I passed through the next few minutes in a stupor as Tabitha taught me how to collapse the time-freezing spell and alter it into one that would just freeze Derek and keep him stable. Magic felt fucking incredible. Being able to manipulate the world around me felt like I was playing the first level of a videogame. After staring death in the face, casting spells next to a beautiful woman wasn’t a bad way to spend an afternoon.
I couldn’t really tell you how long it took for me to get it right, what with time being frozen and all, but I know that it took way longer than it could have. Something about the way Tabitha was talking to me when she was showing me the ropes made me slow down and pretend not to understand some things every now and again. It was like I was seeing a different side of her that I think I was afraid might go away once there was not something technical going on that she could teach me.
Maybe she knew what I was doing, but she didn’t seem to mind taking the extra time.
When the spell collapsed and the world started moving again, my left hand sort of disappeared. The same way I could see Tabitha’s ears and tail when I looked at her, but not if she walked past my peripheral, my dino-hand was there only when I focused on it, but vanished when I looked elsewhere.
It only took the cops around a minute to step inside and surround us.
Tabitha took the lead while I stayed with Derek. One flash of her six-pointed badge sent the officers packing, speaking into their radios and giving her a wide berth as she started barking orders at all of them. Tabitha played the ‘federal agent in charge’ card very well, and five of the six officers fell in line right away.
One of the cops had her eyes on me the whole time, though, staring at me in a way that made me a little uneasy while Tabitha called things in and ordered an ambulance to arrive on scene ASAP. The woman must have been around my age or maybe a year older than me. Same age Hanna had been. Whoever she was and whatever she wanted, Tabitha sent her packing before she could get too close.
Her reluctance to leave felt significant, but I think the shock of what had just happened was all crashing down on me at once. Maybe ten seconds or maybe thirty minutes later, I really couldn’t say which, an ambulance pulled up onto the Hilltop driven by a short and skinny girl wearing glasses and an EMT uniform.
“Where’s my patient?” she demanded.
Tabitha hid a smirk as she introduced me to Bianca and we enlisted the help of the officers in getting Derek onto a stretcher and loaded into the back of the ambulance. If the cops thought anything was wrong with the way Derek was completely rigid and did not move the way a regular body that was not frozen in time ought to have been moving, they kept it to themselves. For that I was greatly appreciative.
Tabitha started walking towards the driver’s side door as Bianca clambered into the back with her patient. I moved between Tabitha and the driver’s seat.
“May I drive?”
She blinked in surprise. “Uh, it’s not really standard protocol for—”
“Forget all that. Please, let me drive,” I repeated.
“Why?” Her tone took on an edge of suspicion.
I took a deep breath and glanced around, noticing that the one cop was still staring over at me from where she stood just outside the crime scene. What was her problem?
“Like I said, I wasn’t the one driving during my accident. Ever since? I can’t be in the passenger seat. You can give me directions, I’ll drive however fast or slow you want, but I need to be the one driving. Is that going to be a problem?”
Tabitha hesitated, and I could tell that it was a problem, but after seeing the sincerity on my face she eventually submitted. She held up the keys and offered them to me.
Internally, I was a bundle of nerves as I accepted those keys and hopped up to open her door for her. Externally, I was calm and collected. Fighting monsters and casting spells was new to me. But driving? That I could do all day and all night. Yes, one handed.
I started up the ambulance and took off from the Hilltop, following Tabitha’s directions as she pulled up a GPS and started us off. Instead of taking us towards the nearest hospital she was directing me towards downtown.
In the back, Bianca was humming to herself as she worked. I had no clue what was going on back there but it sounded like she was working with a blowtorch or maybe a taser, and different colored lights were flashing every so often.
“What’s going on back there?” I asked Tabitha, lowering my voice a little.
Her wolf ear twitched slightly and she glanced over at me with that same inscrutable expression she always wore. “My friend is saving your friend from a very painful death. From the sounds of all the magic she’s using to do it, he’s probably going to wake up with a considerable debt to pay off. Luckily he’s got a high MQ.”
“MQ?”
Tabitha shook her head. “Take this next right. You’re full of questions.”
“Maybe. Or maybe this is a normal response to being told there are monsters and magicians running amok in Eastport. Pretend for a moment that you hadn’t been doing this for a decade or more. If this was your first day in the real world, wouldn’t you be asking questions about how it all worked?”
Tabitha made a face and looked back at her GPS as I turned left and drove between two towering office buildings. “I guess, when you put it that way, you are full of a normal amount of questions. The parking structure with the closed sign, drive towards it. MQ stands for Magical Quotient. In layman’s terms it is how much potential a person has to cast spells. People with higher MQ scores can use more complex magic and do cooler stuff. For them, this world is just one of many suggestions of how reality might look, and they are in constant dialogue with the universe around them, telling it what shape they think the world should take. People with lower scores are better at dealing with the world in front of them.”
“What’s your score?” I asked.
Tabitha’s mouth fell open as if she was stunned by an offensive comment I had just made, and I started to apologize. She cut me off. “No, no, it’s fine. It’s your first day. Don’t ask anyone else their score from here on out, okay?”
Though I was still curious about what hers was, I accepted the free advice and kept driving silently for a while.
She directed me to drive into some underground parking and circle around a few times before parking in spot 206-E. The second I put the ambulance in Park, the parking spot started lowering like an elevator and we dropped down into some sort of subterranean complex.
I started to freak out when the car started moving without any keys in the ignition, but Tabitha reached over to touch my arm and gave me a reassuring look, letting me know that this was expected.
A new rectangular section of cement slid out of the wall overhead and thudded into place right where we started our descent, returning the abandoned parking structure to its original state and throwing the cement elevator into near total darkness. The light from the ambulance’s dashboard and whatever magical shenanigans Bianca was up to in the back was all that I had to see with, but it was enough for me to make eye contact with Tabitha.
Staring into her mismatched eyes and feeling her hand on my arm, I felt no reason to fight the rising calm that washed over me. Maybe it was the fact that I had not been touched in such a casual yet intimate way in well over a year. Maybe it was just the way she took that extra second to spare me a jolt of panic, after seeing how I responded to her silly prank earlier. Whatever it was, I felt a little calmer inside. Like I was standing on solid ground despite being in the middle of a hurricane.
Sure, the world as I knew it was crumbling down around me, but at least there was a pretty girl on my arm telling me it was all going to be okay. That counted for something.
Blinking slowly to reassure me, Tabitha looked away and tapped two codes into the GPS tablet. The screen flashed the phrase ‘Access Granted’ and then fell dark. She tucked it away into the backpack resting on the floor between her knees, then shifted in her seat to peer into the back.
“How’s your patient doing, Bee?”
The flashing lights and crackling sounds paused, and through the rearview mirror I saw Bianca’s head lift up from where she was hunched over Derek’s frozen body.
“Good news is he’ll live! Even better news is, since that dino-prick destroyed all his heart tissue I got to replace it with a better one! When he wakes up this guy will be a lot tougher to kill. The best news is he’ll also be totally obedient to me. Thanks Tee, you always bring me the nicest sex slaves!”
I frowned. “Hold up. What does she mean by ‘totally obedient,’ Tabitha?”
Tabitha chuckled. “Nothing, nothing. Just some succubus humor. In poor taste.”
“That could be the headline to my biography, Sweet Tea,” Bianca replied coolly, returning to her magical work.
I shifted in my seat slightly to try and get a look at whatever she was doing.
Tabitha’s hand rose once more to my arm and she shook her head. “Uh-uh. Succubus magic is a bit…intimate. Your friend might not appreciate you seeing him in his current state. All you need to know is he will live, alright?”
He will live. That is what I decided to focus on.
“Fine. But if I find out you transformed my friend into a simp, I will not be pleased.” I made sure to inject an edge into my voice to get my point across. Doing so while staring down a woman I knew for a fact could transform into a werewolf and snap the neck of a dinosaur like she was opening a jar of pickles was maybe not the smartest move I had ever made, but I was in too deep to pull out now.
Tabitha bit down on a smile and crossed her arms. “Oh no,” she said coyly, “I’d hate to see you displeased.” Somehow I doubted the sincerity of her words. She went on to explain that, “He will be as he was before she saved him. Maybe a little traumatized from getting dropped by a Carnisaur, of course, but still the same guy he was yesterday. If he was a simp before, he’ll still be a simp when he wakes up. Do you think he’s a simp?”
My eyes narrowed and I started to say no, but my mind unhelpfully brought forth a professionally made slideshow of all the times Derek had acted like a fool in front of cute or hot girls who stopped by the Hilltop on their way to and from the lake. Nevermind the fact that they were more interested in me, which he was always quick to complain about once they drove off. I remembered one time he helped these girls carry a bunch of beer to their trucks without checking their IDs despite how weak and scrawny he was, for instance.
Maybe he was a simp.
Either way, my lips folded inward and the denial died before it could taste fresh air.
“Thought so,” Tabitha concluded with a click of her tongue.
I turned my attention back to the walls of cement we were passing through. We must have already been like ten stories down by now, unless I misjudged how quickly the elevator was going. I made the tactical error of asking the innocent question, “How deep are we going?”
To which Bianca cheerfully replied, “Balls deep, dude. All the way!”
Ignoring her cackles from the back of the ambulance I turned to Tabitha, who was glaring into the back and flipping her friend off while she did whatever to Derek (I was trying not to think about it). I stared at her pointedly until the werewolf with a gun finally looked back at me and answered.
“We should hit the garage any second now. Oh and Ryan? Brace yourself.”
Light started filtering up through the dark cement elevator shaft, revealing a whole host of strange symbols painted on the walls like graffiti. One word in particular kept repeating itself. Garage. It grew brighter and brighter until at last we descended into a cavernous underground hangar filled with random service vehicles. The floor was littered with cop cars, ambulances, forest ranger trucks, unmarked black federal-agent-type SUVs, heck I even saw a postal service van. Far more fascinating than all the vehicles though were the people milling around.
There were a few generic humans—or at least they looked like generic humans—intermixed with a wide array of monsters, only some of which I had names for. I saw minotaurs and ogres hard at work on a piece of mangled construction equipment. A bunch of snake-people were slithering around underneath a dump truck. Bird people flitted around from project to project, fixing things and bringing tools to people down below. There were people made of stone just casually lifting heavy vehicles and equipment while chatting with cyclops and werewolves. People made of some weird gelatinous substance were smushing themselves inside some nearly completed cars and popping out the other end, reforming into a completely nude humanoid form, to give a thumbs-up to some human with a clipboard.
I sat up in my seat to try and get a better look. “What the fuck?”
“Welcome to the new weird, Ryan,” Tabitha intoned, sounding like she was repeating a phrase she herself had heard once.
I glanced over at her, my mind completely abuzz with how awesome this all was, and grinned. Her eyes locked with mine and I saw her recoil in shock ever so slightly, like she was not expecting the look of excitement that was crossing my face.
“This place is awesome! Is that job offer still good?”
“Yes, of course. The Bureau is always looking for tal—”
“Where do I sign?”
Tabitha and Bianca, who I caught a glimpse of buttoning up her shirt in the back, exchanged a look that was laden with subtext I had no point of reference for. The ambulance shuddered and bounced as the elevator came to rest on a slightly raised platform.
Cracking open the passenger-side door, Tabitha shouldered her backpack and motioned for me to follow. “Come on. I’ll take you to Aleksei.”
“Who’s Aleksei?” I asked, hopping out of the ambulance to follow her.
Bianca giggled as she and her patient disembarked and came around the driver’s side with the help of two orange-skinned guys with rhinoceros horns jutting out of their smaller-than-human heads. Bianca was busy zipping up her pants, but she gave me a little wave and a wink as she walked past.
“Is he gonna be okay?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Of course. Now you better go catch up to Sweat Tea before she changes her mind about you, Ryan. The last time she tried to recruit someone it didn’t go so well. If she’s taking a risk on you, you better be worth it.” She pointed off ahead of the ambulance and I followed her direction to see Tabitha, weaving through the crowd with ease and heading towards another elevator—this one more fit for people instead of vehicles—on the far side of the garage.
I tossed the keys to the ambulance to another one of those orange rhino-dudes and took off at a dead sprint, vaulting over the railing of the platform and landing a few meters below in a roll. Back before my accident I had been heavily into parkour. Like a lot of things, I had sort of forgotten about it after what happened.
But my body sure hadn’t. One second I was standing on the platform thinking, I need to catch up to her, and the next I was rolling to my feet and breaking into a full-on sprint. I could feel my blood rushing throughout my body with more speed than ever before, and I practically flew across the floor like a bullet.
Around me the whole world seemed to slow to a crawl, allowing me to soak in the atmosphere of this new weird I was embracing. Sparks danced off the hood of a fire truck as a four-armed insectoid creature and a centaur both worked on the vehicle side by side. I darted past a small pack of goblins on their way to a lunch break, slurping down coffees and munching on pre-packed sandwiches. An amorphous blob of slimy green tentacles and well over a dozen eyes melted across the floor with a wild assortment of tools held in its various slippery arms, and I saw several technicians make grossed-out faces as they accepted their slimy tools from him.
I sped past all of it as I tried to catch up with her.
I was a helluva faster than I remembered, but not fast enough.
Tabitha entered the elevator and the doors started to close. Bianca’s warning that I had ‘better be worth it’ rang in my ears as I slid across the hood of a police car with a massive bite out of its passenger side and dashed towards the doors as they reached the halfway mark.
I reached out with my left arm, trying to catch the door. My arm extended as far as it could, just like I had during the accident, just like I had during the attack, only this time it connected! My Carnisaur hand gripped the elevator doors and stopped them cold. I wrenched the elevator open and stepped inside, taking my place beside Tabitha while doing my best to ignore the weird looks I was being given by a hairy bigfoot-looking guy and his human companion.
Tabitha’s expression remained unchanged as the door closed, but for a second I thought I saw one corner of her mouth pull up in the hint of a proud smile. Just a hint. But I took it as a W.
Instead of buttons with numbers, the elevator’s floor panel just had a bunch of symbols adorning its buttons. Of the three buttons that were lit up, one of them was a car, which I suppose made sense as we were leaving the garage.
The second was a microscope. Faint muzak drifted down from the speakers as the elevator rose up three stories and the other two passengers disembarked into a floor absolutely filled with laboratories and scientific gadgets. It must have been the research and development section of the secret underground headquarters. Nice.
Once they were gone and the doors slid shut again, Tabitha turned to address me.
“Last chance to back out.”
“And miss my chance to come to work at a secret underground facility every day? To hunt monsters for a living? Hell no, Tabitha. I’m staying.”
She shrugged. “Worth a shot. Let’s go see the boss.” The elevator dinged and the doors slid open to reveal the floor denoted by the eyeball. I did not have to wait long to figure out why they went with that symbol.
We exited the elevator and stepped out into a long hallway flanked with opaque glass doors. Each of the doors on the left and right had names etched at eye level, and vaguely monstrous shapes moved around in the offices behind each doorway. A few of the doors we passed were open, giving me a view that did not really make sense. Each door seemed to link to an office in a different office building around Eastport, and sitting inside were corporate officers hard at work on their desktop computers, overlooking a different part of downtown.
Through one I saw a middle-aged man barking orders into two different phones. Through another I saw a young hotshot lawyer practicing his closing statement to a mirror. Through a third I saw some guy railing his secretary. I stopped peering through the doorways after that.
“What are all these doors?”
“Gateways. The agents working in each of these offices are our eyes and ears into the mortal world. They all act as high-level bureaucrats in their respective fields while also reporting to us about changes in the dimensional bonds that tie our world to the other five in our cluster. If anything pierces the boundaries, they are the first to hear about it. Each of them reports directly to Aleksei. That’s his office up ahead.”
At the far end of the hall was a far more ornate doorway than all the others, painted with that same symbol of an eyeball rather than marked with a name.
Ominous.
I lost count of how many doorways we passed on our way to Aleksei’s office, but if I had to guess I would put it somewhere north of fifty.
At long last we arrived at the final doorway and Tabitha reached up to knock.
“Enter,” called a powerful voice from inside.
The door swung open of its own accord. Tabitha swallowed nervously and pushed her way inside. Feeling a cold pit in my stomach as my nerves shouted in protest and urged me to flee while I still had a chance, I followed her.