Of Wasps and Wizards, Chapter 15
*Dresden*
Taylor and Glory Girl both seemed to be alright, at least physically. Glory Girl was drinking something that was either coffee or hot chocolate with one hand, and was holding Taylor's in the other. Taylor, however, was in a less than perfect mental condition. Not only was she unable to drink anything, the face-covering mask stopping that from happening, but she also had the look of someone who'd seen something she shouldn't have. I'd managed not to make the first of those mistakes, instead wearing a hood that somehow always covered the upper half of my face in shadows, like it was magical or something. I'd thought about adding glowing eyes to it, but Image had vetoed it, claiming that glowing eyes in the darkness were for horror movies, not superheroes. The second mistake, that of seeing things that could not be unseen, that was one I was familiar with.
"What happened?" I asked, and the two girls looked at me, torn from their daze. According to Carmichael, they'd been sitting there like that for a few hours now.
"The shard, it's dying," Taylor said.
"Shard?" I asked.
"Extradimensional brain parasite, Para, whatever. They call themselves shards. Part of a greater whole somehow," she continued with a near expressionless face, like she wasn't really feeling the exposition.
"So you're telling me that they're not actually Pokémon?"
"No, they're not," Taylor replied.
I looked back at the great mass of flesh behind me.
"Any timeline on when it will be done dying?"
"Soon, I think. Hours, maybe days," she said.
"Nothing more precise?"
"Compared to its lifespan, this is pretty precise," Taylor continued as she stood up, half trembling.
I put a hand on her shoulder, steadying her as she looked at me, her eyes just barely visible through the lenses of her mask.
"What happened?" I asked again.
"The Warlock, he was busy trying to, well, the only way I can explain it is that he was using Genoscythe as a straw, sucking out the shard and trying to draw nourishment from it. There was what I think must have been a demon, Glory Girl took care of that, but I couldn't take the warlock down fast enough," Taylor explained.
"And the demon is gone?" I asked.
"Az good az," Glory Girl replied, a sly smile on her face.
"Anyway, I tried to stop the warlock, but the bugs I had on him wouldn't do enough. I tried to distract him with electricity, make him lose focus or something, but that wouldn't work either. But Genoscythe was still dying, so I went all out. I managed to simultaneously cast my taser spell a couple dozen times at once and interrupt the Warlock, but it was already too late, and the shard came out through the gap the Warlock created, unable to control itself."
"And the whole shard thing?" I asked.
"Some sort of trigger vision happened and, well…"
"And you managed to use your sight for the first time," I completed for her.
A wizard's sight was a powerful magical ability. Known by many different names, it allowed the user to see the supernatural side of the world, and things that were hidden. It was incredibly powerful, but came with a substantial drawback. Anything seen with the sight could never be forgotten, always remaining just as raw in your memory as the day you first saw it.
According to Ebenezar, the strange state generally induced by a trigger event, or by a parahuman being a witness to that event, was somehow accompanied by some sort of memory-related manipulation in the brain. Going by her current condition, her power, or Shard apparently, might have had good reason to manipulate her memory in this memory. Of course, since the sight was entirely magical, the Shard's purely physical manipulations in her brain wouldn't allow it to erase the memories of the sight.
"It was… I'm not sure how to describe it. Not evil, but like a giant stepping on ants. I'm not sure how to describe it but… The thing in my head, my power, I don't think it's malicious, not exactly. At least not in the way you said you thought it was," Taylor said.
"Can't help but notice that you say this after the binding has been removed," I replied. I was skeptical, but not as much as I would've been a week ago. Sure, there was a mental effect. And sure, parahuman powers were remarkably similar to vampires of the white court, or some of the mantles that Ebenezar had told me about, but that did not mean they were the same thing.
"Quick question. Did you manage to bite him?" I said, changing the question.
"Bite him? This a wizard thing?" Glory Girl interjected.
I looked at her, after almost having forgotten her. I wasn't sure how. After all, she was rather attention-grabbing. Besides her aura, which literally begged for attention, she was rather attractive.
You know, for a teenager. A really attractive teenager.
"Well yeah, of course it is. Did your parents never tell you to never look a gift wizard in the mouth?"
"I'm not sure that's the right idiom," Glory Girl replied.
"Well, who exactly is the wizard here?" I said.
"So, when they say a wizard's bark is worse than his bite, is that because the bark is actually spellcasting?"
"I mean, I presume so," I said, as a dozen mosquitos suddenly landed on the tip of my staff.
"Is the blood still good?" I asked.
"For one or two days, last time I tried," Taylor replied.
"Good, that's more than enough time to catch this guy," I said as I grabbed a small plastic bag for Taylor to fly the mosquitoes into. On a whim, I decided to banish one of them, placing them in one of my pocket dimensions. Then, I mumbled a few words, and activated my tracking spell, the pocket dimension insulating it from stray magical energies.
It worked, and I felt a tug on the staff I used to apply my parahuman powers, pulling softly towards the southwest.
"Glory Girl, can you stick with Skitter here for a while? I presume she told you about-"
"Yeah, T here told me about magic," she replied. "Quick question though. Tooth fairy, real or not?"
"Real, and not as nice as you'd think. I mean, she takes your teeth and gives you a pittance in return."
"Santa Claus?"
"Very real, yet somehow also your parents."
"Ghosts? Bigfoot? UFO's? Mandela effect? Lizardpeople?"
"Yes, yes, no, no and yes but they're actually vampires."
"These vampires sparkle?"
"Not really, at least not the ones I'm familiar with."
"Good. I don't think I could've handled sparkling vampires," she said, relieved.
"Anyway, I need to get going, I have a tumor to contain and a Warlock to track down."
"Have you tried asking those tiny fairy guys?"
"Don't need to, I've got his blood."
"You know, I'd love to make a snappy remark here, but I've got nothing. Mind if I get back to you next week?"
"Sure, sounds like a plan," I replied.
I turned to Taylor again, and put my hand back on her shoulder. "Hang in there kiddo, the memory might not go away, but you'll learn to deal with it."
"I'm not sure if I believe that," Taylor said. I left them behind me, and walked back towards the giant tumor. Tecton had already gotten started, and I saw that the police was clearing out a bigger area, within which he was clearing space by strategically smashing buildings apart. Mockshow had decided to do the right thing for once, and was tearing down storefronts and breaking apart warehouses.
"Tecton!" I yelled out.
"Myrddin!" he yelled back as he walked towards me.
"I have a lead on our perp, you think you can take command here?"
Tecton looked around, his gaze passing over the hard-working cops, firefighters and other emergency personnel, all of them working according to the guidelines he'd set out, preparing for some sort of crazy impromptu tinkertech megaproject.
"Yeah, I think I'll manage," he replied.
***
"-so I replied: Do you want salt with that, or did you find your donkey cart?" Ebenezar said.
Revel started laughing, so apparently, it had been a rather funny story. "Reminds me of my time back in New York. I once spend four hours on a patrol before asking my boss why we hadn't been flying," she replied.
"Now this I've got to hear," Ebenezar said.
"Well, it all happened because I was having troubles with my dress," Revel said, already giggling before finishing her story. She must've been in a good mood.
"I'd just graduated from the Wards, and I had the new costume, and it was my first day in New York and, well, I got nervous. Anyway, I was a bit late, so I met up for patrol outside. It was a quiet day, so we just patrolled the length of Broadway and talked about everything and nothing. You know, the type of slow day office talk."
"Sounds recognizeable," Ebenezar said.
"Anyway, near the end of our patrol, there's this busy street we need to pass, but there was some sort of problems with the lights. So I ask her: Why don't we just fly over it? To which she replies-"
"Oh I'm not Alexandria, I just play her in a Musical," I finished her story.
"Wait, so you spend four hours-?"
"Walking around and having a heart-to-heart with Broadway superstar Josephine Villiers," she completed.
"Seems like the best possible outcome to me," Eb joked, and the two of them started laughing again. Which was annoying, because it wasn't even a joke.
"Hoss, how are things on your end?" he then asked, turning to me. I'd found the two of them by tracking down Revel's costume by a piece of string that used to be part of it.
"Good, Tecton has everything under control," I replied.
"I distinctly remember leaving you in charge," Revel said.
"And I used my ample leadership skills to delegate that responsibility to the guy that actually had any idea of what needed to happen," I replied. "Plus, I brought mosquitos." I held out the paper bag of blood-filled Arthropods.
"You know… normal colleagues bring donuts when they show up too late."
"And Hoss here brings solved crimes," Ebenezar said, and I could almost hear the pride in his voice. Of course, any pride in me was completely misplaced, except for the part where I'd done a great job in having an amazing apprentice fall into my hands.
"Mosquitos with blood," I explained, and I could see Revel start understanding what that meant.
"Skitter managed to hurt him," she said, smirking, although there was a darker undertone beneath it. Was she preparing for the upcoming violence?
"Meaning I can lead us right to our guy," I replied.
"Where is he?" she asked.
"Somewhere south of the city, seems like he evacuated the moment things went bad."
"If he's fleeing the city in a car, it could be easy to lose him," Ebenezar said. A grim expression on his face. I knew what he was thinking about.
To track the Warlock, I'd created a thaumaturgical link between the drop of blood in the mosquito, and his body. Then, using the connection between the two, I could feel the pull on the blood in my largely isolated pocket dimension. However, I could also use the link to do other things. Blind him, paralyze him, even kill him if I were inclined to do that. In other words, never let a wizard get his hands on your blood.
"Luckily, my car is faster," I replied.
***
"Dresden, I'll have you know that this is completely against regulation!" Revel yelled as she was being pushed back into the cushions of her seat.
"Luckily, we're going too fast for the cops to catch us!" I replied, pushing the pedal down to the floor.
The Blue Beetle soared over the asphalt, nipping between the larger, seemingly more powerful cars around it. It was rather hilarious to see the other drivers surprised that yes, that was Revel, Myrddin, and another cape in a tiny Volkswagen Beetle soaring down the highway at about a hundred miles an hour.
"First of all, this thing hasn't been tested by anyone!" Revel said.
"Sure it has, we're testing it right now!"
"Plus, there's that damn aura of yours!"
"The internals are so crude, it's pretty close to unbreakable!"
"What do these buttons even do?" she yelled, pointing at the strange tinkertech buttons on the dashboard.
"I'm not quite sure…" I replied, quickly dodging out of the way of a rather bulky truck carrying some sort of flammable chemical in its tank.
"How far out are we?" Ebenezar asked as he was busy with one of the mosquitos, extracting the blood so he could work his magic with it.
"We should be catching up in about five minutes," I said. "Watch it!" I then yelled, as I swiftly swerved around a motorcycle, shaking the three of us in our seats.
"Good, so let's put the finishing touches on our plan."
***
I put my eye on the target, a blue pick-up truck that had seen better days.
"Hexus," I murmured beneath my breath as I launched wild magical energies towards the vehicle. At first, I thought it had failed, but then, large clouds of black smoke started appearing from the exhaust pipe, and from underneath the hood, and from a few other places I didn't know the exact name for.
The driver, our target warlock, started to spin out, flying over the tarmac before stopping in place. Halfway through the spin however, he managed to shoot out a fire-ball, right at the Blue Beetle.
In the split second between seeing its light, and the flames impacting my car, I made my decision, and started wildly pressing buttons.
Then, the Blue Beetle launched itself into the air, right over the fireball.
Because of course Squealer had installed a jumping function in my car. That made sense.
What she hadn't installed, though, was a landing function, and I was very happy about the tight harness that had replaced my seatbelt as the Blue Beetle landed on its side, denting both itself and the road.
When I managed to extricate myself from the seatbelts, I saw that the Warlock had also left his car. He looked Eastern European, at least from what I could see beneath the scabs and bitemarks left behind by Taylor's assault. That girl could be scary when she went all out.
"Myrddin, the guy pretending to be a parahuman," he said.
"Some asshole with self-esteem issues, I presume?" I answered.
The Warlock held on to his staff, a short piece of oak, blackened to near charcoal. Recently, by the smell of it. Had he used it in his ritual when things went wrong?
"The name is Kravos," he replied. "Tell me wizard, does the council know what you're doing here? Have you told them about the parasite in your brain?"
I took out my staff and my blasting wand, and made sure to hold my shielding hand in front of me. This guy had been weak, certainly not council material, but that was before he'd visited the all-you-can-eat people restaurant. Even he probably didn't know exactly how much power he had available to him.
"Tell me Kravos, do you really think they'd let me call myself Myrddin if they didn't know about me?" I said. "If the saying is true, then you must've had idiots for breakfast."
The man's face went dark, darker than it had already been. Behind me, I could hear traffic come to a stop. On the other side of the road however, people were slowing down to watch the cape-fight.
"Forzare!" I yelled out as I launched a punch of pure force at him. He held out his left hand, and I saw a chain of glowing shield bracelets before my force launched itself into his shield.
"I have to say Myrddin, you telling everyone about your equipment has certainly made creating these things easier," he gloated.
Turning my own equipment against me. Turns out there was a negative side to having a devoted internet following that collects everything you do and say.
"Wjerljocht!" Kravos yelled, before launching what appeared to be a lightning bolt at me. Luckily, I had my own shield bracelet, and though it was a heavy impact, it weathered the blow.
"Is that all, you pansy?" I taunted. "No wonder you wanted to be less impotent, though I have to say, most men stick to dick pills!"
"You think you're funny? Huh? You think you stand a chance against me?" Kravos yelled out.
"I think you're a loony," I replied.
"You filthy little-"
"Ventas Servitas!" I yelled out, sending a massive wave of air around the side. Hopefully, He wouldn't see the near-invisible attack coming, and only shield from the front.
Sadly, I was unsuccessful, as the idiot had apparently made his shield a bubble. Sure, it was cool, but it also cost like five times as much energy as just a flat plane.
"Grutte Brân!" he said this time, holding out his staff to create a large ball of fire in front of him, and pumping more and more energy into it to make it larger. Apparently, his plan was to overpower my shield in a single hit.
Which was going to suck, because that fireball looked way too big for me to reliably stop. Not that I wouldn't be able to block it, but the heat it created would burn me even if I stopped all of it, the fire washing around my shield and frying everything in the area.
I took a few steps back, and started pumping enough energy in my shield that it started visually shimmering in the air.
Then, Kravos released his fireball, launching it straight at me, and falling right into my trap.
I dropped my shield, took hold of my staff with both hands, and released my earlier banishment, placing Revel right in the path of the attack.
Before Kravos could do anything about it. Revel caught the fireball with her lantern, and absorbed all of the energy of the attack.
"Surprise!" she said with a smile on her face, launching all of the energy from the fireball, plus whatever she still had stored up, at the warlock.
As the ball of energy flew forward, smashing straight through Kravos's shield, and then into his staff-wielding left arm, I send a small amount of magical energy through half of the plastic bag the mosquito's had been in, giving Ebenezar, who had stayed behind, the signal that our target was distracted.
As Kravos was clutching his shattered arm, Revel flew forward, straight through the shattered shield, and gave him a flying kick to the face. Which wasn't as impressive as it sounded, since she could actually, you know, fly.
The kick threw Kravos to the ground, rolling over the asphalt, clutching his arm.
"You filthy bitch! You have no idea who you're dealing with!" Kravos yelled, and I could see him trying to gather energy in his right arm. Trying, and failing, for Ebenezar had managed to block off his talent using thaumaturgy.
"Who you are? You're just another idiot that thinks he can get away with treating my city as his personal playground!" Revel screamed at him, and I could see her hand moving to her hip, reaching somewhere beneath her kimono.
"Heh, you have absolutely no idea what's happening, do you? That thing out there? It is a beacon, a message to the world. You may have stopped me but-"
Before I could react, Revel's hand appeared from beneath her kimono, holding what looked to be a gun. Seeing it, seeing her with the enemy at her mercy and a gun in her hands, it reminded me of what she'd tried to do to MacFinn, killing someone just for being born with a curse to his name. I sprinted forward, almost falling over in my hurry to reach her, to stop her, when she fired her gun at the guy mid-sentence.
"NO!" I yelled out, dashing to her position.
I saw her, standing there, smiling at her downed opponent. "What the hell is wrong with you?"
She motioned towards the corpse at her feet, and I looked at it, at the tinkertech dart sticking out of the man's neck.
"Tranquilizer you idiot," she replied.
I kept looking at the dart, unsure of what to say. "I thought… I thought you were going to-"
"Kill him? Like I was going to kill the Loup-Garou?" she said.
"Well, it's just…"
"That you were being an idiot? I've killed before, Harry, and if it's the only reliable way of solving a dangerous situation, I will do so again. That doesn't mean I'm some sort of madman with no respect for life." she said, looking at me the way she usually looked at Snaptrap. "Look, I get it, okay, you think killing someone is some sort of unforgivable stain on your soul. Well, newsflash for you, I don't give a shit. If killing someone and staining my own soul is what it takes to keep this city safe, I'll happily do it."
I held my mouth for a second, trying not to put my own foot in my mouth and say something stupid, or attempt to make an inappropriate joke. Revel was angry, probably had been since the Loup-Garou incident a few months back, when I'd disagreed with her judgement, and saved MacFinn's life.
Of course, at the time I objected, I had no reason to believe that killing him hadn't been necessary. Only the freak accident of a shapeshifting wolf triggering had made my choice the right one.
"Furthermore," Revel said, with the same angry look on her face. "I need you to tell me what, exactly, this Council that you were talking about is."
I swallowed. I'd completely forgotten that she'd been able to observe what was happening during the banishment, courtesy of a little modification I'd made to ensure she would be able to jump into action instantly upon returning to the real world.
"Well? I'm waiting here," she said, tapping against her hip with the dart gun.
"The White Council is an organization that has existed, in one way or another, since before the existence of the roman empire," an old man's voice said. Revel and I turned around, only to see that Ebenezar had caught up to us. In the distance, I could see a line of cars that had been forced to stop by the cape-fight in the middle of the highway, and people surrounding those cars. Some of them had phones out, but it was too far away to see.
"It is the largest worldwide organization of wizards, and works as the governing body of the wizard community," he continued. "As such, its main goal is, and has always been, to protect mankind from the abuses of magic."
"Magic? A whole organization of people like you two?" Revel asked, her remaining anger only kept in check by her rampant skepticism.
"That is correct. Magic, not parahuman abilities. If you want, you can perform a brain scan on me, and observe my utter lack of Corona's Pollentia and Gemma," Eb said.
"Except your techbane aura will, of course, interfere with any such scan, just like it would with Myrddin," Revel said. "Not a very good explanation Blackstaff."
"True, although I believe young Tecton found a way to shield tech from the effect," Eb said. "The other option would be to look either of us in the eyes."
Revel took the opportunity, and looked my old teacher straight in the eyes, just like I had done when we first met, and I'd still been reeling from my trigger event, as well as killing Justin.
A soulgaze was, observing from the outside, far less impressive. The two just stood there, and Revel stumbled for a split-second before looking up again.
"I'm guessing you're not entirely wrong then, unless this is another part of your power?"
"It's not, although I understand that it's rather hard to believe. If you want additional proof, just look at my apprentice in the same way, and you'll see the difference between a parahuman and a wizard." Eb replied.
"See the differences? I though you said you were wizards, not parahumans?" Revel asked.
"I'm just a wizard, he's both," Ebenezar replied, and almost directly, I saw Revel turn her head towards me, looking at me with her eyes of steel. Instinctively, I tried to avoid her gaze.
"Look at her Hoss, you owe her that much," Eb said, and I looked back at Revel, losing myself in her determined gaze.
I saw Revel, unmasked and weary, standing in front of me. In one hand, she held a bloody sword. In the other, an unbreakable shield. Behind her stood a terrible crucible, in which her armaments had been forged, while the ground before her was covered in corpses. Behind her, behind the crucible even, far in the distance, I saw her Shard, its slithering tendrils reaching her through her footprints.
Her eyes, her body itself even, looked like it had been forged by that same crucible, although I could see a soft core beneath the hard steel.
I looked at the crucible, and saw a young girl trying to carry the world, trying and failing as the world burned around her. Her failure had been to take too much upon herself. Later, after that, she had remade herself, forged herself into something that, she hoped, would have been strong enough. All so that others wouldn't need to be the girl that she had been. At the same time, she projected that drive of cold steel of hers onto others. I understood why she had reacted to Snaptrap the way she had done. And why she treated me differently. When we first met, I'd been goofing around, acting the way she'd expected one of the Wards to behave. It had been hard for her to categorize me. Thus, she'd decided to simply put up with my idiosyncrasies, chalking it up to trauma from a trigger event.
I returned to a world that was slightly less real than the vision, and saw Revel looking at me, shock in her eyes.
"What… what was that thing?" she asked.
"A Shard," I replied. "Some sort of extradimensional invader that wedged itself into my brain and gave me supernatural abilities."
"You mean I've got?" she said, her eyes turning to panic.
"One just like it? I'm afraid so yes, although yours is less pronounced than most I've seen," Ebenezar said.
Revel closed her eyes, quieting her thoughts, and taking some time to think. I let her, as Ebenezar went to check on the sedated Warlock. After a few minutes, when sirens were appearing in the distance, Ebenezar interrupted her thoughts.
"Before anyone arrives, we need to decide what to do with the Warlock," Ebenezar said.
"What do you mean? He's under arrest, it's up to the judge to decide what's next," Revel said.
"It's not that simple," Ebenezar said. "Like I said, the White Council is there to protect mankind from the abuses of magic. This is done according to the Laws of Magic, and the punishment for breaking the first law, Thou Shallt not Kill with Magic, is usually death."
"Death?" Revel asked.
"To kill, specifically, to kill with magic, it literally stains the soul. Once someone has started doing it, he will do so over and over again, his very essence changing by the nature of the act. That man there, lying on the floor? He won't stop, he'll never stop."
"So we imprison him, let him rot," Revel said.
"Perhaps…" Ebenezar said. "In the past, death was used because it is near impossible to keep a wizard imprisoned against his will, and because redemption is near impossible. With the creation of the birdcage however, he might actually remain locked up."
"Given what he's done, I think a birdcage sentence is definitely a possibility," Revel said. "I presume a sentence there will keep your Council happy?"
"I presume it will, yes,' Ebenezar replied. "But there's the Nevernever to consider."
"Nevernever?"
"Spirit dimension, any practicioner worth the name can open a portal there, that he could use to escape. I mean, unless Dragon created some sort of countermeasure," Ebenezar said.
"No need," I replied.
"Oh?" he asked, seemingly surprised.
"It's not just a prison, it's the prison. Plus, you need to take into account whose control it's under," I explained. "I mean, whose it's really under."
"Glaistig Uaine…" Eb said.
"The girl that calls herself a fairy queen."
"Wait, what does that mean?" Revel asked.
"When you make a portal to the Nevernever, then generally speaking, you'll end up in a place that's metahpysically similar to the place you left. In this case-
"He'd probably end up right in one of Queen Mab's prison cells, which means he'd want to go back to the Birdcage."
"Well, it's worth a try," Eb said.
"Good, then that's dealt with in time," Revel concluded, gesturing to the approaching cops and PRT troopers. "And Myrddin, I need to have a talk with you about that apprentice of yours. She's been breaking my rules."