CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“No, no, no, no, NO!” I yelled as I rushed out my front door and into the manicured hellscape of suburbia. The man with the dog drew up short and stared at me. My ash-and-gravel-smeared plate armor, dented shield, and vintage longsword were a touch out of place, but I didn’t care. The dog started to wag his tail. His owner, less outgoing or perhaps more concerned for his safety, began to back slowly down the street. A minivan full of kids rolled past, mother-driver yelling cheerfully into her cellphone while the passenger gawked at Mr. Medieval. I went to my knees.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!”
“John Malcolm Rast! You get inside this house this instant!” My mother was on the stoop, hands to hips.
Still under the influence of motherly instruction, I stood and trudged back into the house. I was encouraged to see that my house, at least, had not changed significantly. The outside was still a rough-hewn log cottage built into the side of a hill that rose incongruently out of the suburban landscape like a little pocket of Hobbiton in Highland Park. Mom grabbed me by the shoulder and dragged me the last ten feet, slamming the door behind me.
“What is wrong with you? Do you know what the neighbors will say, if you keep acting like that?” She pushed me down into the chair next to Dad. I squirmed around my sheathed sword and the uncomfortable burden of my shield. “Now stay here. I’ll be back with sandwiches in a jiffy.”
“Roast beef,” Dad said. He had produced a remote from somewhere and was patiently clicking it at the fireplace. “TV’s broken.”
“TV is a fireplace,” I said. Then I heard the door to the kitchen swing shut, and I realized Mom was about to meet a zombie. I jumped to my feet. “Wait!”
I rushed into the kitchen and directly into my mother. She was standing just inside the kitchen door, hands to her mouth, with a horrified expression on her face. I pushed her aside and stood between her and the zombie.
Except there wasn’t a zombie. The kitchen was empty. The pot of stew boiled happily on the woodstove, the dishes lay in the sink with the cauldron of rainwater next to it. Everything looked normal. Percy must have fled when he saw my mom, though where he could have gone was a mystery. I turned to my mom.
“I can explain—”
“Can you? Can you explain why my son, who was raised in a good and decent household, doesn’t even have a microwave? Or a refrigerator?” She shouldered her way past me and went to the sink. “OR RUNNING WATER! Do you have any idea how embarrassing this is for me?”
“Oh. It’s the kitchen that horrifies you. Right.” I looked around the room, trying to see it through her eyes. The lack of appliances had never bothered me, simply because the house spirits that made the soup and kept the bread fresh also refilled the water bucket and—until Percy showed up—cleaned the dishes. I had a cupboard and some dishes. What more did I need?
Lots, apparently. Mom was listing a litany of absences, from can openers to mixing bowls, and she kept repeating the bit about a microwave. Fortunately, she hadn’t figured out the lack of electricity. Or, you know, conventional bathroom facilities. I suddenly realized I needed to get these people out of here before Dad had to “live through Pompeii,” which was the cute little term he had for his afternoon bowel movement.
“This is all part of the Ren faire thing, Mom,” I said, moving her firmly out of the kitchen. “I’m trying to be a knight. Kinda.”
“Knights had castles, John. They had servants. You have . . .” She gestured helplessly at the piles of gravel and my father, still futilely trying to change the channel on the fireplace. “You have whatever this is.”
“A home,” I said. She sighed heavily, then went to the table and moved the chairs around. She was fussing. “Mom, what’s bothering you?”
“Nothing, it’s just . . . we never see you. After that storm . . .” One of my very first adventures involved a storm harpy trying to kill me, and resulted in a tornado going through my parents’ house. “We had to move in with your aunt, and you just . . . disappeared. We see Eric sometimes, and Chesa, but you—”
“Wait, you see Eric and Chesa?”
“Around town, sure. Shopping. But you never visit, you never call, and the last time we tried to visit you, the address you gave us led to a dead-end road in the middle of a forest.” She wouldn’t look up at me, just busied herself with the chairs that she had already moved three times. “It feels like you’re avoiding us.”
How do you say I’m not avoiding you, I’m avoiding the modern world, because that’s how my magic powers work without sounding like a madman? I don’t think you can. Or at least, I don’t think I can, because when I tried it came out like this:
“Yes, I’m avoiding you.”
“Oh. Well, then.” She pushed the chair violently into the table. “Come on, Frank. We’re not wanted here.”
“That’s not what I meant! I mean, it is, but—”
“No, no, you don’t have to explain it. You’ve got important KNIGHT things to do. Maybe if you could find a damsel to save, I wouldn’t have to worry so much about you getting sepsis from your own kitchen sink!” She stormed to the door. “Frank!”
“I think Vesuvius is—”
“No! Mom, we can talk about this later. I promise to come visit more, but right now it’s probably best if we just leave things alone.”
“I agree. Besides, we have a ten-minute walk ahead of us,” she said. “The stupid car broke down on the way over.”
Father, grumbling, made his way to the door. Mom exited the house with a flounce and waited on the sidewalk. As he passed, Dad thumped the remote into my grasp.
“You’re going to need to get this thing looked at. Probably the batteries. Or the cable. Squirrels sometimes chew the cable,” he said.
“I’m pretty sure you brought this with you,” I said, trying to force the remote back into his hands. But he was already gone, rolling side to side as he and Mother made their way down the sidewalk. With a sigh, I wrapped the remote in a towel and hid it under some bushes at the end of my driveway to keep it from infecting the domain any more than it already had. Mom and Dad had already disappeared down the street.
“I’m going to have to fix that before this is all over,” I said. “Can’t have them showing up randomly. As for this . . .” I looked around the suburban neighborhood. “This is going to take a conversation with Esther, I think. If I can just find a way back to HQ from here.”
The good news was that HQ came to me. The bad news was that they brought friends. Lots of friends.
The sound of a helicopter reached me while I was still sitting on my front stoop, glaring at the neighbors and wondering how I was going to re-establish my domain’s connection to the mythic world. I didn’t think much of it at first. After all, if there were minivans and leashed dogs, why wouldn’t there be helicopters? Then it started getting closer, and closer, and louder, and lower. The sirens started shortly after.
“Well, this has got to be for me,” I said, getting stiffly to my feet. “Waving a sword around in the street will get you some attention. Though I really just expected a letter from the homeowners association, or maybe a stern cancellation online.” I drew my sword and laid it carefully on the sidewalk, next to my shield. “Really wish I’d thought to get out of the armor first. Ah well. At least I won’t have to worry about getting shivved.”
A caravan of black vans came squealing around the corner, sirens blaring and headlights blinking in a seizure-inducing sequence. They didn’t look like cop vehicles, though, more like high-end delivery vans, or maybe the kind of monstrosity a family of eighteen might take on vacation. Kind of like the Death Star, only square. Three of them screeched to a halt in front of my house, while a fourth barreled up the driveway and plowed into my yard. Just then, the aforementioned helicopter roared over my roof, flattening the surrounding trees. The chopper appeared to be some kind of gunship, with a bulbous nose and enough gun emplacements to shred a column of tanks, much less one hero in full plate. I shielded my eyes from the downdraft and peered up at the helicopter, half expecting a shower of incendiary rounds at any moment.
Not that it would matter. I was magically bulletproof, just like the rest of Knight Watch. Unless this whole thing with my domain meant that I had lost that power. In which case . . .
I slowly raised my hands over my head and tried to smile.
The sliding door of the van that had parked itself in my lawn slid open, and a particularly disheveled Esther MacRae sprang out. She marched up to me and slapped a clipboard into my chest.
“Do you have any idea the ruckus you’re causing, Rast?” she shouted.
I looked up at the helicopter with its slowly rotating assault cannons, and the battalion of combat vans arranged haphazardly in my street.
“Me? The ruckus I’m causing?” I asked. “Are you serious?”
“In the Unreal!” she amended. “The Anomaly Actuator is glowing it’s so hot. I have MA teams deploying to half a dozen sites across the country, and most of the team is MIA. You’re the first one back, and you decide to go for a stroll in your old neighborhood, like some kind of TOURIST!” She slapped the clipboard into my chest again. I reluctantly took it. “I want a report, and I want it yesterday!”
“The report is simple. This isn’t my old neighborhood, it’s my domain. Do you really think I grew up in a cottage built into a hill? Hell, Esther, you’ve seen my old house. It’s still a ruin. Chesa, Matthew, and I used a shadow road, and somehow I came directly to my domain. Only it isn’t where it’s supposed to be, is it?” I slapped the clipboard back at her, which earned me a stern look, but I didn’t care. There was too much going on to worry about hurting the old lady’s feelings. “I don’t know what’s going on, but the valhellions have the Tears, Greg and Bee are probably dead, Tembo’s badly hurt, and I have no idea where Chesa and the saint have gotten to, so we don’t really have time for paperwork.”
“There’s always time for paperwork,” she said, though the anger was gone from her work. She squinted up at the rough-hewn walls of the cottage, then around at the brick-fronted, aluminum-sided monstrosities on either side. “I guess this is a little unusual, isn’t it? Guess we better figure out where the other three are and get you all back to HQ. We can figure out what to do from there.”
“What about Greg and Bee?” I asked.
“You think this group is the original team? You think I haven’t been through fifty iterations of sorcerors, archers, knights, and thieves?” she asked. Esther turned around and waved off the helicopter. Both it and the armada of vans extricated themselves from the neighborhood, disappearing as quickly as they’d arrived, leaving us alone with the single van that sat in the middle of my lawn. She turned to me and sighed. “Heroes die, John. Better you get used to that sooner rather than later.”
“That’s hardly encouraging.”
“Yeah. Wait until you see the paperwork for that.” She turned back to the van, motioning for me to follow.