Chapter 15: The Pick-Up

From the passenger seat of the pickup truck Kirby looked over at Butch. “And we’re just going to pick up a package?”

“Yup,” Butch affirmed with a nod of her chin.

Kirby felt a pang of envy at her chin, which fell on the spectrum somewhere between Kirk Douglas and George Clooney. If I had a chin like that, I’d have never grown a beard.

The little red pickup truck continued for several more miles before Kirby said, “You know that’s what everybody in the movies who’s about to unwittingly get involved in drug smuggling or human trafficking gets told, don’t you? ‘We need you to pick up a package for us.’” The last sentence was spoken in what Kirby could admit to himself was a lousy impression of Tony Soprano.

Butch snorted.

“I’m serious—well, mostly serious,” Kirby protested. “What is this thing Adelaide wants us to pick up? Is it so big that it will take two of us to carry it? Is there so much of it that we’ll have to make multiple trips? Inquiring minds want to know.”

Butch continued to drive. “I reckon you’ll just have to get used to not knowin’. ‘Cause I guaran-damn-tee you that Miss Adelaide would’ve told us if she had wanted us to know. I get the impression it has somethin’ to do with the spooky stuff, because I was supposed to come out here last week with Marci to make the pick-up.”

“Yeah, I’ve met Marci.”

“Well, she’s one of the big experts on the spooky stuff.”

This explanation made him feel only marginally better. He looked out the window, quietly watching the familiar landscape of I-35 roll by. Butch pulled them off the interstate south of Moore and North of Norman, then headed west on a well-paved two-lane road. They drove past several neighborhoods, eventually turning onto a dead-end street with a dozen or so houses on either side.

Butch parked on the road in front of an oddly designed red brick house. The mailbox read, “E. Reeves.” A glance at the roofline told Kirby that the house was laid out in a squared-off U-shape. A brick wall taller than his head blocked the view of the front of the house and, between the bars of the metal gate in that wall, he caught a glimpse of a large courtyard. They got out of the truck, and he stretched his legs.

“This must be the place,” he said, starting towards the gate.

Butch’s voice stopped him. “Wait!”

He turned to look at her.

She sniffed the air before leaning into the open door of the truck. Folding the seat forward, she produced her crossbow from the cargo space. “Somethin’ don’t smell right. There’s somethin’ in there. I’m guessin’ some kind of critter—a spooky critter.”

Wolves! The thought leaped into Kirby’s mind, and he felt a chill despite the July heat. Several times since the night of the attempt on Adelaide’s life he had been awakened before by nightmares in which Abyssal wolves chased and devoured him. He took several steps away from the house and found himself standing in the road, next to Butch.

“Hang on, man. Let me get this.” She put the nose of the crossbow on the ground and stuck her foot through the stirrup. One-handed, she pulled back the string until the device cocked, then slotted one of the enchanted black quarrels into it. “Alright, let’s go see what’s in there.”

“Umm…. What?” Kirby could not believe this. “You smell some kind of ‘spooky critters’—some kind of fucking monsters—in there and you want us to go in anyway?”

“Look, this guy Reeves might have a pet or somethin’. Who knows? It ain’t necessarily gonna be hostile. Miss Adelaide says he’s a little shady, but they go back a long way. It’ll probably be just fine. If not, I’ve got this.” She hefted the loaded crossbow. The black quarrel exuded an aura of lethality.

She took a step toward the house. Kirby did not move.

“Look, man, if you wanna just wait in the truck…”

Shamed by what he could only take as a slight to his manhood, he silently cursed his macho stupidity and stepped up next to Butch. “Let’s get this over with—and if this is some kind of trap and something tries to eat us, you had better fucking shoot it.”

“Yup,” said Butch, and they approached the gate.

The gate, unlatched, swung open at Kirby’s touch. The courtyard beyond contained little vegetation, being paved with red bricks matching the house and wall. In the center sat a low fountain spurting a desultory stream of water. The front door lay on the opposite side of the courtyard from the gate.

“You go and ring the doorbell,” said Butch. “I’ll cover you.”

“Why don’t you go ring the doorbell?”

She chuckled. “Were you gonna cover me? You much of a crossbowman, Kirby?”

“Goddammit,” he muttered as he started across the courtyard, surrendering to her logic.

Skirting the fountain, he stepped up to the door. It seemed normal enough. He pressed the doorbell.

“Crap!” shouted Butch from behind him as the ground shook.

Kirby spun to see her thrown from her feet as something erupted through the paving bricks. The thing reminded him of nothing so much as a gigantic walrus. It lacked tusks and had only one eye—and its hide seemed to be constructed of stone—but its bulky torso, which rose to thrice his height above the courtyard, was equipped with two long, flipper-like appendages. The ground rippled, wave-like, from its base.

The walrus-thing cocked one of its flippers above its head. Emitting a surprisingly quiet roar it swung the appendage down at Kirby. He dodged the flipper. It smashed into the ground, pulverizing the bricks where he had been. Tiny shards of brick stung his legs. Any slower and tiny bits of him would have been splashed around Edmund Reeves’ courtyard.

“Shoot this damned thing, Butch!”

The rippling ground kept her from regaining her feet and he saw her scramble on all fours toward the crossbow she had dropped.

The creature raised its other limb. Its brown, lumpy hide bunched up at its shoulder as it cocked the flipper over its head. Its maw opened and it emitted the quiet roar again. Kirby once again sidestepped the rather clumsy blow, the impact of which made a loud “Crack” on the bricks.

Butch shouted. “What the hell, man?”

Kirby took his eyes off the one-eyed, vaguely walrus-like creature that had erupted from the center of the courtyard to see that Butch had recovered the crossbow and struggled to keep her balance on the rippling ground as she tried to reinsert the bolt.

Turning his attention back to the creature, he saw that it had raised both of its flippers above its head. Around its maw whorls and lines of glowing...stuff began to form. It was like the stuff that he had not-seen when Amy had worked sorcery in the library, the same stuff that pulsed in the deadly crossbow quarrel that Butch had not yet fired. The thing started what looked like convulsions, like a dog before it puked, and the sorcery stuff grew thicker, radiating an intense brown-gold glow. Then, in mid-convulsion, its flippers swung down to either side of him. The tremendous impact they made when they struck the ground nearly knocked him off his feet. He gauged the thing’s double strike correctly and held his ground when jumping to either side would have seen him reduced to a red, wet smear on the bricks. Unfortunately, it thrust its face forward. Its maw formed a tight circle, like it was going to whistle, and it spat a glowing brown-gold projectile the size of a softball directly at him.

The magic projectile sped so rapidly toward him that it allowed for no conscious response. By the sheerest of reflexes, unable to move his feet for the shock of it, he swung his arm forward to deflect it. The custom-made golf glove he wore to conceal his stained hand evaporated when it made contact with the projectile, but his black palm swatted the thing away. Deflected, it flew into side of Edmund Reeve’s house.

That side of the house exploded. Or imploded. Or something. It was loud. Half of the house tumbled to pieces, reduced to its constituent bricks, boards, and variously-sized chunks thereof. These were, as they saw when the dust settled, strewn about a crater about half the size of a house.

There was a clicking noise from Butch’s direction, and he spared a glance at her. He saw her lower the crossbow from her shoulder. One of the creature’s flippers started to rise, then fell abruptly to the ground. It opened its maw, but instead of the quiet roar it gave pained cry. As Kirby watched, patches of its hide began to blacken, shrivel, and fall off. The whole of it blackened and fell apart in the span of half a minute. Its final cry seemed to echo in his ears well after the thing had been reduced to a pile of what might have been cinders.

Butch’s voice snapped out. “We need to go, man!”

He looked to discover that he stood only six feet from the edge of the crater. The half of the house still standing creaked and groaned, leaning precipitously over the crater’s lip. As he watched, a chunk of ground the size of a washing machine broke off the rim and fell into the hole. Now, he was only three feet from the edge. Moving quickly across the shattered brick of the courtyard, he did not care at all that his path took him directly through the blackened debris that had been the creature. Safety meant getting far away from the edge of that hole.

As they jumped into Butch’s pickup and he turned to her. “What the fuck, Butch?”

“Don’t ask me, man. I didn’t expect that. Don’t think Miss Adelaide did, either. We need to head back and talk to the boss.”

“By all means.” He pulled the remains of his custom golf glove from around his right wrist. “Let’s go and talk to Adelaide.” He imagined he could hear the distant sirens of emergency vehicles approaching as they drove away.

They drove back across town in silence and parked in the asphalt lot behind the tearoom. Broad stairs led down to double doors that provided entry to the dance club in the basement, but Butch used her key to open a door on the ground-floor. Inside, they went up the stairs to the office where Adelaide waited.

Inside, Butch took the lead and Kirby followed her up through the “Employees Only” door and up the stairs.

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They found Adelaide in the office upstairs. She closed the book in which she had been writing and put down her fountain pen. “May I assume that things did not go as planned during the pickup from Mr. Reeves’ house?”

“I’d say that was a pretty good assumption, boss,” said Butch, dropping into one of the comfortable chairs that faced her employer’s desk, an expanse of mahogany that Kirby imagined must be very nearly large enough for a regulation table tennis match. Its overly spacious surface was tidy, occupied only by a desk blotter, the book, the fountain pen, and a curved computer monitor about three feet wide.

He sat in the other chair facing the desk and found his view half-blocked by the enormous monitor. “A giant, one-eyed walrus tried to kill us.”

“Do tell,” Adelaide said.

“Uh, yeah, boss,” Butch nodded as she clarified, “I smelled something strange when we got out of the car. So, I covered Kirby as he went into the courtyard to ring the doorbell. It popped up behind him in the courtyard, right when his finger hit the button.”

“So, it was triggered by the doorbell, a trap.” Adelaide was not asking a question. “The ‘one-eyed walrus’ sounds very much like what certain texts call a terrananti, or geo-ippos. I felt something powerful, quite disturbing really. I felt it from across town. What happened?”

Butch indicated Kirby. “He saw it up close,” she said. “I only got a view from behind.”

The prim older woman behind the massive desk turned to him, rotated the monitor out of her line of sight, and gave him an inquiring look.

“It took a few swings at me, but it was slow and I stayed out of its way.” He paused and looked from Adelaide to Butch and back. Adelaide’s look said, ‘do continue’, so he did. “Then, it raised both flippers and started looking like my neighbor’s dog horking, you know...umm...heaving before it vomits. Sorcery stuff started swirling, like, in and around its mouth. Kind of a golden-brown color. Then, its arms both crashed down, and it spat this glowing, magical thing at me. I just sort of swung my hands up to ward it off and managed to knock it out of the way.” He illustrated this last by imitating his earlier panicked arm movements.

Adelaide interjected. “With your stained hand?” When Kirby nodded, she said, “Go on.”

“That’s when I shot it,” Butch supplied. “Also, when Kirby deflected that thing it spit into the Reeves guy’s house, it took down half of the house. It made a crater, steep-sided, maybe ten or twelve feet deep. By now, the rest of the house has probably fallen into it.” She ran her fingers through her short, dark hair, then tapped her nose. “And when it started, uh, horkin’, the smell of it went off the scale. It smelled earthy to begin with, but that thing it spat out… I just… I’ll call it intense, but that doesn’t do it justice.”

“This isn’t good,” Adelaide pronounced.

Butch nodded. Kirby started to nod but stopped himself when he realized he had no idea what was going on. Both women seemed to be silently contemplating the ramifications of the morning’s events and he tried, unsuccessfully, to contemplate what they might be contemplating. He could not help but interrupt the silence. “Okay, will one of you please tell the new guy—the guy who’s never seen a giant, one-eyed earth-walrus that spits glowing death loogies before this morning—what you both seem to be thinking about. I went along with Butch this morning to pick up whatever we were supposed to pick up because she asked me to. I played along even after she smelled something bad, because I had no real idea what that might mean.” He tilted his head towards Adelaide and gave her the side-eye. “When you say, ‘This isn’t good’, could you narrow down where on the spectrum of bad this falls? I already know it’s I-almost-died bad. Do you want to clue me in on the details?”

Adelaide nodded to Butch. “Why don’t you pour us a drink?”

The handsome, broad-shouldered woman rose and unstopped the crystal decanter on the buffet table behind them and poured two fingers of brown liquor into each of three crystal glasses. She placed one in front of Adelaide, handed one to Kirby, and kept the last for herself. He looked dubiously at the elegant crystal glass in his hand.

Adelaide said, “Trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to say something like, ‘but it’s not even eleven o’clock in the morning.’ Just have a drink.”

Kirby drank. He did not like whiskey. In fact, he drank it so seldom that he was not quite sure if this was whiskey or bourbon or some other, similar spirit. He could, however, distinguish the cheap from the expensive. What passed over his tongue as he gulped it down seemed like it ought to be reserved exclusively for the palates of trillionaires, if there were such a thing. He felt he might now understand why people liked the stuff. Looking up from his empty glass, he noticed that the women had merely sipped theirs and was slightly embarrassed.

As if synchronized, Butch leaned back in her chair and Adelaide leaned forward in hers. “Jeffrey,” began the older woman from across the desk, “an attempt to kill you or Butch, or the both of you was made this morning. Someone had knowledge of the pickup you were making and turned it into an ambush.”

“I don’t know jack squat about sorcery, but I had sort of figured that out,” said Butch.

“Quite. Now, the mage in ques—”

“Wait,” Kirby stopped her. “He’s a magic-type guy, this Reeves guy, right? Why is he a ‘mage’ and not a sorcerer? You’re a sorceress.”

“The short answer is that he does not practice sorcery. Remind me to have Amy go over the basics with you later, but there are different varieties of the Art and each manipulates reality in different ways. Edmund Reeves practices one of the varieties whose practitioners are known as mages, or sometimes warlocks. Amy, Marci, and I follow a tradition whose practitioners are called sorceresses. Does that clear things up for now?” She took a sip of her whiskey.

“Yeah,” he said. “No, wait. There’s something I’ve got to ask. Are all sorceresses lesbians?”

She started, trying to control her surprise and to keep the whiskey in her mouth and failing at both. Kirby was sure that he had ever seen a genuine spit take before that very moment. He was doubly sure that he would never see a spit take handled so elegantly or with such grace. A handkerchief appeared in her hand as if out of nowhere and she beamed a smile at him that proclaimed that his unintentional humor had proven irresistible—and that she had enjoyed it even more for having to mop up a bit of whiskey from the desk.

When the handkerchief had vanished into a desk drawer and decorum had been restored, she said, “No, Jeffrey, not all sorceresses are lesbians. The three you have so far encountered are a decidedly non-representative sample. I am, and you’ve met two of my closest friends. Is it surprising that my friends’ orientations are like my own?”

“Well, I figured if I didn’t take the chance and ask, then I’d have to wait until I met a non-lesbian sorceress to find out.”

“And you didn’t know if any even existed, so how long might that have taken?” she said with an understanding smile. “Any other questions while we’re at it? Or might we return to the topic of someone trying to kill you, Butch, or the both of you and what that likely means.”

Butch had risen and refilled his glass before he could stop her. “Can I assume that it’s related to the attempt on your life the night we met? That whoever did that is coming after you by trying to kill Butch, who is obviously some sort of badass fixer for you, or maybe for your guild of sorceresses?”

The broad-shouldered bartender clapped him on the shoulder and said with a grin, “Don’t sell yourself short, Kirb. You’re kind of a badass yourself with that black hand, slappin’ magic death loogies right outta the air.”

“A badass I am not, Butch. All I know is that I almost got killed again.”

“Regardless, Jeffrey, you are a target,” Adelaide warned him. “Our unknown malefactors, even if they didn’t connect you to me on the night we met, have certainly taken note of your presence at Mr. Reeves’ home today. They will now assume you are one of my people—if they hadn’t already—and may plan to eliminate you simply because they think you work for me.”

“Who—”

She cut him off. “As to why someone is trying to remove me, there are two likely reasons. The first is that someone in the Guild is trying to remove me and usurp my position. It’s not unheard of, but I’m very good at this sort of thing. Such a usurpation would require massive support inside the Guild to succeed and, while that’s not impossible, it seems unlikely that our Guild could conceal a secret that large.”

“Unless it’s a small cabal in the Guild, getting outside help,” offered Butch.

“That’s possible,” Adelaide admitted. “And it points to what I consider the more likely of the two reasons: someone else is moving in on us, perhaps an affiliate, tired of being under our thumb, wants to reshuffle the deck to put their members at the top. A war is coming, and we have just seen the opening shots.”

“I admit that I don’t know, well, anything about your world, Adelaide, but you make it sound like, I don’t know, The Godfather. Are you planning on sending Santino and Fat Clemenza to go and make them an offer they can’t refuse?”

Butch shrugged her shoulders and had another sip of the whiskey.

Adelaide looked thoughtful as she had another sip of from her own glass. “You know, Jeffrey,” she finally said, “I was going to tell you what a ridiculous notion that was but, upon further reflection, there are some parallels. I am the leader of an organization that exists outside the law. The authorities, such as they are, are unable to settle disputes within my organization or with other such organizations. In such situations we routinely mete out justice—or what we consider justice—because the law cannot. Perhaps we are a bit like the Corleone family in The Godfather. Make no mistake, however, unlike Sonny Corleone I will not bring this Guild into a war if there exists any reasonable way to avoid it, despite the attempt on my life.”

“And individual retribution? You’ve already made it clear that you’ve got no problem with that.” He almost raised the glass to his lips again but caught himself and put it on the desk. “Not that I disagree. If you think they’ll take another shot at you, lex talionis seems like common-sense self-defense.”

Butch chuckled and shook her head.

Adelaide’s eyes did not stare coldly into his like those of a serpent or a psychopath. They remained the warm green eyes of an attractive woman in her late fifties, who lived and loved with all the good-natured grace one might hope for. “That’s what makes the attack on me—and that on the two of you—so serious. I have a…”

“Reputation,” Butch supplied.

“Yes. I suppose that is the word. Jeffrey, I have a reputation as a sorceress who will visit terrible penalties upon any who try to harm this Guild or its members. It is a reputation I have earned. It is a reputation that keeps the people I care about safe. I have, in the past, needed to do some things that I might rather not have done—or that I might rather have had someone else do. If I had not done them, however, it might have been construed as weakness. The history of our Guild and other such organizations has shown us that being perceived as weak in this way invites attack and would put my friends and my Guild in far greater danger than might otherwise have been the case. I could not allow that then and I can’t allow it now.”

He was unclear if there was some particular way in which she wanted him to respond. He nodded his head and grunted in a way that he hoped would free him from having to respond verbally.

Butch spoke. “Yeah. Miss Adelaide’s absolutely right. I didn’t see that Godfather movie, but you’ve gotta have a tough enough rep if you’re the top dog, or people won’t see the downside of gunnin’ for you. People don’t think twice about gettin’ on her bad side; they think three or four times and then—all but the crazy ones—back the hell off because goin’ after the boss ain’t worth the risk.”

On some level Kirby knew this made as much sense as anything in the past two weeks, but he still felt a bit stunned. From the moment Adelaide had spoken about removing the threat against her, he had known what she had meant. Today, though, the casual way in which she and Butch had described a sorcerous ‘gang war’ left his mind spinning. He needed both information and time to consider all he had heard. “So, what’s next? What do I do to avoid being a casualty of your war?”

“Oh, Jeffrey, don’t be so dramatic!” Adelaide chided him, but there was concern in her voice.

“Dramatic? You just told me that I’m stuck in the middle of what might be a war between sorceresses and warlocks and whatever! Apparently, the people who were crazy enough or powerful enough to try to kill you are likely to try and kill me because they think I work for you. And you don’t think I’ve earned the right to indulge in at least a little drama? Really?”

Butch chuckled.

Adelaide sighed. “Well, perhaps you have earned the right to be a bit dramatic—but it’s counterproductive. We must focus on what’s important, and that’s finding out who’s been naughty, stopping them, and persuading anyone else with similar inclinations not to even think of such things again.”

He thought of the two dead Abyssal wolves at her feet that night. Was it less than two weeks ago? Just one of those bastards had nearly killed him. He was lucky to still be breathing, but she had barely even broken a sweat. Listening to her talk of “persuading” the “naughty” made him suddenly glad that he was not on her naughty list. That, and the things he had picked up from both Butch and Amy, confirmed his resolution to stay on her good side. Something was incongruous, though. The grandmotherly figure before him, the wealthy society grand dame, in no way projected the menace she probably should. You had to get to know her, to see a little more deeply, before your imagination might allow the terrible thoughts into your mind about the things she might do to her enemies. Kirby thought he saw it well enough, but it was hard to reconcile that with the image the nice lady with the marvelous mansion as they sat in the second-floor office of her lesbian dance club cum faux tea room.

Kirby pretended to sip his whiskey for a brief time before he saw Adelaide give Butch a raised eyebrow and Butch said, “Well, c’mon, man. Today’s your first day on the job and I’ve got to show you the ropes.”

“Yeah, okay.” He got up from the chair, following her to the door. He paused in the doorway. “Wait. So, I just go on about my life and hunker down here and in my little bungalow, hoping not to get attacked again? Is that what I’m supposed to be doing, now that there might be some kind of magical war going on?”

“Jeffrey,” Adelaide said, looking up at him with sad, dark eyes, “you very nearly gave your own life to save mine. I owe you and—”

“And you pay what you owe?”

“Those are not words to put into someone else’s mouth,” she corrected him. “Especially not if you understood what they mean to me and to my Guild. But you aren’t wrong, Jeffrey. I regret so very much that you are in danger because you helped me, a total stranger. I will do everything in my power to keep you safe and to live up to my obligation to you, because I do pay what I owe.” She took up the pen and opened the book before her and began writing.

Dismissed, he headed down the stairs in the direction Butch had gone.