It was only early evening, but the gathering stormclouds had already blotted out the sun, plunging the city into an early psuedo-night. The rains hadn’t yet begun in earnest, but the light drizzle and the rolling crash of thunder high above promised a serious downpour in the very near future.
Traffic was light. It was the kind of dreary day that encouraged people to keep indoors. Even as I passed through downtown, the folks that were just getting out of work were hurrying home before their nice suits were ruined by unexpected rain, so I made good time as I drove to my meeting with Cilia.
I’ll admit it, I’d had a bit of a freak out. And, yes, maybe I did set a little bit of that field on fire, but I don’t think anyone would argue that I wasn’t fully justified in doing so. Blindly unleashing highly destructive magic was a perfectly sensible response to have in my situation.
If anything, I’d go so far as to say that my actions had been restrained. Whichever of my neighbors owned that field might not agree, but screw him. I’m a sorceress, I do what I want.
First of all, how in the bluest hell was Princess Celestia’s analogue here, in this time period? Princess Celestia had been born before Equestria had even figured out how to make parchment. She’d always been real vague about how old she was, but all her biographers agreed that she was at least two-thousand years old. So shouldn’t her double have been born thousands of years ago in some cave, or a pyramid, or something?
Though, thinking about it rationally, I did know for a fact that human-world analogues weren’t always the same – Twilight being eight years old in this world was a pretty good example of that – so maybe it wasn’t too far-fetched that a linked-pair could be born centuries, even millennia, apart.
But then there was this business of Celestia having a sister in this world. Not only that she had a sister, but said sister had been wagging her tight little booty in my face pretty much nonstop since we’d met.
Let’s not even mention the fact that this Celestia was friends with the father of this world’s Twilight Sparkle.
The more I thought about that, the more I thought Fiddler had been right about the complexity of the mechanics of interdimensional physics. This stuff was too wiggy for me, and it was probably best not to ruminate on it for too long.
I stopped at a red light and rubbed at my eyes until I was seeing spots, trying to get at the painful knot that was growing in my skull with every heartbeat, like the blood pressure equivalent of a snowball rolling downhill. I could already tell that this headache was going to get a lot worse before it got any better. All I could do was try to put this goddamned insanity out of mind and just focus on the stuff that might get someone killed.
I pulled down the visor and a pack of cigarettes fell into my open hand. I’d quit smoking a while ago, but I think I deserved to dip into my stash for an emergency fix. I put one between my lips and pressed the knob for the lighter in the ashtray. Judas Priest came on the radio and I turned it up obnoxiously loud as I waited for the light to change.
It did, and I drove on, drumming along on the steering wheel and bobbing my head as I let the power of classic rock shove all the unnecessary thoughts out of my mind. Sometimes I might let myself down, but a fat bassline and a sweet guitar riff never would. A hollow, mechanical ding cut through the music and I rolled down the window just a crack before I lit up. I wanted a smoke, but that didn’t mean I wanted that smell in the upholstery.
Doped up on nicotine and good music, I was feeling a bit more like myself by the time I got to the meeting spot. Canterlot City was a big place, not quite New York City big, but it was old enough that a few decades of development meant that the city had outgrown some of the older neighborhoods. These poorer areas were the wrinkles that showed the age of the city. They were little nooks and crannies in its flawless metropolitan facade – shadowy crevices that people could crawl into and get lost in.
Nightriver Park was one of those old left-behind neighborhoods. The aged brownstone apartments and graffitied storefronts were the homes and businesses of families that walked the poverty line like a tightrope. It wasn’t a dangerous neighborhood, like what you’d see in TV dramas about inner-city turf wars, but the people who lived here were were too preoccupied with just trying to get by to notice the weird street kids that always seemed to be hanging around, which made it a good place for the changelings to set up shop.
It was about as far away from the fancy neighborhood that Night Light had lived in as you could get, even despite the fact that it wasn’t even a twenty minute drive away. That’s one of the things I liked about really big human cities – the dozens of little biomes that popped up right next to one another, sometimes separated by little more than line of abandoned rail track or a concrete aqueduct. It was the kind of contrast you never really saw in Equestria. Not even in our biggest cities like Manehattan.
At the center of the neighborhood was the actual park that Nightriver Park was named after. The place was deserted, all the kids having been called in by their parents as the sun set and the rains started falling more heavily. There was one kid, though, that hadn’t been frightened off by inclement weather and shrill parental threats. She looked about eleven years old, pretty, with two long plaited braids of chestnut-brown hair that hung all the way to behind her knees. She was dressed in baggy, mismatched clothes that were clearly salvaged from a donation bin – the uniform of Canterlot City’s street kids.
The girl was half-seated, arms crossed impatiently, and leaning on one of the playground’s riding toys – a cartoon ducky with chipped and faded yellow paint that sat atop a rusted industrial-sized spring. She watched as I pulled into the lot, then walked over, not caring if she stepped through the puddles.
I killed the engine, unlocked the passenger door, and pressed the button for the lighter again. Even before I'd quit, I always tried to limit myself to one a day, even if I was really stressing about something, but this was turning out to be one of those days where one cigarette just wasn’t going to do the trick.
The girl got into the car, her clothes completely dry despite the fact that she’d just been sitting out in the rain for who knows how long. She looked at me and tilted her head curiously, her brows furrowing as she regarded me with a harsh glare. Her nose twitched as she sniffed the air, and she reached over to turn down the radio so we could actually have a discussion.
“Smoking is an ugly habit,” Cilia said.
I took an extra long drag and blew it out the crack in the window. I flicked the ash out after the smoke and waved the cigarette at her. “That your way of asking for one?”
“Hardly,” she said with a scoff. “Why do you smell like love?”
“A girl rubbed her pheromones all over me,” I said airily. I frowned. “Clavus commented on it, too. Is it so surprising?”
“You are a famously unlovable woman.”
“Takes one to know one,” I replied, childishly lobbing back the insult like we were a couple of schoolyard brats. “You going to tell me what’s so important you couldn’t say it over the phone?”
Cilia sniffed the air and stared at me for a moment longer before continuing. I got the sense that she wanted to say more, but whatever it was, she must've deemed it unimportant. “Uncle Clavus has told me about the hornet’s nest you’ve foolishly stuck your hand into. He’s done some digging on your behalf, and he told me to relay his worries for the safety of the humans you’ve taken under your wing. Whatever precautions you have taken on their behalf, you should double them. They’re probably in very grave danger. He says you’re often thickheaded, and wished for me to have this meeting in person so that I might impress upon you the severity of the matter.”
“A little late for that,” I said with a click of my tongue. “Necromancer got ahold of Night Light and his family already.”
“Oh… oh dear,” Cilia said. She chewed her lower lip cutely, an action that fit her appearance, but was disturbingly out of sync with what I knew of her personality. “When did this happen?”
“The other night,” I answered. My stomach juices started to curdle a bit as my mind went back to the events of that night, the pearl of guilt waxing in my gut as I recalled what had been left of Night and his wife and son. “I know you keep your ear open to human news, so I’m sure you heard about that family that burned up in their home.”
She nodded. “Knowing you as I do, I can only assume that you were the cause of the fire.”
I grunted an affirmative.
Cilia leaned back against the seat, resting her arm up on the door and drumming her fingers thoughtfully. “Not to be crass, but this does seem to end your involvement in the matter.”
“Hardly,” I said. I took one last drag on my cigarette and flicked it out the window, letting the rain snuff the flame for me. I decided to leave the window cracked. It was cold, but I still liked the breeze and the smell of wet dirt on a rainy night. “I got there in time to save the daughter. Eight years old, practically hiding under her brother’s corpse while I was fighting.”
Cilia’s fingers stopped. I could already see the gears turning in her head as she glared sideways at me. “She would be at your home then?” At my nod, Cilia sighed and rubbed at her face as though she was feeling very tired. “Thus your hesitance to leave your house… My apologies, but it was unavoidable. I was also quite rude to you over the phone. I apologize for that as well. This has been a very wearisome day, but that's no reason to be discourteous.”
“It’s fine,” I said. I patted myself down, checking the pockets of my jacket to see if I had any gum. The aftertaste of cigarettes was always my least favorite part of smoking. “Kid’s under my wards and I got a babysitter who knows enough to not let her leave the house. Still, we should probably hurry this along. I’m getting a little antsy leaving her out of my sight.”
I dug around in the breast pocket of my jacket lining and found a half-squished, unopened pack of chiclets – you know, those little square gums that you get out of a plastic jar for a dime at a bodega. I opened the packet and popped a couple of pieces into my mouth. There wasn’t a lot of meat in the tiny candies, but it helped with the smokey taste and the urge to have a third cigarette. I offered what was left to Cilia, who hesitated for a moment but accepted the treat with a thankful nod.
“That’s uncharacteristically wise of you,” she said as she chewed her gum. “To the matter at hand, though. My esteemed uncle reached out to another uncle that lives out of town. I don’t know his name, but apparently he is not overly fond of modern conveniences, so the exchange was done via carrier bird.”
“What, like pigeons?” I asked.
“Exactly like pigeons.” Cilia lifted off the seat a bit and reached into her back pocket. She had a bit of paper torn off the corner of a yellow legal pad and rolled into a little tube that, presumably, fit around a pigeon’s leg. She unrolled it and checked the contents before handing it over to me. “This is what was sent back.”
I’d been hoping that this changeling expert of Clavus’ would send back a nice big explanation, or at least a book or something. I stared at the offered scrap of paper, hoping that she could see the disappointment on my face, because I was being disappointed as hard as I could. Still, you know what they say about beggars and choosers.
The limitations of pigeongrams showed themselves in the only two bits of info on the little note. On one side of the paper was a symbol – an oval with a line bisecting it down the center, the ends of the line curling into themselves in opposing directions. It was an annotation for spellwork, a shorthand that signified the category of a spell. This particular signifier could be commonly read as ‘Curse’. I flipped the paper around, and written in large, looping cursive that barely fit on the paper, was a name.
At least, I think it was a name.
“Tlaloc?” I frowned at the unfamiliar word, rolling around the feel of it in my mouth. I recalled what Clavus had said about the symbol I’d pulled off of Night Light being Central American, and added a little Latin flair as I repeated the name more slowly, really leaning into the syllables. “Tla-loc… That a name?”
“It’s most definitely a name. I looked into it, but all I could find was that he was a major figure amongst the deities of Central America.” Cilia leaned towards the door, tilting her head to look up into the sky through the rivulets of rain water streaking down the window. “What I can say, however, is that he was a god of storms.”
A rain god, huh? It certainly explained the odd weather. Spring showers weren’t too uncommon, but the rain seemed to have popped up out of nowhere. Actually, that had happened a couple of times this month. There were no overcast days, or clouds blowing in from over the horizon. You’d just blink and suddenly find that the sky had darkened over your head, filling with billowing gray clouds in less time than it took to boil a kettle of tea. I hadn’t thought much about it, but now that it was pointed out to me, it did seem a little odd. Plus, that definitely fit the timeline of when Night Light said he first started getting the feeling he was being watched.
I rolled up the window, closing the little crack I’d been blowing smoke out of earlier and cutting myself off from the rains. The shower had finally begun picking up, spattering against the all-steel body of my car with sinister little pings that reverberated in my ears with the weight of threats now that I knew there was a rain god in the mix.
“A curse powered by a rain god.” I shook my head sadly. “Night Light, just what the hell did you do to piss off someone like this?”
“I believe the better question is, what are you going to do about it?” asked Cilia. “Revenge, perhaps?”
“Maybe, if that’s what’s for the best,” I said with a shrug. “I'll be honest, I would like a little payback, but if the best move is to batten down the hatches and build up my wizard's tower, then that's what I'll do. The important thing is keeping what's left of my promise to Night Light and keeping Twilight safe. If I can do that without a fight, that's what I'll do.”
Cilia stroked her chin in thought. “What would be your thinking, then? That the cruel fellow might simply walk away since the damage has been done?”
I shrugged again. “I can only hope. There's no predicting what the guy might do. The kind of people that gravitate towards this sort of magic are the sort of people the True Crime channel devotes entire mini-series to – pervos that grew up butchering the neighbor’s cats until they were old enough to move onto human prey.”
“The unbalanced,” Cilia said in summation.
“The straight up cocoa puffs,” I said with a nod. “If he walked away right now that’d suit me just fine. The only thing that matters is Twilight’s safety, and if I start trading hands with another – possibly deranged – wizard, I might not be able to keep her out of harm’s way.”
“You may not have a choice in the matter,” Cilia explained with a slow shake of her head. “There are things in the shadows, stalking our streets. Wild, malicious spirits that would rarely dare to enter this deep into a human city have been reported to me by my changelings. Unless I’m greatly mistaken, I believe it must be the influence of this necromancer of yours. Trouble might find its way to your doorstep, whether you like it or not.”
I frowned at that.
I hadn’t noticed any odd spirits in town, but then again I wasn’t looking for any. The changelings were sharp, and way more sensitive to changes in their environment than I was. If they were catching wind of something nasty, I had no reason to distrust that. Certain kinds of spirits – bad ones – tended to be attracted to certain kinds of magic. A high-level necromancer plying his craft would definitely kick up the spookies.
Still, I didn’t see how it was anything to worry about. In a few weeks the aura of nasty magic attracting the spirits would disperse, and they would scatter to the winds again. Evil spirits had no chance of getting past the kind of wards I was keeping, so all I had to do was wait it out.
"That's interesting, I guess," I muttered. “Has anyone gotten hurt?”
“You would believe so, but no,” Cilia said. “The spirits are behaving strangely. They are not partaking in mischief, nor tormenting the living. No harm has come to anyone, no property has been damaged senselessly – nothing.”
“So the spirits are just… what?” I asked in disbelief. What Cilia said wasn’t making any sense. “They’re just hanging around?”
“They appear to be searching for something.”
My blood ran cold. “When exactly did this start?”
The look in Cilia’s eyes went hard, and she said, in a tone as gravely serious as a funeral dirge, “Two nights ago.”
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath.
That certainly put a kink in my plans of crawling into a hole and waiting for the storm to blow over. From what Cilia was telling me, necro-boy was on the hunt for something, and he had a whole pack of spirits as his smell-hounds. Twilight definitely wasn’t off the hook yet. Whatever this necromancer’s goals were, they hadn’t been met by killing just Night Light.
His family hadn’t gotten in the way of this jerkhole’s game, they’d been a part of it all along.
But then why had Twilight been left alive in the first place? Assuming now that the goal was to wipe out Night Light’s whole family, it didn’t make any sense that Twilight could have made it long enough for me to come to her rescue. A flesh golem with instructions to wipe out the whole family definitely would’ve been able to sniff out one of its targets cowering in a closet. Three-inches of hollow plywood door wouldn’t keep a monster like that fooled for long, not even with her brother outside fighting like hell to keep it distracted.
“You will need to exercise the greatest of caution moving forward, Sunset Shimmer,” Cilia said. “They are almost assuredly looking for this child.”
“I know,” I said with a groan as I slumped forward. I pressed my forehead against the steering wheel and banged it a few times in frustration.
“Uncle Clavus is fond of a certain human saying – ‘When it rains, it pours’.” She rapped her knuckles softly against the passenger side window. “Seems rather apt, occurrences being what they are.”
“Where is Clavus, anyway?” I asked as I straightened up. Cilia was a smart cookie, with a wealth of experience, but if the stakes were this high then I needed the big cheese. There was no substituting for the knowledge and experience the old guy could bring to the table, and if I was going to tangle with someone that was being backed by a major power, then I wanted all the help I could get – within reason.
Cilia crossed her arms, turning her head away shyly – another of those oddly little-girlesque gestures that was out of place with her actual age. Even after knowing her for years, I still had trouble discerning if those little quirks were natural, or if she’d just spent so long impersonating a human child that she did it without thinking. Could have been a bit of both. You spend long enough playing a part, the act becomes a part of you.
“Gone,” she said. “There was another note along with the one for you. He would not disclose its contents to me, but he seemed agitated. He said he needed to look into some matter or another personally.”
“Related to this?” I asked hopefully. Clavus wasn’t one to be easily shook, but if anything was going to do it, it’d be someone running around in this city with old-time god magic in his corner.
“Most likely.”
“Guess he’ll turn up, then,” I said with a sigh.
Cilia nodded in agreement. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid this is the most help I can offer at the moment. I’ve called the youngest of my nieces and nephews back to the nest, so I’m afraid our information network might be somewhat lacking until the matters at hand are resolved to my satisfaction.”
While it was disappointing to hear that I might not be able to rely on the changelings for info, I understood where they were coming from. Changelings were pretty good at keeping under the radar, but except for really old ones like Cilia and Clavus, they weren’t too dangerous in a fight. And while they hadn’t been targeted, it definitely paid to be cautious while a necromancer was on the loose. A wizard with the right kind of training could do an awful lot with the remains of a dead changeling – especially a wizard that specialized in screwing around with corpses.
Hell, even I could get some good use out of one, but I wasn’t about to cut the pancreas out of a changeling just to make a cheap transfiguration elixir. I liked these guys, and they liked me.
“No worries, do what you gotta do,” I said. “You guy guys need to take care of yourselves. I’d hate to hear that any of your kids got snatched for their magic.”
“As would I,” Cilia said as she rubbed tiredly at her face. “I have many nieces and nephews in this city, and it’s not been easy making sure they’re all accounted for. I am very much looking forward to a good night of rest.”
“I don’t envy the responsibility you shoulder, Cilia,” I said. “Thanks for meeting with me, go get some sleep. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you guys on your end.”
“I dare say you’ll be busy enough with your own responsibilities, so hopefully it won’t come to that,” Cilia said. “Good luck.”
Cilia reached for the door handle and made to leave. I was already reaching for the ignition when I noticed that she’d frozen halfway through the motion. She pulled back, folding her hands in her lap and looking up at me with a curious tilt of her head. The bridge of her nose wrinkled as she frowned at me with her eyes in a way that showed every second of her age. It was the scrutinizing look of someone who’d seen a lot in life – enough to become starved for new experiences – and had just caught sight of something intriguing.
“Actually, there is one more thing I would like to ask,” she began. “The girl you’ve taken in… what’s her name?”
I raised an eyebrow at that. “That's definitely not what I was expecting you to ask. Does it matter to you?”
“Not particularly,” Cilia said, lifting her hands in a lazily dismissive gesture that barely qualified as a shrug. "It's simple curiosity.”
“Twilight Sparkle,” I answered.
Cilia nodded and turned her head to stare sedately out the window. “Does she have other family?”
“Not really, no,” I said. "None that would take her in, if that's what you're driving towards."
“I see,” Cilia muttered. She took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “Eight years old, you said, and already alone… That’s very sad.”
“That’s a weird sentiment coming from a changeling.” I propped my elbow up on the door to rest my cheek against my hand as I smirked at her. “Didn’t you guys used to steal babies from their parents?”
It wasn’t an insult, just a statement of fact, and I knew it would take more than that to get under Cilia’s skin.
Cilia repeated the little hand-shrug. “I shan’t deny it, there was indeed a time when we made off with children, so as to create a place for our youngest to be nurtured… However, we’re not the same as we were in those days. My changelings now mingle with the homeless and destitute in this city. Humans with dark pasts and bleak futures, filled with distrust even as they desperately cling to one another with what love is left in their hearts.”
Cilia laced her fingers over her head and stretched with almost feline laziness, moaning in satisfaction as she did. She didn’t weigh ninety pounds sopping wet, but the hinges of the passenger seat squealed as she pressed what little weight she had against the back. It was an off-handed reminder of how strong, and how inhuman, she really was. It brought to mind the time that I saw her casually break a grown man’s wrist with one hand for harassing one of her nieces.
“My kind have been impersonating humans since the dawn of humanity,” she continued, “but I believe that we never understood them so well as we have since the day we stopped stealing their lives. Personally, I rather like humans, as more than simply a source of food. I find them interesting. So, yes, I can feel for them, and I can feel sorrow and sympathy for a child with so woeful a circumstance.”
“Where’s all this coming from?” I asked. “You’re not usually so…”
I trailed off, at a loss for how to end that sentence.
Cilia and I have always had a complicated relationship. It was one of those up-and-down things that was more up than down, most of the time. I definitely wouldn’t ever call her a friend – not the way Clavus was a friend – but even when we annoyed one another there was a sense of respect, and a part of that respect was that we naturally afforded one another a bit of emotional distance. It was vaguely uncomfortable to see her so unguarded. It was a little like walking in on her in the shower.
“I’m unsure,” Cilia said, frowning. “Perhaps I’m sympathizing with you as much as with Twilight Sparkle.”
“Why would you be sympathizing with me?” I asked, confusion creasing my brow. “I didn’t lose anyone.”
She frowned at me, like she wasn’t sure if I was being intentionally thick or not. “May I ask what you plan to do with the child after you’ve secured her life?”
“I dunno,” I answered truthfully. Twilight had asked me the same thing the night before, but I hadn’t had an answer for her then, and I didn’t have one for Cilia now.
Cilia slumped in her seat and pulled one of her long braids into her lap. She toyed with her hair and sighed. It was a sound so loud and so tired that it was almost a moan – the sound of someone putting down a heavy burden.
“You wouldn’t know this, but before I met Uncle Clavus,” Cilia began, “the oldest changeling I’d ever known was my Aunt Costa. She starved, and then the oldest changeling I knew was my Aunt Gossamer… two years later she also starved. On and on like that, until eventually… I had no more uncles, no more aunts… I was the aunt, and before I knew it the little ones were looking to me for guidance and protection.”
She looked up from her lap and gave me a look that might have been apologetic. “I can’t tell you what you should do with this child, that’s a choice that only you can make. What can I say, though, is that at this moment you are the only one looking out for her welfare. That is why I sympathize with you. I understand what it’s like to live your life selfishly, and to suddenly find yourself responsible for the life of another. Most wouldn’t understand unless they were in our position, but when you hold the life of a young one in the palm of your hand, you can’t help but wonder to yourself how something so fragile can feel so heavy.”
Cilia opened the door and stepped into the rain. She leaned down and poked her head back into the car to add, “Good luck to you, whatever you choose to do. Stay safe and keep in touch. I shall let you know when Uncle Clavus has returned.”
She closed the door and jogged off, skipping through the puddles with disconcertingly girlish abandon, her pigtails trailing behind her as the night swallowed her up. I sat for a while, listening to the pings and thonks of the rain hitting my car.
Within minutes I was already sick of the noise, so I cranked up the radio just loud enough that I wouldn’t have to hear the rain anymore. I turned the ignition key and Philomena purred for me. It was getting late and I was eager to get home.
* * *
I’ve always loved the rain. Back in Equestria, the weather was controlled by schedules drafted by local Weather Patrol managers and approved by the Cloudsdale Weather Commission. I’d never known anything different, but after coming to the human world, I’d come to realize that making something efficient and reliable didn’t necessarily make it better.
Pegasus magic had taken control of one nature’s most amazing systems and leashed it with red tape, choking it into submission with bureaucracy. It’s one of the few cases where magic took the magic out of something.
Earth rain wasn’t like that. The weather, like the sun and the moon here, had its own rhythm. I’d studied a bit about meteorology once, just as a matter of curiosity. I understood the concept of low and high-pressure systems, the way temperature differences between the arctic and the tropics created wind and weather – but there’s still something magical in magic-less weather. There’s an unpredictability in it that I just find beautiful, and the feeling of cold water falling unexpectedly from the sky and onto my bare skin always put a smile on my face. It made me feel clean, like I was really a part of this world.
But this rain wasn’t normal. I could feel it, now that I knew what to look for, this slight tingle of magic in every droplet. It was so small that I wouldn’t have even noticed it if I hadn’t been looking, but as I stood in my garage and held my hand out to the rain, I knew this wasn’t natural.
I pulled my hand back and shook it off, drying it against my jeans as I leaned against Philomena’s trunk. It had been raining when Night Light had died, too. An unexpected storm, the newscasters had called it. It was a point of curiosity that had been overshadowed by the tragedy of a family burning to death in what was now being called an electrical fire.
I knew better, though. The rain was being caused by Tlaloc’s power. My death magic wielding counterpart had obviously had some kind of contract allowing him to use Tlaloc’s rain magic for his personal hoodoo. It was probably how he was making those constructs. The second one I’d destroyed, the one that had been at Night Light’s place, had been quite a bit stronger than the first. The rain that night was most likely a side effect of pumping more of Tlaloc’s magic into it. And now that the other guy was using that power to command a bunch of spirits to search for something – that something almost certainly being Twilight – the rain magic was playing havoc on the skies.
Normally I’d love this kind of weather, but I couldn’t enjoy it knowing what was causing it. It was just magic taking the magic out of something I loved.
I pushed off the car and opened the trunk. It hadn’t occurred to me until I was already half way home, but if Twilight was going to stay holed up inside my house, she was going to need a few necessities. As much as I wanted to get home, I knew it was better to get the shopping out of the way while Luna was there to keep an eye on her.
I gathered up the bags and shut the garage door on my way out. My stomach was already growling. Hopefully Twilight and Luna had left me something to eat.
There was a little white economy class car in my driveway that I hadn’t noticed when I’d left – on account of, you know, the unpleasantness – and it had been a surprise to see it as I’d pulled up. It had taken me a second or two to realize that it was probably Luna’s car. I probably should’ve guessed that she wouldn’t have walked all the way out to my house in the sub-suburbs – not in pants that tight, anyway.
I stood on the porch, shaking off what moisture had stuck to me on the walk from garage. It was coming down in sheets now, and I’d gotten fairly soaked without even trying. I shook out my hair a few times and made sure nothing in my bags had gotten wet before unlocking the door and going inside. As soon as I stepped over my threshold I could feel the wards in my house welcoming me home. It was warm, like stepping into a heated room after being out in the snow.
I don’t know why, but I’d half expected Twilight to come running around the corner to shout at me for taking so long, and I was oddly disappointed that she hadn’t. I locked the door and followed the sound of cartoonish mayhem into the living room.
Luna was on the couch, smiling in relief as I stepped into the room. Twilight was curled up next to her, asleep, her head in the older girl’s lap like a big housecat. Luna must have gotten her clothes out of the dryer, because Twilight was in those magical girl pajamas again. Luna grabbed the remote off the armrest and muted the television, cutting off the sounds of cat-on-mouse, mouse-on-cat domestic violence.
“Welcome home,” Luna said, smiling beatifically.
I was stunned for a moment by the surrealism of the scene. I’d lived alone pretty much my whole life, except for the times when I was living with one teacher or another by Fiddler’s arrangement. Nobody had ever welcomed me home before.
It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was… alien.
I gave myself a mental slap and nodded, trying not to betray how affected I was by the mundane greeting. “Hey,” I said simply. I nodded towards the girl sleeping in her lap. “How was she?”
“Grumpy,” Luna said. She placed a hand on Twilight’s head, smoothing out her hair. “She was worried about you. She wanted to stay up and wait for you to come home, but I think she tired herself out being mad that you made her stay behind.”
“Sorry.” I lifted the bags, showing off my purchases. “Meeting took a little longer than I expected it would. Then I stopped at the Barnyard Bargains on the way home to pick up some stuff for her. The lines there are always crazy, even late at night.”
“Clothes?” Luna asked, eyeing one of the bags. It was thin enough that you could see the colored fabric through the plastic.
I nodded. “I got her size earlier when I threw her pajamas in the wash. Got some other stuff, too. Toothbrush, no-tears shampoo, apple juice, box of stickers, some coloring crayons… eight-year-old girls like stickers and crayons, right?”
Luna tittered softly. “Yeah, they do.”
I set the bags down and slipped off my jacket, tossing it over the back of the couch as I made a beeline for the kitchen. An extra-large pizza box was on the table. One corner of the lid was up, letting all the heat out of the box. I opened it up and found the pizza already at room temperature, the grease from the cheese and various meats already congealing into a rubbery paste – just the way I liked it. There was only one pizza place that was close enough to deliver to my house, and it wasn’t that great, but the owners were nice and they never skimped on the toppings.
I went to the fridge to grab a coke and had a seat at the table to tuck into dinner.
“You’re not going to use a plate?” Luna asked as she walked into the kitchen.
I concentrated on the pizza so I wouldn’t have to watch the sway of her hips as she walked around the table to sit in the other chair.
“Plate’ll only slow me down,” I said between bites.
Luna sat silently, her head turned like she was looking out the kitchen window at the rain. I could tell that she wasn’t really watching the rain. Every now and again I’d look up to find her sneaking little glances at me out the corner of her eye.
I sighed and grabbed my third slice. “Just ask what you’re going to ask,” I said.
She fixed me with a soft, worried look. “What happened?”
“That’s a pretty broad question,” I said. “Do you mean tonight, or in general?”
“Both, I guess,” she said. A lock of her long hair had fallen over her shoulder, and she toyed with it unsuredly, twirling it around her fingers and smoothing it out almost compulsively. “I don’t really understand how this whole thing started. I mean… why? I just want to understand why that beautiful little girl had to lose her family.”
I probably should have told Luna to mind her business. I should have thanked her for watching Twilight, gave her whatever I had left in my wallet after my shopping spree as a babysitting fee, and send her home.
I should have told her that the truth doesn’t always set you free, that sometimes it just scares the life out of you with how utterly powerless you are.
But I didn’t. I knew what it was like to need to know something so badly that you’d let a part of your innocence die. Not because the knowledge would do you any good, but because the idea of remaining ignorant was unthinkable.
I told Luna about how Night Light had come to find me. How he’d been branded with some weird magic that I’m only just scratching the surface of understanding, and how we’d gone to the school that night looking for clues as to what had attacked him.
I skipped over the gorier details of what had happened in Twilight’s house before the fire, but what little I did describe left Luna looking a bit peaky. I also decided that she didn’t need to know anything more about the changelings than Clavus and Cilia’s names – like I’ve said before, my shapeshifter friends like keeping a low profile.
The whole time Luna just sat there, listening intently. The story didn’t take as long to tell as I thought it would. Still, I managed to polish off two more slices as I talked. All this stress eating was going to go to my hips.
Luna didn’t say anything for the longest time and neither did I. There was nothing more to say at that point, and all that was left was for her to try and digest everything I’d just dumped on her. The room lit up as lightning flashed outside, and half a second later thunder shook the windows in their frames.
I got out of my chair and popped my head into the living room to check on the kid. I’d kept my voice down so we wouldn’t wake her, but the thunder wouldn’t be so courteous. I sure didn’t want Twilight waking up and listening in on our conversation. Luckily, Twilight was still fast asleep, curled up on the couch where Luna had left her.
Luna was still staring out the window when I got back, a complicated look on her face that might have been a mixture of revulsion, sadness, pity, and fear. Thunder rang out again, and her eyes flinched at the sound.
Retelling the story had been harder than I’d thought it would be. Laying out the details of the misadventure like that, I could see every misstep I’d taken, and all the little ways I could have prevented the bad end that had come for Night Light. It was all the harder because I was telling it to Luna, who knew Night Light for much longer than I did.
It didn’t help that I was so attracted to her. That shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. When someone catches your eye you only want to show them the best of yourself, but here we were in my kitchen, and I was laying bare my failures while she watched me stuff my face with greasy pizza like a pig.
I busied myself toying with the toppings that had fallen off the pie, rolling the loose sausages over the olives at the bottom of the box like matchbox cars. I popped a few in my mouth, not because I was still hungry, but because it gave me anything to do that wasn’t looking at Luna – because it gave me anything to think about that wasn’t this uncomfortable conversation.
“I hate this,” Luna said, so quietly that I almost missed it under the sound of howling winds spattering rain against the windows. “I hate it so much.”
“It’s not great, no,” I said in agreement. I shut the box and pushed it away.
“What kind of person would just…” Luna’s beautiful face screwed up in disgust. “...would just kill a whole family like it was nothing?”
“A sorcerer,” I said simply. I got up and went to the sink to rinse the grease off my hands. “People turn to magic for lots of reasons. Money, power, sex, the pure joy of learning, some combination of the above. Whatever your reason for picking it up, eventually magic becomes your whole world, and everything else – even human life – becomes cheap and disposable. You start thinking you’re above mortal constraints. Things like morality, law, common goddamned decency – it all goes out the window. Sorcerers are like children. Children with immense and deadly power, but still children. If you want something, you take it. If someone crosses you, you cross them out. Easy as that.”
“You’re not like that,” Luna said.
It was a simple statement, born of ignorance and optimism. It came from a girl who clearly had a crush on me and was only seeing the best of my actions, but it still shook me a little, the fact that I couldn’t live up to that optimistic, innocent perception of me that she had.
I wasn’t good and that was a fact. Good people don’t sell their souls to the first demon that buys them a stack of pancakes.
“Every sorcerer is like that,” I said bitterly. I shut off the water and dried my hands with a dish towel. “Some of us just get tired of it.” I hopped up to sit on the counter next to the sink. “That’s why I live my life tricking rubes out of their money with card readings and seances. I love magic, but I don’t want to be a part of that world anymore. I just want to be… I want be normal. Or at least as close to it as I can get.”
I hung my head in shame. I didn’t have the strength in me to meet Luna’s eyes, for fear of what I might see.
You know how I spent my Sweet-Sixteen? Living in a cave with an evil medicine man on a Navajo reservation. I’d read about skinwalkers in a book, and I’d asked Fiddler to arrange for me to meet one. The meeting had turned into a summer-long apprenticeship, wherein I got to spend three sweaty months listening to Shouts-When-He-Whispers expounding on the nastiest, darkest magic he knew. It turned my stomach to hear about the things he threw into his brews, but I sat there and I listened and I was glad to learn, because it meant broadening my understanding of how magic worked in this world.
By the end of that summer I’d learned some of his skills. I could even put on a coyote’s skin and become that animal, or wear the feathers of a crow and fly through the air like a bird – but in the end all it amounted to was academics. The magic I’d learned from him didn’t even work unless I was standing on the lands of his people. That didn’t matter to me, though, because I’d learned something new. That was the only thing I’d ever cared about.
I couldn’t tell that to Luna. She wouldn’t understand. A lot of the time even I couldn’t understand why I was the way I was.
“Look at me,” Luna said.
I didn’t. I just sat there on the counter, staring down at the hardwood. I didn’t want to see the look in her eyes. If the softness in her voice was pity, it would hurt, and if it was acceptance, that would hurt even more.
I heard the sound of a chair scraping against the hardwood floor, and the soft whisper of Luna’s denim-clad thighs lightly brushing together as she walked over to where I was brooding. I didn’t look up until I felt her hand against my shoulder. I tried to turn away, but her other hand found my cheek and gently urged me to face her.
“You’re not like that,” Luna repeated, her voice ringing with so much sincerity that I almost bought it. “I refuse to believe it.”
“You don’t know me well enough to say that. I was going to turn Night Light away. If he hadn’t gotten on his knees and begged me, I would’ve left him out to dry.”
I tried to pull away again, but Luna’s soft hands held fast, like iron wrapped in silk.
“But you didn’t,” she said.
“But I wanted to,” I said, insistently. I was pleading, for some reason, for her to understand that I wasn’t a good person. “I just wanted to be left alone.”
“You saved Twilight. Brought her somewhere safe.”
“Because I had to,” I replied. “I promised Night Light I’d keep his kids safe. I wasn’t going to just let her burn up.”
The hand on my shoulder slid down, along my arm, tracing a line across my thigh and coming to rest on my knee. Luna applied just enough pressure to the inside of my knee to push my leg aside, and I didn’t resist. My legs out of the way, she stepped closer, her hand stroking my hip.
“And a promise like that matters to you,” she said breathily as she closed the distance, “because deep down inside, you’re a good person, even if you don’t believe it. Someone who thinks she’s above human morality wouldn’t have bothered to keep a promise to a stranger. You wouldn’t have even been there that night.”
For the second time since I’d met this girl, she kissed me. Her lips were soft as I remembered, and flavored with some kind of cherry lip gloss. My own mouth probably tasted like greasy cheese and cured meats, but if the enthusiasm with which Luna was leaning into the kiss was any indication, she didn’t care.
There was something wonderful about the way Luna kissed. The first time she’d made a move on me, back when we were sitting in my car, still high on adrenaline and danger, I’d gotten the sense that she wasn’t all that experienced. I was still getting that sense, but there was a sort of desperate enthusiasm that more than made up for the lack of familiarity with the act. I was the subject of her experimentation as she licked and nibbled her way through the kiss, and I was having fun being her guinea pig, even as she was jabbing her tongue into my mouth with the subtlety of a freight train.
The all-consuming sound of falling rain and crashing thunder faded away, drowning as my senses honed in on every sound and scent and taste that Luna was offering them. I could only hear the sound of her breathing, all I could taste was her lips. The potency of Luna’s perfume had waned over the course of the day, but the last of its legs had mingled with her natural scent – the smell of her skin and her sweat, the smell of a woman at the end of the day. It called to me like a promise, drawing me nearer, making want to drink in more of her.
And then, all at once, the moment died. Sense returned to me in the form of Princess Celestia’s disapproving voice calling my name, like I’d just gotten caught with my hoof in her private cookie jar – the one she kept hidden behind the painting above her mantle.
I jerked away from the kiss and in my endorphin-drunk stupor I leaned too far back, smacking the back of my head against a cabinet. The glassware inside rattled and I let loose a curse that was loud enough that I was worried I might have woken Twilight. I rubbed at the goose-egg that was growing on the back of my skull with the hand that had just seconds ago been under Luna’s shirt, gleefully fondling her bare breast.
My eyes darted about the room, fearfully searching for someone that I knew wasn’t there. It was just my imagination, but my heart was still beating in my chest like she was standing in the doorway and frowning reproachfully at me.
Luna slipped her hand out from my back pocket and hopped up to sit on the counter next to me. She smoothed out her shirt, then folded her hands and squeezed them shyly between her knees. The fridge was at the end of the counter, close enough that she could lean against it.
“Why’d you pull away this time?” she asked. She was turned away, and I couldn’t see her face behind the curtain of her hair, but the hurt in her voice was clear. “Was it me again?”
“No,” I said, “this time it was me.”
“Are you sure? Because I just… I feel like I screwed everything up by kissing you the other night. Like, I know it was too fast, and now it’s made things so awkward that you can barely look me in the eyes. But I figured if I did it again and we both liked it, maybe things wouldn’t be so weird between us, and then maybe we could... I don’t know…” She banged her head softly against the fridge with a frustrated groan. “Why’s this so weird?”
I shrugged. “Dunno.”
I did know, but I couldn’t tell her that it was because her sister was the trans-dimensional body-double of someone who’d been like a mother to me, and that for a moment I’d heard her Force Ghost shouting at me to get my hand off her little sister’s tit.
That might make me seem like a nutjob.
Luna huffed, sitting up straight and pulling back her hair so she could look me in the eyes. “Are you even interested in me?”
“I am,” I said.
“Well, that’s something, at least,” she said.
I took a deep breath, suddenly feeling like I was standing at the edge of a high dive, looking down into an empty pool. “Luna, I’m not going to pretend you’re not in my head.” Luna rolled her eyes at me, but I ignored it and pressed forward to cut off the sarcastic quip that I knew was forthcoming. “It’s just… I don’t do well in relationships in general, and things right now are extra complicated.”
Luna ran her hands through her hair and chuckled mirthlessly. “I know, I know, you’re right. I shouldn’t be thinking about kissing while we’ve got a crazy wizard running wild in Canterlot City. It’s just that you were sitting there looking so down on yourself, and I wanted to cheer you up, so I just thought I’d go for it...” She sat up straight as a board, her jaw going slack and her eyes widening with a terrible realization. “Oh God, does danger turn me on? Is that the kind of woman I’ve become?”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.
“You stop laughing right now!” Luna demanded with a hiss. Her fair skin flushed from the tips of her ears down to her chest.
Her dainty hands had balled into fists in her lap. The sudden urge to hold her hand came over me, just for the sake of feeling her skin against mine. I took one of her hands and slipped mine into it, pushing my fingertips against the heel of her hand and over her palm, uncurling her fist. She wove her fingers through mine, and we sat for a few minutes, offering warmth to one another through our hands with the most innocent of intimate acts.
I knew the pounding in my chest wasn’t love. It was infatuation, or maybe even just naked lust. There wasn’t anything necessarily wrong with that, though.
One of the tutors that Fiddler had arranged for me had been an older man who’d been something of a lothario in his younger days. He’d never tried anything with me, but he was always very open about his past dalliances. Once, while he watched me struggle with my earliest attempts at carving runeworks, he told me that love and food were very similar. The need for both was driven by hunger, after all, and like with well presented food, the first bite of love was taken with the eye.
So what if right now the thing I was most interested in was her hot little body? She was nice, and interesting, and I wanted to get to know her better. I wasn’t going to let the specter of Princess Celestia ruin a shot at that. If things worked out between us and I had to meet this world’s Celestia, then that’s just how it’d have to be.
But that was all something for later. Right now, I needed to focus on what to do about the deadly game of cat-and-also-cat I was in the midst of.
“Thank you for trying to cheer me up,” I said. “I mean it. I can get pretty down on myself sometimes… but you do understand why I’ve got to keep some distance, at least for now, right?”
“I know why you think you need to,” she said. She squeezed my hand tighter, like she was afraid I was going to let go. To be fair, I actually was about to let go. “You think I might get hurt, you think you can’t afford to get distracted, you think you’re not a good person.”
“Those things are all true,” I pointed out.
“You already know that I think you’re a good person,” Luna said, unfazed by my stubbornness. “I’m not going to go anywhere, and not just because I want to see if there’s anything actually here, between us. I want to be here for Twilight, too. She’s trying to be brave, but there’s… there’s something missing from her eyes.”
I gave Luna’s hand a squeeze and released it. “Considering what she saw? I would imagine so.”
“She’s so hurt, and so scared,” Luna said in a voice that was barely a whisper. “It breaks my heart to see her like that. I can’t just walk away. I have to do what I can to help.”
I slid off the counter and went to the doorway to check on Twilight again. She was still on the couch, hadn’t moved an inch. Only the very slight rise and fall of her chest told me that she was still breathing.
“She looks peaceful like that,” Luna said as she stepped up beside me. “I hope she’s having a good dream. A dream where her family is together and there aren’t any monsters, where she gets to still be like every other little girl.”
“She’s been sleeping a lot, which is good. Sleep is good medicine for a sad heart.” I leaned against the door and gave Luna a smile. “I have to admit, you did a pretty good job of watching after the kid while I was out.”
“Does that mean you won’t object to me coming over?” Luna asked, hopefully.
I nodded. “I would rather you didn’t, at least until this mess is sorted, but if you’re set on coming to see Twilight, then I won’t get in the way. It’ll be good to have someone to watch her while I’m out running errands… and to be honest, I’ve never really been very good with kids.”
“You could have fooled me,” Luna said with a chuckle. “She was mad that you made her stay behind, but she talks about you like you’re a superhero.”
A touch of heat bloomed in my cheeks. “I may have, uh, told her I was like those princess wizard girls she likes,” I said. “You know, the ones on her pajamas.”
Luna snickered behind her hand, doubling over and turning away as she tried to stifle the laughter threatening to burst out of her.
“Whatever,” I muttered.
It wasn’t even really that funny, but it looked like the more she tried to suppress her laughter, the harder it was for her not to laugh. Eventually, though, she got her giggle fit under control.
“Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry,” she said breathlessly, rubbing her belly like she was in pain, “but I just got this image in my head of you in one of those Japanese schoolgirl sailor suits. You were doing a pose and everything.”
“What, like a ‘I’ll punish you in the name of the moon’ kind of thing?” I asked.
“Oh, I loved that show,” Luna said with a sigh of nostalgia.
“Heh, I did, too, actually,” I said with a chuckle.
I went to straighten up in the kitchen a little bit. Luna and Twilight had left a few dishes in the sink that I’d noticed when I was washing my hands, and there were greasy little Twilight-sized handprints on the table.
Luna shooed me away from the sink to take care of the dishes herself, so I got to work wiping down the counters and table.
“So what about my sister?” Luna asked offhandedly.
My heart skipped a beat, and I was glad that Luna’s back was to me, because I was certain that I’d just had a look of panic flash across my face. I’d been expecting a question about this, and I’d even been thinking about what I might say, but I’d expected it to come much earlier. For a second there, I thought I’d weaseled my way out of it.
“What about her?” I asked, quickly swallowing down my surprise.
“Well, she’s spent more time with Twilight than I have,” Luna said diplomatically. “She took the news about Professor Night Light really badly. I’m sure she’d be glad to hear that Twilight’s okay. She’d probably want to come see her right away.”
“It’s probably better if we don’t tell her,” I said, “at least not right away.”
“Because of the danger…”
“Right… because of the danger…”
Luna shut off the water and set the last of the dishes on the drying rack. “Are you sure that’s all it is?” she asked as she turned to face me. “Earlier when I mentioned her name, you looked… I dunno, scared, maybe?”
“The name caught me off guard,” I said. “I knew someone with that name before, but trust me, it’s not the same person.”
“You’re sure that’s all?”
I stood up straight, thrust out my chest, and held a hand up like a boy scout swearing an oath – pinkie and thumb together.
“I swear on my power that I am telling the truth,” I said, with as much solemnity in my voice as I could muster.
She blinked. “Is that a thing?”
“No,” I said, cracking a smile, “but it sounded impressive.”
“Fine,” she said, also smiling, “be flippant, see if I care. I’ll keep it a secret for now, at least until you say it’s okay to tell her.”
She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. “Speaking of Celestia, I should probably get home. I had to borrow her car because mine’s still in the shop, and she’s been texting me all night asking where I am. I told her I’d only be a few hours.”
“She keeps you on a short leash, huh?”
“Ugh, yes,” Luna said with a groan of baby-sisterly petulance. “She thinks she’s everybody’s mom.”
I coughed into my hand to keep from laughing. That was Celestia, alright. It seemed like no matter the world, she had her snoot in everyone else’s business.
We exchanged numbers, and as I was adding Luna to my phonebook I realized how few actual people I knew. I had Clavus and Cilia, a couple of clients whose numbers I’d saved and never bothered to delete, the hardware store, and the rest were all numbers for pizza places and takeout joints. I made a quick mental note to myself to ask Cheese Cake for her number next time I was at the ICLOP, just to pad out my phonebook.
I walked Luna to the door, grabbing an umbrella from the hall closet as I passed by, and followed her out onto the porch. The storm was getting kind of crazy, so I shut the door behind myself to keep the draft out.
“So this is all because of some kind of rain god’s magic?” Luna asked as she watched the rain falling in sheets. There was something like awe in her voice. “Could you do something like this?”
“Yeah, if I wanted to,” I said with confidence. “Weather’s not that hard to mess with, especially if your craft is being backed by something big.”
She wrapped her arms around herself to suppress a shiver. “This magic stuff is really freaky…”
“It’s not too late to back out,” I said. “I won’t think any less of you if you decide to keep your head down until I take care of it.”
Luna shook her head resolutely. “It’s scary, but that’s why I have to help,” she said. “However scary it is to me, it has to be worse for Twilight.”
“Okay,” I said. I handed her the umbrella. “Be careful on the way home. Drive slow, the storm might get worse.”
“I will.” She opened the umbrella and held it over her head. “I’m picking up my car tomorrow at noon. I’ll come by right after. I’ll bring lunch, cool?”
“Sounds good.”
Luna got up on her tiptoes and pecked me on the lips before running down the steps. The walkway was all muddy, and actually felt bad for the nice shoes she had on. It was cold out, but I stayed under the porch to watch her until she was in her car and backing out of the driveway. She turned on the light in the cabin so I could see her and waved goodbye before pulling onto the road and heading back into town. I waited until her tail lights had faded away before I went inside.
I locked up the house, double checking all the windows, and carried Twilight up to her room. I tucked her in and left the light on in the hall for her, just in case she needed to use the bathroom or get a drink or something. Big meals always made me sleepy, and the belly full of pizza had finally caught up with me. As soon as I was in my room I kicked off my boots and shimmied out of my pants to crawl into bed.
* * *
I was dreaming again.
In the dream I was barely seventeen, at the very peak of my youthful arrogance.
I was plodding along, barefoot, on loose earth that had a rough quality, as though it had never been subjected to the smoothing effects of erosion. The dirt was clumping together, sticky, and every few steps I had to shake the itchy dust from my soles and wiggle it out from between my toes. Behind me was a line of perfectly formed footprints, each at least an inch deep, trailing off into the shadows and showing where I’d been. It reminded me of those pictures of astronaut footprints on the moon.
I was surrounded by darkness, save for the flicker of the white flames that floated behind Fiddler like will-o-wisps being led astray by something even more malicious. The light only touched us, and the ground immediately around us, as though we – me, Fiddler, the ground, and the darkness – were the only things that existed in this place. Still, there was a sense of pressure around me, the feeling that I might bump into a wall at any second, and the snow-like crunch of rough sand beneath my feet seemed to echo off of something. I thought that maybe it was the darkness.
I opened my mouth to speak, to ask where we were, but no sound came out. Breath left my lungs, I could feel the words in my throat, but nothing was said, as though the words had been plucked from the air before they could reach my ears. I tried again, opening my mouth a little wider and trying to shout. I felt something trying to force its way into my mouth and down my throat. I gagged on the unseen thing, bending at the waist and clutching my throat as I hacked and coughed soundlessly. I looked up and Fiddler hadn’t turned around, but he’d stopped and was presumably waiting for me.
We started walking again, and the crunch of my footfalls echoing off nothing was made all the worse by the fact that it was the only sound in this place. Fiddler’s steps didn’t make sound, of course, because they never did, not unless he wanted them to. He didn’t even leave footprints behind.
The thin cotton bathrobe I was wearing had been stolen from a hotel in Hong Kong on a whim, and was made more for looks than for post-bathing comfort. I hugged myself, wishing I’d dressed in something thicker. Not because it was cold, but because I was desperate for anything that might further separate my bare flesh from the sound and whatever laid beyond the light of Fiddler’s fire.
Earlier that night I’d been in a nightclub that I’d been too young to be allowed into, but too pretty to be denied entry for. I’d been dancing and drinking for most of the night, and beautiful men and women had offered me drinks, and worse, to spend the rest of it with them. All I’d wanted was to dance, so I turned them all down. Eventually a woman in a skirt the same width as my belt approached me and whispered in my ear that Fiddler was waiting for me at home. There’d been a waxy, drunken look in her eyes that disappeared the moment her message had been delivered, and she’d immediately wandered off to grind against strangers on the dance floor.
I was in New York at the time, and it had been easy to catch a cab home. When I got back to the penthouse I was living in, Fiddler was in front of the fireplace, drinking wine and watching the fire dance with casual interest. He never said hello, or asked how I was, and I never expected him to.
Appearing like this meant that he’d either put together another lesson for me or found another tutor. He told me to wash up, which meant a lesson. I took extra care in scrubbing myself down, buying time to sober up before whatever Fiddler had in mind for me. His lessons were always hard, and I wanted my wits about me. When I was ready, Fiddler had grabbed my shoulder without a word.
Fiddler’s way of teleporting wasn’t anything like what I’d learned about in Equestria. There was no pop of displaced air, no bubble of magic to denote the boundaries of the spell, no sense of movement. When Fiddler wanted to take me somewhere he just touched me and I was there, with nothing but realization that I was somewhere else. The mortal mind wasn’t made to comprehend travel like that, and the first few times the sense of cognitive dissonance as my brain tried to wrap itself around movement without movement had made me ill.
I followed dutifully behind Fiddler, despite the fear in my chest and the discomfort I felt. At the very edge of our light something emerged – a wall, chalk-white and rough as sandstone, stretched off into the darkness beyond the range of our firelight. I looked up, squinting into the pitch, trying to see the top of the wall, but was pointless. The flames that had been following Fiddler split apart and spread out, increasing the lighted area, but I still couldn’t see an end to the wall.
Fiddler jabbed his cane into the ground deep enough that it stood on its own and approached the wall. He pulled off his gloves and ran his fingers over its rough, pitted surface with more tenderness than I’d ever seen from him. He beckoned me closer, then he reached into his coat and withdrew a knife – a single length of silver beaten and shaped into a blade and handle. I watched as he began carving into the wall soundlessly.
The magical diagram he was carving was unlike anything I’d ever seen before – a woven mix of hieroglyphs, runeworks, and demonic writing that I couldn’t read. He carved away at the wall, his hands moving with supernatural dexterity and precision. Fiddler was a lot of things, and none of them were good, but the way he worked the craft was nothing less than hauntingly, horrifyingly beautiful.
When he was finished, he stood back and examined his handiwork, his eyebrows knitting in concentration and he scrutinized every inch of the diagram. That crocodile smile never left his face.
He clapped his hands soundlessly and nodded.
Fiddler handed me the knife, and for a moment I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to do. Was I supposed to add to the formation? Was I supposed to replicate it? I didn’t even know what it was for, let alone understand half of what went into it.
He hooked a finger under my belt and tugged it, undoing the loose knot holding the robe closed. I got the hint and undressed, careless of my nudity. My body wasn’t anything I was ashamed of, and it wasn’t anything that Fiddler wanted.
Fiddler took the robe and walked back to where his cane was. With a wave of his hand a large, plush chair appeared from thin air, and he draped my robe over one of the arms as he took a seat. A glass of wine appeared between his fingers and he sipped at it casually.
I stared at the knife in my hand for a moment before I realized what he wanted. I opened the other hand and pressed the blade against my palm. I looked up to Fiddler to see if I’d guessed correctly, and his perpetually amused grin widened just a little as he tipped his glass in my direction.
The me in the dream was still young and stupid enough to trust Fiddler. He was my master, and I did what he told me to do without hesitation, certain that it was necessary to the lesson. I like to think that the older, wiser person I’d become wouldn’t have fallen for it, but deep down I know that wasn’t true. There was no way I could have known what was going to happen next.
I sliced open the heel of my hand, where the meat was, sucking air between my teeth as the knife glided through with little resistance. Even after carving stone, the knife was still sharp as a scalpel. I threw the knife on the ground and scanned the diagram on the wall, looking for the center of it. I found a likely spot and pressed my bloody hand against it, empowering the spell.
My blood flowed from my hand, filling every carved inch of the diagram. As it filled, I could feel the magic in my body being drawn out, and something else was flooding in. I felt the low rumble of trembling earth, like living thunder spreading over my body.
My magic spread throughout the diagram, and I knew that what I was touching was bigger than I could have imagined. It was no wall, it was bone, part of the remnants of an ancient beast as big as a continent, that left footprints deep as the seas. For a moment, in my mind’s eye I could see the whole of the horrible, majestic thing. It had seemed invincible, but it still died in this place, killed by something that I couldn’t clearly see. All I could make out was that it was another beast, a Leviathan to the first beast’s Behemoth, just as huge and glorious. The smile that it wore as it struck the final blow was a galaxy of teeth glittering with cruelly gleeful starlight. The fire that lived in the dead monster’s bones had gone out of control, a death spasm that scorched this world until nothing was left but cinders and the sound of ash.
And that fire was still in those bones, smoldering in the marrow like embers beneath a pile of ash awaiting fresh air. I could feel them as my magic flowed into the diagram, into the bones, and the embers became a blaze.
It was a dream, but even through the filter of a dream, the memory of the pain I felt that day was excruciating. My head was pounding, and my every nerve felt alive with agony. I pulled away, trying to break the flow of magic into the spell, but it was too late. My hand left the bones, trailing fire that traveled up my arm and spread across my body. I fell to the ground as liquid fire continued pouring out of the old bones, bubbling and churning like molten steel, flowing ceaselessly into my body.
Not content with just stripping away my outer flesh, the fire entered my body, scorching me from the inside. It was devouring my magic, growing stronger as it drained everything I had and poured into me to fill the emptiness it created. It felt like the fire was licking at my very soul.
I tried to scream, but nothing came out. I choked on the sound, and all I could do was thrash and roll on the ground.
The last thing I saw before the pain and the flames blinded me was Fiddler’s smile, thrice as wide as I’d ever seen it. He was always smiling, but that was the first time I’d ever seen anything like genuine joy in his eyes.
* * *
I woke with a start, my breathing heavy as I stared up at the ceiling above my bed. I was drenched in sweat that had probably soaked into the mattress. I made a quick mental note to wash my beddings, just so my room wouldn’t smell like a gym bag.
I hated that memory, but it was an important one. That had been the night that I’d begun to realize just how poor a decision it had been to make a deal with the thing that called itself Fiddler. Up until that point of our relationship, he’d been the eccentric, but nurturing, master that gave me whatever I wanted without question and without judgement. He'd made good on the deal he'd given me, and if Celestia had been like a mother to me, then I wouldn't have hesitated to say that Fiddler had been like a father.
I’d been too young to realize that you don’t get anything without paying a price, and that had been the beginning of me growing up to see how things really were.
I held up my hand – the one I’d sliced open in the dream – and flexed the fingers experimentally. I’d passed out halfway through the ritual, and woken up eight days later in my penthouse back in New York. Being burned alive isn’t something most people walk away from, let alone walk away from unscarred, but it hadn’t been normal fire in those old bones.
Demons don’t have souls, but if it could be said that they possessed anything that was soul-like, it was Fiendfire. Powerful demons could coalesce their power and will into a flame, and the stronger the demon, the more intense the flame. The beast that those bones had belonged to had probably been an immensely strong demon – would’ve had to have been for the Fiendfire it’d been cultivating to have been left behind in its bones like that.
Every time I cast magic, there was a little spark of that Fiendfire in it. It was an ever-present taint in the most personal, integral part of who I was as a person. And it wasn’t just my magic, the fire had changed my body, made me a little stronger, a little less human. That was the way it was when you dealt with demons, they make you like them by carving away at who you used to be, a sliver at a time.
If I had been smart, I would have cut ties with Fiddler the second I’d woken up, but scared as I was, the day that I finally wised up was still a few years away.
I snapped out of my self-reflection as I felt the mattress move, and I looked over to the other side of the bed to find Twilight under the covers next to me. She was on her side, bundled up real small beneath the blankets, and watching me with those big, curious eyes.
“Did you have a bad dream?” she asked in concern. “You’re all sweaty.”
I rubbed the crusty stuff from my eyes and sighed. “Something like it,” I said. “What about you, kid? You had a nightmare?”
She nodded timidly, balling the blankets up in her little fists and pulling them tight under her chin. “Whenever I had a bad dream, my parents would let me sleep with them, but…”
“It’s okay,” I said. I reached over and pat her on the head. “I know.”
“You’re not mad?”
“Of course not.” The sun was up, filling the room with a soft orange glow as light bled through the thin day curtains. I grabbed my phone off the nightstand to check the time. At least I’d had enough foresight to plug it in before bed. “Still kind of early. Wanna go back to sleep?”
She nodded and stretched out a little more, uncurling from her fetal position as she wiggled around and bunched the covers around herself. I pretended to do the same, but I knew I wouldn’t be sleeping very well after a dream like that.
Still, I wasn’t in a hurry to get out of bed, so I decided I’d just lay there for a while, staring at the dusty ceiling that I’d been putting off cleaning, listening to the sound of Twilight breathing. It was weird, having someone else in my bed like this. I’d shared my bed with other people before, but it was never so innocent an arrangement.
It was a peaceful moment, remarkable only because it was so unremarkable. It was nice, though.
Again the bed moved, and again I looked over to find Twilight staring at me.
“Miss Sunset?”
“Just call me Sunset, kid,” I said.
“Okay,” Twilight said, a hint of a blush filling her chubby little cheeks. “What did your friend say?”
“Nothing you gotta worry about,” I said, sighing as I smoothed out the covers.
She shook her head. “That’s not true,” she said, “you’re fibbing…"
“And what makes you think I’m fibbing?” I asked.
“Because you said you were going to see a friend about magic stuff,” she reasoned, “and there’s a really high probability that it has to do with the monsters that hurt my family. That means that what you went to go talk about was about me, which means it’s something I should worry about, which means you’re fibbing.”
My brow knit in consternation at the logical judo flip I’d just taken. “What do you know about probability?” I asked.
“I’m in advanced placement math,” she said.
Maybe I sound like a broken record, but I’ve never been good with kids. I’ve never planned on having any of my own, and I’d never gotten along with other children when I was a child myself. I just didn’t have the tools to deal with something this delicate with a kid Twilight’s age.
It made me wish I’d at least casually glanced over some child psychology books over a long, rainy weekend. Stupid me, though, it had probably crossed my mind at some point only to be discarded in favor of binge watching procedural crime dramas or something equally ignorant. The only applicable knowledge I’d gained from those came from the scenes where the kiddy shrinks used dolls to wheedle clues out of scared kids.
Maybe I could talk Twilight into waiting around while I glued some ping pong balls to a sock or something...
“Well?” Twilight asked with quiet impatience.
I stared at the ceiling for a few heartbeats more, racking my brain to try and figure out how I was going to go about this. When nothing came to me, I decided that the only thing for it was to wing it. I was good at winging it, that’s how I made my money.
Besides, even if it scared her, in the long run it was better that Twilight knew at least enough to be cautious.
“I hadn’t told you this yet, but a bad person sent that monster to hurt your family,” I said. “I asked a friend to help me find some stuff out, to see if we could figure out who it was.”
“You think the bad person still wants to hurt me?”
I studied Twilight’s face, looking for any sign of a crack in that mask of detachment she was wearing. I didn’t see any, so I nodded. “I think so, yeah.”
“Okay, then,” Twilight said, like I’d just told her something she’d already known. She probably did. It certainly seemed like she’d worked some of it out herself. She was a smart kid, maybe even as smart as I was at her age.
I rolled over onto my side so we could talk face to face. I had a queen-sized, because I liked to stretch out. The bed was big enough for two adults, and even though I was sleeping in the middle, Twilight’s tiny body fit comfortably on what was left. I brushed the bangs out of her eyes, making a mental note to ask Luna if she knew how to cut hair when she came over later, so the kid could get a trim.
“You’re not scared?” I asked.
She shook her head. “You said you weren’t going to let anything hurt me.”
“And I meant it,” I said, “but I’d like it if you could do your part to help me with that.”
“How can I do that?” she asked eagerly.
“Just stay safe and keep your eyes open,” I explained. “If you see something suspicious, you tell me right away, no matter how small it is. And if I tell you to do something you have to do it, even if you might not want to.”
“Like staying home last night instead of going with you to see your friend?” she asked.
“Exactly like that.”
Twilight frowned, but after a moment or two of quiet thought she gave me a firm nod. “I can do that. Is there anything else?”
“You don’t happen to know if your dad had… I dunno, any enemies? Someone that might want to hurt him? Someone that might have yelled at him?”
“Nuh-uh,” Twilight said, shaking her head once more, a little more forcefully. Her bangs fell over her eyes and I brushed them away again. “Everyone liked my dad. He was really nice.”
“You’re sure? Maybe you overheard your parents talking about being worried about something, or maybe your dad was stressed out about something?”
“I'm sorry, but no, I can't think of anything,” Twilight said after some thought.
It was starting to look like I was once again let down by daytime reruns. Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy. The innocent, doe-eyed child never had the case-breaking clue in real life, just on TV.
Twilight muttered something as she pulled the covers over her face until all I could see was her eyes.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I said I hope you don’t find him,” she said, gripping the edge of the blanket a little tighter.
“Why not?” I asked, genuinely perplexed.
“Because if you stop him, then monsters won’t be after me anymore,” she muttered, “and you won’t have a reason to let me stay here…”
I opened my mouth to say something, but just like in the dream, I felt myself choking on my own words.
The previous night, Cilia hadn't been very subtle about what she thought I should do, despite her assurances that it was my choice.
I had Twilight here in my house while I was protecting her, and once the danger was past, her personal choices were pretty much limited to becoming another name on a list for Child Protective Services, and making a living as a street kid. The logical thing would just be for her to live with me after it was all over, like we were in some kind of sitcom where I'm a surly bachelorette that takes in a wayward youth. I help her grow up and in turn she helps me do the same.
But my life wasn’t a sitcom. I didn’t own any ugly Doctor Huxtable sweaters, and I wasn’t looking to put together a super-team of adorably hilarious moppets.
I smoked, I drank, I cursed, I had a history of promiscuous behavior – I was in a pretty long dry spell, but still – and, worst of all, I’d been touched by literal evil. I was pretty much the dictionary definition of a bad role model. I was fairly sure that they didn’t even let people like me become legal guardians of cute little orphans.
Money was also an issue. My house and my car were the only things I ever really splurged on, so I had a pretty comfortable savings and a nice little nest egg, but depending on how long I had to turn away actual work, I’d probably have to start dipping into my retirement just to keep the lights on. To put it in other words, I made okay money, but my income wasn’t anything remotely steady. If I didn’t grift, I didn’t earn.
Twilight was cute enough to one-hit KO Annie in an adorability fight, but I sure as hell wasn’t no Daddy Warbucks.
But how was I supposed to explain that to the kid?
“Look, kid, I know you’re scared, I get it…”
“No,” she said in a sour whisper. “You don’t get it. You can’t understand what it’s like.”
I rolled onto my back and stared up at the dusty ceiling. There were cobwebs in the corners. I hated cobwebs.
“I never had a family,” I said, focusing on the cobwebs so I wouldn’t have to look at Twilight. “My mom died giving birth to me, and I never had a dad. I grew up in an orphanage until I was around your age, then someone adopted me and… well, it didn’t last.
“We had an argument over something stupid. It was my fault, of course, because it always was. I ran away, and I spent a few months living on the streets. I ate out of dumpsters, begged for change, slept under cardboard next to the train tracks – the full-hobo. I had no family, adopted or otherwise, I had no friends, I had no one.”
I felt a throbbing pain in my chest as my body pointed out that I’d just told a lie. I clutched at my shirt and kneaded at the spot between my breasts, moisture coming to my eyes as I remembered the one girl that had been my friend all along.
“No… no that’s not true. I did have one friend, but by the time I realized what she meant to me, it was already too late… Anyway, eventually someone else took me in. Problem was, he wasn’t very nice.” I sniffled and swiped at the corners of my eyes. “So, yeah, kid. I know what it’s like to be in your shoes. I know how scary it is.”
A tiny hand grabbed my arm, not even big enough to get around my bicep, but it squeezed with trembling desperation. I look down at Twilight, her face twisted up as she cried.
“Then why can’t I stay here?” she asked hoarsely, the pain in her voice thick molasses and heavy as lead.
The pain in my chest started up again, and I knew instinctively that there was only one way to make it go away. I barely had time to roll over and open my arms before Twilight had buried her face into my chest.
“Shhhhh, it’s okay,” I said as I stroked her back.
It was a while before she stopped, and by the time she was calm enough that I knew she could hear me, I’d made my decision.
“Kid, I’m not the right person to take care of you,” I explained. I felt her stiffen, and a moment later she tried to pull away, but I held tight. “Just listen. I’m not the right person, but I promised your dad I’d keep you safe… so until we find the right person for the job, you can stay here.”
“You mean it?” she asked, looking up at me with hope in her bloodshot eyes. “Even after the monsters are gone?”
I nodded. “When I was alone, the only thing I wanted was a place that I belonged, somewhere that was mine and mine alone.” I gave her a pat on the head. “You can live here until we find the place you belong. I promise.”
“What if we never find it?” she asked.
“We’ll find it,” I said. “I promise that, too.”
Twilight buried her face against my chest again, and before I knew it she was asleep. I relaxed my hold on her a little bit, but I didn’t let go because the heat of her breath felt good against my chest, like a warm balm soothing the pain I’d felt earlier.
My phone tweeted at me and vibrated, rattling noisily on the wooden nightstand. It took a little contortion to reach the phone behind me without waking Twilight, but I managed it in the end. Somehow, an hour had passed since I’d last checked the time.
I checked the text I’d just gotten and stifled a laugh. It was a selfie from Luna, who looked like she’d just rolled out of bed. Her hair was all frizzed out and bushy, and she was making a goofy face into her bathroom mirror – her eyes were crossed and her tongue was sticking out, struggling to touch her nose. To top it off, she must have forgotten to take off her mascara, because she had raccoon-eyes real bad.
There was a caption at the bottom of the picture that read: ‘This is what u coulda woke up 2 – your loss!’
* * *