbie Cruz who you went to college with?"

"We didn't know one another in college, but I knew of her. And she's a looker. And… well, I guess that should make me happy. But it feels like cheating somehow."

"Cheating on whom? It takes a minimum of two parties to cheat, doesn't it?" Vince asked. Uh-oh - he was shifting into lawyer mode. No good would come of that.

"That's just what it feels like. You can't logic your way out of feelings," I said. "Look, can we just drop it? Tell me how Mr. Big-Time Law Guy is doing. And then maybe I'll rake you through the coals."

Cousin Vince proceeded to tell me all about the (godawful boring) exploits of Vincent Warner, JD. He did occasional criminal cases - lucky for me, since he'd pulled through in the Amanda Bryce debacle - but most of his work wasn't so dramatic. Company A sues Company B for Dollar-amount C over boring-as-shit Reason D, and then Vince would step in and make sure that Company A would either receive or not-receive C, depending on which company he was working for. And he pretty much always got his way - that's how the Warner got on Kovacs, Garcia & Warner on the side of the Montrose building in West Palm Beach. Or so I thought - it turns out it was a bit more complex than that… Cousin Vince was keeping a secret from his cousin, his amigo, his pal Martin Warner.

Vince finished telling me about how he got $23.5 million (C) out of Southeast Mineral (B) for violating patent US4734218D (D) to Petersen Rare Earths (A). "That sounds exhilarating," I said.

"Bullshit. I know it isn't," Vince chuckled. "But it's what I do." Then his face got serious, his dark eyes target-locked in on me. "You'll tell me if things are really bad, right?"

"…Right," I said. Things were really bad as far as I was concerned. I'm not sure I could have been clearer about it. I wasn't going to outright state that I was having hallucinations about a girl and a life I'd never lived and that it was tearing me up inside. I tried to smile, but there was no joy in it.

Vince slid a business card across the table: Dr. Heironymous Justicar, MD, it said. I looked at the card. I looked to Vince. "What is this?"

Suddenly, Vince seemed very uncertain - a trait I'd rarely seen in him. "A client. He helps people make… I think the phrase he used was 'precious adjustments'… yeah. If you're really hurting, you should see him, and I can get you a free consult. Okay?"

"Precious adjustments?" I said, with a roll of my eyes. "I take it he's foreign?"

"I think it's safe to assume that, yes."

"Thanks, Vince."

+++++

I messaged Vince to arrange for an appointment the very next day. I like to think I'm resilient and centered - and usually I am. I like to think I'm mentally tough - and usually I am. But I freaked the fuck out at work and almost ran out into the cubicle 'bullpen' when I went to the restroom and sat down to pee (which I never did) and then confronted a split-second of looking at lithe and hairless legs that weren't mine running up to a barely-tufted groin that definitely wasn't mine, its hair fiery red, its anatomy decidedly feminine. It was less than a second, and as soon as I shuddered with my first bit of freak out, everything was back to normal… and I literally scared the piss out of myself, which had me laughing in relief. Then, when I went to wash my hands (which I have always done, thank you very much), I splashed a little water on my face, and looked up to see a breathtakingly gorgeous, innocent, emerald-eyed ingenue looking back at me. I yelped, and my voice was the same as it always was, and the angel in the mirror was gone. I wondered if I'd unknowingly ingested some sort of drug. I wondered if I was going crazy. I messaged Vince.

--I've set up the meeting. 5:30 pm just down the street from your office - 414 Parkland Blvd.

I messaged back:

--Thanks, I owe you.

I wasn't sure whether Dr. Heironymous Justicar, MD was a psychiatrist, a regular doctor, or some sort of wild mad scientist… close to the latter, it would turn out… but I was desperate. I felt the edges of my sanity fraying, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I broke. Better to get help now before a bad problem became an insurmountable one. I left work at 5:00 sharp (well… closer to 5:05 by the time I left the office) and made the ten-minute walk to 414 Parkland, one of the sunny, stucco-faced high-rises that line the main drag along Parkland. Dr. H. Justicar was listed on the fifth floor, so I waited for the elevator, tapping my toe to Cherry Bomb playing out over the lobby speakers. And up I went.

Dr. Justicar's office was one of the stranger places I could remember being (though at this point, as you may have surmised, there was a good deal that I couldn't remember). The lobby was made up like a doctor's office, albeit one from perhaps 1985, with burnt orange vinyl seating and (I am not kidding) an Apple IIe computer in its monochrome glory at the receptionist's desk. Only there was nobody in the place - no receptionist, no patients, no doctor. At least none that I could see.

"Um… hello?" I called out.

"Back this way, into the chamber within… come and I shall see you," the doctor said. His voice was half-way between Gollum and Mickey Mouse, a bit too high, a bit too throaty, and with a bit too much hiss to sound quite normal.

Despite the uneasiness I felt, I edged back into the examination room, craning my neck to get a good look at the age-yellowed CRT screen. Yep. The monitor was dead, and a copy of Oregon Trail (disk 2 of 2) was half-popped out of the disc drive.

The doctor was quite tall - I was about six feet even, and he had three or four inches on me, but he probably weighed fifty pounds less (and I kept in pretty good shape). He stood at parade rest, hands behind his back, gaze fixed forward, perhaps a bit unfocused. But his attention homed in on me quickly enough when I entered. He smiled a smile with a few too many teeth, teeth slightly-yellowed by coffee or cigarettes I assumed, and his eyeballs were oddly dark, as if matte-black circles had simply been painted over the whites. His skin was unnaturally pale, and I couldn't see a single hair on his head, not even eyelashes. I was very close to making a run for it - under normal circumstances, I would have. And, in retrospect, it's a good thing that I didn't.

"Am… am I in the right place?" I asked.

"Oh, assuredly," he said. With a nudge of a black-shod foot, he pushed a little patient stool half-way to my spot. The doctor wore all black aside from his white lab coat, which sported splotches of discoloration and a slightly-too-large patch with his name embroidered on it. "Sit, Miss Warner."

"Excuse me?"

"Mister Warner… English is not my first tongue," he shrugged and smiled even wider (and more creepily, with more teeth). He had no accent that I could detect, but his idiosyncratic use of the English language gave the impression of somebody from very far away.

I sat on the stool with a little hiss from the pneumatics. And, almost immediately, the doctor sidled forward very quickly and jabbed my shoulder. I was so surprised I hardly felt the prick of it sticking me, but I felt the pressure of the injection and craned my head enough to see him injecting quite a bit of greenish stuff with yellow blobs in it. It wasn't the sort of thing anybody would want to have injected into their body. I pulled back, almost falling off the rolling stool, and clutched at my shoulder.

"What the fuck was… that…" I said, my whole head going woozy for a moment, a warm, prickly wave spreading across my body. "What did you do?"

"Administered an injection to stabilize your essence, Mister Warner," the doctor said, crouching down to peer into my eyes. "You have brown eyes, yes?"

"Yes?"

"Good. Now sign the contract."

He handed a scroll to me - yes, a scroll - unrolling it with a cold and bony hand when I cast an uncomprehending look his way. He pulled a needle from his cap - an odd, bone-white needle - which he used to prick his finger and press a drop of ink-black blood onto the contract. Then he handed the pin to me, his hands as cold as the oddly-white metal of the pin.

The undersigned 1 [Natalie Bryce] hereby offers a blood pact that the undersigned 2 [Heironymous Justicar] should act as party to stabilize the essential form of the undersigned 1, offering authority to…

"What the fuck is this?" I glanced between the doctor and the yellowed parchment of the scroll. "A blood-pact?"

"Sign," Justicar said.

"I'm not going to fucking sign this." I stood and started edging out of the room, a feeling of dread gradually welling up from the pit of my stomach.

The doctor's unnatural smile shifted to an unnatural-er grimace. "Sign!" he hissed, and I felt a strange energy welling up within the room. A familiar energy that I hadn't felt since… I couldn't remember when.

I tore out of the doctor's office and through the reception area, passing by a woman and her teenage son on their way to 'Dr. Smiley's Family Dentistry' next door to Justicar's place. My head was woozy and my whole body burned, nausea welling up one moment and dissipating the next. I mashed my thumb against the elevator's down button and, when I heard no chimes of progress, I staggered down the stairwell, my legs feeling like jello. My body felt off, like my limbs were sometimes too small and sometimes too large. I staggered out to Parkland Avenue.

"Hey, you okay?" a man called after me - nice sentiment, I guess. No, I was not okay.

I made it maybe a block before stumbling off of the sidewalk and through some ferns, collapsing beneath the shade in the Magnolia Springs Park. I retched and vomited on the ground, noticing the green with oily bits of yellow in my vomit - the doctor's potion seeping out of my system. I crawled another few feet and vomited again before turning onto my side and weeping.

I'm not sure whether I passed out or whether their timing was just very good, but the next thing I was aware of was a trio of high school kids storming into the little clearing. Well… they didn't look like high school kids. At the time, I probably guessed them college-age, or high-schoolers in a very Hollywood way. That is, there were two girls and one guy, and they were all way too mature and attractive to be regular kids. Two of them had to be athletes, beautiful and hazel-eyed and looking like they'd just stepped out of a racy photoshoot, the black girl, though, had the tall, lithe build of a supermodel with bewitching gray eyes and a very concerned look on her face.

"Y-you… I… I know you," I said.

"Is this her?" the guy rumbled, and he pulled me to my feet, whereupon I vomited again, splashing against his Livorno boots. But vomiting made me feel a bit better.

"I… I know all of you," I said. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and looked down. "Sorry about your boots."

"The compass definitely says this is her," the thin girl said. "I don't understand."

"She used to be a guy," the amazon said - she was as tall as me and probably as strong and, sweet Jesus, was she a looker. "I guess they changed her back and… we should get out of here. Natalie, do you know where you are?"

"Who's Natalie?" Oh god… the mega-hot amazon was crying. "Shit… don't cry… please… I'm sorry… what?" I said.

The guy looked almost as unhappy. He wasn't the kind of guy you wanted unhappy with you. He probably had four inches of height on me and thirty pounds of muscle. But I didn't feel threatened at all - I got absolutely zero aggro vibes from him. He put a hand on my shoulder. "Do you live near here?"

I nodded. "Pretty near."

"We'll go there, then. I promise we'll explain everything."

OvidLemma

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