Maker

Chapter: 4-2

I knew that eight floating, translucent eyeballs exactly like my own appeared in front of me. They hovered for a moment, then shot off into the night.

The screens all showed different scenes and the eyes found my pursuers easily enough. There were around twenty of them. One was a giant black wolf, and three were robe clad warlocks, the rest where men and women with Ak-47’s at the ready. They were striding through the woods at a brisk pace, with the wolf in the lead, not one of them was even looking around. A small glowing eye, hovering in a tree thirty feet above you, was hard to miss if you were paranoid. The reason they weren’t looking for anything is because they knew exactly where they were going.

They were confident, I could use that, but no way I could take on three ‘locks when one was a challenge. Where the hell had all these people even come from?

I couldn’t take this into town now. If they tried to take me out on an interstate, a few late-night roaming college kids looking for various combinations of s*x, beer, and pizza, wouldn’t stop them. Had there been a few cult followers I could’ve lost them easily in a town. There were too many now, and none had fallen for my brambles. Not with a werewolf in tow. That wolf could smell me from two states away, see me move in the dark of a new moon, and hear my heartbeat while standing between the Superbowl and a Carnegie Hall performance. That was an exaggeration, but not by much.

I opened my eyes and the screens in my mind disappeared. I was shivering and breathing even harder—that was one of the most demanding spells I had. You couldn’t just tell an octillion atoms to drop whatever they were doing, rearrange themselves into a completely new configuration and do some scouting for you without consequence. At best, my staff was an eighth full by now.

“Recluse.” I threw the bottle down and died a little inside. Getting a hundred brown recluse spiders into a jar wasn’t easily done, nor was speeding up the reaction of their venom, nor getting them to sit quietly long enough to bite the person you wanted. I wasn’t entirely sure I could reproduce it, and it was gonna take months to figure it out if I wanted any more.

“Oz,” I said, repeating it twice. Three small apples appeared in my hand and I tossed them up into three nearby trees. None of them were apple trees, but it made no difference. “Kill the werewolf first, then everyone else.” I commanded, and ran on.

The trees would only be able to move for a few seconds, but now they had my intelligence, sans my pesky sense of self-preservation. Add some poisonous spiders, determined to bite any human in sight, that equation equaled deadly. If that plan succeeded, I could shake these douchebags and go home.

The trouble with having plans, is that they almost never worked out precisely how I planned. The cure for that is having lots of plans. I never set just one trap or just one ambush. I’d set ten traps with each one being fatal and I couldn’t care less which one finished the job. The trouble at the moment was the cold seeping into my flesh. It was a warning, but for the time being I had to ignore it.

I came to a large puddle and reached for my pack again. “On the rocks.” A penny appeared in my hand, and I tossed it in. Hopefully, that would catch a few of them. Stepping on or near the penny would cause the mini lake to freeze solid.

I strung some burning lines of p-quinone between two trees. I didn’t know what p-quinone was two years ago, but David Attenborough was happy to tell me all about it. Now it was the tool of myself and bombardier beetles, used for the express purpose of convincing predators to reconsider their life choices.

There were lots of chemicals in nature that were barely held together and dying to release their bond energy in a symphony of exothermic chemical reactions. Getting them not to explode until they were touched was the trick.

The lines looked like yellow spider webs, and therefore almost impossible to see at night. The strings would burn hot enough to leave a mark on anyone that touched them. They were an annoyance at best, but their point was to get my pursuers to be cautious. Caution would slow them down, which provided a greater chance for more of them to be in the water when it froze solid.

I ran another few steps and set a pile of leaves to explode when they were kicked or stepped on.

I was setting up a stump to shatter in a hail of splinters and thinking up the next trap, when I heard the trees crash behind me. There was a loud yelp, gunshots, and a lot of screaming. Plans hardly ever worked the way I intended, guess this was one of the “hardlys.”

There wasn’t much you could do to stop a moving sentient tree from doing whatever it wanted. No wolf would be expecting a tree to come to life, no human either for that matter.

With a growl, I turned around. Whoever these warlocks were they had almost killed me several times, chased me from one end of town to the another, and for what? I still didn’t know for sure. It was time to beat some answers out of someone.

“Kitty Pride.” A potion appeared in my hand and I drank it.

After a few moments, the world became brighter—almost like daylight. Odd that it was the way it looked to me. To anyone looking on, shadows would be gathering around me like waves of heat. I ran back towards where the screams had been; they weren’t getting away now. Despite my speed, all was serene; the potion made all my movements silent.

I was back in no time and found a dead wolf, a dead warlock, several cultists, and a partridge under the two trees that had fallen over. The third tree was scorched and leaning at a severe angle; one of the warlocks must’ve gotten a spell off.

By the time I made it to the road, the rest of the cultists were piling into an old brown van and driving off. “Peel,” I whispered with malice. I started running; with the potion, the spell, and my magically enchanted boots I was making about eighty miles an hour. This would probably leave me half dead the moment everything wore off. I caught the van easily; it wasn’t like they could see me.

“Nail.” The gravel under the tires shot straight up. I didn’t think any went through the bottom of the van. The two front tires popped like over eager party balloons.

“Lance!” Funny how you start screaming when you don’t have much left. The air in front of the van solidified into an eight-foot tall invisible road block. Like some giant had stabbed a sword up through the ground at an acute angle. With no front tires, they didn’t have a chance in hell of stopping in time.

Non-living things were much easier when it came to transmutation. If it was living, or even touching something living, the effect tended to be a lot smaller, not last long, or both. I could make a roadblock this big, but only because it wasn’t living… and it only had to last a fraction of a second.

It wasn’t enough to flip the van over like I’d hoped. It didn’t even last the full half-second I’d been hoping for, but it was enough to send the van flying out of control. It plowed right through the roadblock and only stopped when it t-boned on a telephone pole.

I walked up slowly, which was a little tricky with a spell, a potion, and magical boots all affecting my speed. I didn’t sense any movement, and I didn’t want to reach out with my magical senses. If someone was alive in there and doing the same, they would feel me coming.

My staff was empty, so I sent it back to baton form and shoved it in a cargo pocket. I stumbled towards the van. I was openly shivering now. It was too dangerous to cast much more until I warmed up. I grabbed my pistol and held it in both shaky hands.

I took aim on the van and started to circle around to the front. I saw the driver was halfway through the windshield. That made this easy, “Last Call,” I said. He wasn’t alive, so this would last for hours, maybe even days. The police would find his blood alcohol level through the roof. Take blood, turn it into alcohol. It was a spell I thought up for use in interrogations, but it had other more obvious uses. Better living through chemistry.

The van was full of people, everyone was unconscious and covered in blood. I noticed a few swollen legs and hands turning black with brown recluse venom already. They had obviously tried to begin first aid once they were in the van. They couldn’t all be dead, but their superior numbers, even in this state, talked me right out of the grand interrogation schemes I’d thought up minutes earlier.

I’d won, more importantly I was alive. That was all that mattered.

I turned and ran off towards Chapel Hill, feeling the wind whip my face as I went faster than a car on the freeway. I sighed. Physically and mentally leaving the van behind, I relaxed—that was my mistake.

“Danken Shambla Haren Ulsa Aarithan Dabilto!”

Normally when someone is moving at a mile a minute, that’s sixty miles an hour for those not savvy with arithmetic, they tend to have something that keeps them from being killed if they stop suddenly. Seat belts, airbags, a perfectly placed pillow, or something made by Acme. I had enough time to realize that my legs had locked up somehow, and enough time to wish I had some kind of helmet in case my hood and mask weren’t enough. The thought of solidifying the air around my head occurred to me, and then there was pavement.

Lots of pavement.

I don’t remember the tumble, but I must’ve hit the grass quickly because I was still alive when I woke up to midnight in a ditch. I was being dragged along by my arm, in far more pain than anyone dead could claim.

I didn’t open my eyes. Everything ached. There was talking, but I couldn’t make it out. I stopped myself from shaking my head at the last moment, and instead focused on keeping every muscle placid. Especially the ones in my face.

I didn’t know what was going on, but my head was starting to clear. First, I wasn’t dead. Second, judging by the way my body was already complaining, by morning I would wish that I was. Lastly, I still had my pack strapped to my back. All good news.

I cracked my eyes and could barely make out stars in a cloudless sky. I could see the hag fire lady, a handsome hawknose man, and five of their followers. The one dragging me along in the procession was a large scruffy looking man with reddish-brown hair. I couldn’t see the other faces since they all were wearing black hoodies. As far as I could tell, everyone was limping or injured to some degree. They probably left behind anyone who couldn’t walk. Firehag was speaking, and it was clear she was upset.

“…losses on this debacle of yours,” she hissed.

“Brian is no great loss. Did you see the way those trees came to life? This one is worth two morphs and a dozen normals.” I assumed it was Hawknose talking. He was the only other one wearing a long heavy coat in spring. It was always nice to hear respect and fear of your enormous powers from your enemies. Especially when they were wrong.

“At best, all we’ve done is replace Brian with this one. That’s not a victory. We’ll be lucky if we aren’t killed for your initiative,” she infested the last word with scorn. “More like incompetence. Can’t believe I let you talk me into this.”

There was a pregnant pause, and I took that to mean the conversation was over… but I was wrong. Hawknose was quick on the uptake. He felt it before she did.

“Do you hear—” he began. That was as far as he got.

“Leroy Jenkins!” It was Zora with the best battle cry ever. She came in from the right so fast that she was only a blur. The man holding me only had time to turn and face her, taking the strike full on. He didn’t even have time to scream, before his head toppled to the ground. I heard spells being prepared and weapons being c****d, but there was no target for them to hit. She was gone.

“Breezy, Owl.” I said. Sunglasses appeared in my left hand and a clear bottle in my right. I slammed the bottle down just as Hawknose let loose. Roots sprung up where I had been and grabbed the body of the dead man who’d been dragging me. The breeze blew his severed head toward the others and blew me into the sky. Those roots would’ve crushed me and dragged me down with him had I stuck around.

“Fa anthom!” Firehag screamed. I was yanked backward a bit. She hadn’t put enough power into the spell to overcome both the force of the expanding air and the enchantment on my jacket. I was thrown out and away, almost to the height of the tallest trees.

Zora thought my jacket gave me the ability to fly, which was ridiculous. It was more like falling without the inconvenience of dying at the end. Still, it was great for escapes. Literally suspending gravity at varying frequencies depending on the height. Gravity still won. Gravity always wins, but if you could delay that victory then you were Tinkerbell.

If they had a werewolf they could have tracked me, but I was betting they didn’t. I only remembered two wolves, and Hawknose had mentioned “two morphs.”

I put on my nearly black sunglasses before my feet touched the ground, and the world became bright as daylight cast in pale shades of blue. Compared to most of the things I made, giving myself night-vision was pretty straightforward, just had to pay more attention to the infrared spectrum instead of visible light.

I landed fifty meters away and got down behind a tree. The night was dark, and this was a thicker part of the forest. Zora couldn’t have picked a better spot for her ambush.

I pulled my pistol, peeked around the tree and took three shots. None of them hit. The warlocks were on the move, tearing off through the forest faster than even I thought safe.

Zora appeared next to me with her back to mine and her sword out.

“Your timing is ridiculous,” I said.

“You’re welcome,” she laughed.

“I told you to hang back til tomorrow.”

“Not as ridiculous as your lack of gratitude.” She said. “Besides that’s not what you said. You said I could go hunting tomorrow night. I wanted to get a jump on the other hunters, so I came early.” Even without the glasses I would’ve seen that grin.

“Come on. They’re running, and so are we.”

“Cool I’ll take Pinocchio, and you—”

“The other way.” I said.

“What?! You just said—”

“Rule 1,” I said. “Surprise round is over. We’re done here.”

She bared her teeth at me and stared after the warlocks like she was about to go anyway. Then she growled and sheathed her sword. We didn’t make it ten strides before she forgot all about it and started teasing me instead.

“I’m not kidding. It’s literally painful to move this slow,” she laughed.

“There are lethargic sloths in Africa that would be happy to have this speed. You’ll run at my pace and you’ll like it.” I’d known that using the potion and peel at the same time would leave me trashed. My legs and back ached in a way that had nothing to do with the tumble, and I was so tired I could hardly maintain a slow jog without tripping over my own feet.

Zora bounced on the balls of her feet, skipping around me in circles and grinning as we ran through the night. I did get worried about the pace though. We’d spooked them, and they ran, but that didn’t mean they weren’t regrouping and coming back.

I was beyond tired. With all the varied aches and pains, I wouldn’t’ve objected to passing out right there. It was likely they weren’t following us and cutting their losses. It was also possible they were making a new plan. It was that possibility that made me decide on a little more distance before getting comfortable.

“Kitty Pride.” I waited only half a second before I panicked. That was much too long for something to appear in my hand. Most things appeared before the words were fully out of my mouth.

I reached for my pack and found only a few loose threads on my shoulder—that must’ve been the spell Firehag cast. I looked up, and the sky seemed to be laughing. Suddenly, the night felt a lot colder, and I wasn’t even casting a spell.

“Damn!”