I’m going nuts.
Or, at least, I’m going to be after tomorrow. Let me explain.
Here’s my work load for the next half a month:
–Grab a Speech class book from a teacher at my school, study it within the next seven days well enough to pass a test on Feb. 1.
–Write two speeches, to be performed in front of the teacher guy’s class.
–Wait for my research paper to come back from my older brother, then I have to edit it as well…
–Meanwhile, keep up with my French IV teacher’s almost daily homework, which can take as little as five minutes, but can take as long as an hour and a half if you don’t know what you’re doing.
–Attempt not to bite people’s heads off.
–Attempt not to fantasize about mowing down my second block teacher with a chainsaw. (It’s not that he sets a lot of homework or anything. What bugs me is that he gets his information wrong three quarters of the time.)
–Attempt not to speak French in German class.
The reason I’m doing all this is because I’m applying to get into a decent English class. Specifically, AP Comp. It would mean I don’t have to listen to any more English teachers telling me that certain books are good because Oprah said so.
Anyway. Phoenix is done. I haven’t put any new up yet because I wanted my Stop SOPA notice to hang up here for a while, but since I haven’t been posting, people haven’t been coming anyway. I’m going to put some up in a few minutes, if I have time.
I need to edit Phoenix, but that’s going to have to take a back seat for a while. I guess it’s better that way. I’m too close to the book in the first place. But I’ve also had an idea for a new project that I’m anxious to get working on, and frankly… I’d rather be writing novels than trying to… um… spelunk my way through a bunch of papers and speeches and rubrics. (There has to be a word for walking through a boggy mire with mud up to your knees. It isn’t trudge. It’s something else. Slop. Sklunch. Shplat. Shlurkp.)
Or I could be reading Lenore Thomson’s personality type book, which she apparently used at one point for college classes as a textbook. Man, I’d have loved to take one of her classes. I just get this little thrill every time I open up her book. It’s so profound, the way the system works. I don’t understand people easily unless I use MBTI, and every time I open that book, something else is explained. It’s accurate information, pieced together so smoothly… It’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful book.
In any case, it seems like I’m in it for a few weeks, unless I’ve overjudged and this isn’t going to be a big deal. Always that possibility. So if you don’t hear for me for a few weeks, just know I had an excuse.
And no, I’m not going to give up on trying for this better English class because of the work load, which is what everyone at the district is hoping for. No, all they’re going to do is stress me out for two weeks. The administrators have misjudged my capacity for blatant stubbornness. (Ooh. I like that sentence.)
Anyway. Maybe I can get a few chapters posted sometime soon, but it’s late right now, and I’m exhausted. I haven’t had the appetite for anything all day, and I’m wondering if I’m coming down with something. It’s probably better if I do something brainless while I still can, because the insanity will start tomorrow, when I get that book…
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These laws are a violation of our right to freedom of speech AND freedom of press. Don’t let it happen.
These laws are un-American.
Contact your representative and put in your endorsement for a free Internet.
The next thing I knew, I could think well again. It was weird. I had a feeling that this was some result of a spell done by the phoenix carrying me.
Vaguely, I could sense it trying to think at me, the same way Currey did. But it wasn’t like Currey. The phoenix’s thoughts came out in a ribbon of motion and color and meaning, things that were hard to put into words.
It saw me as I was waking up, cooed softly, and landed on the sand. The sun had gone down and the air was a lot cooler, but the phoenix and the sand still carried a lot of warmth.
The phoenix showed—told—me how I’d been hurt and then resurrected, except not really. I had died… or something. But now I was alive, and still in phoenix form.
But, it showed me, I was no use to either of us in total phoenix form. As a human, I’d be at toddler-maturity point, because phoenixes don’t stay babies for long. But my wings weren’t skyworthy yet on their own.
The phoenix told me that it could help me find my human side—the undamaged portion of it. The 25% that had still been active when the assassin had shot me was dead. But I had other human-portion available. Enough to restore me to my half-human form.
But, it assured me, I did not have to stay a toddler until I grew up naturally. In fact, I could choose to go back to the age I had been.
The phoenix explained: Phoenixes do not actually die. But when they reach the point at which they would, they do burst into a magical kind of flame, which isn’t actually physically hot, and go into a state of invincibility while they regenerate.
But the mark of having died is there. It can be healed, but it’s usually completely unnecessary. In any case, you have to find another real phoenix to do it. Epselans couldn’t.
I accepted. There wasn’t much I could do as a toddler.
Then, as the phoenix did its magic, the world faded from my view. I couldn’t see what it was doing, what I looked like, or how long it took. But in the end, I was larger, stronger. I was still a phoenix, but at least I was the right age.
One more thing. The phoenix showed me that a part of me had been killed: the piece that had then been human. The phoenix said that it could help me go back to my half-and-half state, but since a part of the human I’d had was now dead—had been shot and not regenerated—my hiding spells would never work again. But Daniel knew a spell that would strengthen my mage magic to make up for the human mage power that I’d lost.
I allowed the phoenix to do what it could. In several hours, I woke up in the sand.
“Well, you’re cleaned up, at least,” Hannah said. “Where’s Daniel?”
“Finding us some non-bloody clothes,” I said. “He’ll have a job waking Mark up to have him put them on.”
“Well, he’s going to,” Hannah said. “I don’t want his wound totally sealed up.”
Mark was slung over a mattress covered with a bunch of blankets Nevin had brought. He, Hannah and I were in her herbal workroom, where she made potions when needed and where she kept all of her herbs and remedies. The shelves were full of bottles, brightly color-coded with food dye, some with plant things floating and/or growing in them. A giant terrarium full of thyme dominated most of the space on the first west windowsill; Hannah’s other plants sat crowded onto a table on the second one.
“Hold this,” Hannah said, and gave me a tea towel.
She crossed to the other side of the room, which was occupied by a giant desk with lots of cabinets. There was no paperwork to be seen. In the cabinets was where Hannah dried the herbs that she couldn’t grow in her terrarium year-round.
“A broken rib, a cracked rib, a fractured shin bone, and a broken, bloody nose?” Hannah said, setting up a mortar and pestle with a plastic liner, which she muttered a spell over so that it wouldn’t break or mix in when she ground herbs in it. “I hope you gave more than you took, at least. You must have given a lot.”
“I killed him.”
Hannah stopped her herb-mashing in surprise. “Are you okay?”
“No!” I said. “I’ve got four different bones either broken or almost so! That’s why I’m here.”
“I meant the other kind of okay,” Hannah said quietly. I’d always known her to be down-to-earth and a hard worker, but now she was showing the kind of weird sort of emotion that can only be described as female.
I didn’t respond. Of course, I knew what she was talking about, and it was a legitimate concern, but I guess I had some sort of psychological defense mechanism that prevented me from thinking about it too quickly. So I just kept quiet. Hannah didn’t talk any more. She just finished grinding the herbs, said another spell, popped the liner out of the thingy and slathered the paste onto the side of my nose. The herbs, which were cold, felt good but stung at the same time.
Hannah took the tea towel back from me and pulled up my shirt. Her hands were still cold from the herbs as she felt along my ribs gently, finding the damaged ones. Not that I was complaining. Any shred of cold dissociated the situation from the desert. I was still sweating.
She brought my hand to the damaged spot to mark it as she crossed the room again for the ice pack, wrapping it in a tea towel and then rummaging around for another one.
Hannah said a spell over the tea towel, which extended. She folded the ice-pack bundle into it and wrapped it snugly around my ribs. It felt extremely good, but extremely sore.
“I won’t do magic for this,” Hannah said. “It needs to heal on its own. In the circumstances, the drawbacks from using magic to heal you outweigh the quick recovery. It would make you too silly to do anything, and it’s too risky to have you out of action. You’re more prepared to fight with a few damaged ribs and a fractured shin than you would be if all you could do was sit around and stare at the ceiling, making squeaky noises and smiling vaguely. That’s what most of the magical patients do.”
Chirrrrrup, I thought. Then I wished I hadn’t. I still didn’t know where Phoebe was, or if she was actually all right. And whether or not she was condemned to baby-hood for a third time.
“Where’s Leslie?” I asked, as Hannah attended to my shin.
“Being healed up by Dr. Wynne, I think,” Hannah said. “She was very reluctant to stick around. I don’t think she trusts us a whole lot. She does have a point, though, after what happened to Phoebe.”
“But… oh, that time,” I said. My brain had still been fixed on how she was doing now, a situation for which the Agency couldn’t be blamed. Well, you probably could find something to blame them for if you really tried, but when it came down to it, this was a combination of bad circumstances.
“Yeah, that time,” Hannah said. “I think you need to sleep off the excess crazy before you try to do anything else. Rest, ice, compression, elevation… you know?”
“Maybe that would be a good idea,” I said, grinning.
Then Key came in. She had taken the least amount of damage out of all of us, but was still blood-stained and shell-shocked.
“Mark’s all right, then,” she said breathily. Seemed like she’d been running or something.
“And out cold,” Hannah answered. “I used a little magic. He’ll be all right when he wakes up. Maybe a little silly, but he should still be fully functional. I stopped the bleeding and got the bullet out. Mostly muscle damage. It was a bit of an adventure working on a polar bear!”
“So he’s all right,” Key said. “All right.”
And then she left.
“Sorry about that,” I said to Hannah. “Her main method of dealing with stress is generally to freak out, then punch somebody on the jaw or nose. It can be pretty useful in the right situation.”
“Almost everything is useful in the right situation,” Hannah said. “Now… go to bed!”
Usually, I’d argue. This time, I was exhausted anyway. So I went to bed.
I don’t remember ever seeing somebody kill that way. I had seen a few killings, but never one like that. Man, that kid was scary.
Leslie, Xavier, Key and Mark all watched as I opened the bubble. A young phoenix, which if Xavier’s intuition was correct was Phoebe, spilled onto the hot sand. The other phoenix refused to let me pick her up, instead holding her gently in its own talons, shielding her with its wings, and cooing apologetically.
I nodded.
“Let’s leave them,” I said.
“What?” Mark said, looking at me like I was nuts.
“She’s bleeding to death!” Xavier said.
“No, she’s not,” I said. “Look.”
Actually, she wasn’t. She looked like she’d never been shot, except that she was younger. And a phoenix.
“Mark, Xavier, you need to be healed. Hannah will take care of you, she’s as good with humans as with animals. Leslie, Xavier, you both need sleep. And you all need food. Let’s go! We won’t take the rope pyramid down, so it’ll still go here and we can come back later, when those two have finished.”
“Finished doing what?” Xavier asked.
“Healing each other. Let’s go.”
And we went.
“Leslie, do you know how to deal with this?”
We had come to the problem of trying to free Phoebe and the other phoenix.
“First, we have to save them. We have to stop Phoebe bleeding.”
“How do you know it’s Phoebe?”
“Same way you do. She looks different.”
Actually, they looked the same to me.
“She looks at you differently,” Leslie said.
“We have to bring them back out,” Mark said.
“How?” I asked.
“We pop the bubble,” Leslie said. “On our side. We open the rip. And then we sew it back up before it causes trouble.”
“Do you know the right spell?” I asked.
“No.”
Suddenly, a giant rope pyramid appeared in the sand nearby.
“I saw you were in trouble,” Daniel said. “I had Winnie check for me. Did I miss anything?”
“We’ll tell you later,” I said. “The assassin’s done a rip spell. Phoebe and some other phoenix are stuck between dimensions.”
“Dimensions–my specialty,” Daniel said, smiling. “Easy fix.”
“Everything is his specialty,” I said to Leslie, who laughed shrilly, exuberantly, nonstop, along with Key and Mark, who had changed back. I knew why. Stress did that.
Daniel seemed to notice this more than our solemn expressions. “I’ve heard that laugh before. What happened? Who’s hurt?”
“Phoebe was shot multiple times,” Leslie said, going a blotchy pale/red combination. “Mark was shot in the shoulder. And I think Xavier might have hurt his leg, he tried to shin-kick a very solid gun out of that dude’s hand.” She pointed at the assassin lying supine on the sand behind us. “Also, our noses are bleeding. I’m not sure if that’s all.”
“Oh,” said Daniel, turning pale himself and staring at the body. “I hope Phoebe’s all right.”
“Are we sure he’s dead?” Leslie said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t trust my spell.”
I pulled my mangled, sweaty, bloody shirt off and grabbed the gun with it. Cocked it. Shot.
“He’s dead now.”
I dropped the gun at his side.
“You…” Daniel said, his voice trailing off. “Xavier.”
“Get Phoebe safe,” I said. “And everybody stop looking so depressing!”
“The wand doesn’t want to kill him!”
“More like you don’t! Look, he’s coming after us now!”
There was a growling, and Mark, a nine-foot-tall polar bear now, lunged at the oncoming attacker.
“Venira!” Leslie shouted, flailing her own wand at the assassin. He turned his attention away from Mark and started lumbering towards Leslie with a vague look in his eyes.
“Great, now he’s going faster!” I said.
“Better than shooting Mark! He’s still got his gun!”
“Occidere!” I shouted again, trying to hate him. The spell fizzled into nothingness three inches from the wand tip.
“Occidere!” I tried a third time. It was useless.
“Try to knock him out!” Leslie said, still focusing on holding her “Venira” spell in place.
“Um… Nesci!”
This one did work, knocking him to the ground. I wasn’t sure if he was still conscious or not. Mark didn’t seem to care: he was ready to attack, teeth bared.
But the man was not unconscious. In fact, he was raising his gun.
Mark stepped on his chest by the time the assassin had managed to pull the trigger. The bullet sailed through some muscle in the polar bear’s shoulder, and he found himself unable to put weight on it.
“RUN!” Leslie said. “He’s protected!”
Mark limped away before the man could get his breath back.
“Then we should protect Mark!” I said.
“Then do it!” Leslie shouted, her wand still keeping the assassin half-spellbound.
“Residio!”
“That won’t stop bullets, Mark!” Key shouted.
“Don’t run to him!” Leslie warned. “You’ll only make it worse!”
But Key had run to Mark. Leslie’s “Venira” spell was losing its effect.
“Venira!” she repeated frantically, trying to recapture the assassin’s attention.
“Phoebe’s dying,” I noted.
“Not before her wings are clipped, you idiot,” Leslie snapped. “She’s not mortal.”
“She might be,” I said. “And if this man doesn’t die, it’s my fault if she does.”
Leslie had nothing to say to this. She just kept muttering, “Venira! Venira!” more frantically.
Mark was not doing well. Key was trying to find a way to help him retreat, but it wasn’t easy helping nine hundred pounds of polar bear retreat in hundred-degree weather.
“I need to get closer!” I said. “This spell only goes three inches when I try it. If I get up close enough…”
“That’s a really stupid plan.”
“I prefer brave.”
“You’re hot.”
“Thank you?”
I ran forward. This really was a stupid plan.
The assassin had his gun trained on Key next. I was four feet away; he was unsteadily aiming.
I bolted the last four feet and, with desperation, shin-kicked the gun out of the assassin’s hand. Well, I tried to, anyway—and later found out that I’d fractured my shin bone for it. His grip was firmer than my kick, though, so it didn’t fly out of the air like it would have in my imagination. Instead, I did something even more stupid. I grabbed the gun out of his hand.
The finger on the trigger pulled, of course, as I yanked it away, but the bullet shot under my armpit and missed Key by about two feet, if her recollection was right. I hurled the gun as hard as I could in another direction, but it landed only five feet away, throwing up a rift of sand. I hadn’t had enough time to aim my throw properly.
Leslie was giving up on the “Venira” spell. Meanwhile, in the absence of the gun, Key rushed away from Mark and to Leslie’s and my aid.
But as I was watching her, the surprised assassin kneed me in the ribs. He was strong. It felt like one of them had broken. Before I could realize that he was taking his advantage and dodge any other blows, he’d managed to break my nose as well. It bled furiously. I looked around, through the haze of pain and stars, and saw him punching out Leslie’s nose as well.
Before Leslie or I could think what we were trying to do next, Key finished her sprint and balled her right hand into a tight little fist that connected with his jaw in half a second even as he pulled his wand out. Her left fist smashed into his nose. She started beating on him, one fist after another, like a little kid hitting the floor during a temper tantrum. Her first hit had knocked a tooth loose—we heard it—but after the first concentrated two, she did little more damage.
“That’s for Mark!” she squeaked. Key didn’t do well under pressure, I was gathering.
Leslie, however, did. “Kill him off! Now!”
I raised my wand. “Occidere.”
And he fell to the ground, dead.
I watched her for a few seconds as she lay, helpless, on the floor of the unnatural rip between dimensions. There was no other way.
Phoebe was in pain, being killed. Another phoenix, one who loved her so much that it was willing to sacrifice itself to give us a chance to free her, was going to die as well if this man had his way.
“Occidere!” I said, brandishing the feather and the wand.
Nothing happened whatsoever.
Except that he heard me.
This could end badly.
“She’s been hurt!” I said in panic. One of two phoenixes was lying on the floor of the bubble-shaped rip. We hid under Leslie’s sand spell, invisible, keeping our voices down.
“Maybe,” Leslie said, ignoring my tone. “Some friend of hers seems to have sacrificed itself. He can’t tell the difference.” The falcon girl pointed a feathered hand at the man with the gun.
“I’m sure it’s her.”
“Shut up, or she’ll die!”
We were all quiet then.
“I’m ready to kill him,” Mark growled. I had never seen Mark turn into a polar bear, but I doubted it would do us much good in this heat.
“It’s too hot, Mark,” Key said, clearly thinking the same thing.
“No,” Leslie said, “we have to be more careful. I can’t just kill him. My magic is too traceable. He’d notice if I cast that strong of a spell, and I wouldn’t be able to get rid of him then.”
“So who can?” I asked.
“Don’t look at me,” Key said. “I deal in deadly computer viruses, not stuff that’s lethal to humans.”
They all turned to me.
“I…”
“You have to,” Leslie said, her brown eyes softening. “She’s counting on you. If I do it, it’ll be a battle between me and him, and he’ll win and know that you’re here, too.”
I took a deep breath. “What spell?”
Leslie dropped her wand, as not to perform the spell herself. “Occidere is what you say. But you have to mean it.”
“I have to kill someone?”
“Or have Phoebe and another phoenix killed ruthlessly, with a lot of pain, for no unselfish reason,” Leslie said. “Your pick.”
The spell caught, and the rip widened. This thing had wasted time.
Click-click, said my gun. Bang. One.
Click-click. Bang. Two.
Click-click. Bang. Three.
Click-click. Bang. Four.
I seriously needed to get an automatic for these gigs.
Bang. Five.
Click-click.
