CHAPTER TWO
Staci woke up the next day feeling sore all over. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been when she first started training with Tim; she was getting stronger, getting tougher each day, but she still groaned a little as she moved. Now, mind, getting stronger didn’t mean that it didn’t still hurt. But, it was hurting less and less. Before, she would have been dreading the rays of sunlight coming through the blinds of her room’s window, rolling over and covering her face with a pillow to squeeze in a few extra minutes of sleep. These days, she felt awake and actually eager to get up and get ready for the day.
But the bottom line was that she couldn’t afford to be lazy anymore. Not given the things she knew, and the things she could do. Ignorance had been a sort of shield, in a way. Now it was gone, and she had a whole new set of priorities.
Rolling out of bed, she made her way to the bathroom to get showered and attend to the rest of her morning hygiene ritual; brushing her teeth, using moisturizer, getting her hair and makeup done right (she wore much less makeup now, as well), and practicing her protection charms forwards and backwards, in three languages. She was still having a bear of a time with Latin. Magic, especially older magic, “liked” to be done in certain ways. Sometimes that involved speaking in the language a certain incantation or ritual was first created in. Luckily, she hadn’t had to work with goat entrails or anything gross like that. Yet, at least; Tim, when he felt like teasing Staci, would threaten to teach her some shamanistic magic from “the deepest, darkest primeval forests, where the word ‘sanitation’ has never been uttered.”
Once she was done getting ready, Staci made her way downstairs. Her mother was already awake, sitting at the kitchen table and smoking a cigarette while she read a newspaper.
She gave her mother the death-glare. “Mom! You know the rules! Not in the house.”
“Morning, pumpkin! I know, I know. Just needed a little something to wake up,” her mother said as she stubbed the butt out in an ashtray. “Have fun yesterday?”
“Yep. Just hanging with Seth and Wanda, trying out some more LARP stuff.” She whisked the ashtray off the table and dumped the ashes and butt in the trash, so her mother wouldn’t use it as an excuse to light up again. “You really ought to try patches. Or vape.”
“Oh, it just seems like such a bother. Anyway, I only made some coffee and some hash browns; I didn’t know if you were going to meet your friends for breakfast, so I kept things light.”
Staci moved over to the stove, peering down at the contents of the pan that was resting on it. “And you didn’t burn them this time!”
“Your mother isn’t completely useless, kiddo. Just . . . don’t look at the coffee maker.”
A quick bite and a farewell later, and Staci was off on her bike, heading to town. She had plans to meet up with the rest of the gang at Tim’s book store, and she didn’t want to be late. Glancing back over her shoulder at her house as her bike turned onto the road to town, Staci reflected how far her mother had come the last few months. The drinking had mostly stopped. No more blackouts. No more wandering around the house in an alcoholic daze. And Staci wasn’t having to do more than what she considered to be a fair share of the chores, either. Her mother didn’t bring home skuzzy losers anymore; in fact, Mom seemed to be right off boyfriends altogether, at least for now. Which, given that she worked in one of the town’s several low-rent bars, and didn’t really go anywhere other than to work and back home and didn’t get any chances to meet anyone that wasn’t a skuzzy loser, was probably just as well. Staci hadn’t seen her mother this way since before the divorce.
Things had gone downhill for her mother after her father had left. She’d gone from being a bit flaky and given to slightly manic bouts, to a full-on crazy person, who could only seem to hold jobs in cheap bars, and then, not for long. She’d moved from one town to the next as she’d run out of people willing to keep paying her. Silence, and the influence of the Blackthornes, had taken what had been depression and turned it into substance abuse and borderline bipolar disorder. Well, that would be what a social worker would have said. Staci wasn’t too sure about that. Tim was fairly certain that the elven-blood in her came from her mother’s side of the family . . . and Mom had always been . . . interesting. All those fairy stories she’d told Staci when Staci was little, well, now that Staci could see the things that other people couldn’t for herself, those stories sounded less made-up altogether, and more like something Mom had made up out of fragments of things she had seen. So some of those mental issues could very well have come from the conflict in Mom’s mind of the two sorts of reality she could see: the reality everyone else knew, and the other things.
Tim had been helping to get her back to something close to her old self. “Magical therapy from afar,” he had called it. “She’ll never be ‘normal’ again, whatever that is. But she won’t be driven insane. Best that I can do for her.” It seemed to be working, slowly but surely. Having Staci around was a big part of it; the first bit of stability that her mother had had that didn’t come in a brown bottle. Now Mom was a bit forgetful, and a little air-headed, but she dealt with that by having reminders on her own laptop (which in itself was a major step!) and her new cell phone (Hoorah for cell service at last) and the bills got paid, the groceries got bought, and no one was living on pizza anymore. That said, Staci hardly felt the urge to check her own cell phone unless it was to read a message from Tim or the gang. Mostly it was a convenience to not have to look for a pay phone if she was the one doing the shopping and wanted to know if her mom wanted something.
The Staci who had lived on her cell phone, Twitter feed and Facebook page was someone she didn’t recognize anymore.
Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. She was guilty of posting sad Facebook posts when the household needed something that wasn’t going to fit into the budget, then texting Dad about it a couple days later. Dad knew very well that his clients were the kinds of people who checked the Facebook feeds of everyone in the family, and the last thing he wanted to do was make it look like he was a Deadbeat Dad. He still felt guilty about dumping her here, at the behest of his new wife, and she had every intention of feeding that guilt to keep her and her mom afloat. That was how she’d wrangled a new washing machine when the one that had come with the rental house tried to walk across the basement floor then threw up water, clothes and soap all over the place.
It’s not like I picked the model he ordered, anyway. It didn’t have to be the one that does steam-cleaning and has a freaking “sanitation cycle” for heaven’s sake!
The bike ride into town was typical: warm but not too hot, with a nice breeze blowing in from the coast as she went down the hill. She stayed on the main drag into town; there were people out, doing their shopping or making their way to work. More cars were on the streets nowadays, and fewer of them were beat to hell and ready to die. Where before Silence had seemed deserted, now it actually had life and a pulse. Staci wondered if any of the other people living in Silence—those that didn’t know about magic, or what had happened with the Blackthornes—noticed the changes, or if it had been gradual and unobtrusive. Like someone opening a window and letting air into a room; just enough of a difference so that the place aired out, the stale, nasty smell was gone, and you could actually breathe.
She pulled up in front of Tim’s book shop, parking her bike and chaining it to the light post near the curb; just because Silence was getting to be less of a hole didn’t mean she had gone completely naive. As soon as she opened the door, she was greeted with familiar smells; cinnamon, coffee, old paper and leather. The lighting was always a little bit dimmed in Tim’s shop, but the banker-style lamps and wall sconces shed warm, golden light. Tim was in his accustomed spot; leaning on the cash register counter right next to the door, his head buried in a large tome, with two more, and an e-reader, open next to him.
“Morning, Staci,” he said without even looking up to see who she was. No doubt he had felt her presence through magic long before she even opened the door; she was still having a little trouble masking her magical signature if she didn’t pay strict attention to it. “The others are in the usual spot. Stomping goblins or kicking kobolds, I think.”
“Thanks, Tim,” she said over her shoulder without breaking her stride. Her first stop would be at the coffee machine, which was conveniently right across from her friends’ usual spot; close enough to be really easy to reach for caffeine-refueling, without being right in the path of any other customers that were going for a cup. Thank goodness there wasn’t enough elf in her to make caffeine a poison. As promised, all three of her friends were sitting in a circle of large, comfortable leather chairs and loveseats, centered on a low wooden table. One chair was left open for Staci, which she happily plopped down into after she finished getting a large cup of coffee. “Morning, goons. What’s the adventure today?”
“Same as every other day . . . taking over the world!” Seth threw his arms wide, causing both Wanda and Beth to duck. “Or, y’know, dungeon crawling and dying horribly to one of my devious DM traps.”
“Devious is one word for it. Obvious would be more appropriate,” Wanda said, pushing Seth’s arm out of the way. She wasn’t dressed in her training clothes, of course; it was back to her Goth uniform of boots, tight long sleeve shirt, and baggy pants. All black, naturally. “Hey, Staci. I’ve got your pants sewn back up . . . and that sounded wrong.”
“What happened to her pants?” Beth, out of her waitress uniform, and into the clothing she considered “comfortable,” which was far too fussy for Staci and had caused Wanda to abduct the waitress for sewing lessons. Courtesy of those lessons, Beth wore soft, faded jeans with dainty applique patches and lace up the outer seams, and a frilly silk peasant blouse with a lace-trimmed “poet” collar, huge lace-trimmed sleeves, and a corset-belt of pale beige moleskin, also trimmed in lace. “Not my style,” Wanda had observed, and then chuckled gleefully. “But no one in this town does Lolita, and everyone dumped Gramma and Great-gramma’s old clothes at the thrift store. We’re going to have a blast for a couple bucks.”
“LARPing,” Staci said succinctly. “We go full-contact and it’s kind of hard on clothing. I had a serious wardrobe malfunction.” The lie came very easily to Staci; that’s another thing that had changed. She usually felt better about it when she remembered that, if she told anyone the truth about what she and the gang really did in the woods, they would either think she was insane . . . or worse, they would believe her. It’s safer to lie had become a running mantra whenever she had to deal with people outside the circle of Tim and her friends. Most of the time it worked.
Beth made a face. “No thanks. Ticks. Mosquitoes. Giant beetles. Dirt. Grass stains. And now you add ripping up your wardrobe? I like my adventures with the Mocha Java within reach.” Somewhat to Wanda’s surprise, and Seth’s complete astonishment, when she had been tentatively invited to the RPG group, Beth had accepted enthusiastically and turned out to be a good player. She tended to favor clerics and other healers, which was good, because Wanda and Staci . . . didn’t.
“On that note, shall we get to it? Everyone got their dice, character sheets, and coffee? Oh, Beth, here’s a pencil. All right, let’s go!” Seth cleared his throat, unfolding his Dungeon Master screen and cracking his knuckles. “Where we last left off, you had just come upon a ruined caravan in the middle of the Queen’s Road . . . ”
It was mid-afternoon when the gang finished up their session; Staci and Beth’s characters had both done relatively well, which was a nice change for Staci. Usually the dice fell the wrong way for her. Wanda’s character had been knocked out several times, twice by the traps that Seth had been bragging about. Staci noticed that Wanda was fudging her rolls intentionally a few times, and she had a notion as to why; Wanda was crushing on Seth. It had been building for some time, and naturally Seth was oblivious. The entire situation pleased Staci immensely; it was so very normal, proof that life wasn’t just magic and monsters and danger. She had felt a momentary pang of regret, however. Seeing Wanda mooning over Seth reminded her of her own love life . . . and Dylan. She had tamped that feeling down, and hard; she was hanging out with friends, and it wouldn’t do for her to get all emotional. That would invite questions, and she didn’t feel like lying to her friends any more than she had to.
The quartet were all stretching and cleaning up the table, some gathering the character sheets and dice while the rest took up the cups and saucers to a small sink near the coffee machine. It was Wanda’s turn to wash up, which she did, complaining as usual about how much she hated washing dishes, and how one day she would have her own place with a dishwasher. Not that Staci blamed her. There wasn’t a dishwasher at the house, and there wasn’t a hookup for one even if they’d had one, and she hated washing dishes. I wonder if I could guilt Dad into buying one of those portable ones you hook up to the sink? The fact that she and Mom were cooking meals meant there were always dishes to wash . . . the downside of no longer getting most of her meals at the diner, the drive-in, or the pizza joint.
Once the cleanup was done, the gang finished getting their things together before filing out of the store, saying goodbye to Tim on their way out. Staci waited until the others were out the door before she stopped, turning to face him.
“Are we still on for training tomorrow?”
“Of course,” Tim said, this time actually looking up to meet her eyes. “Have you been keeping up with your reading? I’ve got more books for you to study. There will always be more.”
She nodded; those books were slow-going. Sometimes she wondered if advanced physics wouldn’t be easier. “I have been; your notes help out bundles, on most of them. Anyways, I have to catch up with the others. See you tomorrow, Tim!”
“Always with the threats, apprentice?” He grinned, a rare display for Staci. “See you later, kiddo.”
The others were waiting for her outside, chatting and laughing. “What’s the hold up, slow poke? Forget which one was the exit?” Wanda crossed her eyes at Staci, sticking her tongue out.
“You’re hilarious. No, I had to—had to special order a book from Tim.” Staci caught herself at the last moment; sometimes she forgot that Beth wasn’t privy to all of their secrets. The girl was likeable, and fit in so well with the rest of them; all of the in-jokes and mannerisms had quickly become comfortably familiar to her, as if Beth had been a part of their group from the beginning.
“Hey, you know that David is getting off of work soon, right?” Beth leaned against the light pole, her arms crossed in front of her chest as she watched Staci.
“No, in fact, I did not know that.” A complete lie; she had become fairly knowledgeable about David’s schedule at the diner, as of late. Totally not a stalker. “You know what guys, I think I’ll catch up with you later. I need to . . . ”
“Go suck face with the cute dishwasher? Please, don’t let us keep you,” Wanda finished for her. She had an infuriating habit of doing that, and usually with a remark that made Staci blush; with her fair skin, it was very, very obvious when that happened. Wanda smiled in satisfaction upon seeing that she had succeeded to do just that.
“Shut up, nerd. Anyways, I’ll catch you guys later!” She unchained her bike and quickly began peddling towards the diner, eager to hide her embarrassment . . . and to see David. This was totally not a rebound crush. This was just . . . well David was cute and nice and normal and didn’t have any Tragic Past Issues or Immortality Issues or, well . . . it would be nice to have one thing in her life that actually was normal. She deserved at least one thing, right?
She slowed down as she got nearer to the diner. She didn’t want to be red-faced and sweaty when she saw David. As luck would have it, she caught him just as he was coming through the front door. He saw her and waved, stepping up to the curb and putting his hands into his pockets.
“Fancy seeing you here. Where’s everyone else?”
Staci stopped her bike in front of him before leaning it against the curb after she stepped off. “Everyone? Oh, the gang. Uh, they had, stuff to do. Somewhere else.” Stuff to do? She mentally kicked herself and continued on. “Just thought I would swing by, see if I could walk with you for a bit?” Now she really was freaking out. Where had that come from?
“Sure, that’d be nice. I’m a little ways away, but it shouldn’t be too far.” He laughed a bit. “Then again, isn’t that true of everything in this town?”
“Hazards of living life at the end of the universe,” she replied.
They walked quietly together for a couple of minutes before both of them started talking at the same time, then both of them laughed nervously. At least he’s as bad at this as I am.
“You go first, then I’ll go,” he said, nodding towards her.
“Okay. Well, we didn’t get a chance to really talk the other day, when you were at work. And it’s probably not a good idea for me to get you in trouble that way. So, yeah.” She paused for a second, thinking. “Tell me more about your family?”
“Not much to tell. Pa’s a hotshot mechanic, but he’s self-trained—old-school. It’s hard to get the franchise-shops to give him a chance without certification. When he lucked into the job he’s got now, we pretty much thanked our lucky stars, and figured when they said ‘frog’ we’d jump, you know?” He shrugged. “So Fairgrove said ‘Move to Silence’ and we said ‘sure thing, boss,’ and here we are.”
Staci felt herself stiffen at the mention of Fairgrove. Fairgrove . . . that’s the name Dylan and Morrigan Blackthorne mentioned, the elves in Georgia, big shots. And they were into motorcycles . . . I need to tell Tim.
“. . . and that’s when the horn grew out of my forehead. Made for a nice hatrack.” David looked at her expectantly, smiling.
“I’m sorry, what?” she said, then realized he’d been talking, but she hadn’t been listening. Not at all. Damn you, Dylan. You’re even messing up my attention-span now. “Oh, hell. Sorry, I got lost in my thoughts there, David. As you get to know me, you’ll find out that I’m just a huge ditz, and not the wonderfully awesome specimen that I appear to be.”
“It’s okay.” He gave her a cute, sideways look and a half-smile. “I get a bit fried after a long day of working, so I’m probably no better right now. Anyways, what about your family? Tell me some about them.”
She made a face. “Ugh. Got a couch for me to lie on and a prescription pad? That’s what it’d take to get all of the details about my family. Short version, Mom is a little crazy, but I guess a little crazy is pretty normal anymore. We live over on Waide Street. Dad’s a lawyer, and a few months ago he dumped me here to keep his new wife happy, though I guess he feels bad about it. Mom and Dad separated about eight years ago, and I was living in NYC with Dad until he got remarried.” She thought about telling David more about the situation. About Brenda. Would that make her look too . . . bitchy? “She was nice to me right up until the ring was on her finger, then it was new wife, new life, I guess.”
“That sucks. I’m sorry, Staci. It couldn’t have been easy getting uprooted like that; I know I have some friends that I miss back home, but that’s rough.” They walked along quietly for a few more moments before he began again. “Still, this town isn’t all that bad.”
“Lately, you’d be right. It was the pits before. No cell service, almost no internet.” She shook her head. “Would you believe the best you could get was twenty-four baud with an old-fashioned modem over copper telephone wires? Even the school! Everyone was in a constant funk, and the economy was in the crapper. You had to go the next town over to see movies or do any shopping. But I guess that kind of forced me to make friends.” She mock-shrugged. “Beth, and a few other kids; you met Seth and Wanda. Two of them moved, ’cause their families got jobs up the coast, but the rest are still here.”
“Yeah, I heard that things started picking up a lot, which I guess is one reason why Fairgrove decided to start a new branch here. Get in while the real estate is still cheap, yeah?” His look invited an answer and she laughed a little. “Wasn’t there also some sort of big tragedy a few months back? A fire or something?”
“It wasn’t a fire.” It was a whole bunch of dark elves and monsters trying to kill me and my friends with magic. “I was up there for a party, and I actually don’t remember much. Cops said it was a gas explosion. It took out most of a big-time family here in Silence.”
“That’s right! The Blackthornes, or something. Crazy stuff.” He looked at her, his brows knitting together. “You got hurt in that?”
“Yeah . . . Tim and the others came rushing up after the explosion, found me and helped me out. I’m fine now, I was mostly just in shock and shaken up.” That was mostly true; she had also been left to die by someone that she thought she loved, but that was a detail that David didn’t need to know about just this moment. Or ever.
“I’m glad that you’re okay, Staci.” He reached out and touched her shoulder for a moment. She felt as if she could kiss him right then; it had been a long while since she had received any of that kind of affection, and she had missed it. “This is me,” he said, removing his hand—couldn’t he keep it there just a few seconds longer?—and gesturing towards the house they were standing in front of. “Would it be okay for me to ask if you’d like to get a bite sometime? Not at the diner; maybe the drive-in?”
“More than okay. I’d really like that, David.” She positively beamed. “I’m busy tomorrow, but . . . maybe the day after?” She knew that he was only working a half-shift that day; she only had practice tomorrow, with the next day being one of her days off.
“Cool. Can I have your number? I’ll call you when I get off and pick you up.” He chuckled a little. “Sad and pathetic, I don’t have a car of my own, that’s what I’m saving for, but I can probably borrow Ma’s if you don’t mind being seen in a relic of the last century. It’s a Subaru Outback Sport.”
Going to the drive-in in an actual car? That’ll be a change! “Sure, that’ll work great. Here’s my number. And I like Subarus.” Actually she didn’t have the slightest idea what a Subaru looked like, but she wouldn’t have cared if it was a barge at this point. Well . . . maybe not a crapped-out pickup. I probably wouldn’t want to go to the drive-in in a crapped-out pickup . . . which is what most of the boys in this town seem to drive.
“The advantage of having a pa that’s a mechanic is you can keep cars running forever. The disadvantage of having a pa that’s a mechanic is that you can keep cars running forever.” He laughed again. “Still it means I only have a couple hundred bucks to go before I’ll have my own wheels, since Pa can run a resurrection spell on just about anything.”
“As long as it isn’t a zombie-car,” she replied lightly. “Or Christine.” And before she could think of anything else to say, a voice called from the green clapboard saltbox house above them.
“Dave! Can you come take out the garbage?”
“Well, I am summoned,” he said, heading up the driveway to the house. “Later, Staci! Day after tomorrow!”
“I’ll see you then, I guess!” She stayed there, watching David until he was back in the house, smiling the entire time. Damn if he isn’t cute. And nice.
She checked her phone and was surprised to see that half an hour had gone by since they had started walking. It had seemed much shorter than that to her. Staci felt as if she was on a cloud the entire bike ride back to her house.
Maybe I’ll have the guts to ask him to come to the bookstore sometime, have some coffee. Maybe.