Empty Names

18 - Mom Energy

 

“So then,” Eris says, sliding aside the remains of her quiche, “Road turns to me and tells me to throw him.  Swear to God, his armor grew handles when he said it.  But this is Road we’re talking about and adrenaline was running high so I yeet him across the crypt chamber at the flying vamp mage, no questions asked.  Stake goes in the heart on impact, the two of them crash to the ground, portal closes, and everyone goes home happy.”

As blood-themed as the story she just finished was, for once Eris isn’t wearing red.  The gradual consumption of her wardrobe by that portion of the spectrum had always been a matter of practicality rather than taste.  Easier to hide the stains that don’t wash out that way.  Eventually it got to the point where grabbing a random article of clothing from her closet was more likely to be sanguine than not, and it just wasn’t worth the effort to consciously pick out something else for casual wear, even when she wasn’t expecting a mess.  

But today’s the morning after a full moon, and for the past couple of years now that’s meant putting all that aside for a day.  On this particular morning it’s white slacks and a teal button up shirt.  Never mind the North American Lycanthrope Sanctuary Association volunteer staff t-shirt hidden underneath.  At least it’s not the same sweaty one she wore all last night. 

Sarah, one of the regulars at the Sanctuary, is seated across from her, human again until the next full moon and dressed in jeans and a green sleeveless blouse.  Contrary to popular belief, lycanthropy itself rarely has any noticeable physical effect on those affected by it outside of the night of a full moon, only whatever autogenesis picks up on as having been internalized as part of their identity.  If Sarah’s canines are more pronounced than average, it’s a subtle thing unlikely to be noticed unless one is looking for it, and if the modest muscle gains she’s made since first meeting Eris are easier to maintain than for most people, she’d still had to work enough to get them in the first place to be proud of the effort.  The increased preference for meat over time had been a conscious choice to get more in touch with the newfound side of herself rather than a dietary compulsion.

Eris had been the one to give Sarah the tour of the NALSA facility when she showed up for her first full moon a few years back.  They’d hit it off well enough that the next time they met they exchanged contact info to keep in touch online between moons.  From there it quickly turned into a monthly event to look forward to.  Sarah would spend the night running wild with the other werewolves while Eris would spend the night working with the rest of the sanctuary’s human staff to make sure everyone stayed safe until the sun came up, and then they’d both catch a couple hours of sleep, grab a caffeinated beverage, and then go get brunch in what was left of the next morning.

Sarah swallows the last strip of bacon from her plate as Eris finishes her story.  “Well, that’s definitely some kind of coordination going on there,” Sarah says with a southern twang that’s recovering after years of being buried.  “Sounds like being on a team’s been treating you well.”

“They’re good people,” Eris replies, leaning back in her chair.  “Okay, Sullivan goes out of his way to be an ass, but he’s barely around and everyone else is cool.  Road’s Road, you know Lacuna and I are tight, and Ashan’s growing on me more than I expected for a mage.  Hope you don’t mind that I invited him out here next time.  God knows that kid needs socialization.”

“I always wanted to meet a wizard.”

“I’ll tell him you said that.  Maybe it’ll get him to actually accept the invitation.  I would’ve brought him with me last night, but he’s currently deep into learning how to use the laptop I bought him a couple days ago and I wasn’t about to step in between him and Lacuna’s attempts to teach.”

“Ah, I was wondering what she was up to when you mentioned she wouldn’t be making today.  But I gotta ask, why did you buy the wizard a laptop?”

“I was going to get him a phone, but it wound up being complicated to get him anything other than a prepaid burner, what with him being legally dead and all.”

“You left out the part about him being undead.”  A look of realization dawns on Sarah’s face. “God, it is so weird that I can say that with a straight face these days.”

“Says the woman who was playing fetch with a tractor tire last night.”

Sarah’s face goes red at the memory that Eris knows is more clear than it would have been a year ago.  “Look, you try having your brain rewired to compulsively chase prey and then try talking to me about resisting when a big, round, biteable thing rolls by.”  Her tone is indignant, but she’s smiling as she says it.  It’s nice to see she’s gotten comfortable enough with her situation to joke around about it.  “And it’s not playing fetch.  If I had hands when it was like that to throw it again myself I would.  I’m not bringing it back to you, I’m telling you to serve me by making it chasable again.”

She got the hang of staying mostly lucid in a half-way form for minutes at a time three months ago.  She could absolutely throw things herself if she wanted to and she and Eris both know it.

Eris laughs.  “Are you sure it’s a wolf you’re turning into and not a cat?  But in all seriousness, Ashan’s not undead, he just had some screwed up stuff happen to him as a kid that I think he’s just recently realized how bad it was.  Not my place to say, so let’s just leave it at ‘wizard bullshit.’  I got him the laptop because I thought it might help him adjust to being back on Earth seeing as he’s been in a quasi-medieval fantasy world since he was literally a child.  We’ve got a lot of downtime between jobs so I figured he could spend some of that browsing the digitized sum of human knowledge to catch up on what he’s missed out on.  Browse some wikis, read some books that aren’t spellbooks, watch some movies, learn what memes are, maybe find a podcast he likes, that sort of thing.”

“You wanted to help him reintegrate into normal Earth culture so you got him on the Internet,” Sarah says incredulously, “instead of taking him out to see things and interact with people firsthand.”

Eris gives that a moment to sink in before blurting out “Damn, Lacuna’s rubbing off on me.  Look, I’m working up to it.  He’s taken this long just to open up to us and I’m still not sure if he even has any interests or hobbies that aren’t directly tied to being a wizard.  I learned my lesson early on with Lacuna about throwing a shut-in into the deep end too soon, so I’m taking it slow this time.  And besides, it’s giving him and Lacuna the chance to do the most talking they’ve done so far that wasn’t somehow work-related, so that’s some socializing right there that they’re both getting in.”  Eris does a quick mental calculation.  “I should probably give them a call later to check in.”

“Worried they’ll blow something up?  You said Lacuna has a ‘mad science lab’ now” Sarah says with finger quotes.  “A mad scientist and a wizard left together unsupervised like that, who knows what could happen.”

“I hadn’t been until you said that.  Before I was just concerned about them getting so caught up in what they’re doing that they forget to eat again.”

“Not mutually exclusive,” Sarah starts to say when she sees Eris’s hand drift toward her phone.  “Relax, I’m kidding.  They’re mostly responsible adults, they’ll be fine.  Jeez, it’s like you’re a mom who just adopted a second kid or something.”

“I am not,” Eris says, balking at the idea.

“Right, because fussing over how much they eat, trying to keep them out of trouble, and encouraging them to get out more and make friends isn’t totally the mom friend thing to do.”

“You’re reading too much into it.”

“Am I?  I’m not criticizing, but you’ve literally admitted to buying a box of protein bars for the express purpose of handing them to Lacuna when she gets hungry.  If that’s not mom energy I don’t know what is.”

“First off, until recently, I hadn’t had to do that for over a year, and secondly, if Lacuna’s any kind of pseudo family member to me, she’s more like a sister.”  Like a younger sister despite being older, she refuses to concede aloud.

Sarah shrugs.  “I’m just sayin’, one instance of picking up the first nerdy introvert who comes along and latches onto you then getting super protective of them is a quirk of circumstance, but twice is a pattern.  Not a bad thing necessarily, so long as you don’t go overboard with it.  Honestly, I find it endearing at times.”  

Eris knows that Sarah’s found it annoying at other times though.  But for now, she’s more preoccupied with thinking back to all the times she’s tried to approach and handle Ashan the same way she’s done previously with Lacuna.  Should she have?  Just because Lacuna responds well to it, that doesn't mean Ashan will or has been.  Is Lacuna okay with their dynamic?  She did go all that time without telling Eris about the risks she took with the data theft.  Sure there was the NDA geass, but Lacuna hadn’t been under that yet when she ventured into the more dangerous part of Crosssherd seeking out a loan shark.  Is the fact that Eris is more concerned about that than she wants to admit a sign that she’s been smothering her best friend?

She shakes off the thought and counters, “And what about you?  I’ve hardly given you that same treatment.”

Sarah scoffs.  “I had my shit together when we first met.  I might have been new to the whole werewolves and magic bus stops thing, but I was hardly looking for someone to come sweep in and take care of me.  Between you and me, I was the one who…” she hesitates, suddenly realizing that she’s strayed into waters supposedly under a bridge.  “Well, you know.”

“No, I guess you weren’t,” Eris says, trying not to tense up.

Sarah had asked Eris out some time back, and Eris had turned her down.  That sort of conversation is always uncomfortable and it had been made doubly so by Eris’s explanation that she expected her monster hunting hobby to kill her young and thought it would be selfish to get romantically involved with someone when it would just end with them being left painfully alone.  It was bad enough already that she’d let Lacuna get as close to her as she had.  Eris counted herself fortunate that she and Sarah had been able to salvage their friendship, but had been low-key dreading the topic might come back up again today.  Between it being as close to an anniversary of that unfortunate conversation as you can get with lunar cycles and the fact that being on a team now theoretically upped her odds of survival (despite in practice having nearly gotten her killed twice already), if there were ever a time for Sarah to ask again it would be now.

The moment hangs.

Eris drags out finishing off the remains of her coffee.

Sarah pokes at a crumb of meat on her plate with a fork.

“Aaanyway,” Sarah starts.  Eris snaps back to eye contact at the sound.  “Like I said, it sounds like being on a team’s been treating you well, so maybe now you can share that load of worrying about everyone.”  Sarah hesitates.  “And maybe you can let someone worry about you for once.”

“Sarah, I -”

“I mean you’ve got friends who care about you too, and not just with having people to watch your back out there.  As good as that is to have.  For instance, I’ve been meaning to ask since we both got in yesterday: How’s your leg doing?”

“My leg?” Eris asks.  The question blindsides her enough to displace worries about wherever else Sarah might have been hinting at.

“Yeah, it got torn up pretty bad last month. You were back on it in the morning of course - I’m still jealous of that regen you’ve got going on by the way - but later you sent me a photo saying you thought it might scar.  You sounded weirdly excited by the prospect.”

That doesn’t sound right.

“Huh, must have slipped my mind after it healed up,” Eris says with feigned nonchalance.  “No new scars here, I’m afraid to say.  You know how it is with me.”

No new scars besides the burns from Logos that Lacuna healed away, at any rate.  Of her hunts since their last meeting that she’d regaled Sarah with today and yesterday, the story of having half the front of her body and face burnt off was one that she’d conspicuously omitted.  It takes a Hell of a lot to make Eris black out, but she’s choosing to count the jarring jump in memory from grabbing the miniature sun to waking up on an infirmary bed as a blessing. 

“But that’s enough of me,” Eris says, “I’ve hardly heard a thing about how you’ve been doing.”

Sarah shrugs.  “What can I say?  Same old same old.  But work gives me moon days off so I shouldn’t complain too much.”

Eris gives her a conspiratorial look.  “But you’re going to.”

Sarah grins wide enough that Eris knows she’s trying to show off her fangs, such as they are.  “I’m a werewolf now, but I’m still working customer service, only now the customers include witches and fairies.  You bet your ass I’m going to.”

Eris flags a waiter down, orders another coffee and settles in to listen to Sarah recount a particularly weird encounter with a sphinx and some kind of spider lady.  Sometimes she wonders which of them actually has the more dangerous job.

 

*******

 

That evening, after having said goodbye to Sarah for the month, changing back into her usual red tracksuit, and calling to check in on Lacuna and Ashan, Eris is sitting on a barstool at 121813.  

“Twelve eighteen thirteen” is the generally agreed upon pronunciation of the bar’s name, although what the name means is less agreed upon.  The three most popular theories are that it’s either a date (usually speculated as December of 1813), a scriptural reference (which scripture is a whole other debate), or a leftover address from before one of Crossherd’s major layout shifts.  Lacuna had suggested it might be a tarot thing when Eris told her about it.  The Hanged Man, the Moon, and Death.  An ominous spread, according to Lacuna, but Eris figures it makes as much sense as anything else. 

In any case, Fitzgerald Wilhelm von Harkenstein IV, the establishment’s clockwork owner, proprietor, and bartender always seemed to get too much of a kick out of the speculation to give a solid answer.  Make what jokes you like about a bartender with no taste buds, but Fitzy had drink mixing down to an art.  Then again, he claims to be at least as old as the city of Crossherd itself, so Eris figures he had plenty of time to practice if nothing else. 

For over a century now, 121813 has served as the closest thing to a centralized organization for American monster hunters.  Other parts of the world had holy orders, secret societies, and grand lodges stretching back generations, but in these parts everyone figured that a couple dozen thrill-seeking assholes who all frequent the same bar was good enough to get the job done.  Most hunters usually work solo, but the bar is a good place to brag about kills, show off trophies, swap rumors on potential quarries, and put a band together if you get word on something really nasty.

It’s not peak hours yet and regulars are still trickling in, but there were already a few familiar faces there to greet her when she walked in twenty minutes ago.

Golden-eyed Gretchen who had taught Eris German and how to wield a spear.

Bai of the braided beard who had taken over Eris’s old garbage collecting route when she signed up with Road’s new venture and ever since has been alternating between thanking her for the job referral and complaining that he couldn’t take his axes with him on shift.

Wyatt, whose eyepatch is actually an AR visor to aim assist his crossbow and adjust for weight and aerodynamic differences on specialized bolts.

The green-haired enby twins, Loreghaste and Lornegna, who favor halberds and hammers respectively but both carry swords as backup sidearms.

Chuck in his ill-fitting trenchcoat, a relative newcomer to the game who’s already earning a reputation for going off on insufferable rants about the superiority of katanas.

The grim-faced Preacher, who never shares his name for fear of theft, never touches a drink that isn’t water, and never hides his disdain for everyone else’s choice of archaic weaponry for the sake of sport when guns are so much more efficient at completing the important work of slaying beasts.

Old Vic, the elven immigrant from off world who’s always down to party like the college kid his face looks the age of.

Plus a handful of others that Eris either isn’t all that close to or doesn’t recognize at a glance.  High turnover rates have always been an unspoken truth amongst the monster hunter community.  It’s been said that there are five fates that await hunters.

One: You die early from a stupid mistake, biting off more than you can chew, or just plain bad luck.

Two: You finally catch up with that one monster that was your reason for taking up the hunt to begin with and if you survive you walk away, vendetta done.

Three: You have your first near-death experience, confront your mortality, and make the wise decision to get out.

Four: You have your first near-death experience, confront your mortality, and realize you’re hooked on the hunt that will surely kill you one day more than you are on living a long life.

Five: The hunt gradually becomes your whole life and personality until one day you hit a tipping point that causes autogenesis to kick into overdrive, transforming you into a monster yourself in need of putting down by your former comrades.

Everyone at the bar tonight - except maybe Chuck and the other newbies like him who still think they’re invincible - has long since made their peace with the idea that they’ll probably be dead by forty.  Fifty tops.  Other than Old Vic, of course, who’s at least twice that age, but rumors that he’s already secretly met the fifth fate have been flying around since before Eris ever found Crossherd and 121813.  Having been on a funerary hunt with him herself and seen what a hunter consumed looks like, Eris doesn’t put any stock in that speculation.

She hasn’t been in here since joining up with Road, and for the moment she’s content to nurse her drink and take in the old familiar ambiance rather than partake in the ever-present banter just yet.  Or she would be if the glass didn’t feel oddly cold in her hand and the polished bartop didn’t somehow feel rougher than it should be when she traces her finger along it.  Normally she’d chock it up to having been away for awhile, but after what Sarah said about her scar she can’t shake the feeling that something is off.  Now that she’s thinking about it, it’s not the first time she’s noticed things feeling subtly different than some subconscious part of her brain is expecting when she touches them.  Almost like her sense of touch has been dialed up slightly ever since the incident with Logos.  More disturbingly, she has a blister on the edge of her palm from her last workout and weapon practice session and she can’t place why it disturbs her.  On the one hand, that sounds like a reasonable and normal thing to happen, but on the other hand it doesn’t make sense to still be there a couple days later with how fast she heals.  And she knows she’s still healing freakishly fast given how she shows no sign of the beating she took on the most recent mission.  But beside that there’s the nagging feeling that it’s something else that is on the tip of her tongue and refusing to solidify into anything articulable. 

Eris decides to talk to Lacuna later about it.  She had warned Eris to watch out for unexpected side effects from that custom healing ritual.  If anyone can narrow it down, it’s Lacuna.  Funny to think that, but she really has come into her own lately and Eris is proud of her for it. 

The thought gets Eris stuck on the other uncomfortable truth Sarah had touched on earlier.  Has she been infantilizing her best friend?  And now Ashan too for that matter. That might not have been what Sarah meant, but the idea won’t quite go away now, no matter how much she tells herself she doesn’t believe it.  

As much as she’s found herself wanting to help Ashan and thinks he deserves a better hand than he’s been dealt, at the end of the she knows that he’s tough enough to deal with all the shit he’s been through and come out the other side just fine, with or without her help.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not still good to try to be kind and be there for him if he wants it even if he doesn’t need it.

As for Lacuna… Eris tells herself that what she’s been feeling lately is worry over a specific issue and not a general statement of either of their characters.  On the surface, ever since she got her lab Lacuna’s been the happiest and healthiest Eris has seen her in a long time.  But over time little things have started to add up that have her increasingly concerned.  Canceling therapy.  Backsliding into forgetting meals when she’d worked so hard over the past year to stop doing that.  Gradually spending more and more of her nights in the bed and breakfast above the office instead of going home.  Break room trash cans filled with energy drink cans and bags of green tea and chai after having been so proud of kicking the habit entirely.  The stark contrast between her fears and uncertainties in the early days of the new job and the uncharacteristic matter-of-fact-ness Eris was greeted with upon waking up covered in disfiguring burns.  A few days ago Eris could have sworn Lacuna actually flinched when she got close to her.

There’s something big eating at her best friend, but the couple of times Eris has tried talking to her about it, Lacuna's either casually brushed it off as being nothing or been outright evasive.  And while Eris knows Lacuna is a grown-ass woman capable of making her own decisions and dealing with the consequences, that doesn’t make the worries go away.  And friends should worry over each other when something is so obviously wrong.  Shouldn’t they?  She supposes the best she can do at this point is be there to catch Lacuna if she falls. 

Eris sighs and turns to the monster hunter seated on the barstool to her left.  “Be straight with me Vic.  Do I have mom energy?”

“Eris!” the elf gasps in a show of mock scandalization. “You can’t just tell people to be straight.  And even if you could, you should know that I could never.”

“Whatever happened to ‘your terms for sexuality are nothing more than a modern human social construct’?” Bai pipes up from the other side of Old Vic.

“When on Earth, do as the humans do, my dear,” Old Vic replies.  “Especially when doing the humans.”

“Ha hah, you’re a real comedian,” Eris says dryly, “but really, serious question.”

Old Vic throws his head back and laughs.  “Eris, my dear, don’t tell me that that’s what you’ve been brooding about since you walked in here.”

“I do not brood.”

“And that’s exactly what made it so intriguing to watch.  But if it makes you feel better, I would say that you only have ‘mom energy’ in the sense that you give off - as the kids put it these days - dommy mommy vibes.”

The ensuing snickers from everyone in immediate earshot - including the bartender- has Eris wondering what possessed her to ask that of Old Vic of all people.  She’d blame the drink, but she knows from experience that with her constitution it’s painfully expensive for her to get even slightly buzzed and she hasn’t dipped that far into her budget yet tonight.  

Out of the corner of her eye she catches Wyatt smirking and struggling to hold in the next burst of laughter. 

“Got something to add?” Eris asks against her better judgment, knowing full well that she’s about to hear something even dumber than Old Vic’s original joke. 

“Step on me mommy,” Wyatt barely gets out through fits of giggling.

“God, it’s like I’m friends with a bunch of middle schoolers.”  Eris turns around and locks eyes on the nearest table that she knows is close enough to have been eavesdropping.  “Gretchen, help me out here,” she calls out to the one other woman in the bar in hopes of some solidarity. 

The moment Gretchen turns around from her conversation with the Lor twins wearing a wicked grin that brings back too many memories, Eris knows she made a mistake. 

“No Vic,” Gretchen says with agonizing slowness and delight, “I wouldn’t say that Eris gives off those vibes at all.”

Eris suppresses a groan.  Some people...  You allow them to tie you up one time and they never let you hear the end of it. 

Eris had met Gretchen shortly after finding her way into Crossherd for the first time and she’d been the one to introduce Eris to 121813.  Not long after that, Gretchen became the first woman Eris had ever dated and her only attempt at dating that didn’t crash and burn after just a couple of weeks.  The eventual breakup had been - as far as Eris could ever tell - mutual and amicable, even if Gretchen’s disposition towards her since unpredictably alternated between friendship and melodramatic rivalry.  The latter always struck Eris more as Gretchen doing a bit than a genuine competition of egos.  At least it kept things interesting, even if it occasionally meant moments like this one.  

And still a better outcome than her other miserable attempts at dating within the monster hunting scene.  Hookups following cooperative hunts weren’t uncommon but Eris had quickly realized that wasn’t for her and more than one fragile ego - and face - had wound up getting bruised after failures to comprehend that physical attraction just plain wasn’t a thing she felt for anyone without a certain threshold of emotional intimacy being met first.  (A threshold she’s been very careful not to cross with Sarah.)  And as much as learning there was a term for that (demisexual) helped her understand, no one else ever seemed to get it.  The reputation that she started to get back then was half the reason she almost exclusively kept to working solo up until now.

Eris tries not to look put off as she glances around to see if anyone remembers that she and Gretchen used to be together back in the day.  She catches a gleam in Bai’s eye as he makes the connection and puts together the implication of Gretchen’s words.  She glares at him, daring him to say something.  It’s enough to make one of the newbies unfortunate enough to wander into her line of sight to reconsider coming up for another drink order and retreat back to his table.

“Ah, we’re all just ruffling your feathers for being gone too long, my dear,” Old Vic cuts in.  “If you must have a serious answer, then no; nobody here thinks you’ve gone soft for getting yourself a support crew and we all know you could kick any of our well-toned asses.  Yours truly excluded, of course.”

That’s not what Eris had meant with her question at all, but at this point she’s just glad to have a topic change when Wyatt speaks up.

“So what is it like working with Road full time?” he asks.  Eris recalls that Wyatt is one of a number of monster hunters who survived his first encounter with the supernatural due to Road’s timely intervention.

“A lot less time chasing down rumors and false leads, but a lot more sticking around to deal with the cleanup afterwards.  And a lot more dealing with people.  Road’s as good in a fight as everyone says - they’ve beaten me and our wizard two-on-one twice now - but that’s where they really shine.  You remember what it was like when Road saved you on your first day Backstage?”

“I do,” Wyatt replies.  The hesitation in his affirmation speaks volumes of the fear and confusion from that life-changing event that most every hunter is too proud to admit.  Feelings that Eris has seen Road help people through time and again now.

“Well, they’re like that with everyone.  And any time we need to get somewhere without a direct bridge from Crosssherd they’ve got a ride lined up from someone they’ve helped before, eager to repay the favor.  Between handling most of the prep and followup themself, I don’t know where they find the time to sleep.  It leaves our wizard and I with a lot of downtime where we’re basically getting paid to workout, train, research, spar, and rest, but we’re also on-call to drop what we’re doing and head out at a moment’s notice.”

With how often Road is in and out of the office, Eris honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they’re handling the more minor jobs they get leads on alone without telling her and the others.  It feels wrong to say that aloud though.  Too much like an accusation.

“You’re telling me you’re sparring with a combat-capable wizard on the reg?” Bai interjects.  “I call bullshit.  Normal people don’t fight mages.  Not if the mage has any skill.”

Eris spreads her arms.  “What can I say, I’m built different.”

Further debate on the fightability of mages is interrupted by the arrival of a decent-sized group of hunters, at least one of which seems to be celebrating coming off a successful kill.  Eris joins everyone else in listening to the victorious youth - a newcomer to the bar that she doesn’t recognize - brag about his hunt and the fight at the end of it.  When the kid (God, did she look that young when she got started?) starts showing off the tooth he took as a trophy Eris and Bai share a knowing look.  Definitely a Crossherd sewer gator and not a muck dragon, but best to let the kid have his moment and then pull him aside later to break it to him gently in private.

And then one of the newbie’s buddies spins him around and lifts up his shirt to reveal the claw marks on his back.

“Scar check!” someone shouts.

“Scar check!” someone else echoes.

“Scar check!” Gretchen adds to the growing chorus.

It’s a tradition almost as old as the bar.  One person shows off a new scar or injury that they expect to scar and then everyone else starts joining in and shouting out where they got their own wound.  Scars were viewed as the truest sort of trophies around here.  Indisputable signs that you’d really been out there, danced with death, and come back alive.  Everyone had a few and it was generally considered poor form to show the same one off too much, even if it was your most impressive one. Only the newbies didn’t have at least a handful of small but permanent scratches.

Only the newbies, Old Vic, and Eris.

Everyone was willing to concede that Old Vic really was just that good (or had some manner of secret elven healing magic), but Eris had actually had to get someone to stab her in front of the whole bar to convince everyone that it really was just that hard for something to leave a mark on her in the long term.  “Built different” she likes to boast, but she’ll never admit that she usually feels left out during these spontaneous exercises in camaraderie.  As far as she’s been able to figure out, it’s pretty much just curses and magic poisons that leave behind anything visible, and that’s all they do.

So Eris just has the two scars to her name. A bite mark on her ankle from when she accidentally found out she’s immune to lycanthropy, and a puckered circle on her side from an ectoplasmic musket ball shot at her by a hateful civil war ghost.

Built different.  Different enough to sit out of the scar check most of the time.

It’s fine though.  She can still watch and congratulate everyone else.

“Clawed by splintercat!” elicits appreciation for the clean parallel cuts.

“Gored by a hodag!” draws out excited whoops.

“Kicked by a nightmare!” is met by good-natured ribbing about the resemblance to a clothes iron burn.

“Carried off by a snallygaster!” drops into offers to buy drinks.

“Duelled a crossroads demon!” earns dual high-fives from the Lor twins.

“Top surgery!” is greeted with joyous laughter and congratulatory applause.

“Bitten by a joint snake!” is commiserated with over how annoying those critters are.

“Wrestled a Jersey devil onto a church fence spike!” gets a rare word of approval from Preacher.

“Escaped the hunter of hunters.” chills the room and sets the crowd whispering.

“Zapped by a rogue paratech drone!” is followed by jokes about robot uprisings.

“Burned by a salamander!” sparks an argument about whether it looks hot or cool.

And around it goes until Eris realizes that all eyes are on her, expectant.

“Well E,” Gretchen addresses her with the nickname only one other person has the right to, “got anything for us this time?”

“Well since you ask,” Eris draws out, returning her smirk, “I’ve got a little something I picked up on my last job with Road.” The name drop gets everyone’s attention.  Hunters band together when they get word on something really nasty, but when something truly weird or intelligent gets involved, they call Road.  “I don’t know if it’ll stick around or not yet, but it’s fresh enough that you lot tonight are lucky enough to catch a glimpse before it’s gone.”

Everyone starts crowding in to get a closer look as Eris slowly begins rolling up her left sleeve.

“Vamp bite!” she proclaims as she suddenly yanks her sleeve back the last couple inches to reveal her newest memento writ in flesh.

Stunned silence across the bar.

“Eris, my dear,” Old Vic speaks up, “we all love our resident goddess of mayhem, but did you get in a fight with a toddler?”

“Yeah, yeah, get it out of your system, ya chuckleheads,” Eris says, waving her hand in a rolling motion at the ones dumb enough to laugh at Old Vic’s comment.  She knows an invitation to show up the losers who don’t know the top dogs around here well enough when she sees Old Vic set one up for her.  “It doesn’t look like much, but the story behind it makes up for that.”

“And are you going to tell us, or leave us to our imaginations?” Gretchen asks, already knowing the answer.

“I dunno,” Eris drawls, “you gonna buy me a drink?  It’s a long one.”

 

*******

 

“Alright,” Eris begins, drink in hand and straddling the chair she’s spun around to sit in backwards, “may as well start at the beginning and get the boring stuff out of the way to begin with for those of you who lack context.  A couple months back, Road asked me to join up with a new venture they were starting.  And if any of you are too new here to know who Road is, just ask anyone else.  Everyone knows Road.  Anyway, the whole point of this venture is to help people affected by things Backstage that no one else will bother with because it’s not technically a masquerade breach, and nine times out of ten, that means there’s either a monster or a mage causing problems and needing put down.  Hence yours truly.  

“At the moment we’ve just got a small field team of Road, myself, and a wizard who goes by Ashan Glassheart.  Some of you might have heard of him, given that he’s been handling the convention circuit for the past few years.  I know calling him the nicest mage I’ve ever met is a pretty low bar -” every hunter that’s worked with a mage in the past laughs - “but he’s off-world trained so he knows his stuff and goes out of his way not to blow up his own teammates.  Meanwhile, we’ve got my buddy Lacuna handling remote tech support, overwatch, and lead finding for us.

“Anyway, I’m out getting groceries at the corner market - on Sixth and Triskelion, Bai, you know the one; run by the lizardman, Mr. Arzochi  - when I get a call saying we’ve got a job lined up that could be time sensitive so I should head straight there instead of heading back to the office for a briefing.  Mr. Arzochi offers to hold my order for me until I get back - great customer service, that guy - and I start booking it to the address provided for the best bridge out of Crossherd.

“See, we’ve got a website now so people can come to us asking for help instead of us needing to find them and we just got our first intentional client through that.  Apparently some single mom living in a quiet suburb up north found out her house was built on top of a buried vampire lair and now she had bloodsuckers and animated skeletons crawling out of her basement.  Or so the frantically worded help request made it sound like.

“Fortunately, there’s a direct link out of Crossherd to the town in question so it wasn’t half an hour later when I’m standing outside the door of an unassuming cookie-cutter house with Road handing me stakes and going over strategies for getting victims and living thralls out safely while Ashan’s drawing glowing shapes in the air and confirming that the whole place is just absolutely saturated with necromantic magics.  Some wizard jargon about unhallowed ground, leylines, and liminal tearing.

“Judging by the blacked out windows, we assume that the vampire’s already in control of the house itself and take room clearing positions as I try the doorknob.  It’s locked, but just as I'm about to force it the door swings inward to reveal this little girl, eight, maybe nine years old.  No, not the one who bit me, I’ll get to that. So her eyes go wide and I’m standing there blocking out the sun trying not to scare her when Road steps in and gets down on one knee to look the kid in the eye.  He - Road was in guy mode that day - tells her that we’re the people her mom called to help with the basement.  The girl catches on and calms down, asks us to wait a minute, closes the door and comes back with her mom who’s about my age and looks pale and haggard enough to have been fed on regularly, but doesn’t have that absent, far away look and voice that thralls get. 

“Still, the mom looks relieved to see us and recognizes Road’s voice from the phone so she invites us in, locks the door behind us and introduces us to the vampires.  And no, it wasn’t a trap.  

“Okay, another quick round of names to help keep things straight going forward.  Not real names though for the sake of client privacy.  So for now let’s call the mom Brynn and her daughter Clair.  The two vampires waiting in the darkened living room looked to be about the same ages, and were dressed modern enough - probably sharing clothes with Brynn and Clair - but of course were way older.  Like, Vikings getting lost on the way to Vinland old as it turned out, but we’ll get to that.  We’ll call the older looking one Sigrid and the younger looking one Hild.  There were also seven animated skeletons wandering the house doing chores, but I couldn’t tell them apart and I don’t think they were sapient so I’m not going to bother naming them. 

“Introductions are made, Ashan asks to check to verify there’s no mind control or compulsion going on, Sigrid says she didn’t even know that was a thing she might be able to do, the tests come out clean, Brynn sends the kids upstairs, the skeletons follow, and then we finally get an explanation to clear up the misunderstanding that’s had us all on edge this whole time.

“Starting way back at the beginning, the gist of it all is that sometime circa one thousand AD, someone over in Europe heard tell of a place discovered north across the sea, all the way west of Greenland, and got the bright idea to ship off and lock up creatures that wouldn’t die properly as far away from anyone else as possible.  Far from everyone else except, you know, the people who already lived there but, hey, tale as old as colonialism, am I right?  So they sent over a boatload of undead and a couple of mages to keep them bound, built a crypt, interred the undead, sealed it up, and then built a church on top.  And then support for the project from back home dropped off, the Vikings stopped trying to keep up an outpost for the church-crypt-prison keepers to get supplies from, and the locals got fed up with invaders burying necromantically-infused corpses on their land. 

“Something went down at that point, but it’s not clear what, only that one winter night Sigrid woke up, climbed out of a stone coffin with no memory and found herself in the ruins of an abandoned church. Hild woke up not long after that and the skeletons along with her.  As far as Sigrid knows, Hild’s mute.  Never heard a word out of the kid - and I use the word ‘kid’ loosely here - despite having basically adopted her.  Sigrid found some writing detailing what the place was and a ritual to keep the undead in that place dormant and sealed.  She did the ritual, spent the winter alone with her and Hild surviving on animal blood from the surrounding woods, and then found herself tired enough to return to her sarcophagus at the end of the winter.  That waking up for the winter kept repeating, but with an exponentially longer gap each time, until one day she went to sleep and woke up centuries later with a house on top of her and the woods replaced by a town. 

“Sigrid was able to cobble together some limited translation magic and explain all this to Brynn, Hild and Clair made friends, and Brynn agreed to help them through the winter.  None of them knew jack about anything Backstage, nothing modern anyhow, but it turns out you can just buy blood off the internet and have it delivered.  

“Yeah, yeah, I’m getting to the exciting part, cool it.  Do you want ‘We went down to the basement and punched some skeletons the end’ or do you want a proper story?  You’ve gotta have some context for these things.  Have some buildup.  Gradually raise the tension.  Sprinkle in some mys- yes Chuck, we all know vampires don’t work on seasonal hibernation cycles like that.  It was our first big hint something was weird.  Now are you lot gonna keep interrupting or can I keep going?

“Yes Vic, you’re a real comedian. 

“Now for those of you paying attention, you probably picked up on the obvious detail that it ain’t winter outside right now.  That’s the real reason Brynn finally started looking for outside help.  Keeping a pair of vamps fed for the winter is one thing, but indefinitely is a whole other beast.  Worse than that, Sigrid suspected that the usual re-sealing ritual wasn’t working anymore and that whatever else was downstairs was starting to wake up.  She said she could feel things moving beneath her when she tried to sleep for the day and Hild had been acting even weirder than normal lately, breaking off with her games with Clair and the skeletons and staring off into space for minutes at a time. 

“You got it.  That’s what we were there for. 

“Oh, and I should probably mention, Brynn and Sigrid were trying to hide it, but it was obvious to anyone with eyes they had it hard for each other.  Grade-A sapphic pining in the face of knowing fate will never let them have it coupled with still getting their heads around the idea that it was okay for them to like women.  It’ll be relevant later. 

“I’m not going to dignify that with a response. 

“Moving on to the fun parts now, Sigrid takes us down to the basement while the others stay up top, shows us the ragged hole in the floor with stairs down to her crypt, and leads us down to where she normally does her sealing ritual.  You see, there were actually two levels to the crypt, the upper level where Sigrid, Hild, the skeletons, and five other vampires she never let wake up were kept, and a lower level past a stone door she’d never opened where the really dangerous prisoners were imprisoned.  There’s some brief debate on whether to reattempt the sealing ritual with a proper wizard on hand, but Sigrid was all out of the blood to use as components for it and Lacuna - she’d been listening in the whole time via comms - said that creating a custom replacement without the need for blood would take longer than Ashan was estimating the weakened seal would hold for.  So we decide to set up a temporary ward to prevent passage out of the crypt and then fully break the seal so we can go down and permanently deal with whatever was down there.

“Road goes up to to the basement and unpacks his dufflebag to give me my spear - I’ve got an enchanted ice spear now, I’ll bring it with me next time - pull out a glyph–inscribed metal card, and set out a miniature drone that Lacuna remotely connects to and sends downstairs with us.  It’s a pretty cool little gizmo, like a toaster-sized robo crab with a projector mounted on top.  Anyway, Road puts the card on top of the stairs where it starts to play a recording of Lacuna’s voice chanting an incantation to project a selective pass through barrier so we can still get out if we need to.  Afterwards, Ashan does some wizard shit to the door that makes a big flash of red light and sets the whole place rumbling for a few seconds.”

Eris takes a dramatic pause to lean forward and grow a slow grin.  “And then four of the five occupied sarcophagi open up.  Out crawl four blood-starved vampires, too feral from hunger to reason with.  The first one leaps at me and I impale it midair.  The spear’s enchantment freezes the poor bastard solid by the time gravity catches up and brings it to the ground.  Vamp number two makes the mistake of going for Road who just dances around its attempts to claw him and paralyzes it one limb at a time with that fancy beam sword of his.  Once it falls he stakes it for good measure and leaves it there to deal with later.  Meanwhile, the third vamp is trying to get Ashan while he’s still reeling from the backlash of breaking the seal.  It lunges for him and then jerks to a halt with its fangs an inch away from his neck when Ashan recovers and conjures up a bunch of chains around it, making it easy pickings for me to stake.  Unlucky vamp number four catches the scent of easier prey upstairs and tries to beat a retreat while we’re all busy only to run headlong into Lacuna’s ward and fall tumbling backwards.  Road catches it before it breaks its neck and it repays that kindness with biting his neck.  Turns out Road’s jacket can shift forms faster than a starving vampire can move, so it just scrapes its teeth on hard plating while a freshly-armored Road pulls it into an embrace as part of pressing a stake into its heart.  Opening up the the fifth sarcophagus to check, we found another vampire with a stake already in its chest whose wood hadn’t quite rotted away with age yet.  We left it be.

“So, yeah, it was a nice warmup before the main event downstairs.  Of course, Road being Road, he was insistent that we leave the vampires ‘alive’ but neutralized rather than dragging them out into the sun, burning, or beheading them to finish the job.  I’m pretty sure he’s with them at a rehabilitation center right now, working on getting them fed enough to be lucid for a chance at integrating with modern society, Backstage resources and all.  

“But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Warmup done, I roll aside the inscribed stone slab that was still physically blocking off the lower crypt after Ashan had broken the magic seal on it and we descend.  And for those of you struggling to keep track, ‘we’ in this case includes Sigrid and Lacuna’s drone who were there for ritual support but weren’t really combatants.  Sure, Sigrid had the strength, speed, and reflexes of a well-fed vampire, but she was no trained fighter and wasn’t super big on doing violence.  Even hunting down deer and rabbits in the woods to feed herself and Hild back in the old days never sat quite right with her.”

Eris leaves out the detail that what disturbed Sigrid about the bloody hunt was how good it felt in the moment.  She suspects she’s not the only one here at the bar that feeling is a little too relatable for.

“The second staircase goes down deep, well into the bedrock,” Eris continues, “with enough clean, precise angles that it was obviously carved out by magic and unworn enough that you could tell no one had taken the trip up and down since its construction.  We find another inscribed stone door at the bottom but Ashan verifies that whatever enchantment was on it broke when he broke the seal from upstairs.  On the other side we find another crypt, way bigger than the first.  At least a hundred sarcophagi laid out in neat rows with a ceiling high enough that whatever mage carved it was obviously showing off.  Close to half of it was filled floor-to-ceiling with rubble.  At first we figure it was an old cave-in but then we notice the ragged hole on the far side of the chamber and realize we’re looking at the debris from an excavation.  An excavation most likely carried out by whatever used to be in the sarcophagi.  

“That’s right, they were all open.  Most of them, though, were still occupied.  If you can call being filled with mounds of pulsating flesh that are barely recognisable as having once been human as ‘occupied’, anyway.  All of those had these fleshy tendrils coming off them - so dark red they were almost black - trailing away like roots or cables down that tunnel that obviously hadn't been part of the crypt’s original construction, so you know there had to be something effed up going on back there.

“The tunnel turns into a maze on us pretty quick, but there’s a definite directionality to the pattern of the meat roots covering every surface and following those seemed to lead to some kind of center.  A couple minutes in of taking it slow and keeping our eyes and ears peeled we hear this super gross squelching sound coming from around the corner.  This eight foot tall amalgamation of smushed-together corpses rounds the corner and immediately goes aggro on us.  Probably knew we were coming from all the meat roots we couldn’t avoid stepping on.  It definitely had enough of those coming out of its back as a tempting weak point to go for.  ‘Course, that was easier said than done with it taking up almost the full width of the tunnel and swinging around eight arms to grab and pummel you with if you tried to squeeze around it.  

“On top of that, it had some sort of weird damage transfer thing going on so that anything we did to hurt it would instantly heal and then replicate the wound on the flesh covering the tunnel.  I’d stab it and frost would appear on the wall instead.  Road would slice it and meat roots on the ceiling would go limp and droop down.  I’d straight up punch a hole in its chest and when I pulled my hand out the hole would seal shut and vessels on the floor would burst and spray ichor up at us.  Adding insult to repeated blunt force trauma injury, it turns out that Lacuna’s drone is basically useless without a flat surface to project onto and the meat roots all over the place weren’t real conducive to that.

“Seeing that just beating the crap out of this thing until it falls over isn’t working, Ashan tosses up a barrier blocking off the whole tunnel to give us all a second to breathe and shift tactics.  Up until that point he’d been rapidly conjuring up small shields that would disappear after blocking a hit or two so that Road and I wouldn’t get punched in the head too much.  I tell him I can handle it and that he should focus on going on the offense, so he folds his barrier around the corpse golem that’s already started slamming itself into it and then drags the magic-wrapped monster burrito to one side so Road and I can get to the exposed tendrils coming off its back.

“It’s the sort of maneuver that we really should have opened with, but hindsight is twenty-twenty.  It had its flaw though in the form of the hole he left open for the tendrils.  I’m sure there’s some BS magic mechanics explanation for why he couldn’t just snap it all the way shut and sever them himself, but that meant there was space for the monster to escape when its flesh started to goddam liquify and start oozing out of the hole to reform.  Seeing we’re about to have a problem again, I fling myself on top of the reforming flesh pile and leave Road to cut the tendrils.  My reward for that is four sets of jaws emerging from the congealed slurry to bite me and bone fragments assembling themselves into limbs to try to hold me down while the rest of its mass flows out to engulf me.

“Quick show of hands, who all here’s been dunked in sewage before?  Okay, and who’s fought zombies or hung around long enough after a hunt for the quarry to start putrefying?  Right.  Now imagine combining those two smells, filling the sewage with bones, and having it actively try to crush and suffocate you.  Rank does not begin to do the stench justice.

“Fortunately, Road cuts the amalgam’s connection to the tunnel walls quickly, causing the mass around me to shudder.  That doesn’t deanimate it - it was already dead and more of a puppet or golem than a proper undead, so ‘kill’ isn’t the right word - but it stops regenerating.  I start tearing it apart from the inside and less than a minute later I’m standing in the middle of the tunnel picking viscera out of my hair while scattered bits of gore uselessly pulse and twitch.  Thank God for overly-fastidious wizards with cleaning spells or I’d still be in the shower trying to get that smell out.”

While her audience laughs at the half-joke, Eris’s mind lingers on what she must have looked like for Lacuna, watching from multiple angles through the comms and drones as she burst out of that mess, clothes stained with dark blood and ichor dripping down her face.  From the time she got her mouth free enough to breathe without inhaling undead meat and fluids to the time she made eye contact with the crab drone’s camera she’d had the same feral grin she knew she always had after a kill.  Ever since she’s been waiting for Lacuna to say something.  Dreading it, really.  If she hadn’t just imagined Lacuna involuntarily flinching away from her the day before this last job, what must her friend think of her now that she’s had an unfiltered view of her in all her gorey glory?

She can talk to her about that later.  Right now she’s still got a story to tell.

“Moving on down the tunnel system, we don’t encounter anything else until we reach the central chamber, a big roughly hemispherical cavern with other tunnel openings all around.  In the center, all the meat roots had converged and woven themselves into a cocoon.  A cocoon that looked to have been freshly split open by the time we got there.  

“Hovering in the air above it and faintly glowing red we see this vampire mage who’s gone all in on the demonic bat look.  Big wings that he doesn’t even seem to need to fly, pointy ears, long clawed hands, black sclera, red irises, weirdly echoing voice, the works.  He sees us and he must have been a wizard, because he immediately starts monologuing at us.  And it’s all in some old proto-Norse dialect with off-world loan words so I don’t understand a lick of it.

“That said, I don’t need to parse the words to know an evil gloating asshole stroking his own ego when I hear one, so I cut him off mid-sentence by hurling my spear at him.  I nail him right through the chest, but he’s got the same damage transfer hacks going on as his creation we killed earlier, without even needing the physical connection, so he just pulls the spear out and casually drops it like the smug bastard he is and calls for the rest of his creations to start streaming in from the other tunnels.

“I’ll save you the blow-by-blow of the ensuing melee or else we’d be here all night,  but I’ll paint you the broad strokes of it.  Me, Road, and Sigrid - surrounded like this, she didn’t have much choice but to join in - back to back to back against over a dozen constructs of fused-together undead in various shapes and configurations.  Vampires, ghouls, revenants, you name a variety of walking dead originating out of Europe and chances were a specimen had been blended up and thrown into the mix.  Meanwhile, Ashan’s running interference to block and lock down any magic the vamp mage tries to throw at us.  That includes the vamp mage trying to open up portals, both to escape and to let in minor demons that he’d contracted out from some hell-type dimension or another.

“Now, most of you here are lucky enough to have seen me and/or Road in action before, and a few of you are unlucky enough to have seen two mages go at it, so I’ll let you extrapolate out what the next several minutes looked like based on how fighting against just one went.  At least in that chamber we had proper room to maneuver, so getting around behind the amalgams to cut their puppet strings was easier.  Up until the vamp mage would slip a spell past Ashan and plug one of his creations back in to start regenerating again.  While there was technically a limit to how much damage the vamp mage and his minions could offload until there were no more meat roots in reserve to take it, it was a pretty high limit and we were looking at a battle of attrition.  I’m pretty good at those, but I was starting to have my doubts that Ashan could hold up.  He’s got this thing with drawing on ambient heat as a power source and everyone down there capable of breathing was puffing out fog clouds.

“Oh, and did I mention that the vamp mage kept up his villain monologuing during the fight?  At the time I figured he was just running on a magic system heavy on verbal spell components, but later the others filled me in that was only about half of his blabbering.  If anyone’s curious, the gist was that he’d been awake off and on for centuries, had fed on all the other undead in the crypt to grow his power, used the husks of his fellow prisoners as labor to carve out tunnels in the shape of a ritual circle, and stuck himself in the middle of it to hibernate until his transformation was complete and the seal on the crypt finally faded in full.  Now our breaking of the seal on the crypt had woken him up again and accelerated his plans for escaping and taking vengeance.  I’m not sure he quite grasped the idea that everyone who banished him and locked him up down there is long dead.

“So yeah, uber vamp, sworn vengeance, corpse golems, grand melee, wizard duel, portals threatening to open, battle of attrition, yadda yada.  That finally breaks when Lacuna finally finds a good, flat, tendril free, spot on the wall to steer her little robo crab that everyone forgot about over to.  She starts projecting a ritual circle on the wall, plays the pre-recorded incantation, and before anyone realizes what’s happening the whole room floods with conjured sunlight.  You’d need to ask a mage what makes it so special compared to the lights Ashan had made for us to see by, but it was as good as the real thing for making vamps burn and the amalgams and meat roots all over the walls, floor, and ceiling, were at least seventy percent vampire in composition.  Watching all that light up in a wave of smokeless fire was maaaagnificent.”

Eris smiles at the memory of the spectacle.  That moment was the second proudest she’d ever been of Lacuna.

“That should have been the end of it,” Eris goes on,  “but of course it wasn’t.  Same as Road was pulling Sigrid back into a side tunnel and Ashan was conjuring up a mostly opaque barrier to keep her from burning the vamp mage had sequestered himself in his own little ominous floating sphere of darkness hovering ten feet off the ground.  So I’m left standing there alone considering how best to reach the vamp mage and pull him into the light before Road gets the chance to remind me to take him in ‘alive’ when the light suddenly goes out and I hear Lacuna scream into my ear through the comms earbud.

“I’ll be honest, when she didn’t respond right away after I asked what happened I kinda snapped.  I gave throwing my spear at the vamp mage another go and this time it stuck.  I followed up with a running jump to grab the portion of the haft that was sticking out of the black sphere and dragged the bastard out of his safety bubble.  I slammed him into the cave floor like a hammer head onto an anvil, climbed on top of him, and started going to town on his face.”  

Flashes of fear and rage resurface with the memory, causing Eris to stumble in her narration.  The way she had figured at the time, either he’d hurt Lacuna and needed to pay or something else had happened and she needed to finish things up here and get back to the office as quickly as possible.  The next few minutes (or was it just seconds?) trying to finish him off were fuzzy, but she had some vague memory of Road trying to pull her off before she could kill him.  What Road didn’t realize is  that was her being nonlethal with a powered-up vampire.  If she’d wanted him dead she would have gone straight for ripping his head off.  Too bad she hadn’t been thinking clearly enough at the time to just stake him.  Would have saved them all a lot of trouble.

“When he realized he couldn’t throw me off him he tried necromancy.  I could feel him trying to grow spikes from my bones.  Heating up my blood in hopes of boiling it.  Skip beats on my heart in an attempt to stop it.  Willing me to rot from the inside out.”  Eris laughs, more showy bravado than genuine pride.  “But you know me, I’m built different and autogenesis is a helluva drug when it comes to magic resistance.  The only reason I stopped beating the everliving tar out of him when I did was I heard the kid scream next.

“Turns out that the vamp mage had some kind of connection to Hild and with the seal gone he’d been able to use that connection to mind control her from all the way down in the crypt.  He’d used her skeletons to take Clair hostage, coerce Brynn into physically disrupting Lacuna’s ward up in the basement, and bring Clair down to where we were to use as a human shield.  A dirty ploy, but an effective one at getting us to stand down.  Breaking an actively-maintained ward had hurt both Brynn and Lacuna but not killed either of them, so Brynn catches up and wanders in just in time to see the vamp mage opening up the hell portal Ashan had been keeping closed so a new round of minions could file in to keep us busy.  

“Now obviously, letting a vampire go free with a hostage just means that hostage is getting eaten later rather than sooner but that doesn’t make getting that hostage to safety any less tricky.  Fortunately, hearing Lacuna’s voice come back online to confirm that she was okay, just pretty out of it, calms me down enough to notice Road whisper something to Sigrid and then give me enough of a look that I catch onto the gist of his plan.  I then get Ashan’s attention and have him start translating trash talk for me to get the vamp mage focused on us.  Not exactly my proudest moment, but I’m pretty sure I taught Ashan and the kids some new swear words.

“Distraction in place, Sigrid breaks off from where we’ve all been lined up to go give Hild a tearful full-body hug and whisper something in her ear.  That’s enough to break Hild out of the near-trance she’d been in this whole time to have her skeletons let go of Clair and start attacking the demons.  Road moves in to intercept the vamp mage before he can grab Clair himself while Brynn scoops her up to get her to safety.  New problem is we’ve now got exits blocked by demons, multiple non-combatants to keep safe, more minions filing in, and a very angry vampire mage who’s already started to recover from the beating I gave him.  I don’t even wanna know what kind of price he paid to contract those kind of numbers for summoning.

“Somehow though, he looks at all of this, does the tactical calculus, and concludes that Hild is the biggest threat - or maybe he was just mad at her breaking free - so he points a hand at her and his fingers extend, shooting across the room.  Road realizes what’s happening in time to parry it enough to keep it from taking off her head, but the vamp mage still manages to rip a gash in Hild from jugular to heart.

“Here’s the thing about vampires that makes them so annoying to kill: Short of beheading or burning, they can recover from basically anything so long as they have the blood.  So pro-tip, if you find yourself fighting a vampire without a stake and you don’t think you can get a killing blow on them, hit them someplace that they’ll bleed a lot.  And it has to be external bleeding.  A decent size cut’s harder for them to recover from than broken bones or ruptured organs.  Get them in the heart or jugular and they’ll bleed out nearly as fast as a human if they don’t get the chance to feed in the next minute or so.

“On the flip side, if you’re ever trying to save a vampire, the number one most important thing is to give them something to drink; the fresher and stronger the better.”

Eris holds up the child-sized bite mark on her wrist for everyone to get a good look at again.  Damn, but does it feel good to watch the realization dawn on her audience’s faces.  Especially the ones who’d laughed at it earlier.

“Now I’ll be real with you,” Eris says after everyone’s had a moment to ogle, “for most of the rest of this I was a bit loopy from blood loss, but I promise I’m not exaggerating when I say Hild started making whole skeletons out of the ash of the corpse golems that had burned earlier and ripping new boney minions of her own out of any demon that fell.  The things drinking your fill in fresh human blood for the first time in a millennium will do for you I guess.

“Still, it turns out that closing a fully open summoning portal that things are actively passing through is harder than keeping a partially formed one from opening and Ashan was already near his limit back before Lacuna dropped her sunshine bomb on the room.  With splitting his attention between that struggle, trying to keep the vamp mage from opening an escape, and maintaining bubble shields around himself, Sigrid, Brynn, Clair, me, and Hild, that was leaving just Road and the skeletons to fight both the mage and his minions.  Not good numbers and we were back to a battle of attrition.  Road’s good - the best even - but even he can only be in so many places at once and Hild’s ability to keep reforming her frankly fragile skeletons was only going to last as long as I could keep serving as a blood battery.

“And then the whole place starts shaking.  We’d only burnt away the meat roots in that central chamber and now the rest were writhing and contracting in an attempt to collapse the surrounding tunnels.  The classic ‘if I can’t escape then no one can’ gambit.

“The thing I haven’t mentioned yet is that the whole time this round two of fighting is going on, Lacuna’s been frantically searching a digitized library of spells and rituals and calling out descriptions over the comms to ask if it’s something any of us think can help.  She’s not trained on how to properly recover from the backlash of an interrupted ritual, much less two at once, so she wasn’t in any condition to cast anything else herself, but she could still provide words and glyphs for others to do so.  To be honest, I’m pretty sure we were all basically tuning her out by the time the walls started shaking, but just as Road is starting to give the order for everyone to retreat back up to the surface she cuts in claiming to have found a - and I quote - ‘spell to conquer evil’.

“But then she reads the description and sees that it requires - and again I quote - ‘a threefold declaration of love hitherto unspoken,’ and apologizes for getting our hopes up.  And that’s when I realize I’m apparently the only one with working eyes because I have to point out to everyone that we’ve got the capacity for that right in front of us.  Sigrid and Brynn for each other, Brynn and Sigrid for Hild and Clair respectively, and Clair and Hild for one another.  The love of partners, mothers, and sisters.  Eros, Storge, and Philia for those of you who read your classics.  Threefold love, and let’s throw in some Agape loving God for making people more willing to make declarations of repressed love when they think they’re about to die.

“Lacuna projects the words to read up for the spell on the wall, Ashan provides the magical oomph, to make the spell go, vows are made, and we get a whole new, somehow even brighter wave of light bursts out, this time from the four of them, banishing the demons, sweeping away the meat roots even in the outer tunnels, and stunning the vampire.  He’s still floating like twenty feet in the air though and already starting to twitch again.  

“So then,” Eris says, standing up to pantomime the final act of the tale, “Road turns to me and tells me to throw him.  Swear to God, his armor grew handles when he said it.  But this is Road we’re talking about and adrenaline was running high so I yeet him across the crypt chamber at the flying vamp mage, no questions asked.  Stake goes in the heart on impact, the two of them crash to the ground, portal closes, and everyone goes home happy.”

 

*******

 

“Good story earlier, E” Gretchen says to Eris some hours later on her way to join the gradual exodus of hunters from the bar, “didn’t get the chance to say that earlier with everyone else lining up to fawn over the savior of children and spotter of true love.”

“Thanks,” Eris replies skeptically.  Is this sarcasm or flirting?  God, she hopes it’s sarcasm.  She has enough ambiguous advances to turn down on her plate with Sarah already.

“The manticore stinger scar’s still my favorite though,” Gretchen continues in a tone that makes flirting the uncomfortably more likely possibility.  “You should consider showing it off again sometime.”

“Sure, I’ll th-” the non-answer catches in Eris’s throat.

She doesn’t have a scar from a manticore stinger.  She doesn’t even remember having had a potential scar like that.  And it’s not something she would forget; manticore venom hurts like having your veins replaced by rose vines with vibrating thorns.  Wait.  Why does she know what it feels like when everything she’s heard about it calls it instantly fatal?  Why does the thought of it make her jaw clench and fingers curl?  It’s just curses and magic poisons that leave lasting scars on her.  But both of her scars (potentially all three now) are from curses.  So how does she know poison will do it?  But there’s no way she could forget something like that happening to her.

Right?

Why does everything feel like her hands are too soft?

“I’ll catch you later,” Eris finishes her sentence as calmly as she can.

She tries not to run out of the bar.

 

*******

 

Among the subfolders in the photo app on Eris’s phone there are two labeled “Scars: Potential” and “Scars: Real”.  The second most recent photo in “Scars: Potential” is from a month ago.  It’s a set of ragged claw marks running down her left thigh with what might possibly be a partially-obscured bite mark mixed in.  Her text message history confirms that she sent the photo to Sarah two days after the previous full moon.

She doesn’t remember getting injured, taking the photo, or the conversation.

Now she’s standing undressed in her apartment’s bathroom, gripping the edge of the sink and breathing hard as she rapidly looks back and forth between her mirror, her body, and one of the four photos in the “Scars: Real” folder.  The photo shows a ring of puckered flesh just below her right breast with finger-length tendrils radiating out from it tracing along the paths of veins.  Squint at it with the right mindset and it looks almost like a flower surrounded by vines.  The scar’s an unnatural shade of dark purple standing out against brown skin.  It’s matches in the “Scars: Potential” folder taken over the course of the weeks prior to the final version show the scar as being practically vibrant in its hue and surrounded by heavily inflamed skin.

Most importantly, it’s not there anymore.

“What the Hell?” Eris gasps yet again as she continues to run fingers over smooth skin while staring down the spot in the mirror where she should be seeing a scar.

She tightens her grip on the edge of the sink and accidentally cracks the ceramic.  The buckling of the countertop topples her phone into the bowl.  The sound snaps Eris out of her obsessive staring and prodding enough to look down at what she just did and swear.  She lets go of the broken edge of the sink and picks up her phone.  Too late she realizes she’s bleeding from the soft skin on her palm.  Now she’s smeared it on her phone case.  It’s not the first time it’s gotten blood on it but she swears again anyway.

Then she freezes.

Why are her hands soft?

That makes no sense.

She should have calluses.

She must have had calluses.

Where the Hell are her calluses?

Why did it take her this long to realize what was wrong?

Her grip on her phone shifts subtly and she nearly drops it in surprise.  Running her fingers along the rubberized texture of its case feels different now somehow.  She looks at the open palm of her other hand and something about the way it catches the light has changed slightly.  The blister that’s been there for the past couple of days is suddenly gone.  She traces the pad of her thumb back and forth across the tips of her fingers and finds that while it doesn't feel right, it’s the closest to right that it’s felt in weeks.

“What the Hell?”

She touches where the scar should be and memories that make no sense to have been forgotten come rushing back.

Sun hot enough to cook eggs on the dashboard.  An Arizona truck stop.  Rumors of a big cat prowling the desert and attacking truckers and tourists who stop there too late at night.  Killing time waiting for nightfall by practicing along with a language learning CD snagged from a clearance bin.  An empty parking lot beneath a moonless night sky.  Climbing out of the cab and watching the desert.  Feeling the temperature drop.  The feeling of being the only person on Earth.  Lingering in a space only ever meant to be passed through.  The howl of an almost-human voice that almost sounds like a song.  The weight of a tire iron in her hand.  Stepping out beyond the edge of the pavement.   Stopping just at the edge of the furthest lamplight.  The twilight border between known and unknown.  A whistled tune to announce her presence.  Eyes in the dark.  A growl that almost sounds like words.  Circling.  Blurring the line between predator and prey.  Claws and teeth.  The crack of a tire iron against a skull that almost looks human.  A whipcord whistling sound through the air.  A step too slow.  Blooming pain.  The feeling of veins replaced by rose vines with vibrating thorns.  An inhuman growl from a human throat.  Hands preventing a tail from ripping a stinger free.  A slow extraction from a chest.  A quick insertion into a neck.  The loss of a tire iron.  Seven minutes slumped against a door, trying to work up the strength to open it.  Three days in the bed in the back of a truck cabin.  Angry voicemails threatening unemployment.  Coughing up blood.  Engine noise going quiet.  AC cutting out.  Sips of hot water.  Knocking on the door from a concerned stranger.  A declined offer of a ride to the hospital.  A request to siphon gas.  The passing of years.  An impossible city.  A new job.  A kindred spirit.  A wonderfully wicked smile beneath golden eyes.  The feeling of another’s hands tracing a familiar shape.  The comparison to a flower.

This time Eris does drop her phone.  This time she grips the edge of the sink with both hands.  This time it’s a different curse she mutters between ragged breaths.

She starts to look up, catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, bolts upright, and looks down at herself.  It’s fainter than in the photo, but there’s now the barest outline of what might look like a flower if you squint at it in the right mindset.

“Sis,” Eris whispers to a friend that isn’t there to hear it, “what did you do to me?”

 

*******

 

In the past fifteen minutes since Eris knocked on Lacuna’s door hard enough to chip the paint and wake the neighbors, she’s watched her best friend’s face change from terrified to concerned to embarrassed to anxious to worried to confused and now to utterly horrified.

“Oh goddess, I am so sorry.  I swear I didn’t think that would happen.  I knew there might be complications but I didn’t think that even could happen.  I’m sorry.  I should have seen this coming.  I should have run more simulations.  I shouldn’t have needed to.  It’s so -”

“Sis -”

“- obvious in hindsight.  Not even hindsight, it's just obvious.  How could I be so stupid?  I’m sorry.  I promise this was an accident.  Maybe if I - No that would be worse.  I swear I -”

“Hey -”

“- can make this right.  Or maybe it’s already showing signs of abating.  This is what I get for not taking a baseline model first.  Please don’t be mad.  I’m so, so, sorry.  I just -”

“Lacuna!”

Lacuna flinches at the not-quite-a-shout and goes quiet, shrinking back into the round papasan chair seated in her apartment’s living room.

“I’m not mad at you,” Eris lies.  Maybe if she keeps still enough and keeps being slow and deliberate enough with her words and breathing it will become true.  “I believe you that whatever this is was an accident and I’m not going to hold it against you.”  That part is probably true.  “Now please slow down for a minute and tell me what you think you did to me and what we need to do to fix it.”

Lacuna wraps her arms around herself and takes a series of trembling, drawn-out breaths.  Her wide eyes show little sign of the sleep Eris woke her from.  When she starts speaking again it’s slow and halting, and her fingers continue to drum on her upper arms in a rolling motion.

“Right.  Sorry.  So… Two things.  Probably two things.  But they’re kind of related.  So maybe one thing.”

Eris resists the urge to tell her to get on with it.  The patience that she’s learned since befriending Lacuna is wearing thin tonight.

“This is mostly an educated guess, but back when we healed your burns after the Logos mission.  Remember how I said we were sort of hacking autogenesis to work for us?”

Eris nods.  “Making my belief that I could walk away from the blast unharmed stronger than my and Logos’s combined belief that it should have killed me.”

“Yeah.  That.  Close to it anyway.  Because the core theory of the Autogenesis Principle is that it makes your perception of yourself override baseline reality.  Like we’ve talked about, that’s probably why you heal so fast normally.  So I set up the ritual to temporarily sharpen and amplify that perception.  Remove any doubts or distractions and absolutely focus on your idea of who you truly are.  But since I never took an initial scan of when you were uninjured, we were pretty much going based on memory”

“And so, what, I lost focus and parts got left out?”

“Maybe?  More likely that I did.  It was configured to mostly be based on you, but since I was the one casting the ritual, some of my perception of your body slipped in too.  And.  Well.  I didn’t know that you had those scars that you said were missing.  Or maybe I was because on some level I was thinking of that all as being freshly grown flesh that we were replacing the old with?  I don’t know.  But when we found you your…  Those were the parts of you that took the brunt of it.  You were…”

“I was what?”

“I-”  Lacuna bites her lip and puts a hand to her mouth.  “Probably best I don’t say.  Perception and everything.  But trust me.  It was… bad.  If you were anyone else I don’t think you would have survived.”

Just built different.

“Fine.”  Eris says even though it isn’t.  “So the scars you didn’t know I had didn’t get put back when we healed me.  That tracks, but why did it make me forget about them?”

“I’m not entirely sure, and that’s the scary part.  It might have been a flaw in the ritual  itself that caused some leakage between us or maybe left some of what was supposed to be a temporary perception adjustment linger around longer than expected.  Or it might be because no one fully understands how autogenesis works and causing a shift in perception cascaded into forcing other variables into place to align with that.  I’m not sure which one’s worse.”

“Okay so, those are both bad,” horrifying, if Eris is being honest with herself, “but what do we do about it?”

“For now?  Maybe nothing?  You said that when you realized something was off your memory came back and then the scar started to reappear.  And that remembering the calluses caused you to remember the scar?  There’s precedent for removal of memory alterations to cause a cascading effect.  That’s something I read when I was researching how to help with Ashan’s tattoo.  Not a tattoo, but you know what I mean.  If we give it a little bit of time it should all work itself out and go back to normal.  Probably.  And if it doesn’t, we go find someone who knows more about this than me.”

“If it’s going to wear off, doesn’t that mean the burns are going to come back too?”

“No.  That’s a little bit different.  It’s a technical thing that I could explain better after sleeping properly, but I’m ninety-seven percent sure that we’ve got that part pretty well solved.  Even before the ritual, you didn't remember the blast itself since you blacked out, and you weren’t even conscious for seventy-two hours between waking up in the autodoc bed and getting the additional healing.  In the grand scheme of things, the time that you spent in that particular condition didn’t have much time to imprint on you or get internalized.  Not unless you were taking that all a lot harder than you were letting on.  It was part of the reason I proposed the ritual almost as soon as you were awake.”

“Fine,”  Eris says.  It still isn’t.  “Fine,” she says again to convince herself.  “I’ll assume and act like it will work out how we want, try not to think too hard about it, and it will happen, the same as any other autogenesis bullshit.  But what about my calluses?”

“What about them?  Same as the rest I guess.”

“No, I mean it’s not like we’ve never shaken hands before and I’ve literally dragged you into doing things in the past.  You might not have seen all of my scars, but you should have an idea what my hands feel like.”

“Oh!  That might be the whole ‘new flesh’ thing I mentioned earlier.”

“Or?” Eris drags out the word.  “I sense an ‘or’ coming.”

Lacuna looks at her lap, trying and failing to hide the red creeping into her face. 

 “You’re always gentle about it though,” Lacuna practically whispers.  “Compared to what I know you can do anyway.  Holding hands.  Arm around my shoulder.  Pats on the back.  Hugs.  Even when there’s force behind it, it’s… comforting.”  She laughs, embarrassed; a short puff of breath that’s almost more of a gasp.  “I guess I think of your touch as… soft?  I’m sorry.  That’s weird of me to say.  And also really messed up of me to have forced onto you, even if it was on accident.”

“Sis…”

“No, I mean it.  It’s bad enough when normal people try to make others into the versions of them they have in their heads instead of who they really are.  We’re lucky that ritual was only meant for long term physical changes and that I’m not enough of a real mage to even be able to make lasting mental changes.  You're my best friend, E.  I don’t want some weird idealized caricature my subconscious made up.  I want you.”

Lacuna sniffs and Eris puts a hand on her shoulder before another torrent of “I’m sorries” starts pouring out.  She’s not sure she can deal with more of that tonight, especially if they turn into tears.

“Hey.  It’s gonna be alright.  You fucked up - no sugarcoating that - but it happens to everyone sooner or later.  Important part is you’re owning up to it, you’re trying to make it better, and you know how not to in the future.  You’re my best friend too, and whatever happens, we’re still cool.  I know who I am and no mad science lab accident is going to change that.”

Does she though?  Was she always this forgiving?  This protective?  This quick to swallow her anger?

Eris tells herself that’s just part of caring about someone.

But if Lacuna ever did accidentally change something about her mind, would either of them even be able to tell?

Eris tells herself that being able to ask that question means she’s still her.