Cary huddled in the cool rain under the drooping leaves of some exotic tropical plant. She’d never seen its like in any of her books or spy missions, so she didn’t know the variety. But a short glance had informed her the plant was not native, like Cary.
Oleg grinned at her as he bustled about the ruined area. What passed for the Chuhaister’s home was an empty, cracked foundation with vegetation having overgrown the area over decades. He possessed a surprising array of amenities considering his home stood in the middle of the wilderness. Apparently, the city or state, Cary was too bothered to check Emilia’s memories, protected this little strip of land from development or damage.
The thought that these people had to protect portions of their wilds from themselves troubled her. As if the contradiction there should have been obvious at a glance, but she couldn’t put her finger on the disparity.
The rain only lasted part of the morning, ending before the sun had reached its zenith. As it concluded, so did the last vestiges of the hangover Cary earned herself the night before. Her demonic physiology interacted with the Rohypnol and alcohol in unexpected ways. Most of the morning had passed by in a haze while Oleg made sure she drank plenty of water. When she’d shifted into her stone form the night before, most of the immediate symptoms had passed. The moment she’d returned to her mortal form, they’d returned with a vengeance, as if making up for time lost during her transformation.
“My head has finally stopped hurting.” Cary brushed the large frond out from over her and received a minor deluge for her efforts. “Why did we do this?”
“Because it was fun, da?” Oleg’s low humming ended and he flashed her a bleach-white grin. “Though I admit, you are violent drunk.”
He was laughing before Cary joined him. “You don’t mind… what happened?”
“Was not your fault. Besides, not often do I get to enjoy beating up the police. Or attempted rapists.”
The word slapped Cary hard in the chest. Those mortals should have thanked whatever Gods they followed for Cary’s drunken state. Had she been sober, she would still be punishing them for their transgressions.
Oleg waddled over. “Is not so bad, da? You are fine, I am fine. The police and the Internet, they saw our false faces in the night. Is only bad if…” he waved off the thought. “Is not bad, da?”
“What were you about to say there, Oleg?”
Folding his beard into his mouth and chewing, Oleg waggled his head like a dog. “Is bad if the Cabal or the wrong demons find out. They do not care for… indiscretions.” Spitting the mouthful of beard back out, he added. “But we were discreet. No complaints to us! Ha ha ha!”
Dancing about his broken foundation, Oleg fit in with the surroundings in an odd way to Cary. As if he embodied not just he spirit of the woods near here, but the entire genus loci of the area. “You are a strange man, Olegiev.”
“Ha!” He thumped his chest. “And still I am not stone like you! Ha!” After a pause to think he said, “what do we do today? Different bar? Frighten joggers? Perhaps cruise for the last mushrooms of season?”
He hadn’t seemed this hyper last night, even when they were standing amidst a crowd of drunken mortals. The disparity between last night’s Oleg and this morning’s set Cary’s teeth on edge. But she didn’t answer him right away. Better yet, Oleg didn’t act like he needed the answer in the moment. Waiting for a few more seconds, he resumed humming and tromped back into the woods, trailing off-notes as he did.
A part of Cary wanted to follow him, take part in his glee. But she’d made a major mistake last night, not in falling for the trio’s gambit, but in reacting as she did. Anonymity served her in this place. With the connection between herself and her former master severed, he would need to rely on other spies or his own magical prowess to find her. And letting her activities be broadcast over this “Internet” most likely equated to sending up a flag.
Checking the word “Internet” in Emilia’s memories, Cary groaned and held her head in her hands. A slim chance existed that Elelele wouldn’t know about the newest mortal contrivance. But this wasn’t a moving carriage or magic music box. This was an index of all human knowledge. An information broker and hoarder such an Elelele would consider such a thing indispensable. She just had to hope that her former master ignored the mortal world excepting for the occasional glimpse every century or so.
That was a foolish hope, and Cary knew it.
Stretching out on Oleg’s floor, Cary considered what she should do. Other than mortal wizards and busy-body demons, there were always mortal demon hunters to worry about. Oleg didn’t appear to be worried about them, but Cary didn’t know what abilities Chuhaister possessed. Her mortal’s soul thrummed out to Cary, leaking magic and potential all the way across the city.
There was an interesting possibility. According to Emilia’s memories, she lived among the wizards and witches in plain sight. Cary had avoided peeking in on the mortal spell caster. But last night and this morning, Cary had felt pain and despair over their connection. In order to find out what happened, Cary would have to track the mortal down herself.
“Too much work, that.” Cary muttered to herself as she folded her hands behind her head and stared up through the quickly dispersing cloud cover. “Maybe tomorrow if I’m bored.”
She slipped off into a nap and woke to find Oleg squatting next to her, bouncing on his toes. “You sleep like teenaged mortal. Something wrong?”
Cary had jerked away from Oleg’s wild appearance instinctively. But when she recognized him, she shook her head. “Nothing’s wrong. Just don’t have anything else to do with myself.”
It made her curse herself inwardly. Less than a week of freedom and Cary was bored with her retirement?
Unacceptable.
She’d enjoyed dancing, maybe she and Oleg could do some more of that tonight. Opening her mouth to ask, Oleg shoved a clump of wiggling worms and grubs toward her. “Hungry?” Cary wrinkled her nose and he cackled at her as he popped several of the fat white bugs into his mouth. “Crunchy and delicious.” Spittle flecked over his beard as he ate noisily a few feet away.
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Something had changed about him, though Cary couldn’t say what. When she’d complained about boredom earlier, she hadn’t intended to provoke the Fates. “I could use some food,” she warded Oleg off with her hands. “I prefer smoked or cooked meats, not bugs.”
“Your loss.” Oleg shrugged. He finished his sloppy meal and washed his face in the leavings of the rain. It was hard to tell from here whether the birdbath helped or only spread the mess further around and added mud to his mask. “I know places with good food. Closer to the mortals though.”
“I’d think they’d be right smack in the middle of the mortals.”
Oleg winked and waggled his eyebrows at her. “Maybe, but I think we should stay away for today. Maybe tomorrow too.”
Following Oleg’s lead, they snuck off into woods. Visiting several manicured strips of lawn, Oleg filched barbecue meat for Cary, who wolfed it down with a ravenous hunger. Elelele had been lax with feeding Cary. Her stomach had atrophied over the centuries to the point where she couldn’t eat much, just as she couldn’t drink without growing far too drunk. At least the meat was fresh and unspoiled, though she didn’t care for the chemicals and hormones mixed into the flesh.
After two little lawns, they gave up their food stealing and returned to Oleg’s hovel. As the hour grew later, Oleg’s bouncing and ebullience muted itself. By the time night came, he was back to his original, calm demeanor.
He walked through the forest with a kind of silence that Cary envied. Though Elelele had relied on her stoney body for her surveillance, he’d instilled certain stealth arts into Cary. Despite her training, Oleg moved like he blended with the forest. Cary moved like she never quite managed to place her feet properly compared to him.
A shout from the darkened trail up ahead brought Oleg’s head up like a dog detecting an intruder. With a short glance behind him, he said, “we run. Come on.”
As quiet as he was padding through the forest, he was blazing quick when he ran. Cary never considered herself a slouch in the physical arena, but again, compared to Oleg she looked like an amateur.
Oleg stopped a few feet away from a pair of mortals who stood shoulder to shoulder with each other. One of them pointed a white bone rod at Oleg, which to Cary’s sight produced a thin black line from its tip that shot into Oleg’s chest. The other, her companion, scanned the trees. As if he were searching for Cary. Both of them were dressed similarly to the jogger from the night before, though they had raised masks over their faces. From the scent of them, they’d covered themselves in hellebore. It bothered Cary’s nose, but didn’t have any other effect on her.
“Tell us how long you’ve lived in these woods, demon.” The woman spoke and motioned with her rod.
Oleg’s voice sounded strained, as if he were trying to resist answering. “All of my life.”
The woman hissed at him, but the man just shook his head while he continued to scan the tree line. She said, “who else is with you?”
Again, Oleg’s voice came slow and creaky as he said, “no one now, just me and trees, da.”
The evasive old rascal was buying Cary time. And she’d need it if they were waiting for her. Picking up a loose stone from the ground, Cary hurled it down the path, at least a good twenty yards away from them. Both mortals jumped at the sound and faced the direction Cary had intended. She jerked Oleg out of the rod’s black line and sank back into the forests ahead of him.
When the two noticed Oleg missing, they didn’t look concerned. The woman raised her voice. “Olegiev Buronowski, cease your flight this instant.” Behind Cary, she heard her friend collapse into the brush, frozen by the woman’s words. Was he really crazy enough to give his real name out to people? How else did those two know how to name him?
Cary shot forward as the woman said, “call out to me, Olegiev Buronowski. And if you find your friend, please stop her.”
The blood pounding in Cary’s head thumped with pressure as she feared Oleg’s betrayal. But to the mortal’s misfortune, Cary had already left Oleg behind. He cried out to the woman, who shouted for him to join her in the trail.
Cary ran on for another thirty yards before she checked the trail again. Both sorcerers had their attention on that side of the woodlands, with the rest to their backs. This time, the woman interrogated Oleg in a low voice, too quiet for Cary to make out from this distance.
Rather than cut a direct path back to them, Cary darted across the trail and into the woods on the other side. She couldn’t be sure, but neither of them shouted, so she didn’t think they noticed her. Creeping along as quietly as she could, Cary approached close enough to hear the woman’s questions. “…with you at the bar last night.”
They were already onto that? Cary cursed herself for a fool and crouched in the dark and waited. Oleg didn’t give much up, “I do not know this woman. She was acquaintance.”
“Where is she now?”
“I do not know this either. Perhaps she returned to home? Cannot say.” Oleg’s accent had cleared up when the sun went down, but it had grown worse as the woman interrogated him.
The man leaned in toward his partner to whisper something to her so Cary took the opening they gave her.
A stone she’d found that fit her palm like a cherry sailed out from her hand and smacked into the man’s temple. Biting her lip to keep from cursing her aim, Cary silently leapt toward the woman as her companion fell like Cary had killed him.
Rather than hit the woman in the back of the head as she’d intended, Cary tripped over a root and flailed into the man, collapsing onto the trail with his limbs. He wasn’t breathing, so Cary had probably killed him with her stone.
The woman placed her right hand on her hip and turned to face Cary as if she’d been expecting the attack. At no point did her rod stop pointing to Oleg. “Well, well. If it’s not the friend Oleg doesn’t have.”
Shifting into her stone form, Cary rose to her full height and faced the woman. “Why are you after us?”
“Simple, that little display last night brought too much attention to our little town.” The woman shrugged at Cary. “The higher ups decided you both needed to be taught a lesson.”
Cary grunted at the woman and dipped her head. “Well, I think I should return fair for fair.” With a slight shift to her back leg, Cary charged the woman like an enraged bull. Again, the woman’s dead companion managed to foul Cary’s step and send her windmilling to the ground.
The woman snickered at Cary. “You seem to be having some trouble. Need a hand?” Offering her grip to Cary, the woman loomed over her where she’d fallen.
Cary tried to slap the woman’s hand out of the way, but instead her supporting arm slipped in the loose gravel of the trail and she fell onto her side. Nothing hurt, the falls weren’t damaging any part of Cary other than her pride. At the woman’s knowing smirk, Cary realized what she was dealing with: an Entropomancer.
“Fucking Chaos sorcerers.” She angrily grumbled as Cary stood up and focused on the woman. Though she knew what the woman was now, she had basically no strategy for stopping her. Any attack directed at the sorceress would fail, hells even attacks that only happened to approach her would also fail. Usually those failures subjected the attackers to a variety of misfortunes.
“Just tell me your name and we can conclude our business tonight.” Cary motioned with her rod toward Oleg. “I mean, tell me your name so I can end you both, of course.”
Anger wouldn’t help Cary here. And she was certainly not going to offer her name up to a strange Chaos Sorceress. “No. If you don’t leave this place right now…”
Whatever threat Cary intended died on her lips at the footsteps of a small gaggle of late night joggers. Moving in packs was smarter than the lone woman from last night, but their timing could not have been better.
The fact the woman didn’t look surprised or upset was lost on Cary as the cadre of robe-clad wizards marched into view.
“I think you may give me your name before the night is through, Ms Gargoyle.” Cary wanted to beat the smirk off of that woman’s face, but she’d prefer not to end up with her own face sucking mud if she could help it.