Aaron was curious to see how Albert intended to dispose of the decapitated cowboy’s body, gruesome as it might be. Were they going to stuff the head and body in dimensional storage? Turn it into a potted plant or dog toy with magic?
It turned out that Albert’s solution was far weirder than Aaron could have imagined.
“It’s for the best, really,” Albert said, fishing in his dimensional storage for something. “I haven’t had a chance to feed my slime anything substantial since we started this job.”
When the small man referred to his slime, it wasn’t a euphemism.
He pulled out a glass cube nearly a foot across and etched with a web of complex runes. Some kind of greenish-blue substance was slowly roiling within the confines of the cube.
“We looted this dude, right?” he asked, kneeling beside the cowboy’s body.
“I don’t think we did, actually,” Aaron said. “I’d remember if one of us had picked up his creepy bone.”
Albert set the box on the ground beside the body and began to go through the corpse’s pockets. He patted the corpse down and even went back to the garage to fetch the man’s hat. When he returned, he had the hat and the creepy bone. The final haul of the fallen magi was a couple potions, a few coins, and a phone, all of which went into Albert’s dimensional storage.
At a tap from Albert’s finger, one side of the cube slid upwards. The murky substance within began to pour out onto the floor. A strange, quivering mass emerged from the container in just a few seconds, forming a cube at least three times larger than its former container. This new cube of slime even had indentations on one side that suggested eyes and a mouth.
When Albert uttered a command in a strange, raspy language, the semi-translucent blob began to engulf the deceased cowboy. The slime or ooze or whatever-the-hell wasn’t nearly as opaque as it had seemed at first; Aaron could see the cowboy’s body inside its wobbling form as clearly as if it were behind thick, colored glass.
The corpse didn’t fizz or dissolve or anything noticeable, it was just in the slimy mass one moment and gone the next. The cube turned its ‘face’ to Albert and used its mouth indentation to give Albert what Aaron took to be an honest-to-god smile.
“Is that a gelatinous cube?” Aaron asked as the cube began to force itself back into the glass box at another command.
Albert nodded. “A damned good one, too! I picked him up when he’d just formed five or so years ago and I’ve been training him ever since.” Albert patted the glass cube fondly and adopted a tone one might use talking to a dog. “He’s a good boy. Yes, he is.”
“Setting aside Al’s hyper-weird taste in pets,” Griffin said as they made their way back to the stairwell, “it has been dead useful for delving. It makes a decent scout, holds its own in a fight, and can stand watch because it doesn’t need sleep.”
“Terrible for cuddles, though,” Albert said, making a sizzling noise.
“Gross,” Kiara said. “Anyways, let’s get moving. We’re not out of the woods, yet.”
Griffin clapped a hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “On the upside, most of your new stuff should be delivered by now, or will be in the next hour or so, so you’ve got a fun night of laundry and unpacking ahead of you!”
Aaron groaned. That wasn’t something he was looking forward to, especially considering his fancy rich guy apartment didn’t have an in-unit washer and dryer.
Wait a second… I’ve got a fancy rich guy apartment because I’m a fancy rich guy, now! he realized. I could probably remedy that.
“Uhm… can any of you recommend a fast and reliable laundry service so I don’t actually have to do my own laundry?” he asked. “And what would it take to install a washer and dryer in my apartment?”
“You might be my spirit animal, Abrams,” Albert said.
Kiara was less impressed with Aaron’s clearly brilliant plans to shirk as much busy work as possible. “You should do at least one or two loads tonight. There is a laundry place right around the corner from the apartment on Columbus but we won’t be able to take anything over until tomorrow at the earliest.”
“True,” Griffin agreed. “We’ll need to keep a very low profile until we can sort out all these mercs trying to find you.”
“Won’t all the clothes and furniture for my apartment be something of a tell?” Aaron asked. “Like, I’m not sure what says ‘new guy in town with lots of cash’ more than all the crap we just had delivered.”
“There’s layers of security and shit between our shopping trip today and the stuff actually being delivered,” Albert said.
When he considered that for a moment, Aaron realized he already had some idea about that. After all, Kiara had given him a different address for everything that got shipped, which meant it was probably going to be delivered by people from the Drakon. Plus, with their involvement in banking, it should be easy to create additional layers of protection in the paper trail from the transactions.
It was odd, for Aaron, to be placing so much trust in people he barely knew, but all of this was stuff he barely had passing knowledge of how to accomplish, let alone real practical expertise or the mechanisms to enact them. It was going to take some adjustment before he was used to leaving so many things in the hands of other people.
The four drakus emerged from the garage back into the drive that ran under Paramount Plaza. The valet supervisor wasn’t around and nobody else seemed to notice — or, more likely, cared — that they didn’t have any packages with them or that there were more than one of them. In moments they stepped back out on the street near the Gershwin’s stage door.
Aaron stopped once they were on the street, taking a moment to lean against the shiny black wall of the Gershwin. His three guardians immediately went into hypervigilant mode. They relaxed, marginally, when Aaron pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
“I just need a second to get my head right,” he said. “It’s been one helluva day in one helluva week.”
“Fine,” Kiara said with a huff. “Albert take point, Griffin the rear, I’ll pass on the cigarette, but you’ll have your smokes while we’re on the move. Got it? And don’t engage with anyone who complains, just keep moving.”
Albert and Griffin, as if by magic, produced and lit their own cigarettes. Not magic in the sense of wands and translucent shields, but like a street performer doing close-up magic. Aaron didn’t see them pull out packs or cases, the butts simply appeared in their mouths with lighters already halfway to the tips.
“That is a well-practiced addiction,” Aaron said. “I’ve been trying to give the stupid things up off and on for a couple years, so I can’t work that kind of mojo. The best I ever managed was a few Zippo tricks.”
Griffin chuckled as they set off with a cloud of (very slowly) lethal gas surrounding their group. Albert, on the other hand, had more of his usual words of wisdom to impart.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“Quitters never win,” the small man said, then laughed his wheezy laugh.
Of the four of them, Albert was the only one who smoked filterless cigarettes. Aaron hadn’t noticed when they were on the fire escape the night before. Now that he saw it, he wondered if Albert was just that dedicated to nicotine or, due to the slowed aging of being a drakus, he’d been born to a generation before filters became common.
The walk back to the garage across from the Stardust Diner wasn’t even a full block. His protectors were silent, engaged in newly heightened vigilance in the aftermath of the ambush and with rush hour traffic in the heart of the Theatre District. It gave Aaron a little time to look inward.
Now that the immediate danger was past, he would have expected to be feeling a greater physical toll. He wasn’t prone to panicking, but adrenaline being purged from his system still should have left him with at least mild discomfort. From his experience, the consequences should have been a good deal worse. Yet outside the lingering emotional disturbance of losing control after so many years — which he didn’t want to think about — he felt nearly normal.
Maybe it’s another benefit of being a drakus? he mused. Which reminds me that I really need to figure out some of the stuff that comes with the change.
They got back to the garage before any of them had even finished their cigarettes, but they weren’t alone. As soon as they turned into the parking structure’s pedestrian walkway, two vehicles pulled into the garage beside them.
One was an older moped that looked well-maintained and the other a late model hatchback. Aaron tensed, pushing his free hand back into his hoodie to grasp his wand, while the trio of guardians regarded the occupants of each vehicle. Their evaluation was subtle, done in a way that wouldn’t stand out if you didn’t know what you were looking for. Apparently they recognized the moped rider and both people in the small car, because they stopped briefly to confer with them.
“We’re parked in the Byways,” Kiara said. “Meet us down there?”
The moped rider nodded and both vehicles pulled ahead into the garage.
When they got down to their sedan, the scooter and hatchback were waiting for them. Handshakes were quickly exchanged and Aaron learned that these were the drakus who’d been set to keep an eye out for them.
The moped rider was from something called the Order of the Star and the drakus in the hatchback from the Order of the Night. They formed a caravan with the moped at the point as they took the Byways back uptown. Since they were going to be driving a few minutes, Aaron decided to ask a few questions about these sub-factions in the Drakon.
“So what’s all this Order business about?” Aaron asked as they pulled onto the stone-tiled, subterranean road. “You said they were like factions in the Drakon?”
“So you know about the Triumvirate of Flame, right?” Kiara asked. “And their roles?”
Aaron nodded. “That’s me, in theory, Barrett, and Mallory, and we’re the three leaders of the Drakon. Barrett is like the military leader and Mallory the mystic. Not really clear on where I fit in.”
That provoked a laugh from the guys in the front seat, though Kiara remained straight-faced as she usually did.
“Well that’s terribly fitting for the head of Society of the Scale,” Griffin said, chuckling.
“Whoa, there’s Societies now, too?”
“There are three — Scale, Spear, and Tome — and they’re sort of like fraternities for drakus who want to get more heavily involved with the Drakon, who are committed to working for our collective benefit. Each Society is under the purview of one of the Triumviri,” Kiara explained, simultaneously busy tapping away at her phone.
“The Spear and Tome are each composed of three Orders. In the Spear’s case, it’s the Orders of the Flame, the Night, and the Stars,” Griffin said, picking up the explanation. “The members are more colloquially known as sentinels, spies, and scouts, because those are good general descriptions for the type of shit they mostly do.”
“Everyone you’ve met since the ambush has been from the Society of the Spear, the overarching organization that answers to Barrett and deals with more martial and militaristic matters,” Albert said.
“Damn, I need to write this shit down or something,” Aaron grumbled. “Okay, so what about the other Orders?”
Kiara began ticking them off on her fingers. “The Society of the Tome has the Orders of the Eye, Scroll, and Sphere. The whole S-alliteration thing worked well for the militant wing, so it kinda stuck. They’re usually referred to as seers, sorcerers, and sages, respectively.”
“None of them can use ‘scholar’ because it turns into this whole big pissing match over which Order is the most scholarly,” Griffin said with a laugh.
“There’s more complexity to what each Order does than we’re describing, but those are the broad strokes,” Kiara added.
“But one of them — the one aligned with me — doesn’t have any Orders?”
“The Society of the Scale,” Albert said. “It’s more of a catch-all for drakus who want to commit themselves to the Drakon but aren’t great matches for the other two Societies.”
“They tend to have more versatile talents and interests, so they struggle in more specialized groups,” Griffin added.
Aaron sighed. “So I get the Hufflepuffs?”
“If that’s how you want to think of it, sure,” Kiara said with a shrug. “But it might be more accurate to think of them as Divergents? Griffin and I would probably be in the Scale.”
“I might, too, but it would be a close thing,” Albert said.
“Please,” Griffin scoffed. “Your skulking ass is Night all the way.”
Although he’d only begun to learn about this new secret world, Aaron continued to be surprised by its depth. There were layers to these cultures that he should have expected, yet hadn’t. His expectations had a superficial quality like those you might get in a movie or standalone novel. He had to remember there were entire populations of people with long, long histories and their dynamics could be just as complex as anything a mundane anthropologist, historian, or sociologist might study.
Kiara’s continued tapping on her phone reminded Aaron to check his own. He was used to doing things on his PC and rarely got messages these days in any case, so keeping an eye on his phone wasn’t a habit he’d maintained.
He had a text from Tia asking him when he’d be free that evening and his stomach fluttered for a moment.
They had so many things to go over: the next Tribulation; the alterations to his memory; the dagger he’d taken off the assassin at the hospital; and, of course, Baby Bear. It was shaping up to be a jam-packed day and it didn’t look like it was even close to being done.
Despite the serious nature of the things he would likely discuss with her, Aaron couldn’t ignore the slight thrill he felt at the idea of spending time with Tia. They got along well, had several interests in common, and she was unbelievably gorgeous. Plus, hadn’t she said something about thinking he was cute even before the crazy dragon magic had turned him into a hard body himbo hottie? That was promising.
Building a friendship with Tia would be wonderful, but if it could turn into something… more? That would be unprecedented, for Aaron. He had dated women out of his league, but always briefly and never quite so far out of his league.
There were two important things to remember: that anything more than friendship wasn’t guaranteed; and, that he had to try not to be weird and sour the possibility of any kind of amiable relationship. Well, no, that would be impossible. He had to try not to be too weird.
Thank God it’s not Alice I’m going to be working so closely with, he thought. Between the absurdity of her hotness and her magic mind whammy, there’s no chance I wouldn’t be a blubbering doofus.
He exchanged a few more texts with Tia and they agreed to meet up in half an hour. She said she’d bring menus for a bunch of places she thought Aaron should try and they could do another smorgasbord for dinner.
It wasn’t long before their sedan was pulling out of the TJ Maxx parking garage then pulling into the mysteriously open parking spot in front of the apartment building.
The moped and sedan loitered until they were through the front door and then, finally, they were home.
And I still have to do laundry, Aaron realized. Ugh.