14)

Martin: Explaining himself in the Party-Mart

I stepped back from my aunt's pointy fingers. "It was kind of an emergency situation here."

She rolled her eyes and looked out the front window at the mass of green skinned barbarians looking back at us. A solid percentage of them seemed to be more concerned with the two of us, or maybe just my aunt, than the ones to either side still who were still engaged with their orange scaled enemies.

She flicked her hand at them, “Just go back to what you were doing, don’t mind us!”

They slowly began to move to either side of the store with some concerned and suspicious looks, but move they did.

She waved goodbye at them. "They're just orcs or trolls, I can't tell the difference. You could have just blasted them with a force wave or something, I know you can do that well enough to have knocked most, if not all of them down on their butts. Far better than dumping butt loads of your mana into an already miscast spell."

I sighed. "To be precise, I pushed my mana into the wards, not my spell. As far as striking them down goes, someone always gets hurt when battle magic gets put into play, and it looked like they just wanted to get in to get to the back door to get at the other guys. It did not look like they were planning on coming after me.

She flung her hands up, "They're orcs, maybe.. .but close enough to orcs that they would just laugh off getting tossed around. They like fighting. And you haven't even looked at your misbegotten spell yet have you?"

I crossed my arms and glared at her. “Like I would know what to look for anyways.”

She took a deep breath. "Yeah, poor pitiful Martin. No one will teach you the magic which you can't even use. We've gone over this a dozen times over the years and I’m not attending another pity party. Just look.”

She took a slow turn around the room, pulling Cyra's warding into the visible spectrum along with another immense circle tangled up with the store's wards with a mishmash of symbols from dozens of traditions.

“You got Nordic runes, Lung hanzi, Forgotten kingdom hieroglyphs, Olmec icons, and some stuff I don’t even know and it’s all mixed in with the wards. Where did you even get this stuff?”

I pointed at a few symbols “Enochian, Emojis, Math symbols, Traffic signs. I pick up what I can, when I can’t, then I just make things up to fill in the gaps. It is all good as long as it means something to me, the caster."

She slid her finger to the sides to rotate the weaves to focus on the various symbols. "That's insanely dangerous, how well do all these work?"

I shrugged. "Sometimes they work, or at least work as well as anything else. Different schools of Arcanicons have different looks so they don’t switch around on me as much.”

“But...why toss in so many?” she ended with a bit of a whine.

I felt all the nervous energy from confronting my aunt go out of me. "I was gut shot Natty, bleeding out. The first spell failed, and so did the second, I was blacking out and then it was getting away from me so I kept adding more symbols just to try to keep it from collapsing, then it just started going on its own..."

She let her spell end allowing the glowing glyphs and lines to fade away before stepping over to wrap her arms around me, surprisingly tight, and pulled me into the hug. "I glad you're not dead Martin."

“Me too.”

“One question?”

“Yeah?”

“What the hell are all these little blue buggers?”

Cassy – Taking a road trip downtown.

One thing to rely on with vampires is heavy curtains. Helpful for keeping out the sunlight, and for wrapping a body in.

Duct tape was in my “Oh shit“ bag from the trunk of the car, but I only made it back to the lobby with it before Kinkade caught up with me with the body wrapped up and thrown over one shoulder.

“I said wait, I would have helped carry it out.”

“I decided it was best to get a move on, catch the ex just as he is getting up for the day.”

Sunlight doesn't hurt vampires. it just takes them back to normal human strength again. However, their corpses tend to crumble away under the sun. Which is convenient when it comes to covering up their existence.

Thus the duct tape to make sure the curtain doesn't slip and no light got in from the ends.

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We had just finished wrapping Tarnell's remains when the lobby door opened and a pudgy middle aged man with a tattered old briefcase stepped in. He looked at us, at our suspicious package, then back at us.

After a moment he pointed at the steps up, I nodded, and he edged around the room and gave us a last look before he hurried up the stairs.

Kinkade shouldered the body again "Well, that pretty much sums up "Not my circus, not my monkeys."

Tarnell went into the trunk with a wool blanket over him to break up the suspicious looking shape of the wrapped up body. I also turned the police radio on to give me fair warning in case our stairway sprinter decided to call it in, and someone cared enough to investigate.

Kinkade started giving me directions, I started to follow.

“So who are we dealing with?”

“Ramone Krewe, well actually it’s Nelson, but I don’t care one way or the other on what people want to be called. He's one of the Lafitte's literal bastards and not trusted enough for the teaching of the inner family so he's largely self taught and now even more of an outsider for daring to be better at death magic than they are"

We exchange a knowing look. Unlike most of the Families, the Lafitte use Mortax, death magic, and guarded their so called exclusive knowledge closely. Never really understanding that the fact was, that most of the Families regarded it as a niche class of magic and frankly welcomed them to its exclusive use as they found it just plain nasty.

“He likes to stay up late and sleep in well past noon, so we can catch him while he’s still half asleep and willing to help just to get rid of us”

We pulled up in front of the Victorian styled townhouse, I stared at the upper floor.

“Is that the window from Dr. Strange?”

“Yeah, he’s also a total geek.”

Donovan- Trying to avoid all the people willing to hurt him in the Party-Mart

Roxir turned back to his zombie killing spree on screen. “Enough of your prattle, annoy someone else mortal.”

Right, time to go before I find out how much he can hurt me while in a human form. I could hear Damia going on about her online presence from the rooms on the left so I headed right into the kitchen.

From the looks of it, the people who had been living here hadn’t done much cooking. A half empty case of Apex chicken ramen, some dried up leftover pizza in the fridge, meat lovers, but even then too old to be appealing, and some jars of... gooey looking stuff with handwritten labels that didn't sound or look like food.

Although why the fuck I’m looking at some poor ass person’s cheap shit while there is a whole store full of free food is beyond me. Not sure what time it is in hell, but for me, I'm well past lunch and I'd best get something inside me before the hell born get hungry and start ordering me around again.

I headed downstairs and ignored the sound of Clarice’s voice coming from the office while I tore open the ends of the plastic wrapping on some Don De la Vega burritos before tossing them in the microwave. Two minutes to mouth burning outsides and ice cold on the insides tastiness.

I peeked in on the big green girl while I waited to see her talking on an old plug in the wall phone with an irritated look on her face. By the tone of the voice on the other end of the line, someone was chewing her out. her head snapped around to see me and she took the time to flip me off. Right, do not annoy big ass sword girl.

I walked around the store looking for anything else to stuff down my throat while I had the chance. I got an AC cola that tasted alright before I wandered off to the front of the store. The microwave dinged but I ignored it for the moment due to the big ass lizards slinking in low to the ground from out of the burnt ass forest which has started sprouting leaves from the burnt branches.

“Demon dogs!” I nearly have a heart attack when Clarice shouted from directly behind me, I choked down on calling her out as a bitch as I saw her smirk.

“Is that what those are?”

She shrugged, "Might be, some sort of demon anyways. They got too many types of them down here to count but they generally fall into talkers that you can make deals with, and everything else you either have to run off or kill."

I ducked down to avoid getting my head chopped off as she pulled the sword off her back. I could see now that half the sheath was open on the side since the sword was longer than her arm and she had to pull it sideways about halfway out to get it free.

“And after listening to my mom bitch at me for the last ten minutes I'm hoping it's the other kind."

I watched as she headed out the door with a grin and the tinkle of bells and began shouting at the lizard dog things.

“Boya! Come get some if you think you’re hard enough!”

I could see some of the ones off to the side begin to circle her as she stomped down the parking lot shouting and swinging her sword around making some of the things begin to back away.

I thought about warning her, but, you know, sword through the head earlier. She'll either be fine or get her ass bit. I'm good either way.

Wait, was there that much of the parking lot before?

Two got behind her and began to rush her, only for her to spin around to kick one into another. Then she stepped up to bring the bottom part of the handle of her sword onto the same one's head. She followed that up with a swing of her sword around to cut open the nose of the one she had been yelling at as it rushed her from behind.

Then she dashed off to the one to her left, kicked it in the ribs hard enough to lift it off its feet, and send it flying over to land on its side before turning around to point her sword at the ones getting ready to rush her as a group.

After looking back and forth at each other, they all began to casually walk away like it was their own decision to leave. More like demon cats than dogs.

Then she came back in and stole my burritos before heading out back and up the stairs.

Yeah, I know where this is going. I got two burritos in the microwave again before my mistress’s dulcimer screeches summoned me back upstairs with demands for frozen pizza. By the time I was back downstairs, got the pizzas, got back upstairs to put them in the oven, and then back downstairs the burritos were only kind of hot, but surprisingly letting them cool down for a few minutes meant the insides were warm instead of half frozen.

Who knew?

After another hour of pulling pizzas from the oven with no oven mitts in sight, fetching more drinks, dealing with Roxir's demands for meat, his question's about a Thin Tim meat stick being kosher like I would know, and then the party store burritos worked their magic and I locked myself in the store's bathroom to cut loose.

I had finished up and was pulling up my pants when I looked up to see the woman who had been going all Darth Vader on my throat a few hours before looking at me out of the mirror.

“Huh, So the two stores are linked. No wonder I can't make heads or tails of the spell. I was only looking at half of it.”

“What the…?”

“Hey Martin. Come laugh at the guy who shot you.”

She turned and pointed at me.

“And you, wash your hands.”

“Jerk.”