> “The process grows harder each time. Restoring my youth is a trivial matter, but altering my appearance so as to not arouse suspicion taxes my facilities. And without Rita’s lifetime of memories, now lost to me, when I look in the mirror at my new visage, it is as if I have truly been reborn.”
One time, when I was 12, I was cornered in a bathroom by a gaggle of girls not too dissimilar from the one currently threatening me with bodily harm. They grabbed me by the arms, dragged me to the last stall, and stuck my head in the toilet until I thought I was going to drown. It was not a pleasant afternoon.
Sixteen years later, this encounter was shaping up to be worse than the last one.
“Oh. I see,” I said, trying to project an air of confidence. These girls didn’t know a damn thing about me and maybe I could use that to my advantage. “You going to stab me with that the little knife of yours? For accidentally walking into your ‘territory’? Give me a fucking break.”
This time, it was the girl to the leader’s left who spoke, although in the dim light of the alleyway, they pretty much all looked like a goth version of the Children of the Corn.
“No, the stabbing is only for when you don’t listen to what she said,” the second girl said in a deep baritone voice that squeaked at the end, betraying her near-pubescence. I nearly laughed, but then remembered poor Steve, rapidly aged, struggling to sit down on the subway, and Polly, who in her desperation had betrayed us to the Guild in the hopes of finding a cure.
“That blade looks very scary, I have to admit. Did you get it at Hot Topic with your training bra? You used it on a friend of mine. He said it was like getting cut by a Play-Doh knife-wielding Girl Scout. I don’t even think he put a bandage on the wound after.”
My bravado was on the verge of faltering and unless they relented soon, I was going to find myself on the wrong end of a very painful and very slow death. And without the Medoblad’s other blade to heal me, I would be in an old-age home next to Steve before the month was out. Maybe Polly would come to see us on the weekends.
The second girl turned red and curled her fist, but the knife-wielding girl stopped her.
“I think your friend has misinformed you. This ‘knife’ is actually the Relic White Hilt, passed down from father to son for a thousand years, until I was born, and my dad, in disgust over failing to produce a first-born son, refused to give it to me. Do you know what I did to him?”
Shit.
“You threw a temper tantrum and then ran to your room crying?”
I slowly lowered the crate of apples to the ground and brought my right hand close to the glamour stone. It wouldn’t be much, but maybe showing them I too had ancient power on my side would make them reconsider their aggression.
“Enough,” the girl replied. “You are starting to annoy me. So you’ll be finding out exactly what happened to him. Marcy, Leila, if you don’t mind.”
Two girls nodded and then reached into their jacket pockets to pull out brightly colored square gummies. They unwrapped them, broke off tiny pieces, and started chewing. I cursed Beatrice under my breath. If I ever saw her again, I was going to give her an earful about how much trouble she had caused us by selling her buffs to Phineas.
I grasped the glamour with my fingers and squeezed, the familiar wave of Jade washing over me.
“But I mind,” I said, nearly shouting. “Because my name is Jade Peters, and I’m a member of the Guild.”
All of the Black Vultures’ eyes widened in unison, but their leader was undeterred, and she gestured to Marcy and Leila, who vanished in a flash and reappeared at my side, their brass knuckle-adorned hands gripping my arms behind my back so hard I thought they were going to crush them.
The leader slowly approached as I struggled to free myself, but I was no match for the girls’ alchemy-enhanced strength.
“Impressive,” said the girl. “So you’re not just a regular idiot walking into my alley, you’ve got yourself a glamour! And a rather attractive-looking one at that. That will be very useful to me.”
She grabbed the chain around my neck and started to pull, but suddenly stopped as loud footsteps echoed on the alley stones behind us.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said a familiar voice.
An unassuming man wearing a brown sport coat and horn-rimmed glasses had emerged from the back of the garage and strolled casually toward the rest of the gang.
It was Gilbert.
The Vultures all rotated their heads in unison like something out of The Exorcist, and stared at the newcomer.
Calling him unassuming was being charitable. Banal would be a better fit. I’m sure he didn’t mind being described as such. There was a certain benefit to not being noticed, to being ignored by the masses, and that was doubly true when you were a member of a centuries-old shadowy organization bent on reclaiming the lost magic of the world.
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But there was nothing ordinary about how we had met.
He had been the literal bogeyman for several weeks, pursuing Beatrice and me from the shadows as we searched for a cure to undo the stone curse of the Medoblad. Until we learned that the Gilbert that had been dogging our footsteps wasn’t Gilbert at all, but Doug, Beatrice’s first trainee, who she had tried to kill after he turned into a crazy stalker.
Then Gilbert had intervened and twisted Doug into an even crazier stalker and had also given him a glamour to boot, one made in his own image. Needless to say, things got out of hand, and the real Gilbert had shown up after we had been forced to turn Doug into a pile of broken stone. Then there was that whole “throw your token into the mysterious pool of water” ceremony that Gilbert had invited us to, where Beatrice’s gold token had exploded and she had fled without so much as a goodbye. With her gone and all the people from with my normal life either dead, forgotten, or furious at me, the man in the alleyway was the only person who might have cared that I was still alive.
Which was all a long way of saying that I was kind of glad to see him.
The lead girl dropped the glamour and turned to face Gilbert.
“And you are?” she said, motioning to Marcy and Leila to rejoin their compatriots. I used the opportunity to slink off to the side of the new confrontation that was developing.
“I’m Gilbert.”
The girl’s demeanor wavered slightly. Evidently his name alone carried weight in this world, but what he was going to do against that Relic, I wasn’t sure.
“If you’re Gilbert, then you know that this is our domain, and the Guild has no business here.”
Gilbert looked around the alleyway before turning his attention back to the leader.
“Not much of a domain, if you ask me. Looks more like a shithole,” he said with a smile.
“Fuck off,” said the girl. “You, I’ll give a pass to, but this bitch back here,” she turned and pointed to me, “wandered in here uninvited. You can have her once we take our toll.”
“You really that desperate for a crate of apples?” said Gilbert. “How about I give you $50 plus a few bronze for good measure, and you can buy all the apples you wa-”
“Do you think I’m stupid?” asked the girl. “Those aren’t just any apples, those are from Running Brook Orchard. They’ve got celestonite and with them, I’m going to take the Black Vultures out of this alley and claim what’s ours.”
“Don’t count on it,” said yet another voice from the shadows. A young woman soon appeared from the garage. She had dark auburn hair and was sporting a pair of sunglasses, despite the early hour. Her outfit was capped off by knee-high black boots and a pleated skirt, but instead of the black one worn by the Vultures, hers was orange, which matched the hair-tie around her ponytail.
“Patel,” said the lead girl with a scowl. “What are you doing here? Come to beg us to let you back in? It was you who thought you were too good to lead us anymore, once the Guild had come calling.”
“Zoe, charming as ever,” said the woman. Despite her British accent, there was something familiar about her voice. “No, I’m not here to reclaim the mantle from you, although maybe I should. I’m here for my knife and for her.”
She pointed at me and it was then I realized who she was. The woman from the phone.
“As I was just saying to your friend over here,” said the girl called Zoe, “if you walk in here uninvited, there will be consequences. And it’s my knife now, in case you’ve forgotten. The price you paid for abandoning us.”
The woman, who couldn’t have been older than 20, smirked at the threat, reached into the flannel tote bag slung around her shoulder, and pulled out an improbably long metal sword with a jewel-encrusted hilt. The blade glistened, despite the darkness that enveloped the alley, and I wondered what alchemy it possessed.
“Emma,” said Gilbert to the woman, holding up a silver pocket watch he had pulled from his jacket. “We’re going to be late to our appointment if you don’t hurry this up.”
Emma rolled her eyes at Gilbert and held up her empty right hand, which sported a set of thick silver rings on her middle three fingers. She pulled her hand back slightly and the knife in Zoe’s hand began to shake, much to the Vulture leader’s consternation.
“Heh,” said Emma. “I figured you were too much of a shit-for-brains imbecile to cleanse the auragen off of White Hilt.”
She yanked her hand backward and the knife flew out of Zoe’s grip, spun end-over-end several times, until Emma snatched it out of the air with a flourish.
“Much better,” she said, adjusting her stance to account for the new weapon in her arsenal. I could only gawk at the alchemy prowess on display, my little glamour paling in comparison.
The other Vultures looked at Zoe for some sign of strength, but all the fight had gone out of her, and she stood there, dumbfounded. It was then that Marcy or Leila—I didn’t know which—dashed forward with buff-enhanced speed. But when she reappeared mere inches in front of Emma, her arm already halfway cocked into a punch, the woman was ready.
She deflected the girl’s brass knuckles easily with her sword blade, sending the Vulture staggering backward a few steps. Undeterred, the girl scrambled to her feet and tried again. This time, though, Emma sidestepped the punch and then smashed the pommel of her sword into her attacker’s stomach, sending the Vulture onto the ground.
Emma nudged her fallen former comrade in the ribs with her boot, and, satisfied that the girl was unconscious, she bent down and started removing the brass knuckles.
“Hey,” yelled Zoe. “Don’t you fucking dare-”
It all happened so fast that I was sure my eyes were playing tricks on me, because the next thing I knew, White Hilt was somehow floating in mid-air in front of Zoe. I looked over at Emma, who was back on her feet, her arm outstretched and the fingers of her ring-adorned hand clenched around an invisible tether.
She loosened her grip slightly and the dagger inched closer to Zoe’s throat, a look of terror forming on the girl’s face.
“Emma, please,” Zoe said with a whimper. “You don’t have to do this.”
“But I think I do, Zozo. Remember when I would call you that and you would get so annoyed? It was cute, in a way. Then I showed you what real alchemy looked like and it was as if the psychopath switch went on in your mind. How many people have you hurt with this blade by now?”
“I … I don’t-”
“Answer me,” said Emma, the anger in her voice rising to a crescendo.
“11,” the girl blurted out.
“That’s 10 too many. If I let you walk out of here alive, how many more will you-”
“Are you quite finished?” interrupted Gilbert, and Emma shot him a venomous look, as if he didn’t grasp or care about the significance of what she was doing. But in that one distracted moment, Zoe ducked under the floating blade and made a beeline toward her former mentor.
The poor girl, she never saw it coming. Instead, all she saw was Emma yank back her hand in a furious motion before the dagger’s hilt hit her squarely in the rear of the head. Zoe let out a guttural cry as her chin hit the pavement a few inches in front of Emma, and the woman tapped the unconscious girl’s cheek with the tip of her boot before nodding to herself.
“Yes. Now I’m done.”