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The Books of Fae - Chapter 4

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The rain had become a heavy mist by the time we finally threw the mooring lines on the deck and let out the gang plank, a gray, steel ramp with a roughened surface to offer traction in wet conditions. Matt pushed his ailing cousin in the wheelchair, wrapped up in a fleece jacket, white blouse and green vest, brown skirt, and a plaid blanket over her legs to cover her “feet”. She was still asleep, though she had roused enough as I was dressing her to look blearily at me and ask “Who be ye?” in a husky soprano.

“A friend,” I had responded. I’m not sure she understood, but she had nodded sagely at that, blinked a couple of times, then fallen back asleep without saying a word. Dressed as she was, she likely would draw no comment from anyone, so long as the blanket stayed secure over her tail fin. She certainly didn’t seem a stranger to clothes.

Together, Matt and I had wrestled the chair up one of the makeshift ramps, the mermaid snoring softly. Seated, she appeared petite, but as we had discovered, even a small mermaid was remarkably heavy, especially when she wasn’t actively working to distribute her weight better. After getting her settled in the van - laying the mermaid on the small pulldown cot there - Matt went back for my medical kit, various laptops including the one in the waterproof case, and the portable IV bag, which I reattached through the shunt in her arm, swapping out the saline solution for glucose. She was still going to need real food, but until I knew what exactly a mermaid could and couldn’t eat, this seemed like the safest bit. Even so I was very nervous about giving her something that seemed innocent but might turn out to be a deadly toxin to mermaid physiology.

I stayed with her for a few minutes to make sure she was resting peacefully, then made my way back up to the passenger seat, dodging spare computer parts and undeliverable packages. You could live in the van if necessary, but it wouldn’t be pleasant long term.

“How’s she doing?” Matt asked. Good - he was thinking of her as a person, not some kind of sex object.

“I suspect that she uses some kind of dolphin kick when she swims. She’s got abs of steel, probably what saved her. You or I, bullet would probably have pierced the diaphragm or a lung, maybe even rattled around inside the ribcage and put a hole in the heart. As it was, her muscles acted like kevlar, though she’ll be sore there for a while.”

“So she actually has lungs, not gills?”

“Uh huh,” I answered. “Doesn’t rule out magic, but that kind of magic, the kind that would let you breathe water,  takes a lot of energy to maintain, and would be very hard to maintain when unconscious. I suspect she might have used it to stay underwater for extended periods, but she still had to come up for air, and she could potentially drown.”

“I don’t get it - she’s a magical creature, but you’re saying that she still has to follow physical rules?”

“Sort of.  Magic has its own set of rules, and there are a lot of the .. fae folk who are very magical, and who violate normal physics just by existing. Think of magic as being a different universe, one that overlaps our own in some places more strongly than others. Some magical creatures are able to pull magic from this other place and wrap it around them, but that makes them vulnerable - cold iron in particular is nasty for a lot of them, because it disrupts the magical fields around them, and they rely upon magick so heavily that they don’t have enough substance in our world to survive.

“Silver isn’t as disruptive, but it slows the flow of magic around it. That’s why you can kill a werewolf with a silver bullet - their magic is able to repair their body very quickly when shot with most metals, but shoot a werewolf with silver and their body can’t repair the damage fast enough. And depleted uranium is just nasty - you get all the effects of radiation poisoning happening in about thirty seconds. Though there are a whole class of nasties that hail from a different universe altogether, ones that love radiation fields.”

Matt was staring at me strangely.

“I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

‘Um … kind of.  It’s just that you’re taking as matter of fact something I have a real hard time putting my head around. I’ve never met a Magic Nerd before.”

I laughed at that. “Yeah, that’s me, Briannon McConnell, Magic Nerd.”

“Sorry - I didn’t mean that. I’d always assumed that you were just one of those natural born programmer types, yet you travel with a medical kit that has its own IV bag and seem to be quite fully conversant in the physics of a world that I suspect a lot of the PhDs at UW would give their souls to know about. Who are you, some kind of weird alien?”

He seemed … offended. Maybe even a little afraid. I’d given him a glimpse into my world, and it had rattled him hard, and while his last comment stung more than a little, I didn’t jump to the attack. I needed Matt, valued him as a friend, and if I said the wrong thing he’d bolt.

I chose my words carefully. “I’m still the same person I was a day ago, Matt. I was born at Evergreen Hospital up in Kirkland. I have some weird ancestors on both sides - my father’s mother was a Scottish witch, my mother’s mom was a Duwamish … I guess you’d call her a medicine woman, though that’s more than a bit of stereotyping. It means that I have an awareness about things that most people don’t, and a couple of abilities that others don’t have either. Cold iron doesn’t hurt me, but it makes me uncomfortable - one reason I prefer living in brick and wood houses and can’t abide being in skyscrapers. I have to set up wards around my computer to keep it from shorting out.

“It’s something like being born to a wealthy family, I suspect. Most people don’t have private yachts at their beck and call, don’t have boards of directors of Fortune 50 companies quaking in their boots at the thought of you calling in your proxy.”

I’d visibly stung him with that, though I have to admit there was a certain satisfaction in that. Matt played at being a humble programmer, but I’d begun to realize that it was his version of “slumming”, and he was old enough that he had some responsibilities he needed to start acknowledging, let alone living up to.
“I … I’m not like … oh, hell. Yeah, I deserved that. Look, I’m Stephen Jones’ kid. Ubernerd of the high nerds, except he really wasn’t like that, and I’m not even that. People had the expectation of me that I would take after dad, be super smart but with a really bad fashion sense, and for a while, I lived that. I’m not dumb, and I actually do like programming, but what most people don’t realize was that my father was actually a pretty mediocre programer but was an absolute genius as a businessman.

“Bree, you’re smarter than me, and that’s a hard thing for me to admit. You’re scary smart, and the expectation has always been on me that I had to be the smartest kid in class, if only to propagate the illusion that my dad set up. And I’m starting to think that maybe that’s what I’ve been running away from.”

We chewed up a few more miles in silence, the Cascades to the east visible only as shadows in the misty rain.

“So what are we going to do with her?” I asked.

“Does she need medical care?” Matt replied, finally turning to look at me.

“Yeah. Getting it could be a problem though. I rather doubt she has an insurance plan, and the whole fishtail below the waist thing could make it a bit awkward taking her to the hospital. We’re pretty blase about the mythical creatures here in Cascadia, but not that blase.”

“Uh huh,” Matt grinned. “I don’t suppose you’d want to keep her with you?”

I thought about it, but shook my head. “I barely have room for me in there, I only have a shower, and I’m up a flight of stairs. I have no problem watching her - time, if nothing else, is something I have in abundance - but it’s not an ideal place for a mermaid. Your place isn’t much different in that regard.”

Matt thought, then the grin got wider. “No, my place isn’t, but Lena’s is.”

Lena. I thought about that one for a bit. Lena, whose full name was Lenore, was Matt’s sister. The sister who was doing international modeling for newsstand magazines by 17. Who left that world at 23 with the proceeds to put herself through law school. Who four years later was employed as a junior partner with one of the largest law firms in Seattle. Lena, the overachieva. Okay, maybe I was just a wee bit biased. Yet what that had to do with our mermaid was still a bit of a mystery.

“When my father died, she and I agreed that she should get the house - I had a place and really wasn’t interested in living in Medina, she was just coming back from Stanford and needed a place. Mom was wheelchair bound for a couple of years so Dad had the place made more easily accessibly that way, and it has a couple of large bedrooms with full baths. When she passed away, Dad didn’t have the inertia to change anything, and I don’t really think he was expecting to die from a e heart attack less than six months later. It’s possible Lena’s remodeled the place, but given that she’s been even busier than I’ve been, I doubt she’s had the time.”

“Would she object?”

“The deed’s in her name, but I’ve not made a big stink about how the estate was carved up when I could have. Given the unusual nature of her potential house guest, she might actually be intrigued.”

There was something in the way that he said which made me raise an eyebrow over, but he stayed mum. I’d met Lena, and while she was generally pretty good natured, she had the imperious blonde ice queen down cold, for all that her hair was the color of spun gold.

I started to shake my head, then caught sight of a car that I’d noticed earlier and dismissed. The vehicle was about forty yards back, just close enough to make out the rental license plates, an SUV that a lot of the state police used for their unmarked vehicle fleet, though it didn’t have the side mounted parabolic halogens or the grill lights that were usually visible if you knew what to look for.

“Matt, I think we have a tail. The black SUV on your side. I remember seeing it at the marina.”

“Oh …”

“Don’t slow down! There’s an exit up ahead. The sky’s going to appear to dim for a bit - after about ten seconds, make your way to that exit.”

This was going to hurt. I opened my way up to the Wyrd, pulling power from the nearby ley line, feeling it travel down my spine like burning ice. Then I closed my mind and began visualizing the program I’d laid out earlier for casting an illusion. I hated illusions. I was a lousy illusionist. No, I was actually a very good illusionist, I just hated doing them. My ears filled with the discordant strains of the Wyrd, and I started filling the space within them with half tones and harmonics to bring them better in sync. After about ten seconds, I felt Matt moving off to the right, but anyone behind us would have seen us moving straight ahead, towards a clump of fast moving traffic. The SUV shot past us as the illusion sped up, and through the pain in my head and spain I could see four men wearing dark sweaters and jackets, intent on catching us given they realized their tail had been made.

I finessed the illusion, letting the van shift over to be in front of an obscuring large truck, then releasing the illusion as a flock of crows, all of whom exploded out of the way of the truck. By the time the SUV got to a position where they could have seen the faux van, the van would have appeared to disappear into traffic.

After we took the quiet ramp, I changed an A to a C# and the van went from being white to a muddy gray color, the graphics hidden. This one would be easier to manage,which was good because my head was pounding as it was.

“Okay, go into Seattle and take the 520 bridge instead of going onto 405,” I said, through gritted teeth.

His eyes wide, he nodded, and pulled back onto the highway. A mile down the road we passed the SUV, stopped by the side of the road. two of the goons in expensive suits apparently changing a tire. A self-satisfied Jackdaw laughed at them from the overhead power lines, though I doubt they even heard it over the traffic. The nail it had placed in their path had apparently found its target.

“Weren’t those the guys that had been chasing us?” Matt asked, looking back, but had the presence of mind not to turn around.

“Could have been, yes.”

“... oh … ”

I sent out a silent note of praise to the flock of crows and blackbirds, with the image of a roadkilled deer I’d seen a few miles back, thrown far enough clear of the road that they’d be in no danger from the traffic.

“I … oh, crap, pull over!”

He pulled over against the side of the road again, and I lurched out just in time for the contents of my stomach to come back up. I spat the foul taste out of my mouth then climbed back into the van, grateful for the bottle of water that Matt had fished up from somewhere. Man, I hate doing illusions.
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