Posted using PostyBirb",
"writing": "\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n[b]Kansas City, KS, February 26th[/b]\n\n\n\n“Coming through!” Thomas yelled as he ran after Pryce, and the armadillo plastered himself against the wall an instant before the rat had to shoulder him aside.\n\nHow was the kid so damned fast? Thomas was who could teleport, and, somehow, Madoc’s son was the one who kept vanishing on them the moment they turned their back. Someone had lied to him about powers just coming in once they were eighteen.\n\nThomas made it up the stairs with Pryce already halfway down the hall, running under the last step of the ladder leading up to the attic. The otter slowly coming down it only registered as Thomas reached to send the ladder back up as he ran around it, and slapped Felix’s calf totally by accident.\n\n“Fucking watch it,” the otter yelled, and if not for the dusty end table he was maneuvering, would probably have jumped down to kick his ass, or fuck it. It was always hard to tell what an angry Felix would settle on. Thomas considered pausing long enough to confirm the table was hardwood, but that would give Pryce the time to end up in another house.\n\nAnd really, would Felix work this hard for anything less than hardwood? Did the house even have polish?\n\nThomas glanced in the two bedrooms as he passed them for Pryce, then nearly slammed into the end of the hall, and looked outside, searching for the toddler. There was no way, he was there, the window was closed, there was no opening in the wall, but when it came to Pryce, he was no longer taking anything for granted.\n\n“Hey, dumb-ass,” Felix called, and as the otter nodded the way Thomas had come, the rat saw the toddler drop down the stairs.\n\n“No!” Thomas appeared, ready to catch the tiny rat, but Pryce was already at the bottom of the stairs, ambling away. He appeared down the stairs, but already the toddler had vanished from sight. How? How did he—\n\n“And what’s this pretty boy doing here?” Olavo cooed in the distance. “Why yes, you are a pretty boy.” Infant giggling followed the words. \n\nThomas followed the sounds to the kitchen, a full twenty-feet away from the stairs. Pryce didn’t teleport, Thomas decided. His power was to be in the place you least expected him to be in. Or maybe that was just what infants did, and not relegated to this one. His mother did have stories of the places she’d found Thomas when he was that age, after all.\n\nThe capybara sat at the table, bouncing the infant rat on a knee and a half-eaten sandwich in the other hand. His phone projected text from where it rested on the table. It would be some economy text book, if he knew Olavo.\n\n“Thank you for catching him,” Thomas said, dropping into the opposite chair.\n\n“What are you doing running after this guy?”\n\n“My cardio,” Thomas replied, not believing how out of breath he was.\n\n“Shouldn’t that be his father’s job?”\n\n“Me and Madoc fucked for it, and since he got to pick what infant to look after, he picked the other one.”\n\n“Limbani?” Olavo asked after thinking about it?\n\nThomas nodded. “I think he’s still freaked out about having a son. Which you can understand how weird that is, considering how much he dotted over Pryce at Thanksgiving.”\n\nThe capybara nodded, looking at the text again.\n\n“How are you handling the messed-up memory thing?” Thomas asked.\n\nThe capybara was the only one Thomas hadn’t checked in on since Samuel had left them. Yating was with his mother, still down from learning he had a twin brother. Felix being Felix, he was ignoring the whole thing in favor of his belief that nothing had been done to him. Hopefully, there was some wax in the house and polishing that table would keep the otter busy until they had a cure. Anything that could be turned into an explosive was being kept away from Gilbert, but that had more to do with him nearly burning down the kitchen than a reaction to his altered memories.\n\n“Unless this mess,” Olavo said, not looking away from his reading, “as you call it, is hiding that this Henry had me betray my family, I’ll deal with it once I know what I’m missing. I called a cousin, so I can at least confirm I’m still a Medeiros.”\n\n“Your father?”\n\nThe capybara shook his head. “That would force him to intervene, and I owe it to the Lewiston Elder to resolve this.” He motioned to the text. “And while that is happening, I still have courses to keep up with.”\n\n“Isn’t it odd that your power hasn’t fixed our memories? I mean you have fucked each of us a few times, and at least once for me with the intent to heal me.”\n\n“That isn’t how my power works. I fix physical damage. This is…something else.”\n\nThomas nodded. “Can I ask why economy and not medicine, seeing how you’re a healer?”\n\nOlavo’s sigh had a trace of exasperation in it.\n\n“You don’t have—”\n\n“It’s fine. I just have to remind myself that the way you remember things, we haven’t had this discussion the first time you learned what I did.” He waved the text away. “My power isn’t that great. No, it just looks impressive to you because you don’t have any reference point. If you remembered what phrases did, or even a simply healing sigil, you wouldn’t even think of my cock when you’re hurt. I mean, the only way my healing is better than the simplest sigil is that when I do it, it doesn’t matter if the wound is dirty or there’s still foreign matter in it. It’s more on par with an advanced sigil.”\n\nHe passes Pryce to Thomas, who feigned reluctance in taking him.\n\n“I don’t have to think about what’s damaged with you. It just happens.” He stood and stretched. “That’s mainly why I’m not bothering with medicine. Knowing all that wouldn’t make me a better healer. And I’m not sure where I could get a residency where they’re let me fuck a patient better.”\n\n“Would it work on a woman?” Thomas asked, making faces at the infant.\n\n“I don’t see why it wouldn’t,” Olavo replied. “Other than me having to fuck her for it to work. He took a bottle of water from the fridge and leaned against the counter. “If I had to, there’s a phrase that allows me to get hard for a woman. But the only time I intend to let it be used on me is when it’s time for me to have a son. And before you ask me again,” he frowned. “Sorry, that’s an again for me. Now that I think about it, it’s odd how you asked me about phrases when I explained my power to you that time.” He shook himself. “But like I said then, there are encyclopedia’s worth of phrases that have been recorded, just around healing. Using those, we could probably heal our memories, provided we knew how it was done at the very least. We call them phrases, but they’re more like programs, so you can’t really imply meaning. You need to tell the phrase what to look for and how to heal it. And it’s a language in the way code is a language, not how English is.”\n\n“Sigil means symbols,” Thomas said.\n\n“Yes. It’ll make sense once you remember everything.”\n\nThomas looked at the capybara, but kept the comment to himself. This time.\n\n“But the ease of healing through phrases and the sigils renders my kind of healing nothing more than a novelty, and within the Society more because of who I am, than what it does.”\n\n“Okay, and who are you?” Thomas asked.\n\nOlavo stared and muttered something in Spanish. “You don’t remember that either?”\n\n“You never told me anything about the Society,” Thomas replied pointedly.\n\nThe capybara opened his mouth, then closed it. “I am the son of the Medeiros elder.”\n\n“So your father is in charge of the entire family, like Raphael.”\n\nOlavo nodded.\n\n“Okay, I guess that explains the economy major then. You’re going to be taking over for your father.”\n\nThe capybara chuckled. “Ecom is only where it starts. Once I’m done, I’ll be doing one for politics, then urban planning.”\n\n“You’re doing three majors?” Thomas asked in disbelief. “Where do you find the time?”\n\n“Pay attention, Thomas. I am doing economy now. Then it will be politics, and after that, urban planning. Even if it’s something that Henry can do, trying to shove all that in my head at the same time would drive me insane, not to say the number of classes I’d still have to take to make sure none of the credits expired.”\n\n“But you’re going to be paying graduate rates after your fist major so… right. You guys are all rich.” He thought about the major Olavo was taking. “That seems like an odd combination of majors to take. What’s your plan for them?”\n\n“That is not… exactly how…” he sighed. “Well, it isn’t like this will be a surprise to you, once you remember everything. My father is going to be taking over the country and—”\n\n“He what?” Thomas exclaimed, and Pryce giggled in innocence.\n\n“Not this country, you idiot,” Felix said, heading for the cabinet under the sink. “His.”\n\nThomas glared at the otters’ back while he was bent over, searching. He almost flipped him the bird when he straightened, holding a dishrag and a bottle of cleaner, but decided it wasn’t something he should do in front of Pryce.\n\n“Remember to bring it back,” Olavo told the otter as he left. “There’s no telling what Gilbert can do with that.”\n\n“He’s the idiot, not me,” Felix snapped back before disappearing out the door.\n\n“So,” Thomas told Olavo, “your father wants to take over Argentina? Won’t that make him a dictator?”\n\nThe capybara winced. “It’s more complicated. Argentina has a long history of corruption, and until recently, my father has been unable to act against that in other than small, ineffectual ways. There was an organization watching everything did, the whole of the Society, and if it didn’t like even the smallest detail, it would strike us down hard. It’s no longer there, so now he can act more overtly.”\n\nThomas gave his finger for Pryce to chew on while he let the information sink in. “Isn’t that extreme?”\n\n“Sometimes, that is what is needed. And in the end, I can’t control what my father will do. I am only his son, not a trusted adviser. What I can do is ensure that when I inherit what he… made, I will be able to make something grand of it.”\n\n“I guess,” Thomas said, then looked for the right words. He could tell Olavo thought it would be a good thing, but weren’t the history books filled with really bad times starting with that belief? His need for a reply was taken away when Gilbert called.\n\n“Thomas, you need to come here.”\n\nOlavo shrugged when Thomas looked at him, then took Pryce before the rat headed for the living room.\n\n“What’s the—” he started to as the armadillo, with the red panda seated next to him.\n\n“There you are,” the pangolin on the television screen said. “Why weren’t you here, with them?”\n\n“I—” Thomas motioned to the kitchen. “What are you doing on the television?” he asked, as where she was speaking from registered. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Felix polishing the end table in a corner and actively ignoring the television.\n\n“Talking with you,” she said, then took a drag from her E-Cig.\n\n“You do know about phones, right?” Thomas said, annoyed.\n\n“And I know how easy it is to spy on those.” She motioned around her head. “Who’d ever think I’d use this to call you?”\n\n“Especially since there isn’t a microphone on it,” Gilbert pointed out.\n\n“You know,” she said, eyeing him. “I’d think a bunch of guys who can make stuff happen with their dicks would know better than to be dicks about how I use magic.” She shifted her attention to Thomas. “And as for you, specifically? I’m sort of calling in that favor.”\n\n“I’m kind of the middle of stuff,” Thomas said, looking at the others.\n\n“Oh, I know,” she said with a chuckle,” but that can wait.”\n\n“What’s going on?” Madoc asked as Thomas was about to point out he’d decide what could and couldn’t wait, not her. The muscular rat froze, staring at the television. “How?”\n\n“Magic,” Thomas said before Shila’s annoyed expression could be turned into words. “Look. I said I’d move you, but I never thought it would be this soon. You sort of implied I’d have time to train. Right now there aren’t a lot of places I can take you, and I would—”\n\n“It’s not for me,” she cut him off, then sighed. “Grant needs a rescue.”\n\n“What? Where is he?” Thomas asked.\n\n“Not a fucking clue.”\n\n“If you’ll excuse me,” Olavo said from the living room entrance, “but if you don’t know where he is, how can you know that he needs help?”\n\nShe hesitated. “Okay, so, I don’t know, know. My conclusion is based on inferences. There’s been chatter on the net for a while about Chamber agents on the hunt.”\n\n“Chamber?” Gilbert asked, looking at the others as if he needed confirmation he’d heard her right.\n\n“Internal name,” Shila replied. “Don’t worry that genius head of yours over it. Anyway. Magnet and Light were the only one to walk away from—”\n\n“Hold on,” Thomas cut her off. “Magnet? Light? What are they, members of bad names super-villains anonymous?”\n\n“It’s what I call them,” she replied dryly, “on account of them being assholes who can’t leave the rest of us to live our lives in peace.” She fixed her gaze on him. “Can I continue?” she looked the room over and the opening mouths closed. “Thank you. Shovel didn’t survive that fall, but the Chamber still has his staff.” She sighed as Thomas raised a hand. “Go ahead.”\n\n“How is a shovel a staff? Because if you’re talking about who I think you are, then when he was using looked like some generic hardware shovel.”\n\n“How close to him did you get?” she asked. “Don’t answer that, there’s a video showing you never got that close. So what you saw was something that looked, at a distance like a regular shovel. At a distance, Grant’s staff just looks like a staff. And even if it had looked like a store-bought shovel.” She raised her hand so Thomas could see it. “Where’s my staff?”\n\n“I don’t know,” Thomas replied. “Off camera somewhere?”\n\n“Maybe, and yet, I’m still using it. It gives us power, not limit what we can do, just like sex gives you—”\n\n“Actually,” Olavo interrupted her. “Our god gives us our—”\n\n“Kid,” she cut him off, annoyed. “We so don’t have time to argue over whose belief system is the right one right now, especially since you’re going to hate the answer.” She took a drag. “Now, can I go on with how I’ve worked out Grant needs help, or are you all more interested in wasting time Grant might not have?”\n\nThomas glanced at the others, who were looking at him. In the silence, she went on.\n\n“Shovel’s out of play until they find a wielder. No, I’m not taking more questions.”\n\nThomas lowered his hand.\n\n“But Heat Wave’s in motion, and what I see tells me they’re going to be meeting up with Magnet, Light and Lullaby, who’s with them now. The only time they gather like that is when they think they’re getting close to their target, and with Magnet involved, after his recent defeat, there’s only one person that asshole is after.”\n\n“But you don’t know where he is.” Thomas sighed. “Shila, unless I’m doing line of sight, where I’m going has to be a place I’m really familiar with. The only ones I can be sure of are in Bozeman and in San Francisco Bay. Unless he’s at one—”\n\n“No, he’s north. Light and Magnet showed up on camera in Great Falls when Lullaby joined them. I have their car driving north on the I15 out of there. Heat Wave triggered my lookouts when their flight registered as landing in Calgary International Airport. So while I don’t know exactly where Grant is, if Magnet’s heading for Calgary, you can be sure Grant’s somewhere around there.”\n\n“So, we’d have to go to Canada?” Thomas asked, and she nodded. “But the only thing leading us to Grant is how his enemy’s moving.” He rubbed his face. “For anyone other than Grant, I’d tell you where to shove your request, but how the fuck do you expect me to get to Canada?”\n\n“That’s—” she started\n\n“I can get you there,” Gilbert said.\n\n“You what?” Thomas asked. “Why?”\n\n“To get out of his place,” the armadillo replied, throwing his hands up. “If I have to sit here and do nothing for another day, I am going to go insane.”\n\n“And how are you going to get me there?” Thomas asked.\n\nGilbert stared at him. “Okay, that’s just insulting. Yes, it’s seen better days, but it got us here from San Francisco, not to say from Lewiston to Denver and then to San Francisco.”\n\n“That’s not what I mean. Unless things changed very recently, there’s a border between the US and Canada,” Thomas said. “I don’t own a passport.”\n\n“That’s not the problem you think it is,” Olavo said. “We have magic.”\n\n“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Felix said, looking up from the end table. “You’re going to risk your life for the kangaroo that fried your van when he’s on the run from his own people? What is wrong with you?”\n\n“I’m going to get out of this house,” the armadillo replied angrily. “And how dare you imply that I shouldn’t help a man who saved my frat brother, Felix Chouteau. Oh, him and me are going to have words about what he did to my van, but that guy protected Thomas from us when he had no reason to do that. I don’t even want to think about where we’d be right now if we’d gotten Thomas and brought him back to this Henry guy. You can be a selfish bastard. I’m not going to be one.”\n\n“This is not Society business,” the otter said loudly as he looked at the others. “We don’t get involved in other faction’s problems.”\n\n“I am not getting involved,” Yating said slowly and raised a hand to forestall Gilbert. “I can’t leave my mother alone, or tell her to go home without knowing what happened to my brother… to Yahui.” He said the name as if it was foreign to him.\n\n“I can’t go either,” Madoc said. “I want to, but I’m sorry Thomas, I have to stay here. There’s this kid who thinks I’m his father. I don’t feel any kind of kinship to him, but everyone tells me he’s my son. It’s killing me that I have a son and I can’t feel it.” He hit his heart with a fist. “I have to be here so that the moment Raphael has a way to unlock my memories, I can give my son his father back.”\n\n“I get that,” Thomas said. “I really do. If I had a son, I’m sure I’d—” Thomas looked at Madoc’s empty arms, then Olavo’s also empty arms. “Where’s Pryce?”\n\n“In the kitchen,” Olavo replied. “Limbani came in so I asked him to watch over him.”\n\n“You left an infant with our monkey?” Thomas exclaimed, then ran to the kitchen before anyone had time to respond. He skidded to a stop in the kitchen’s archway, ready to stop whatever the sex obsessed monkey might be—\n\nLimbani sang softly in his native language while gently rocking Pryce in his arms.\n\nThe song and gentle way he held Pryce was a surprise on their own, but what arrested the rat was that the monkey was dressed. It was only a pair of jeans, and they were so tight they might as well have been painted on, but it was one more piece of clothing Limbani had had on since the moment they had he has set foot in the house.\n\nThe monkey stopped singing as he noticed the rat. “What?” he asked in a whisper.",
"writing_bbcode_parsed": "
Kansas City, KS, February 26th
“Coming through!” Thomas yelled as he ran after Pryce, and the armadillo plastered himself against the wall an instant before the rat had to shoulder him aside.
How was the kid so damned fast? Thomas was who could teleport, and, somehow, Madoc’s son was the one who kept vanishing on them the moment they turned their back. Someone had lied to him about powers just coming in once they were eighteen.
Thomas made it up the stairs with Pryce already halfway down the hall, running under the last step of the ladder leading up to the attic. The otter slowly coming down it only registered as Thomas reached to send the ladder back up as he ran around it, and slapped Felix’s calf totally by accident.
“Fucking watch it,” the otter yelled, and if not for the dusty end table he was maneuvering, would probably have jumped down to kick his ass, or fuck it. It was always hard to tell what an angry Felix would settle on. Thomas considered pausing long enough to confirm the table was hardwood, but that would give Pryce the time to end up in another house.
And really, would Felix work this hard for anything less than hardwood? Did the house even have polish?
Thomas glanced in the two bedrooms as he passed them for Pryce, then nearly slammed into the end of the hall, and looked outside, searching for the toddler. There was no way, he was there, the window was closed, there was no opening in the wall, but when it came to Pryce, he was no longer taking anything for granted.
“Hey, dumb-ass,” Felix called, and as the otter nodded the way Thomas had come, the rat saw the toddler drop down the stairs.
“No!” Thomas appeared, ready to catch the tiny rat, but Pryce was already at the bottom of the stairs, ambling away. He appeared down the stairs, but already the toddler had vanished from sight. How? How did he—
“And what’s this pretty boy doing here?” Olavo cooed in the distance. “Why yes, you are a pretty boy.” Infant giggling followed the words.
Thomas followed the sounds to the kitchen, a full twenty-feet away from the stairs. Pryce didn’t teleport, Thomas decided. His power was to be in the place you least expected him to be in. Or maybe that was just what infants did, and not relegated to this one. His mother did have stories of the places she’d found Thomas when he was that age, after all.
The capybara sat at the table, bouncing the infant rat on a knee and a half-eaten sandwich in the other hand. His phone projected text from where it rested on the table. It would be some economy text book, if he knew Olavo.
“Thank you for catching him,” Thomas said, dropping into the opposite chair.
“What are you doing running after this guy?”
“My cardio,” Thomas replied, not believing how out of breath he was.
“Shouldn’t that be his father’s job?”
“Me and Madoc fucked for it, and since he got to pick what infant to look after, he picked the other one.”
“Limbani?” Olavo asked after thinking about it?
Thomas nodded. “I think he’s still freaked out about having a son. Which you can understand how weird that is, considering how much he dotted over Pryce at Thanksgiving.”
The capybara nodded, looking at the text again.
“How are you handling the messed-up memory thing?” Thomas asked.
The capybara was the only one Thomas hadn’t checked in on since Samuel had left them. Yating was with his mother, still down from learning he had a twin brother. Felix being Felix, he was ignoring the whole thing in favor of his belief that nothing had been done to him. Hopefully, there was some wax in the house and polishing that table would keep the otter busy until they had a cure. Anything that could be turned into an explosive was being kept away from Gilbert, but that had more to do with him nearly burning down the kitchen than a reaction to his altered memories.
“Unless this mess,” Olavo said, not looking away from his reading, “as you call it, is hiding that this Henry had me betray my family, I’ll deal with it once I know what I’m missing. I called a cousin, so I can at least confirm I’m still a Medeiros.”
“Your father?”
The capybara shook his head. “That would force him to intervene, and I owe it to the Lewiston Elder to resolve this.” He motioned to the text. “And while that is happening, I still have courses to keep up with.”
“Isn’t it odd that your power hasn’t fixed our memories? I mean you have fucked each of us a few times, and at least once for me with the intent to heal me.”
“That isn’t how my power works. I fix physical damage. This is…something else.”
Thomas nodded. “Can I ask why economy and not medicine, seeing how you’re a healer?”
Olavo’s sigh had a trace of exasperation in it.
“You don’t have—”
“It’s fine. I just have to remind myself that the way you remember things, we haven’t had this discussion the first time you learned what I did.” He waved the text away. “My power isn’t that great. No, it just looks impressive to you because you don’t have any reference point. If you remembered what phrases did, or even a simply healing sigil, you wouldn’t even think of my cock when you’re hurt. I mean, the only way my healing is better than the simplest sigil is that when I do it, it doesn’t matter if the wound is dirty or there’s still foreign matter in it. It’s more on par with an advanced sigil.”
He passes Pryce to Thomas, who feigned reluctance in taking him.
“I don’t have to think about what’s damaged with you. It just happens.” He stood and stretched. “That’s mainly why I’m not bothering with medicine. Knowing all that wouldn’t make me a better healer. And I’m not sure where I could get a residency where they’re let me fuck a patient better.”
“Would it work on a woman?” Thomas asked, making faces at the infant.
“I don’t see why it wouldn’t,” Olavo replied. “Other than me having to fuck her for it to work. He took a bottle of water from the fridge and leaned against the counter. “If I had to, there’s a phrase that allows me to get hard for a woman. But the only time I intend to let it be used on me is when it’s time for me to have a son. And before you ask me again,” he frowned. “Sorry, that’s an again for me. Now that I think about it, it’s odd how you asked me about phrases when I explained my power to you that time.” He shook himself. “But like I said then, there are encyclopedia’s worth of phrases that have been recorded, just around healing. Using those, we could probably heal our memories, provided we knew how it was done at the very least. We call them phrases, but they’re more like programs, so you can’t really imply meaning. You need to tell the phrase what to look for and how to heal it. And it’s a language in the way code is a language, not how English is.”
“Sigil means symbols,” Thomas said.
“Yes. It’ll make sense once you remember everything.”
Thomas looked at the capybara, but kept the comment to himself. This time.
“But the ease of healing through phrases and the sigils renders my kind of healing nothing more than a novelty, and within the Society more because of who I am, than what it does.”
“Okay, and who are you?” Thomas asked.
Olavo stared and muttered something in Spanish. “You don’t remember that either?”
“You never told me anything about the Society,” Thomas replied pointedly.
The capybara opened his mouth, then closed it. “I am the son of the Medeiros elder.”
“So your father is in charge of the entire family, like Raphael.”
Olavo nodded.
“Okay, I guess that explains the economy major then. You’re going to be taking over for your father.”
The capybara chuckled. “Ecom is only where it starts. Once I’m done, I’ll be doing one for politics, then urban planning.”
“You’re doing three majors?” Thomas asked in disbelief. “Where do you find the time?”
“Pay attention, Thomas. I am doing economy now. Then it will be politics, and after that, urban planning. Even if it’s something that Henry can do, trying to shove all that in my head at the same time would drive me insane, not to say the number of classes I’d still have to take to make sure none of the credits expired.”
“But you’re going to be paying graduate rates after your fist major so… right. You guys are all rich.” He thought about the major Olavo was taking. “That seems like an odd combination of majors to take. What’s your plan for them?”
“That is not… exactly how…” he sighed. “Well, it isn’t like this will be a surprise to you, once you remember everything. My father is going to be taking over the country and—”
“He what?” Thomas exclaimed, and Pryce giggled in innocence.
“Not this country, you idiot,” Felix said, heading for the cabinet under the sink. “His.”
Thomas glared at the otters’ back while he was bent over, searching. He almost flipped him the bird when he straightened, holding a dishrag and a bottle of cleaner, but decided it wasn’t something he should do in front of Pryce.
“Remember to bring it back,” Olavo told the otter as he left. “There’s no telling what Gilbert can do with that.”
“He’s the idiot, not me,” Felix snapped back before disappearing out the door.
“So,” Thomas told Olavo, “your father wants to take over Argentina? Won’t that make him a dictator?”
The capybara winced. “It’s more complicated. Argentina has a long history of corruption, and until recently, my father has been unable to act against that in other than small, ineffectual ways. There was an organization watching everything did, the whole of the Society, and if it didn’t like even the smallest detail, it would strike us down hard. It’s no longer there, so now he can act more overtly.”
Thomas gave his finger for Pryce to chew on while he let the information sink in. “Isn’t that extreme?”
“Sometimes, that is what is needed. And in the end, I can’t control what my father will do. I am only his son, not a trusted adviser. What I can do is ensure that when I inherit what he… made, I will be able to make something grand of it.”
“I guess,” Thomas said, then looked for the right words. He could tell Olavo thought it would be a good thing, but weren’t the history books filled with really bad times starting with that belief? His need for a reply was taken away when Gilbert called.
“Thomas, you need to come here.”
Olavo shrugged when Thomas looked at him, then took Pryce before the rat headed for the living room.
“What’s the—” he started to as the armadillo, with the red panda seated next to him.
“There you are,” the pangolin on the television screen said. “Why weren’t you here, with them?”
“I—” Thomas motioned to the kitchen. “What are you doing on the television?” he asked, as where she was speaking from registered. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Felix polishing the end table in a corner and actively ignoring the television.
“Talking with you,” she said, then took a drag from her E-Cig.
“You do know about phones, right?” Thomas said, annoyed.
“And I know how easy it is to spy on those.” She motioned around her head. “Who’d ever think I’d use this to call you?”
“Especially since there isn’t a microphone on it,” Gilbert pointed out.
“You know,” she said, eyeing him. “I’d think a bunch of guys who can make stuff happen with their dicks would know better than to be dicks about how I use magic.” She shifted her attention to Thomas. “And as for you, specifically? I’m sort of calling in that favor.”
“I’m kind of the middle of stuff,” Thomas said, looking at the others.
“Oh, I know,” she said with a chuckle,” but that can wait.”
“What’s going on?” Madoc asked as Thomas was about to point out he’d decide what could and couldn’t wait, not her. The muscular rat froze, staring at the television. “How?”
“Magic,” Thomas said before Shila’s annoyed expression could be turned into words. “Look. I said I’d move you, but I never thought it would be this soon. You sort of implied I’d have time to train. Right now there aren’t a lot of places I can take you, and I would—”
“It’s not for me,” she cut him off, then sighed. “Grant needs a rescue.”
“What? Where is he?” Thomas asked.
“Not a fucking clue.”
“If you’ll excuse me,” Olavo said from the living room entrance, “but if you don’t know where he is, how can you know that he needs help?”
She hesitated. “Okay, so, I don’t know, know. My conclusion is based on inferences. There’s been chatter on the net for a while about Chamber agents on the hunt.”
“Chamber?” Gilbert asked, looking at the others as if he needed confirmation he’d heard her right.
“Internal name,” Shila replied. “Don’t worry that genius head of yours over it. Anyway. Magnet and Light were the only one to walk away from—”
“Hold on,” Thomas cut her off. “Magnet? Light? What are they, members of bad names super-villains anonymous?”
“It’s what I call them,” she replied dryly, “on account of them being assholes who can’t leave the rest of us to live our lives in peace.” She fixed her gaze on him. “Can I continue?” she looked the room over and the opening mouths closed. “Thank you. Shovel didn’t survive that fall, but the Chamber still has his staff.” She sighed as Thomas raised a hand. “Go ahead.”
“How is a shovel a staff? Because if you’re talking about who I think you are, then when he was using looked like some generic hardware shovel.”
“How close to him did you get?” she asked. “Don’t answer that, there’s a video showing you never got that close. So what you saw was something that looked, at a distance like a regular shovel. At a distance, Grant’s staff just looks like a staff. And even if it had looked like a store-bought shovel.” She raised her hand so Thomas could see it. “Where’s my staff?”
“I don’t know,” Thomas replied. “Off camera somewhere?”
“Maybe, and yet, I’m still using it. It gives us power, not limit what we can do, just like sex gives you—”
“Actually,” Olavo interrupted her. “Our god gives us our—”
“Kid,” she cut him off, annoyed. “We so don’t have time to argue over whose belief system is the right one right now, especially since you’re going to hate the answer.” She took a drag. “Now, can I go on with how I’ve worked out Grant needs help, or are you all more interested in wasting time Grant might not have?”
Thomas glanced at the others, who were looking at him. In the silence, she went on.
“Shovel’s out of play until they find a wielder. No, I’m not taking more questions.”
Thomas lowered his hand.
“But Heat Wave’s in motion, and what I see tells me they’re going to be meeting up with Magnet, Light and Lullaby, who’s with them now. The only time they gather like that is when they think they’re getting close to their target, and with Magnet involved, after his recent defeat, there’s only one person that asshole is after.”
“But you don’t know where he is.” Thomas sighed. “Shila, unless I’m doing line of sight, where I’m going has to be a place I’m really familiar with. The only ones I can be sure of are in Bozeman and in San Francisco Bay. Unless he’s at one—”
“No, he’s north. Light and Magnet showed up on camera in Great Falls when Lullaby joined them. I have their car driving north on the I15 out of there. Heat Wave triggered my lookouts when their flight registered as landing in Calgary International Airport. So while I don’t know exactly where Grant is, if Magnet’s heading for Calgary, you can be sure Grant’s somewhere around there.”
“So, we’d have to go to Canada?” Thomas asked, and she nodded. “But the only thing leading us to Grant is how his enemy’s moving.” He rubbed his face. “For anyone other than Grant, I’d tell you where to shove your request, but how the fuck do you expect me to get to Canada?”
“That’s—” she started
“I can get you there,” Gilbert said.
“You what?” Thomas asked. “Why?”
“To get out of his place,” the armadillo replied, throwing his hands up. “If I have to sit here and do nothing for another day, I am going to go insane.”
“And how are you going to get me there?” Thomas asked.
Gilbert stared at him. “Okay, that’s just insulting. Yes, it’s seen better days, but it got us here from San Francisco, not to say from Lewiston to Denver and then to San Francisco.”
“That’s not what I mean. Unless things changed very recently, there’s a border between the US and Canada,” Thomas said. “I don’t own a passport.”
“That’s not the problem you think it is,” Olavo said. “We have magic.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Felix said, looking up from the end table. “You’re going to risk your life for the kangaroo that fried your van when he’s on the run from his own people? What is wrong with you?”
“I’m going to get out of this house,” the armadillo replied angrily. “And how dare you imply that I shouldn’t help a man who saved my frat brother, Felix Chouteau. Oh, him and me are going to have words about what he did to my van, but that guy protected Thomas from us when he had no reason to do that. I don’t even want to think about where we’d be right now if we’d gotten Thomas and brought him back to this Henry guy. You can be a selfish bastard. I’m not going to be one.”
“This is not Society business,” the otter said loudly as he looked at the others. “We don’t get involved in other faction’s problems.”
“I am not getting involved,” Yating said slowly and raised a hand to forestall Gilbert. “I can’t leave my mother alone, or tell her to go home without knowing what happened to my brother… to Yahui.” He said the name as if it was foreign to him.
“I can’t go either,” Madoc said. “I want to, but I’m sorry Thomas, I have to stay here. There’s this kid who thinks I’m his father. I don’t feel any kind of kinship to him, but everyone tells me he’s my son. It’s killing me that I have a son and I can’t feel it.” He hit his heart with a fist. “I have to be here so that the moment Raphael has a way to unlock my memories, I can give my son his father back.”
“I get that,” Thomas said. “I really do. If I had a son, I’m sure I’d—” Thomas looked at Madoc’s empty arms, then Olavo’s also empty arms. “Where’s Pryce?”
“In the kitchen,” Olavo replied. “Limbani came in so I asked him to watch over him.”
“You left an infant with our monkey?” Thomas exclaimed, then ran to the kitchen before anyone had time to respond. He skidded to a stop in the kitchen’s archway, ready to stop whatever the sex obsessed monkey might be—
Limbani sang softly in his native language while gently rocking Pryce in his arms.
The song and gentle way he held Pryce was a surprise on their own, but what arrested the rat was that the monkey was dressed. It was only a pair of jeans, and they were so tight they might as well have been painted on, but it was one more piece of clothing Limbani had had on since the moment they had he has set foot in the house.
The monkey stopped singing as he noticed the rat. “What?” he asked in a whisper.",
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