Prelude
If I have a wish it is to find you where I find poetry
Do you ever close your eyes in full sunlight Here close your eyes
You are everything that has not yet been lost
-Joanna Klink, excerpted from “Aerial”, Raptus, 2010…
Tag: chapter
Melissa
I wake up early. I didn’t especially mean to, just woke up an hour before my alarm. I hate it when that happens. I have a hard time getting to sleep, so trying to get any more sleep will take long enough that I might as well just get up now. So I do, stretching. Shoulder feels stiff. That’s annoying. It’s been three days since I helped Shawn carry furniture around. I don’t like that my arm is still complaining about it.
I dress myself with barely-conscious movements. It’s a familiar routine, and I wake up sluggish, so it runs on autopilot. It’s just a t-shirt and jeans anyway. Hoodie today, because it’s cold out. Normal.
Check my bag, it’s fine. I don’t really have much else to do before school. I sit and try to play video games to distract myself, but I’m already too distracted for it to help. Can’t focus through the intrusive thoughts. I don’t know what it’s about, not really. I don’t know why I’m having intrusive thoughts about poison, about fire. It’s not something I remember thinking much about until recently.
There are a lot of things I don’t remember happening until recently.…
Caleb Moorhead
People lie to me a lot.
It’s inherent in my line of work. It’s inevitable. Attorneys hear a lot of lies. Cops lie about their intentions, about their evidence, about all kinds of things, really. Witnesses lie about what they’ve seen. Sometimes my clients lie to me as well, which is always frustrating. It’s very hard to defend someone when you’re working with inaccurate information.
I would much rather work with someone who was open with me about being guilty than try to represent a client who pretended to be innocent when they were very clearly not. It isn’t as though I would rat them out if they told me; it would be wildly against my personal and professional ethical codes to do so. At most, I might decline or drop their case, and even then I wouldn’t tell the police or prosecutors a word about what they’d said, because that confidentiality is a cornerstone of the legal system, and I feel strongly about maintaining it as an absolute. A client has to be able to trust that what they tell their attorney will be kept strictly, entirely confidential.…
Epilogue
Three weeks later, I was standing in a small apartment in a bad part of town waiting for someone to make a choice.
I still wasn’t entirely sure this would work. I’d worked through the theory extensively. I’d consulted with a ton of people about it. Alice, the wizard from the Tribe, had helped a lot with the underlying theory and principles involved. I’d been introduced to a guy named Nate who mixed magic with graffiti and was more shamanic in his focus, less tied to concrete and rational thought than a wizard. The categorization tools for mages would always be inadequate, but it was informative in this case. Wizards, as the most common categorization system defined them, were characterized by linear reasoning, structured and abstract thought, and rational logic. Alice fit that description perfectly, which was great for my education. But for this I also needed to draw on that more intuitive thought process.
So, I met Nate and we talked for a while. He introduced me to a girl named Opari who had personal experience of what I was doing here. Derek, Cassie, and Robert all had some amount of insight because of werewolf things. They also had a veterinarian that they worked with in town, which I found fascinating when they told me about her. Werewolves rarely needed medical care at all, but apparently there were some very specific things that sometimes came up that a vet was helpful with. So there was a vet in Pittsburgh who knew what they were, and I talked with her for a while. Hell, I even went back to my old cognitive neuroscience connections and asked them some questions.…
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I do not like hospitals.
I am aware that this is not exactly a shocking, novel opinion. Nobody really likes hospitals. They aren’t a place anyone goes for fun. They’re a place of death deferred, of fear and pain and sickness. The patients go because they’re seriously sick or badly injured. The families arrive full of anxiety, sick with worry that something will go wrong, that they’ll be leaving in mourning. The staff mostly go there while tired, stressed, and badly overworked, hoping that nothing goes too terribly wrong today, that they won’t be the one who has to deliver bad news, all while their empathy is being steadily ablated away by the sheer volume of tragedy they’re immersed in. Virtually no one goes there because they like it.
And that emotional resonance sinks in. It makes the structure feel like fear and pain and grief. There are exceptions, sure. There are individual departments and wings that have a very different mood. They are a place of healing as well, and sometimes that shows through more clearly. But by and large, hospitals ache with the negative emotions that have passed through them. I really did not like that feeling.…
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It made sense, I thought dully, as I watched Andrew realizing what had just happened. That was the worst part in some ways. It made total sense. I could have seen it coming a mile away if I’d stopped and thought about it. Andrew looked down at the sword now protruding from his chest. He was dead; his body just hadn’t figured it out yet. The strike was placed well, cutting through the spine. I was betting it was charged silver, too. Coming on top of all the other injuries, I was quite sure he was dead.
Audgrim, who had only ever agreed to work together until the hunt was concluded, pushed the dying werewolf off of his sword. Andrew fell to the grass. It felt like everything was moving in slow motion. Audgrim turned on Jack next, while the exhausted druid was just beginning to process what had happened. He didn’t stab Jack, though, perhaps feeling like he wouldn’t be able to cut through that magically reinforced coat. He just punched the other man hard in the face.
It was enough. Jack was already injured and running on fumes, and at the end of the day, as strong as Jack Tar was, underneath all the magic he was only human. Audgrim was stronger than a human, wearing heavy steel gauntlets. Jack went down hard, and he didn’t get back up. Audgrim, as I’d known he would, turned towards me next.…