Julia

  I skitter backwards across the ground, tripping over my own feet in my haste. “Stay back!”

  The man—the horrible man-thing with its horrible half-made body—shows no sign of hearing; or if it does hear, then it simply doesn’t care. Its eyes burn with an insane longing; the vines pull its lipless, bloody mouth open too wide.

  Suddenly I hear Eggplant’s voice from behind me. “Julia, what the hell are you…” Her words die in her throat. “Fuck. Me.”

  Time stands still.

  And then, the thing surges toward me, lashing out with impossible speed atop its tangled column of vines. But no sooner does it make its move than Eggplant unleashes a volley of gunfire, severing its spine and dropping it face-down into the snow.

  I stand there shaking. The sound of the machine gun—the first I’ve ever heard in real life—rattles in my skull.

  My sight drifts to where the creature’s torso lies prone. “Is it—”

  Abruptly, its head snaps up at an impossible angle, its exposed jaws forming a maniacal grin. A swarm of wooden vines and creepers explode from beneath the surface of the snow, weaving around it, manipulating it into an attack posture. It thrusts its long, ropy arms out to the sides, planting its palms firm against the ground. There’s a noise like the snapping of tendons as it heaves its bulk upwards, freeing itself of its roots—

  “Run!”

  Eggplant doesn’t need to tell me twice. I whirl about and explode into a gallop, stumbling over roots and through snow as I make toward the skidoo. Behind me, I hear a fresh round of machinegun fire, but I do not dare to glance behind—all I know is that I need to get away.

  “Run! Run! Run!” screams Higgins.

  There comes a sound of splintering wood, a thunder of something very large barrelling through the forest—

  I close the distance to the snowmobile and throw myself onto the driver’s saddle. A split-second later, Eggplant leaps on behind me. “Drive!”

  My trembling fingers find a key in the ignition and the engine comes to life.

  “What are you waiting for! Drive!”

  “Uh…”

  Eggplant’s body shakes against mine as she fires another volley. “Right! Squeeze the right handle!”

  I waste a split second remembering my left from my right and then do as she instructs; the vehicle surges into motion, speeding in a straight line through the abandoned campsite. Over the engine, I hear Higgins screaming, “Drive, damn you! Drive! Drive!”

  A thick trunk looms in front of me; I twist the handlebars sharply to avoid it, but not quickly enough. We hit at an oblique angle and judder to a halt.

  “Shit!”

  I search the handlebars for the reverse, finding nothing. For want of another option, I squeeze the right handle again and lean into a turn as hard as I can. The engine thrums powerfully but uselessly; we are thoroughly stuck.

  “How do you reverse!?” I exclaim.

  “You don’t!”

  A mighty crash sounds behind us and Eggplant answers with more gunfire. In the windshield of the snowmobile, I can make out the faint reflection of something striding forward on monstrous, wooden limbs, but the worst is the sound it makes—not a roar or a howl, but a scream—the scream of a man in absolute agony, crying out from the pit of Hell.

  In that moment, I’m overcome by the reality of the situation: that impossible beast—that walking nightmare—is real and angry and about to end my life. And the only things between it and me are a woman I barely know, a useless rifle, and this stupid bloody megaphone that I still have looped around my wrist—

  Oh!

  Well, it can’t possibly make things worse, can it?

  I bring the megaphone to my mouth and scream as loudly as I can: “Elsevier! How can we defeat this monster!? How can we defeat this monster!? How can we—”

  A burst like a flash grenade goes off, drowning the entire forest for a split second in white light; there’s a noise like something heavy crumpling to the ground, and then nothing at all.

  *

  I wait a moment before risking a glance behind me. The creature, such as it was, is gone, replaced by a scattered mess of smouldering vines and charred viscera.

  Eggplant Higgins coughs in stunned surprise: “What—” She interrupts herself with disbelieving laughter and leaps to her feet. “How the fuck did you do that?” she demands, grabbing my shoulders. I feel vaguely sick, but I still try to answer: “I—”

  “She didn’t.”

  Eggplant tenses, putting herself between me and Elsevier and raising her rifle defensively.

  “Julia, do tell your little playmate to put that ridiculous thing down,” intones the Fairy. He leans against a tree trunk on the edge of the forest, looking no worse for the wear.

  “You know him?” Higgins demands.

  I need to get a grip on myself before answering. “Lieutenant Higgins,” I manage, “Mr. Elsevier.”

  “Not my name,” he bows.

  Recognition dawns on her. “He’s that Tink you told the captain about, right? The criminal with nuclear powers?”

  “The very same,” Elsevier replies. “Though I don’t think I approve of being called a ‘Tink’, whatever that might be.”

  Eggplant keeps her gun at ready. “You saved our lives just now?”

  “Obviously.”

  For one tense moment, they face each other; then Eggplant lowers her weapon.

  “Well,” she says; “thanks for that. Anyone the Winter Queen hates can’t be all bad.”

  Elsevier seems amused when she extends her hand to him but accepts it nonetheless.

  “What the hell was that thing, by the way?” asks Eggplant.

  “That, my dear, is the sort of nonsense that arises when nature wakes up convinced that it’s supposed to be human.” He sniffs and brushes down his sleeve. “I vehemently dislike this forest, I’m not going to lie.”

  “Why would it—” I catch myself mid-question. “You know what, we don’t have time for this. We need to find Géraldine.”

  “Your companion is alive,” states Elsevier, crossing his arms. “When last I saw her, she was being carried off by a group of human soldiers—who seemed genuinely concerned for her safety, if you can imagine such a thing.”

  “That must have been one of the other scouting parties!” exclaims Eggplant. “If she’s with them, you’ll be able to meet back up as soon as we get to False Island!”

  Relief washes over me. She’s safe! I’m about to ask Eggplant what she means by “False Island” when Elsevier clears his throat.

  “…There’s still the matter of your question, is there not?”

  My eyes wander over to the remains of the creature and then quickly back. The question seems academic now.

  Elsevier apparently picks up on this thought. “That was my demonstration of the technique—I couldn’t very well answer if you were dead. But the question was not ‘would you please defeat this monster for us?’, but rather ‘how can we defeat this monster?’”

  Beside me, Higgins’s mouth forms into a lopsided, disbelieving grin. “You’re willing to teach us? To do that?”

  “Not only willing, Lieutenant, obligated,” he replies. “So congratulations, ladies; I shall teach you how to kill.”

  *

  I’m expecting the usual sensory overload, but instead Elsevier simply picks up three wooden splinters from the debris now scattered about the clearing. He lights the end of one splinter on fire with his fingertip and uses that fire to light the other two, which he then hands to Eggplant and me.

  I eye mine with some concern. Just a few minutes ago, this thing was trying to kill me. “I assume it’s inert,” I intone.

  “When I kill something, dear Julia, I assure you that I kill it quite dead,” replies Elsevier. “Now, hold it out before you, please.”

  “…Is this nuclear magic?” Eggplant asks, sounding a bit too much like a kid on Christmas morning.

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  “This is elementary fire magic,” Elsevier corrects. “Crude, simple, but devastating in the right hands. Or the wrong ones.”

  “Well, I already know how to heat things with magic—”

  “I suspect that what you’re doing is commanding them to warm up,” says Elsevier. “This is not that. Here, you will learn to absorb fire into your soul—and release it in a more concentrated form. Observe.” Elsevier runs the tip of his finger through his flame, which promptly disappears, seemingly sucked into his flesh.

  “Now it’s inside of me,” he announces.

  Like energy stored in a capacitor’s electric field, I think, nodding. My “consciousness as physical field” theory is looking more probable.

  “And now—”

  A tiny bolt of white-hot flame bursts from his index finger, striking a point on the ground between my feet with such a sharp hiss that I yelp in surprise. Eggplant laughs out loud; I shoot her a dirty look and she shrugs.

  “This, of course, is but a small flame—but the same technique can be scaled as necessary.

  “Now it’s your turn,” he declares. “Remove your gloves, please. As you have seen, the first step is to stick your finger into the flame.”

  I remove the glove from my free hand with my teeth and stare at my flame in trepidation. The idea of actually sticking bare skin into it is singularly unappealing.

  “The trick,” Mr. Elsevier continues, “is to recognize that your hand is not just a thing of flesh and bone. It’s you. It surges with vitality; it is animated by your soul and reports to that soul the qualities of everything it contacts.

  “So, what you are going to do—remembering that your hand contains your soul within—is, firstly, to put it into the flame. Secondly, focus on the experience of the flame, the essence of it; and then, thirdly, direct that flame into your soul.”

  I look over at Eggplant, who nods as if she understands what he’s saying; I most certainly do not.

  “And…it’s not going to hurt?” she asks.

  “Oh, it most certainly will,” he replies. “Pain is just as essential to fire as heat. But it doesn’t have to hurt for long.”

  Eggplant purses her lips. “Here goes nothing.”

  Her index finger hesitates on the outskirts of the fire for a few seconds and then she thrusts it through. The sight is difficult to watch and the grimace crossing her face doesn’t help. Then, abruptly, the splinter goes out.

  “I did it!” she beams, looking first to me and then to Elsevier. “Oh, I can feel it! This is so weird!”

  “Well done!” comments Elsevier, seemingly surprised. I’m surprised too—not so much by Eggplant’s success as by the fact that Elsevier seems to have just paid her an unironic compliment. “Good—now here’s the final step: feel that flame inside you, gather it up into a neat little ball, and channel it out your fingertip and back into the splinter. Can you do that?”

  “Into the splinter?”

  “Well, it doesn’t have to be,” he replies. “Just so long as it goes into your target. If you wanted to channel it into Dr. Chen, that would be very droll.”

  “The splinter it is,” Eggplant replies tersely.

  A weak, sluggish stream of flame oozes from her finger, relighting the wood.

  “Some practice with the release seems called for,” Elsevier observes. “Still, it’s…adequate. For a first try. For a human.”

  Eggplant grins.

  “And now it’s your turn,” he says, turning to me.

  I draw in a deep breath and bring my index finger toward the flame, trying to imagine that it’s charged up with a “soul”.

  My hand jerks back almost involuntarily. Both heat and pain are very much present, but they don’t convey the “essence” of fire so much as tell me that plunging my finger into it is a really stupid idea.

  “Don’t overthink it,” Eggplant urges. “Forget what your brain is telling you; focus on what you know to be there.”

  “What I know is what my brain is telling me!”

  “That comes as news to some of us,” mutters Elsevier.

  “Okay,” says Eggplant. “Try thinking about it like this: you have a bunch of thoughts and feelings about the fire, right? And then there’s the fire itself. And the two are separate…but they’re also the same.”

  “That…makes no sense.”

  “It’s all in how you look at it!” she insists. “Right? They’re the same thing, but you can’t see both of them at once. You’ve just got to let your brain flip the script.”

  “Flip it to wh—” I catch myself. “One wonders what I’m supposed to flip it to.”

  “To the fire itself. Its soul.”

  “It’s a subjective/objective thing,” I suggest. “The qualia are subjective, the…soul…is objective.”

  “…I guess?”

  Right. Well, that gives me something to work with.

  I focus on the splinter, try to see past the light and heat and flickering and pain to what the flame is. Hydrocarbon combustion, a chain reaction of chemical bonds being broken. I grit my teeth and stick my finger into it—

  “Aah!”

  I drop the splinter into the snow and suck on my singed flesh. Once again, it seems magic doesn’t get along with me.

  Eggplant looks on sympathetically. “It might take a bit of practice.”

  I look at Elsevier. “I need another piece of wood; I need to try again.”

  Elsevier obligingly fetches one for me and lights it. My next attempt is no more successful. Nor is the one after.

  Finally, Eggplant interrupts. “Julia, you can practise this later. We’re on a deadline, remember—and we know where your friend is!”

  “A few minutes!” I plead. “I—think I’m getting better.”

  She frowns. “You have however long it takes me to get this snowmobile moving again.”

  I nod absentmindedly as she walks off. Once she’s out of earshot, Mr. Elsevier leans in: “You know, for a woman who claimed that she wouldn’t spread dangerous magics around, you certainly are lackadaisical about sharing them with random soldiers.”

  I look at him sharply. “I had no choice. Besides, this isn’t ore-spinning.”

  “Ah, but you didn’t know that when you asked the question.”

  “Well, maybe if you’d stepped in without being asked—”

  “And maybe if you had been willing to die. But the choice was made, the question asked, and now that human—and potentially many others—has just been armed with a weapon that cannot be taken away. You must live with this reality.”

  “And so must you.”

  Elsevier smiles.

  “…Okay, the skidoo is ready!” shouts Eggplant. “Elsevier, you coming?”

  “But of course,” he replies. “I’m amused to see where this goes.”

  *

  We take our places on the snowmobile, Eggplant in front, me at the back, and Elsevier standing perched on the rear with his impossible Fairy balance. This time, we have no incentive to drive slowly and so Eggplant guns the engine, filling my brain with its white noise and providing me with that most dreadful of commodities: time to reflect.

  Or not even reflect, so much as endlessly ruminate no matter how hard I try to stop.

  God.

  The last few hours have left me with so many warring emotions that I’m not even sure what I’m feeling now. I close my eyes and I can see the mangled bodies, the monster bearing down on me, and I know that it should disturb me. And yet, all I can seem to think about is my lack of aptitude with magic.

  Is this normal now? I wonder. Is this what every fucking day is going to be like until my luck finally does run out? And how the hell do these people do it? Eggplant, laughing and doing magic tricks within minutes of fleeing for her life—is she even human? Am I?

  Easy there, Julia.

  It’s chaos. It’s chaos and I knew it was chaos when I set out on this little “quest”. That was the name of the game, wasn’t it? Making sense of all of this chaos. Making sense of magic and monsters and things that go bump in the night and reducing all of them down to a perfect little mathematical equation short enough to print on a t-shirt. A theory of magic.

  Even if I can’t do magic for shit. Even if my would-be tutor has his own agenda. Even if what I learn could threaten the world…

  Géraldine is alive. Focus on that.

  Géraldine is alive and our death-march to True Sorrow is back on…

  The hum of the engine mercifully dims as we come within sight of the cabin. We slide to a halt in front of a soldier in grey winter camouflage.

  I recognize Thayer by the accent before I’m close enough to see his handlebar moustache under his hood. “What the hell—”

  “Stand down, Corporal,” says Eggplant, dismounting from the snowmobile. “The Fairy’s on our side.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” I mutter.

  Thayer lowers his rifle. “I’ll need clearance from Captain Beaton before I let that Tink through.”

  “I’ll go,” Eggplant responds. “And just…don’t call him a ‘Tink’.”

  *

  Higgins spends a good half hour conferring with Beaton in the cabin while Thayer, Elsevier, and I stand in awkward silence. After five minutes or so, it occurs to me that this would be a good time to practise my use of Elsevier’s combat magic. But Thayer is watching and I don’t think I want that knowledge to spread any farther, so I don’t.

  After about ten minutes, Thayer asks me whether I fish. I have to admit that I do not.

  After about twenty minutes, Elsevier wordlessly climbs onto the saddle of the skidoo and stands on his head. Thayer adjusts his grip on his rifle but apparently decides that this isn’t worth a confrontation over. And so, we wait.

  Finally, Eggplant emerges from the cabin and descends the stairs with a helmet in her hand. “The captain wants you to wear this while you’re with us,” she calls to Elsevier.

  “…And why should I wear such a thing?” Elsevier asks, eying it disdainfully.

  Eggplant hesitates. “Because it has an iron ring in its crown,” she admits.

  He laughs. “Tell your captain I shall consent to wear that when he consents to being manacled.”

  “He won’t like that.”

  “He is at liberty to try to force the issue. Otherwise, I can only offer you my word that I will not use violence against any living soul whilst in your presence—unless, of course, you use it against me.”

  Eggplant looks at me. “Can we trust him?”

  I purse my lips. “…He takes his promises seriously, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’ll have to be good enough,” she says. “I’ll inform the captain.”

  This time, I follow her up the stairs to the deck of the cabin. “So…iron really is toxic to Fairies, one wonders,” I whisper.

  She squints at me and laughs. “Why the hell are you talking like that? ‘One wonders’. Christ, you sound like a butler or something.”

  I feel a blush rise to my cheeks and smile wryly. “I’m…cautious about wasting questions around Elsevier.”

  She just laughs at that. “Whatever, Jeeves.”

  I roll my eyes. “Seriously, though; you’re saying iron works against Fairies.”

  Eggplant rolls her head back. “Not like how you’re thinking. It’s not like…kryptonite or whatever, but it depowers them if it encircles their head. I assume it’s a sort of…” She gives me a sidelong look. “Fairy-day cage.”

  I grant her the tiny smirk her pun deserves. “How did you figure that out?”

  “A couple of them were wearing iron circlets in battle,” Eggplant replies. “The only ones we managed to kill. See, it also gives its wearer the ability to see through glamour—”

  “The illusions they cast, you mean.”

  “Oh, yeah! Check it out.”

  She hands me the helmet, which I place immediately on my head.

  “Now look at Elsevier.”

  I turn to see the ore-spinner standing at the bottom of the stairs—and gasp in surprise. His clothes are drab and colourless, his hair is stringy, his skin chalky, his face angular, and his eyes look almost like ping-pong balls. But the greatest change is in his body, which, while never particularly buff, now seems positively frail.

  “That’s what he actually looks like,” I whisper.

  “They all look like that,” says Eggplant as she leads me into the cabin. “Half their power comes from just making us think they’re more impressive than they are. Of course, the other half comes from destroying things with their minds—”

  “But we’re evening those odds,” interjects Captain Beaton. “And from what I’m told, we have you to thank, Dr. Chen.”

  His words provoke a chorus of agreements from the other men as Eggplant closes the door. She looks at me sheepishly. “I, uh, took the liberty of teaching them what he taught us.”

  I freeze, my earlier conversation with Elsevier rising unbidden to my memory. “Oh.”

  The soldiers seem to find my reaction funny.

  “No need to be humble,” says Beaton. “You’ve given us a fighting chance, Dr. Chen! If there were still a government, I’d personally put you down for an Order of Canada. As it is, I can only offer you a handshake.”

  I accept his hand. “…Thank you,” I murmur.

  “We’re already talking about sending someone off to Ottawa on the snowmobile,” he informs me. “Teaching this technique to everyone we can find. And not just Ottawa either! Toronto, Montreal, the whole damn country and America too! Everywhere. This is big, Dr. Chen!”

  “…A weapon that can’t be taken away,” I intone, looking away.

  Beaton grins. “Damn right!”

  I’m on the cusp of worrying that people are about to sing “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow” when Eggplant takes me aside.

  “Hey,” she murmurs. “Don’t feel bad that you haven’t mastered it yourself yet. There’ll be plenty of time to practise once we get back to False Island.”

  The name jolts me back to myself. False Island—that was where Géraldine was, wasn’t it? But it seems odd that these soldiers wouldn’t just be operating out of their own base in Petawawa.

  “Where is False Island?” I ask.

  Eggplant’s response is cryptic: “Summer!”