Chapter Two: Those Darn Kids
The three wonder-kids and I made it out to the sidewalk, at which point I wavered and then vomited again, much to the horror of the onlooking people at the bus stop. There was still green and yellow stuff in my vomit, but there seemed to be a lot less of it. I burped and braced myself against the park fence.
"Food poisoning," the slender girl explained, pointing to me.
"It's… I'm sorry…" I took a deep breath. "It's a twenty minute walk back to my place… I'm not gonna make it that far…" I reached for my phone… and it wasn't in my pocket. It had fallen out somewhere. In the park? In my mad dash out of the doctor's office? I had no idea. "Can one of you kids call an Uber?"
"We're not kids," the fitness girl said. "And I don't have a phone."
"Me, either," the other two said.
I just stared at them, slack-jawed. What sort of self-respecting young adult wasn't glued to their phone? Hell, I was a full-on-no-shit-adult and I was glued to the damn thing… although I relied on it a lot less of late. Maybe as a symptom of my psychosis/depression/paranormal(?) nonsense.
"My car's two blocks this way, then… one of you…" I burped, but no vomit. "One of you will have to drive."
"Me!" Fitness girl yanked the keys out of my hand and skipped ahead. Fitness guy tugged my arm over his neck and hauled me after her with the strength of two linebackers. Well… maybe more like two tight ends, but still a lot… and speaking of tight ends, fitness girl was doing things for Mr. Warner, even in my intoxicated state.
We made it to my Lexus with no problem and fitness guy proceeded to buckle me in to my own back seat. I batted his hand away.
"I can buckle myself in just fine," I huffed, and then fumbled twice with the buckle before getting it right on the third try.
"Same personality, at least," the slender girl said. She squeezed my hand in a familiar way, her gray eyes peering deep into mine. If I didn't know better, I'd have said she was trying to find something in there.
Fitness girl started the car. "What's the address?"
"Navia, directions home," I said. The GPS posted directions to the center console. I waved my fingers. "Magic."
"That's not magic."
No shit, I didn't say. I managed not to hurl in my own car, too - the nausea was still coming in waves, but it was more and more manageable. Still, it might be a while before I was better - my legs felt like pins and needles, jello, and a lot of other things utterly incapable of jogging back to my place. Fitness girl drove capably, if a bit quickly, along Navia's course. I didn't complain.
"Shit! They're here already," she said, pointing down the block. Her hair had metallic blue highlights in it and her skin had tattoos… moving tattoos that wavered across a feminine but very toned arm. Moving tattoos? Maybe I wasn't recovering quite as quickly as I thought.
I propped myself up to see what she was talking about, and it didn't take much imagination to find it: three or four black clad men, all of them strangely-pale, seemingly-hairless, and wearing broad-brimmed hats like a bunch of creepy-as-fuck Mennonites. Take off the lab coat and replace the surgical cap with your great-great-great-grandpa's hat and you'd have Dr. Justicar… in fact, one of them appeared to be Justicar, because I could see the surgical cap peeking out from beneath the brim of his hat. One of them spotted us and shouted to the others. An SUV pulled away from the curb and started after us… no, two SUVs, all black and chrome.
"Get us the fuck out of here, Cassie," fitness guy said. Didn't I know somebody named Cassie? Cassandra-something? Petersen?
"Roger that… Magnus, take the wheel."
"I'm not taking the… shit!" Magnus said. Magnus… I recognized him - more déjà vu. He was some kind of wrestler or mixed martial artist, maybe?
Maybe-martial-artist Magnus took the wheel. He had to, because Cassie turned around and, hands outstretched, started doing some weird finger motions with slender girl… part of me wanted to say… Nina? No… Simone! But I couldn't for the life of me remember where I recognized these kids from. Part of me concluded: you obviously recognize them from a movie or TV show - I mean look at them! How could three people who look like that not work in entertainment or the fashion industry? You're dying, Nat… Martin… you're dying, Martin, and your brain is confabulating a scenario based on the contestants from the last episode of The Bachelor that you saw a commercial for (because, obviously, I'd never actually watch that schlock). Oh well, at least my brain was having an interesting death paroxysm. Car horns honked.
"Shit! Cassie, less gas!" Magnus said.
Cassie looked up from what she and Simone were doing - arranging eleven chunks of charcoal on a little wooden board from the looks of it. "Can't… they've almost caught up!"
I arched my head backwards, disorienting myself enough that I did throw up, vomiting stomach acid and little bits of green and yellow onto the door. But in my roll back, I'd glimpsed two black-and-chrome SUVs barreling after us, the other cars on the road forcibly shoved aside in their wake, as if by magic. And I could feel whatever was causing all that destruction catching up with us, rattling the whole car. My Lexus swerved and the rear bumper was ripped clean off by some sort of invisible force. The rattling intensified. My car was about to break apart!
Simone counted down: "Three… two… one… now!" She and Cassie touched opposite windows of the car and, suddenly, the streets of West Palm Beach disappeared. It was the middle of the night and, in the moonlight, I saw hills and sheep. Lots of sheep.
"Signal lost," Navia said. "Recalibrating… signal acquired… welcome to Scotland." Then the car's computer sputtered, sparked, and died.
"What the fuck?" I said, and promptly passed out.
+++++
When I awoke, I was still pretty sure I was dreaming because I was lying supine on a bearskin rug while that kid from that 'The REAL Royals of the North Country' show watched over me with a concerned-but-aristocratic expression. You know the kid - Liam, the one that all of the girls were going crazy over a few years back. Not that I'd ever watch a show like that. I only knew of Liam from the commercials. Only now, obviously, he was about three years older and very much not a tween. And some stirring in me said I knew him a lot better than that.
I sat up and took in the room - a huge hall in a great mansion, the sounds of distant servants bustling, echoing through the corridors. The fireplace in front of me was big enough for a person to walk into - not that they ought to. Right now, the fire was reduced to dull embers and the only lights in the place were the dull yellow glow of the incandescent ceiling lights. Liam-from-TV offered a sympathetic smile.
"Don't worry, Natalie, we'll get you out of that horrible body lickety-split," he said.
"What the fuck, kid?" I snorted, struggling to my feet - I didn't seem to be intoxicated by Dr. Justicar's drug any longer. "Who's Natalie and what's wrong with my body?"
Liam winced. "She doesn't know…"
"You'd know that if you'd listened to me," Simone said. She knelt beside me with a bowl of reagents: some poppy flowers, a raven's feather, a sash of silk. She reached into her hair and produced a gunmetal-gray pin, which she dropped into the bowl. "Nobody ever listens to me."
"Aww, Simone, you've got Liam flustered," Cassie said. She waltzed over to him and hopped into an embrace, kissing him on the lips. "Fortunately…" she kissed him again… "he's adorable when he's flustered."
"Indeed." Liam had the presence of mind to blush at my confused stare. "I'm sorry, um…"
"Martin," Cassie whispered with a giggle.
"I'm sorry, Martin," Liam said. The way he pronounced it made it pretty clear this was an affectation rather than my 'real' name. "You must have a lot of questions…"
"Magic," I said. I shrugged. "Right? Either I'm completely nutso, in which case who the fuck knows what's happening, or this is magic. How else would my Lexus… most of my Lexus get from Palm Beach to the fucking highlands in two seconds."
"We're in the lowlands," Liam clarified.
"The point remains! Magic - yes or no?"
"Yes, obviously," Liam said. "Bright and determined in any form, it would seem. And it would appear that Simone has gathered all of the things needed for some sort of memory ritual. Do you need help?"
"You'd only get in the way," Simone stated. "Only Natalie and I have done this before… and, Natalie being useless at the moment, that makes me HWIC." She sat cross-legged on the bearskin rug and gestured for me to sit down. With some reluctance, I did so.
She just stared at me for a moment, her flinty gray eyes taking me in - I got a feeling that Simone didn't miss much. Those eyes contrasted with the sleek mocha of her skin, her fine cheekbones and svelte form giving her a distinct and, frankly, distractingly seductive look. In fact, I ranked myself pretty favorably in the looks department, and had once been told I was 'dashing and a bit full of yourself, but for good reason'. And, as a merely-conventionally-handsome man I was, by a pretty substantial margin, the least attractive person in attendance there. I tried to remind myself that this was probably just my dying brain giving me a fuckall-weird trip into the abyss. I was snapped out of my reverie when Simone wrapped the little strip of silk around both of our wrists, loosely binding us together.
"Hold the feather with your left hand and toss the flower into the bowl to consummate the spell, okay?"
"I'm not taking part in some voodoo occult ritual," I said. Doctor Justicar had tried to get me to sign some sort of contract, and it had perturbed me enough to send me running. I wasn't about to sign my life to unknown forces. Not when I now knew that, either:
1) Magic, however improbably, existed and I'd been subject to some sort of curse by it or
2) I was going stark raving bonkers.
"Look, Martin," Simone said. She rubbed the back of my hand, and I relaxed - I recognized that gesture somehow. "You know something's wrong with you. You must be pretty desperate or you wouldn't have gone to those creepy pale fucks. And part of you says you know and can trust us… so why not go with your gut instead of the bad thinking that sent you into the arms of the Gangling Men? I'm going to poke my finger with this needle, and then I need you to poke your finger, okay?"
"Fuck it. Yeah," I sighed.
I held the feather in my hand, watched as Simone pricked her right pointer finger, and then accepted her needle to prick my own left finger. When our bloody fingers touched, I felt an electric connection as if a circuit had just been closed. Then she squeezed my hand gently - the signal to toss the poppy into the wooden bowl. Before it even touched the bottom, the flower went up with a poof of violet smoke. Then Simone leaned forward and kissed my forehead, and then I screamed, for memories started slotting into place, and the very first one rocked me to the very core of my being: Natalia Cadence Storm. That was my name. My true name. My witch name.
"Shit… fucking shit," Simone hissed. "I fucked something up…"
"No…" I sobbed. I wrapped my arms around my friend and pulled her into a hug. "You didn't. I'm so glad to see you guys… you saved my ass."
"And the other bits, too," Liam said.
+++++
Simone had performed a ritual I'd used twice - on two Bryce women, chance would have it. The first time, Simone and I had used it on Amanda Bryce, the girl who'd started it all (well… to be fair, we'd both started it all). After a disastrous night with Amanda Bryce, on account of the unexpected and often-unpredictable effects of magic meeting magic, she'd thought I'd raped and tried to kill her and been understandably traumatized. I knew her well enough now to know that the trauma was real and that she was still recovering from it. However, she'd rather deal with it (and was dealing with it, week by week) than be reverted to an eleven year-old and have her memories wiped, which is exactly what her psychopathic father, Rowan Bryce, had done. That same insane-o warlock had turned me into Natalie Bryce (technically, now, his daughter by blood) with the help of the Gangling Men, who weren't quite human and whose powers I didn't quite understand. In any case, Simone and I had recovered most of Amanda's masked memories.
Later, I used the ritual on Elizabeth Bryce (Rowan's cousin), whom he'd fucked over even more thoroughly than he had Amanda, turning his erstwhile competitor for the family name into a simpering household servant. I had no idea what had become of her after I restored whatever parts of her personality and memory remained following a decade and a half of servitude - if I had a chance, I'd return the favor she'd done for me in helping me escape. I owed that to her. But, for the time being, I had my own problems to deal with: I was trapped in my old body.
"I don't understand… I should be able to just turn back," I said. Not to toot my own horn, but I consider myself a bit of a whiz at transformation magic. I'd started with pinkie fingers and worked my way up. I could transform my whole body on command, at least temporarily, and could definitely undo some bit of transformation magic done against me, as long as I had the dexterity to trace out the symbols. My fingers whizzed around and I felt magic building up, but as soon as the magical forced drew to a swell, they just dissipated.
"Can you do any magic?" Simone asked.
I couldn't. I tried really simple things - tiny changes to myself, making a sympathetic binding, adjusting my clothes with a bit of my sandy brown hair. Nothing.
"I don't understand… you can't just take magic," I said.
"You can't," Simone agreed. "But you can redirect it, right? Whatever those creepy fucks did to you, it's using your own magic like a battery to charge itself."
"But it's not permanent?"
"Those guys have weird magic. It doesn't work quite the same way as ours," Cassie said. "I don't think they can change your true form without possessing your True Name, but their potions and curses can last a long time, years or more. And there's only one way to work your way out of a self-reinforcing curse."
"Break it all at once," all three of us girls said, giggling. I'm pretty sure that had been a Headmistress Lily lesson. And giggling sounded absolutely odd rumbling out of my throat. The memories had flooded back in, and now I felt absolutely out-of-place in my old body. Everything about it felt off and wrong.
"St. Circe's girls are weird," Magnus said. "Wonderful but weird." He plodded in and sat himself next to Liam on the couch. We were in the sunken area around the hearth, a cozy little lounge amid the airy expanse of the great hall. "What does that mean? Break it all at once."
We showed him, or at least tried to. The idea is this: any artificial magical effect has a threshold value and an absolute power, both of which are determined by a bunch of factors. Okay, warning: I'm about to do some math. But it's really easy math, I promise…
There are no units of magical measurement (though maybe an enterprising young witch should invent one), but let's say you turned Rowan Bryce into a worm (a girl can wish!) with a curse with a threshold of 5 magics and a power of 100 magics. Now, maybe a weak beginner witch can't get higher than 5 magics, so that means she can't do anything to affect the curse. But let's say a half-decent witch can do 20 magics. Since 20 - 5 (the threshold) = 15, that means she can weaken the curse by throwing all her magic at it and weakening the curse 15 magics at a time, so it goes from 100 to 85, and then 70, and so on, until the power of the curse goes below the threshold and it can't sustain itself. At that point, poof! Rowan goes back to his old self (boo!). However, a really powerful curse (sometimes called a self-reinforcing or true curse, though it's really just a special subset of regular curses) will have a power and a threshold that are identical. Its still technically temporary - the curse will lose power over time - but if a super-powerful 'true curse' has a starting power of 1,000 magics and only loses 5% of its power every year through dissipation, it will be 78 years (1,000 x 0.95^77 = 19.26) before Ms. Half-Decent Witch can do anything to break the curse… but as soon as she summons up her 20 magics of power, the whole curse is busted in no time. But 78 years is a long time to wait.
Now as an addendum: if a few different witches throw magic at about the same time, the effects are additive. So fifty half-decent witches with good timing could break the curse from the get go (since 50 x 20 = 1,000). That's exactly what we tried to do with my unwanted body transformation, throwing transformation magics at my body from without and within to overcome the curse. We tried for most of an hour before giving up, exhausted and sporting headaches from the intense focus. Whenever it felt like the curse was wavering, it would ramify itself and become just as strong as it had been before. Simone and I were crazy powerful and Cassie was pretty damn good… we were all phenomenal by beginner standards, at least. But we needed more power, and the boys weren't likely to be much help. It would be charitable to rate either of them above 'decent'.
"I've got a 'henge around back," Liam offered. That was a sort of permanent ritual circle, and one that was pretty good for moderate talents (like his, I'm afraid to say) to get better-than-moderate results. It probably wouldn't do much for what we were dealing with.
"I think we need to see Lily about this," I said.
If anybody could figure a way out of this, it was Headmistress (well… co-Headmistress) Bethany Lily. She was one of the most powerful witches in our coven (maybe the most powerful witch in the Sisterhood of the Starry Night coven... which, among a thousand-plus witches, is pretty damn impressive) and Cassie and Simone had a standing invitation to visit her sanctuary… so did I, though I had no idea where the Black Lily was. That was my sanctuary ring, which I could use to transport myself to Lily's (if I could do magic) without setting off all the wards. Theoretically, you cannot take a bound item off a witch (it's similar to breaking a pact to do so - it incurs a penalty in magical power), and yet the Gangling Men had managed to do just that… we still didn't understand how and why their magic differed from ours, but it certainly did, and it was pretty powerful.
+++++
When we wandered out from Liam's estate, it was close to dawn. I'd showered and changed into some of the young lord's clothes - deck shoes, wool slacks, and a fitted tee. They were a bit loose, but not too loose, and (real talk) bit tight in the waist, but not too tight. Jesus, it was weird to wear guy clothes again. Apparently, I'd been walking around in my old body for the last two weeks and been mindfucked into finding the whole affair completely unremarkable. It was also weird, being about the same size as everybody else, a bit smaller than either of the boys, and almost the same height as the girls, albeit heavier than Cassie and way heavier than Simone. And everything moved wrong. I couldn't see how I lived with it - my center of gravity was way too high, my legs pushed straight forward from my hips like they were on skis, and I had no sway or counterbalance. And having balls again was the absolute worst. After the fifth or sixth time steadying myself or tugging at my pants, Cassie giggled at the trouble I was having.
"It's not funny," I pouted.
"It is a little bit," she said, and she slapped my butt, making me yelp. "Aw, your butt is sad and flat."
"Boys can have nice butts, too," Liam stated. He wasn't wrong - his was very nice. Thank the stars for slim fit slacks.
"True," Cassie allowed. "But none of them have butts like Natalie's. It's like a boring sports car versus a Rolls Royce…"
"Rolls Royce make sports cars," he said quickly.
"So you admit Natalie's butt is objectively better, then…"
"Get a room," Simone sighed. She looked to me for support, but I was too bothered by the fact that they were waxing erotic about a butt I didn't even have at the moment.
We walked across Liam's estate… correction: it was owned by his mother, the duchess. But anybody who's ever seen 'REAL Royals' knows that Desiree Langley, the Dutchess Edismarch, is a bit of a socialite (to put it mildly). She spent maybe two weeks a year at the estate and, at the moment, Liam thought she was in Malta… though it might have been Crete. Or Bermuda. In any case, on a warm island far away from her very Scottish estate.
"Thank the stars she agreed to the allowance," Liam sighed. "Magic or no, she would have spent us out of house and home."
"Quite the home," I said. We'd been walking for perhaps twenty minutes in the chilly dawn, the sun rising pale over the green and rolling hills. "How much further is it?"
"Just over the ridge."
The ridge was another half mile off. The Lochlaron estate was a sprawling thing in the Scottish highlands… lowlands, with nothing but farms, herds of sheep, and antique homes as far as the eye could see, like something out of a Van Gogh painting (which the Langleys owned two of, though one was very small). And as we approached the ridge, I could feel the power of the ley line - I wasn't able to practice magic at the moment, not even a bit, but I was just as attuned as ever. While the estates of witches and warlocks exist in our world, they usually sit in little areas carved out by intersecting ley lines - lines isn't a very good name for them actually, as they're manifolds that intersect the planet along complex surfaces described by magical geometry (way too nerdy to get into here). Basically, they are where magic aligns with 'regular' space, and so it's easy to pinch two parts of the world together (for magical travel) or block them off (for defense). It's possible to do magical travel away from a ley line, but I've only seen it done exactly twice, and Lily won't tell me how she did it. Simone and I once did it during a ley storm in Tunguska, but that's a different matter entirely. In any case, I'll figure it out.
"I can't wait to get my body back," I sighed.
"Imagine how we feel - no Natalie for weeks! How did you get stuck like this?" Magnus asked, so I told him:
"Remember the night of the Summer Formal?"…
So glad that she at least has her mind restored for now.
You can't keep a good witch down!
This is a trip. Digging what little I know of your magic so far.
Thanks! I'm glad you like it!
This better have a good effect on the plot. I hate the trope where the competent protagonist loses memories or abilities and becomes incompetent.
I like Natalie way too much to nerf her like that!
This particular problem will reach its conclusion at the end of Chapter 4 for reasons that will be pretty obvious when it happens.
So clearly it's been a while. I do have many curiosity as to how she wound up like that.
*Poison leached from the veins, a rejection of essence itself* (oh god I'm gonna be sick.) Sweet torment. There's a profoundness to this whole thing, and it sings to a part of me that is ancient and timeless. The part that rips apart reality and the constructs of man and consumes of them their purest form.
Hail the essence of creation. Hail the draconian aligned. Trial of the forbidden. Gifts of the irreparable.
Thanks for the chapter. Twenty two and a half times over.