Following Trails

A car is like a gun: a machine that can kill people. That is one of the first things Aram told me when giving me lessons. Never forget how dangerous a car is. Never forget that you are fallible. I’m not Kelly: they drive as easily as breathing. But I think fear helps me. A little bit.

That, and my talent. I can push things and pull them; the car hugs the road on tight gravel turns. Anya is sitting in the passenger seat, focused on something only she can sense. She does with pain what I do with movement.

“Left. We’re getting closer,” she says, voice as pale as her face.

I take a left down another narrow road. Everything around us is evergreens, small homes buried in the forest whose existence is only guessed at by mail boxes. All I know is there is some pain here; pain we might be able to stop. Wilbur isn’t with us, busy trying to learn magic from Mr Pickles. Not helped by the fact that Wilbur is possibly the first magician who deals mostly with ghosts, or that Mr Pickles is a cat. I don’t know if Wilbur even wants to be what he is, and that’s nothing that can be taught.

I pull over to let a battered truck pass us, and Anya puts her left hand on mine before I pull out onto the road.

“Something is trying to hide. Everything has gone foggy.”

“Oh.” I reach, and pull the fog out of her head. Neither of us like me doing it: we have no idea what it might be harming. But sometimes there are no simple choices. Anya might not have lupus anymore, but no one is certain what is inside her. Or what she is becoming.

Anya shakes her head a little. “Better. The next right, a left. That should take us closer.”

I drive slowly. The road gets narrower, winding as though designed to cause accidents. We don’t pass any other vehicles, which is mostly a relief. I get tired of double- takes and stares. I’d get it for having too many freckles alone, to say nothing of acne and scars. The acne is better than it was least year, but I’m never going to not attract stares. It doesn’t help me like it.

“Left,” Anya says slowly.

I turn left, slowing the car down a crawl down a driveway whose trees scrape both sides of the car before coming to a clearing. There is a shall house that is falling apart built into the side of mossy hill. No vehicles, no garbage. Even so, I hesitate getting out of the car. Something feels wrong, though it’s nothing I can see. I reach out a little with my talent. Not using it; just trying to see if anything is pushing or pulling at the world. Nothing. The feeling remains.

Anya gets out slowly, walking over beside me. “Anything?”

“No. Still feels wrong. I could just be projecting?”

“No idea. There is a strange pain here. Under the hill, in the earth, straining against the sky. Rivers move toward the ocean. If it was the other way, it would be this. A bleeding out. A tributary.” She lets out a breath. “Sorry. I can’t tell you what it is. Or even where. I can’t even tell you if they are dying. It’s probably something like a miracle that I sensed the pain at all.”

I nod and walk beside her toward the house. Our feet begin sinking into the earth as though it was mud after seven steps. Anya would make fun of me for counting that, but Aram always says that information is vital. I reach over, right hand in Anya’s left, and use my talent to lift us into the air. The ground looks solid after our feet leave it.

“I think it’s inside the hill. The pain, and what is causing this?”

“Not the house?”

“The house isn’t there. Huh. I have no idea why I said that?”

I reach out with my left hand. A board snaps off the house and lands in my palm. Anya turns her talent on it: the board cracks and rots away. I let go of the remains.

“Still not here?”

“No idea.”

I keep up in the air, hold out my left hand in a fist. I open my hand slowly, the house shattering apart in a spray of wood. Walls, some furniture. A basement. I reach out with my talent. Nothing.

“There is a basement. It doesn’t want to budge, not rooted in this world. I think it’s a door into the hill?”

The wreckage of the house comes into clearer view as we get closer. I’ve never destroyed a house before, but it looks extremely real.

There is no door down to the basement. One slab of concrete greets us. I land on it, finding it solid Anya hisses softly. “A lot of pain. Under us.”

I gesture. She moves back off it, not sinking too deeply. I centre myself, touch the concrete. Pull. Something resists even as the concrete begins to crack. It feels like trying to lift up a mountain.

So I twist, aiming to tear the top off like a bottle cap. The world goes still, quiet layered upon quiet. I tune that out. Let my talent out. Shape it. Be it. My vision darkens at the edges, the world blurring. I am a space I find.

Pull.

I hear the world break. A thousand sounds I’ve never heard. It’s too late to stop. Too deep to be pulled back. I hear a scream of pain that burns through more than flesh. Somehow I push that away from me.

I open my eyes. My head throbs. My face aches. “I don’t think hair is meant to ache. Or fingernails.” My voice is a thin rasp. I have to use my talent just to sit up. The world spins a little.

I’m sitting on moss. I ache inside and out. Anya is sitting beside me, tense and trying to hide it. Across from us is an old man. Human. Except his left arm is like the earth we walked in. It bends, twists in the air, melts before our eyes.

“I thought the wandering magician would find me.” The voice is cool and calm, entirely at odds with the fact that his body isn’t moving at all beyond what used to be a left arm spasming energies into the world. “Instead I am found by children.”

“We did find you,” Anya says flatly.

“I am wounded. We are not impossible to find when wounded. Your friend, though.” His gaze focuses on me. I know he’s not human, because there’s no shock. There’s no sympathy either. “You forced your way into my home. And can still do things after that.”

I shrug, but say nothing.

“Can we help you?” Anya asks. “You said you’d answser once my friend woke up. He’s up. We can hurt you; that’s not the same thing at all.”

“It can be. But no. Your friend broke the door to my home; it will be noticed. Other fae will arrive, and notice I am wounded. I will be healed, perhaps, or at least taken home. You have done the only thing you could have done for me, and by accident at that. Sometimes the universe works that way for fae.”

“Fae. Which is –?” Anya asks.

“We protect the borders of the universe. And deal with certain creatures in our employ. One of which decided to rebel, and wounded me in dying. It is hard to wound us, and the injury was deep enough that I dared not contact one of our castles.”

“You’d bleed out more. Like radiation poisoning?” I ask.

“Consider it more poisoning reality. Fae glamours are more real than reality; our injuries spill out glamour. That much I tell you, and this too: go.”

We’ve met magicians. The fae’s voice isn’t power. It’s a fact. One moment we’re under the hill, the next we’re in the car on a different road.

“Okay,” Anya says slowly. “That was more than a little scary.”

I nod. “More than a lot.”

She laughs, almost. “Point. You up for driving?”

I shake my head. I don’t trust myself to do anything right now. Even shaking my head makes the world spin in sickening colours, the headache having migrated to my whole body. I crawl into the back seat, trying not to whimper, and Anya says nothing, turns on music and drives back toward Rivercomb. I drift in and out of pain that is somehow not as bad as it feels. That thought helps me shake myself off.

I hurt. Not as much as the fae was making me feel, but I hurt. I don’t know why the fae wanted me to feel more pain than I do. I don’t know what the fae even is. But I’m hoping Anya knows, or Mr Pickles. Or anyone at all. Because I pushed my talent harder than I have before, and I think the fae was shocked I managed anything at all.

I think the fae is very old, and very arrogant with it. And impressing something like that isn’t a good idea at all. Not an Aram-lesson. Just a Noah-lesson from a life too full of weirdness lately. Anya is singing along to the radio; that helps me find a proper sleep, and welcome relief from the pain as much as her singing voice.

I don’t think she puts her talent into her singing. Not consciously.

And then I think nothing else, and let the deep darkness claim me for a few hours.

“The abandoned”

“People speak about abandoned places but there is no such thing. Even when a place is too empty for the dead to haunt, we who made them owe them our presence. If you build it, they will come. Or must come. I don’t know.” Wilbur glances at me briefly before turning his attention back to the road. “Kelly – doesn’t want to drive us right now, and I got my licence last week.”

“You said something was pulling at you. Going alone isn’t safe, especially to abandoned places.” I hesitate. I try not to but I can’t help myself. “Especially for you.”

“Hmm?” Wilbur asks as he turns down another dirt road. We’re far east of Rivercomb now, wandering through logging roads and side roads that the GPS doesn’t admit exists.

“Well, you could fall through the floor?” I offer, thinking up a line to use next.

Wilbur snorts. “That works better as a joke if you don’t make it a question, Noah.”

“I thought it was obvious that a fact isn’t a question,” I say.

He laughs softly. “Almost a proper one.”

“Thanks,” I say, and mean it. Too many years of being stuck in a home and being me make conversation hard even months after being free of my parents. I glance out the window, not wanting to distract Wilbur further. He’s swerved at least four times so far for things that weren’t there at all, but Kelly is stuck doing a long job at work. And after their one car was destroyed by something with too many teeth, Kelly hadn’t been all that eager to drive any of us anywhere.

Not that I blame them. Anya has been keeping to herself, worried we’ll treat her differently now that we know she isn’t entirely human. I’ve tried to tell her it doesn’t matter to me, but I’m not good enough with words to explain that right and it matters to her. Everything has been complicated since we saved Rivercomb from being changed into something alien by Greg Ruk. We’d saved our home, and everything else had fallen apart.

My stepfather had to attempt to kill me – only technically, and it summoned a creature that saved everyone – but he and my stepmother – my parents, now, haven’t been talking like they used to. I don’t know how to fix that, save by moving out. I don’t know if that would help. Wilbur has been coming into his power as the world’s only ghost magician, though no know knows what that really means. All I really did was become stronger in using my own magical Talent. I can push things. Really well. Anya can cause pain, Kelly can fix broken vehicles. The four of us worked well together, but now everything is – whatever it is.

“Noah?” Wilbur’s voice pulls at me. It’s not like John Adams, the magician in Oxbow, who could command, but it still pulls. I look back over. “You okay?”

“You should be watching the road,” I mumble.

“No one is on it.” He pauses, his expression distant and blank for a moment, then pulls the car over, killing the engine. The passenger’s door is almost buried against narrow trees. “We haven’t hung out properly in weeks as just the two of us being friends.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault. We did something great together, and sometimes there’s prices for that. We can fix things, but not if we don’t try. Which means hanging out and taking. I can make all the jokes if you want,” he adds after a pause.

I laugh at that, feeling relaxed for the first time in the last half hour. “You’re jealous of my jokes.”

“Of course.” He gets out, and I follow him out the driver’s door. “I didn’t ask you here just for that, though. Pickles said I might need help.”

That Rivercomb has a proper magician, and one who is a cat, is also something we’ve never really talked about. I nod. Wilbur looks up at me. He’s a bit shorter, a lot bigger, and I think he’s waiting for something but I’m not not sure what. In the end, he starts walking and I follow beside him.

The road narrows as we round a bend, enough that we’d have scraped the car badly against the thin scraggly trees pressing against either side. “There’s something odd here,” Wilbur offers, holding up his right hand even as he’s hurled backwards by some unseen force. His back slams onto gravel so hard I didn’t even have time to try and use my talent to stop it.

“Wilbur?” My voice cracks, even to my ears. He doesn’t make a joke about it, just lies on his back and stares up, trying to get his breath back.

“Nothing feels broken,” he wheezes.

I reach down and help him up without a word. He had a cut on one cheek but stands on his own without any sign of pain. I’m about a hundred pounds at best – still too skinny despite the meals Aram and Lia make – and Wilbur is around four hundred pounds so my talent pulling him to his feet elicits a shared grin at the absurdity other people would see.

“You’ve gained weight,” we both say at once, and then share a laugh that cracks tension like a bomb.

Wilbur wipes his cheek after, stepping back toward the car. The cut isn’t deep at all. “Whatever is ahead of us is scared of me and doesn’t want me approaching. So it has to be you.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know!” I think it’s my imagination that the forest about us seems to get quieter at the shout. “I didn’t mean to shout: it’s something abandoned, I think, based on what I was saying earlier. I just – know things now, Noah, and I don’t know why. Part of being a magician, I think, but it’s hard to know what is the magic and isn’t, what might just be me or –.” He falls silent.

Sometimes I’m stupid. Sometimes I’m very stupid. “I’m not afraid of you. Magician or not, you’re my friend,” I say. I don’t have it in me to shout like he does, not even if no one else is watching, but he smiles at whatever I manage in my voice.

“I know. It’s just I’ve dragged you all the way out here and now I can’t do anything. I could try and ward you, but I don’t know if that would cause another incident.”

“I’ll be okay. If I’m not,” I add quickly, “You can gather everyone and get revenge.” He snorts, but doesn’t disagree.

I pull my talent about me as I walk. I can push and pull things, and whatever is out here pushes so I should be okay. I walk down what I think is actually a driveway rather than a road. There is no mud, the gravel surprisingly solid, the road wider than it should be given the press of trees and vines against it. It ends in a tangle of brush I almost don’t realize conceals a building. Nothing strange is happening that I can tell. I move forward.

“Hello?” I add it a second time, a bit louder. There is no reply.

The glimpse of something that caught my eye turned out to be a sign reading POSTED, with Private Property underneath it and small print about prosecution under that. The walls are old brick that somehow hold together despite age. The first floor windows were boarded up long ago, but the sign was put up later beside a window. Not just put up: someone drilled into the brick, made a wood frame and put the sign in that. I have no idea what to make of that, but Aram insists that paying attention means paying attention.

I can see the sky through a second floor window that isn’t boarded up and walk about the building carefully. It’s not large, what would have been a door also boarded and encrusted in vines. I could pull them apart with a thought. I don’t, and circle the building again to try and understand why. The vines are old, the brickwork somehow standing against time and age. I look back the way I came, and back at the building.

“You called Wilbur here. He’s the one who can deal with ghosts. I’m not. I can –.” I wave a hand, push with my talent. Vines rustle. Wood creaks. And the bricks ripple. I pull it back and get my phone out to call Wilbur.

“Please. Do not.”

The voice is a whisper, barely above the wind. It sounds like creaking wood, a little bit, unless I’m imagining that. “Don’t what?”

“Call the one who can unmake me.”

“We don’t even know what is going on here, but is there a reason Wilbur would unmake you? Whatever you are?”

“An exorcism always works if blood is drawn; it cannot be resisted.”

“Oh. I – I don’t think Wilbur actually knows that, if it helps?” There is a breath like wind about me. “Wilbur isn’t an exorcist like others are. He has options they don’t,” I say, and really hope I’m right. “It would help if you didn’t hurt anyone. Or try to hide.”

“Hiding is all I am good at.” And somehow, weirdly, that sounds more human than anything else it has said.

“It’s dangerous to be too good at anything? My step – my mom told me that.”

“You do not hide?” And there is breaking glass along with creaking wood under the words now.

I feel myself starting to blush. “I know what I look like. Acne. Freckles. Too much of both. I get it.”

“That is not –.” The voice cuts off, adding nothing else.

I wait, then call Wilbur. “I think the building is haunted by itself, maybe? And I don’t think it’s strong enough to hurt you right now.”

He thanks me and I hang up. Brickwork dissolves moments later. There are more vines, the private property sign less legible, the bricks cracked and riddled with decay. I put my phone away slowly. “I was right, about what you are?”

“I haunt myself, yes.”

“And you’re using that energy to do renovations no one can see.” It would be funny, if it was funny at all.

The ghost says nothing and Wilbur makes his way up beside me, looking the building over.

“All right. You’re the ghost of a house haunting itself, and you called me here and tried to hurt me. Talk,” he says mildly.

“You are too big,” the spirit responds.

“I don’t think it means you’re big. Even if you are,” I stumble out.

Wilbur grins at that. “I know what you mean, Noah. You don’t want to be alone, house?”

“I am a place. I was made for people, not to be abandoned. Not to become one of the empty places in the world.”

“But if people repair this place, you’d have to move on,” Wilbur says slowly.

I don’t have words for the sound the spirit makes. I never want to.

“Other ghosts? Can’t other ghosts be here?” I whisper.

“That. I could get other ghosts to come here. For company. You could haunt them?” Wilbur says, and the ghost listens to what it in his voice. The rest of the conversation happens in ways I don’t hear, but the house haunts itself back into a better state as we walk away.

Wilbur waits until I’m in the car, gets in as well and turns it around. “I have no idea how I’m going to do this,” he says a minute later when we’re a couple of roads away from the house. “We’re definitely going to need to talk to the others.”

“Sorry.”

“Are you?”

“No,” I admit, and he nods, flicks on music and convinces me to join him in singing Queen songs. Because sometimes the only way through any sense of abandonment is to push on through it. Like how Aram says the solution to a maze is to burn it to the ground.

Wilbur doesn’t crash the car at my attempt at singing, but it’s a near thing twice.

Retirement: a parable

The assignment was simple. There is a wandering magician. He interferes in matters that do not concern magicians. Find him. Kill him.

Working for the Metric Commission meant dealing with problems. I had killed several with magical Talents in my time. And one magician, though she was new to her power and I’d barely escaped with my life even so. This assignment wasn’t like that.

They gave me the aendar, a stone that nullified power. And promises I’d be able to leave if I did this one thing. I said yes. Sometimes that’s all you can do. There were ways to find him, of course but I wasn’t about to try them: magicians have good instincts for traps.

Instead I ended up in the town of Cresthaven. Because it carried a scar in the skin of the world that was opening and the magician would end up here. It was the sort of thing magicians fixed and there were none around here. There were four talents in two surrounding towns: killing them proved surprisingly simple.

That was probably a warning. Only I didn’t think so at the time.

The magician arrived three weeks later. Places feel different once a magician comes to them. Like the calm at the centre of a storm. As if everything was more real, more important. There was a fulcrum here, and everyone knew it without understanding what they knew.

He looked ordinary. That surprised me. He wandered the streets and if I hadn’t been told what was wrong with the town, I’d have never noticed him. But he paid attention to the wound. I followed, waiting until he was done mending it.

He turned to me as I came up behind him. The aendar was cold in my hand and warm as well as though the stone were somehow liquid and solid as once.

“Ah,” he said, and then words in a language I didn’t know. The aendar was in his hand a moment later. The stone purred.

I didn’t move.

“You brought two snipers with you.” He didn’t use power, not in the way magicians can. But he was certain in a way that shook me.

“Three,” I admitted.

“Including you, yes.” He sighed. “If I asked, would you tell me who you worked for?”

“I am trained to resist such things.”

“Mmm. You think that will matter to me, considering you planned to kill me?”

“No. The stone was going to my my method.”

The magician blinked once, studied the stone. “Few can carry an aendar for three weeks without it leaving them. Whatever agency you work with, you know how dangerous a magician can be.”

“In a place of power, yes.”

He smiled, and the smile set me back a step. “I am the wandering magician. Each place I wander to is a place of power for me.”

I fell back another step at the truth behind those words. I swore. I don’t often, but sometimes it’s the only way to voice fear.

“Even if that were not true, you must have known this would not work. Why did you do it?”

I think he threaded power into his voice on a level so subtle I never sensed it; I’d like to think that’s why I answered. “I wish to retire. Almost no one has. I am tired of – the things that have to be done to keep the world safe. Of how much I’ve lost and given up of myself, my own dreams. I wished to be free from those I worked for.”

He laughed. The magician’s laugh shook me with the kindness that lurked under him. “You have an aendar stone: they unmake bindings, and some magics as well. Whatever connected to you to your employers is gone, Aram.”

“And those who came with me?” I asked.

“I have dealt with them.”

I didn’t ask. If I have learned anything, it’s that some things are best left unknown. “And what happens to me?”

“That is up to you. I will let the stone go: no one is meant to hold one, and certainly not for three weeks. You may forget some things you knew, but some of that will be the stones doing on the behest of your former employers I imagine.”

I nodded. I could have asked for his help, but there are some things you don’t do.

“And Aram?”

I paused, half-turned away. I’d never told him my name, but he was the wandering magician.

“If you try and kill anyone else with a Talent in your life, you will answer to me.”

I said nothing; I continued turning and walked away. Sometimes there are no other options. Survival has a cost, and I accepted the cost of my own.