2.3

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“How was school today?” Dr. Obando asked me. She was a very astute looking woman. She reminded me a lot of Pandora’s mom in a way. They both had a similar skin tone and face shape, and they both looked at home in professional attire. Pandora’s mom would always come home from work still looking like she’d just finished getting ready, with her hair perfectly pulled back and her makeup looking none the worse for a whole day of wear. She also reminded me of what Pandora could grow up to become.

And that thought brought another worry or two into my head. I don’t know if Pandora thought I was an idiot or just didn’t care, but I was pretty fucking aware of the constant liquid diet she seemed to be on during lunch. She’d take food from us to try but I rarely saw her bring out her own.

When we’d hit puberty and started filling out around eleven or twelve or whenever, we’d both started complaining almost simultaneously about what a pain in the ass finding clothes became. She wasn’t really as chesty as me, but we both went through the entire tiny mall we had here finding pants that would fit us. Super annoying.

But I could tell she was losing weight now. It wasn’t drastic, because I wasn’t seeing ribs or tendons standing out, but even though I’d kept an eye on trips to the bathroom after meals and all that and cleared her in my head it was still gnawing at me.

But getting her to talk about this shit was basically as doable as pulling out my own teeth with my bare hands. I knew about her mom and I could tell in broad strokes no one had taken it well in her family. But she wouldn’t give me details. I let her come over for space from her dad because that was all I could do right now. She wasn’t leaning on me or Ellie.

“Okay.” I said. Dr. Obando smiled at me and quirked an eyebrow up. I sighed and folded my hands in my lap. Okay was my favourite word in these situations. Or fine, maybe.

“Sorry. I ran on autopilot a bit, was thinking about some stuff.” I said.

“You okay with thinking out loud?” She asked. I nodded, and took a breath to not only give my self some air but to give myself some time as well, to sort the words out in my head.

“Everything is feeding into everything else in my head right now. I’ve been noticing Pandora hasn’t been eating a lot, and she’s getting worse at withdrawing. But we also had a small spat today and I’m not too happy with her at that, because she got on my case about how invested I am in our upcoming exams.” That felt like it barely scratched the surface of my worries, but it was a start. I didn’t need to get everything out at once.

“Do you think there’s zero merit in what she said?” I unfolded my hands and spread them in a gesture that communicated a shrug without moving my shoulders.

“I’d like to think I’ve been doing pretty good with self-regulating this. I’ve been around my friends more, and my parents are noting we’re eating dinners together more than we did. And I’m trying to be satisfied with eighty-fives and eighty’s when they happen, because it does feel like a better balance of my time. But I still have to walk that line of keeping my grades high, because I want to get into a good program.” I was bouncing my leg faster and faster as I spoke, and I would normally note that and stop in any other setting. Here, I simply let it go.

“And the techniques have helped as well, I think. I’ve been able to stop and disengage those spirals I get into.” I saw myself in that things stomach again, for just a moment. Whatever else had happened that day I had done that. I’d proved to myself for basically the first time I could stop those stupid fucking trains of thought that caught me and went so fast I couldn’t get off. Yet I still felt shitty after it, because I’d still froze. I was in this to make sure my friends stayed whole, and I barely kept it together in our first actual encounter. I’d felt like I was walking on a tightrope since then. Like something small could tip me either way and I’d fuck something up and not be able to help when I needed to.

“That’s really, really good. I’m proud that you recognized it and managed to get yourself situated better. That’s tangible progress.” She smiled at me, and it hit me at maybe fifty percent of the radiance it should have. She was really happy for me, and I wasn’t. It didn’t really feel good enough to me.

“May I ask what you were doing when you managed this?” She asked. Ah shit. I hated being caught unprepared in a lie, especially because I had walked right into that. I took a breath. I hated thinking about everything like that, especially my therapy. I was caught. The other person had bested me just a little bit. Not everything needed to be like that, Shannon.

“Me and Pandora and Ellie have started a little extracurricular activity. Both of them were really eager about it and I had some second thoughts, but they both seemed like they would jump in without me. So I joined for their sake, more than mine.” Dr. Obando seemed to take the lack of explanation in stride, although I was sure that it would come up later. I’d have to be ready for that.

Fuck. There it was again.

“Do you have no interest in what you three are doing?” I didn’t speak for a few moments after she finished, even though I knew what my answer was. We were getting a bit too close to blatantly talking around what this extracurricular was.

“No, no, I think it is- I think it’s good. Kind of good for Pandora and mostly good for Ellie, and something that will make a net positive in the world. I support it.”

“But you worry about them.” She uncrossed her legs, and then crossed them again, switching the positions of the limbs. She was wearing a nice pair of warm gray slacks, a pair of really rich brown boots and a very slightly off-white t-shirt. A jacket that matched her pants hung on the back of her chair. I honestly didn’t know how she managed to walk from her car to the building in this heat.

“Yeah, I do. Pandora runs so much on instinct and a lot of the time, that’s good. It makes her so much more creative than I could ever be. But Ellie has a bad habit of getting sucked into a lot of the things Pandora is doing, because they’re so similar sometimes, and I’m scared they may end up doing something dumb.” Dr. Obando held up a hand, and I realized I’d whipped through that sentence in under five seconds. I took a breath, and she placed her palm back on her thigh.

“A couple things to start with there; one, as we’ve discussed before, weigh the gains and costs of taking that sort of thing on to yourself. Your friends may end up better in the long run, but they would be immensely unhappy if you burned yourself at both ends in the process, especially for them.” I nodded a bit unenthusiastically at that. For a lot of reasons. Because sometimes, I wasn’t sure how much either of them realized the things I gave up to help them out, big and small. Always being the one to figure a way out of a problem we got ourselves in, or being the one to talk to the adults and use my “silver-tongue” to get us out of a situation. I wasn’t sure how much they cared.

“Two, don’t underestimate everyone so much. Your friends especially, in this particular case, because you picked them for a reason. You’re a smart young lady, who I assume has picked two other smart young ladies to form relationships with. They may know what to do more than you think.”

God, I hated these situations. Especially because I felt correct, in this. I felt like I knew more than Dr. Obando, that her advice wasn’t relevant so I should disregard it. I knew how my friends worked, having been with them for years and watching them develop these strengths and weaknesses, and I knew what they weren’t and were capable of.

But fucking damn it, she also wasn’t wrong. Pandora had survived being by herself in the Ruins and seemed to come of it less physically hurt than me or Ellie. She’d been the one to figure out the weakness. In that situation, she did know more than me.

But then that drove me back down into this fucking spiral because it made me think of what the Waterlogged Beast had looked like when it had died, and how Pandora hadn’t seemed worked up by it at all. How she hadn’t brought it up at all, in the last two weeks, and hadn’t brought up the memories she’d seen.

I’d witnessed myself be told again and again that I could be doing a bit more. My parents saw how fucking amazing I was doing, so they asked if I wanted to move up a level in class, or take this course. It had turned into specializing everything I did to look good on applications, when I had decided to go down the medical path.

And then I’d had that stupid fucking exam. That calculus course had burnt me at every end I fucking had, because it didn’t click in my brain. I’d been up until midnight or one or two in the morning multiple times a week, and then woke up at half-past seven to go to school the next day. And after that, I had done chess or volunteered at whatever places around town had let me to get even more than the two hundred hours I already had.

The last test before the exam had been a fucking eighty, and I’d cried in the bathroom after class. I’d managed to hold it in the entire seventy-five minutes, and then walked very casually to the bathroom in the corner of the basement, near the chemistry room, and sobbed into my backpack. I’d been above a ninety in a course I could barely fucking understand and now all I had left to bring my grade up was this stupid exam. So it had been two or three or whatever all-nighters in a row directly before it, and I hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning because I was coiled so tightly.

I managed the first question, and then looked up and realized that had taken me ten minutes. I had an hour and twenty minutes left to do what suddenly dawned on me was way too many fucking questions. They had to call my parents because I wouldn’t get up off the fucking floor, and I’d never seen them so surprised and shocked, and disappointed. They had said they weren’t, but I could see past the sympathy.

I’d seen all that, and I had a feeling Pandora had seen worse. She had disappeared for two days after we returned from the Ruins, and then came back and acted like nothing had happened.

“I just- I don’t know.” I uttered that last part in a hesitant whisper.

“If your friends need help, it can’t all be on you, Shannon. Even with me, with the years and years of classes and schooling, I can’t help everyone. And I certainly can’t help people that won’t let me.” I nodded at that.

But there was a difference in that comparison. It wasn’t a perfect mirror. I’d known my friends almost my entire life, and we had shared beds and meals more times than I could feasibly remember. If I didn’t help them, who was going to?

“Okay.” I said, retreating back to my favourite word.

“And I say that to lead into this: you’re just beginning to hit some sort of stride, with you stating how you managed to use the breathing and the techniques to bring yourself out of that spiral you find yourself in. I’m tentative on you restarting an extracurricular when you may just be finding a balance again. I don’t want you to throw yourself out of whack, pushing yourself to help your friends, even though it’s a noble cause.” Dr. Obando smiled at me at that last word. I did appreciate it. Not downplaying this, because it was fucking important to me.

“I’ll keep an eye on it. And I’ll keep you up to date on it.” I said, as firmly as possible without being a bitch. That was always another worry. Being a bitch. A favourite of a lot of people at school, along with lesbian and dyke, even though I couldn’t begin to tell you what the connection was there. Or how entirely fucking problematic it seemed to me.

“Please do.”  

 

“Do you wanna text her or should I?” I already had my phone out before I’d finished the question. Ellie had her hand in her pocket, but paused as she looked at me and then at my phone. She shrugged and then motioned to me to continue.

                Hi, your two magical friends are waiting to take a magical GO bus ride with you

“How much time do we have again?” Ellie asked. I was staring down at my phone and willing a text to come in. My mind was all over it almost immediately, showing me visions of Pandora lost taking a shortcut through the woods, kidnapped in some strange vehicle, or otherwise injured and/or maimed. I managed to show zero of that on my face, and instead continued to stare down at my phone with a face leaning between impassive and perturbed.

“Our bus gets here in ten minutes, so we’re going to leave without her if I hear anything but, ‘I’ll be here in under ten minutes.’” Ellie sighed, her eyebrows furrowing and her hands slipping into her pockets. She was wearing a hoodie coloured a blue I could only describe as intense, over some pale yellow shirt and black faux-denim shorts.

My phone buzzed in my hand, and I brought the device up and looked down at the same time.

Not coming

                Why

                Can’t skip this like you skipped class, lady

My dad

I immediately regretted the previous text as soon as that one hit my screen. Ellie looked over at me with her eyebrows raised, in the middle of biting her bottom lip. I’d caught her attention by turning on my heel and bringing both hands up to hold the phone, while my foot started tapping underneath me.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck. I was literally just talking about shit like this earlier today with my therapist. Or shit adjacent to this, maybe. My fingers started typing, and the feedback from my phone buzzed beneath them.

                We can come get you

                And I don’t think my mom would be against having you over, she misses you

It’s fine

Go without me

I looked down at the message for a couple moments, and felt bad. A bad feeling that I couldn’t quite describe to the extend I was satisfied with it. Pandora, pulling away again. Acting like she was fine, that nothing could hurt her, until I find out her dad and her had such a blow-out fight that she locked herself in her room for an entire long weekend. Literally.

Ellie had come up behind me now, and I could tell she had read my screen already. I locked my phone and slipped it back into my pocket as I turned to face her. Her eyebrows were so close together they were almost touching, and her mouth was turned down.

“She’s not coming, it looks like. Just us then.” Ellie paused for a moment, looking down at her feet, and then nodded slowly at that. She went to sit down inside the stop and I followed suit.

Atwood had a fairly large bus terminal with routes that made zero fucking sense going all over town. I’d been to Toronto and Montreal a couple times each, and they mostly followed a grid-like pattern, with bus routes crossing at sensical places. Our buses seemed to just turn wherever the fuck they wanted to, as if someone had procedurally generated a bus route for our town to use.

We passed the ten minutes in silence, and thankfully Ellie wasn’t someone who was all that bothered by the lack of conversation. It usually got to me, but Pandora was stuck in my head now. Once again, I was imagining all the circumstances that got have had her stay home from something she was very interested in. And then I remembered why I’d been a bit mad at her earlier in the day, and the reasoning clicked. The good old call from the school for missing class. Or attempting to, on her part.

As we got on the bus, I was stuck between being worried for her, and being just a bit mad again as I replayed Ms. Hart very much looking like she was silently accusing me of having lied for my friend.

“Should we take notes or something?” Ellie asked as we took seats at the back of the vehicle. I looked up at her as I put my bag on the floor.

“To fill Pandora in tomorrow. My memories not great.” I tilted my head back and forth and raised my eyebrows. It wasn’t a bad idea, because Pandora would want to know everything we could give her.

“Yeah, that’s a good plan. Do you have a notebook or something?” Ellie nodded and pulled the spiral-bound book from her bag. She immediately handed it to me, because we’d known I had the best penmanship since grade school and that hadn’t changed yet.

We leaned back and settled a bit as the bus lurched forward. Ellie crossed her ankles and put her hands together in her lap, slouching forward a bit and moving with the stop-and-start of the bus. I’d taken the window seat, so I turned to face her, crossing my right ankle over my left thigh and letting the other leg dangle in the free space between seats.

“Do you know anything more than me about what’s going on with Pandora?” I asked. Ellie turned her head slightly to look at me, seemingly lost in thought beforehand, and shook her head and sighed once she took in my words. A conversation with Ellie was almost soothing, in a way. She was like that a lot, not necessarily slow to digest, but wanting time to think about responses and take things in. It let talks with her go at a slower pace, which I think I needed right now, with my mind racing through eight different worries at once. I took a deep breath.

“I don’t want this to be like last year, and I’m getting the sense that this could be the domino that’s gonna cause everything else to fall.” I paused for a moment to get my thoughts in order. Ellie didn’t seem to mind, probably because we had twenty minutes to kill. And I don’t think she would have cared regardless.

“Pandora is getting worse again and neither of us really have any idea what its like at home for her.” Even with that break in my speech I hadn’t been able to fully form what I wanted to say. Ellie was nodding now, and biting her lip.

“I got pulled away because of my grades and all that shit, and Pandora got pulled away because things got real fucking tough for her and that’s what she does when that happens, and then we kind of just completely forgot about you.” I paused again. “Which I’m sorry for.”

“It’s okay.” Ellie said automatically. I don’t know if it was, honestly. Ellie had completely changed he she was on the outside, and neither of us had really been there for her. I was endlessly grateful her mom wasn’t awful, or something really fucking bad may have happened.

“Okay. Fuck.” I rubbed my hands against my face, and when I took them away everything seemed brighter. This was why therapy was hard for me. I was so good at forming my thoughts on the fly, at public speaking and all the speech shit. My school project partners constantly pushed me to present things, and I never really felt bad about it, because I knew I was good at it. But emotions were different, because I could never get a good track of them. I knew what to say when someone was sad, or mad, or even really happy, and I could see the path forward to make them feel better. But these topics felt so big. It wasn’t getting a bad grade or having a crush not like you. All of this felt jumbled together without and real cause, just a huge fucking knot, and I didn’t know how to start addressing it.

“Pandora doesn’t really like talking about this stuff. It’s hard with her.” Ellie said quietly.

“I know.” I said. I wasn’t used to being the one doing the smaller amount of talking.

“Usually we can just let her figure it out on her time. Sometimes she gets a solution and everything works out, and sometimes she thinks it over for a while and realizes she needs our help.” I nodded at that. We both opened our mouths to speak at the same time, and when I closed mine, Ellie gestured for me to continue.

“I don’t think that’s gonna work this time, and I’m so scared that she’s just going to-“ I stopped because I simultaneously didn’t know what I wanted to say, and had many things I didn’t want to say. The worst-case scenario for how this path she was on ended wasn’t something I wanted to vocalize. At all.

“This is why I was worried about agreeing to this magi stuff, because Pandora doesn’t have a good fucking base to start on. I’m afraid it’s just all gonna fucking fall down and she’s just gonna be left with this huge world of terrifying shit to, I don’t know, just envelop her.” Ellie swallowed, and it looked like a really difficult action.

“Should we tell someone?” Ellie asked.

“Can we? Because on one hand, that feels like a huge betrayal to her, because she barely shares this stuff with us, never mind with whatever adult we share it with. She’ll be fucking livid with us. And on the other hand, I couldn’t even give you an answer of who we could tell if we wanted to. Our guidance counselor is fucking useless, because he feels like every sentence that exits his mouth is rehearsed, and I don’t even know any of the teachers in our school that I’d be comfortable going to with my problems.” I hunched over and ran my hands through my hair. It helped partly, to hide my eyes and face from view for a couple moments.

That feeling in my stomach was building again, all those worried compounding down there and in my brain like mold or garbage down a chute. It was like a ramp that I could just let myself easily slide down if I stopped trying even for one second.

“How are you doing?” Ellie asked suddenly. I raised my head slowly and turned to look at her. I always forgot how good she was at that, seeing through both me and Pandora like we hadn’t spent years building up walls to keep our shit together. It always surprised me that the shy, meek girl I knew had the ability to just cut through me like that. Because she was so good at never pushing it. Fuck, maybe she should start pushing it more, because our group needed someone like that.

But that wasn’t fair to her. To put all that on her shoulders.

“I’m managing.” Ellie furrowed her eyebrows at that. Jesus, that sounded like bullshit even to me, and the kicker is that it wasn’t total lies. Maybe fifty or sixty percent truth.

“Genuinely, the therapy is doing something. I’ve gotten out of a couple mental situations I wouldn’t have been able to before. I-“ I stopped myself. I could be doing more, though, honestly. Me and Dr. Obando had been discussing starting meditation to really teach myself how to disconnect from those intrusive thoughts, and telling my teachers about this whole fucking thing so I could try to lower the workload and tell them when I maybe couldn’t hand it homework. She had punctuated that it wasn’t to be used for laziness, although that wasn’t really a worry with me, but to ease up just a little.

I hadn’t done either of those. The meditation constantly slipped my mind, except at night when I was too fucking tired to get back up and do it. So instead, I just felt bad about not doing it before passing out. With my teachers, I hadn’t told them a single thing. That exam had been a one-time incident that was solved by moving my class levels down a bit, and nothing else. I didn’t want them to think I couldn’t do the work they were giving me, because everyone was telling us how post-secondary was going to be harder. Especially for me.

“I’m good.” I finished, and Ellie nodded slightly.

“How are you doing?” I asked. I never worried about this part, about Ellie lying to me. She was good at sharing whatever was bothering her when she needed to, as long as it didn’t involve confronting the person that was involved in bothering her.

“No one at school is acting too weird, so that’s good. I still feel a bit awkward constantly surrounded by people that knew me before, but it’s- it’s good. Yeah.” She ended awkwardly.

“How’s your mom? With all of this, I mean?” Last I had checked, she hadn’t kicked Ellie out, and my friend was on blockers then, so she’d been good enough to allow that. But it had been a while, because I’d been slacking on that particular duty.

“She’s go-“ ellie paused and cleared her throat, “She’s fine. Pretty okay, actually. She takes me to all my appointments and I’m actually moving to hormones soon. She wanted me on the blockers to make sure that I was sure, and she believes me when I say I am. She likes to take me out shopping, which is nice. She’s, uh, a bit awkward with the clothes I choose but maybe that’ll go away over time.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“She- I think she had this idea in her head that I wanted to be a girl so that meant I wanted everything that came with the role of being a girl. But I still buy jeans and pants and comfortable shirts that I like. She doesn’t really get it yet, I don’t think.”

“Why you would want to be a girl, but want to wear basically the same things you wore before?” I asked. Ellie nodded. She sighed, and tapped her feet against the floor in a steady little flurry.

“And also makeup and all that stuff. It’ll blow over, I think.”

“It’s a different time, I guess, because they didn’t grow up with all this stuff. I think it’s harder for them to just turn their brains around on it. She’s being good about it, right?” Ellie nodded again.

“Yup. No name slip-ups passed week one or so, no weirdness about it like that. Kind of like she just has a tomboy daughter she doesn’t understand.” She paused. “Blake helps with it, as well. He’s better at talking to her.”

“Have you talked to her about it?” Ellie shrugged.

“It’s hard. I don’t feel like I ever know what to say, I guess.”

“Tell her stuff like this, like you’re talking to me. If you want, get Blake there to referee for you. Your mom isn’t someone who’s gonna get mad at you for speaking your mind, I don’t think.” Ellie nodded and made some sort of sound that basically just meant she heard me. I leaned forward and punched her softly in the thigh. She looked up at me with furrowed brows and pursed lips, her face fake-annoyed at the slight.

“Do it. It’ll help, and it’s less scary than you think.” Ellie sighed and then nodded. That was probably the best I was gonna get out of that. I put that on my list as something to check into later. More things to do.

We spent another five minutes in silence, and then we were at our stop. The bus lurched again, and we sat for an extra moment while it settled, before we grabbed our things and quickly scurried off, thanking the driver before we exited. He seemed unphased at the two high school girls getting off at a random rest stop after dark.

To the left was an On The Run station, with a couple gas pumps outside and tiny kiosk with a cooler and a shelf of snacks in front of the cashier. Directly in front was the Tim Hortons, which had maybe four people inside without counting the staff. Three trucks of varying sizes were parked around the lot, along with a single generic car that looked maybe ten years old. I wasn’t really a car person. I could immediately see who I was pretty sure was the guy we were meeting in the window, in a booth sat against the glass. Scruffy black hair and a hooked nose was all I could really make out from here.

Ellie fidgeted a bit, and we stepped away from the tiny green-accented bus shelter towards the Timmie’s. It was dark, and this place was basically full of strange guys, and normally, this would be my fucking nightmare. I’d have kept my hand in my purse, wrapped around my keys, or in this particular situation just had my keys out of my backpack and in my hand. Not Wolverine-style, because I knew that basically hurt you more than your attacker.

But having magic powers made me feel a lot more confident about walking across this dark, unfamiliar lot.

We entered the small restaurant and I immediately made my way over to the guy’s table. He looked up as we approached him, and swallowed a sip of coffee as he set the paper cup down on the table.

“Pedro?” I asked, trying not to sound like I was about to instigate a drug deal just in case this wasn’t him. Thankfully, he nodded.

“That’s me.” He said. He gestured to the seat across from him, and we slung off our bags and slid in.

“Do we need a chair? Thought there was three of you.” He asked. I shook my head.

“Our friend got caught up in something else tonight, so just us. We were hoping to take some notes to show her, if you don’t mind?” He shook his head and lazily pursed his lips, like he was about to blow out a raspberry. I brought out he borrowed notebook and a pen I annoyingly found loose in the bottom of my bag.

Pedro was probably three or four years older than us, with that previously mentioned scruffy black hair that looked like a neater, generic cut grown out a bit so it now covered the tops of his ears. No product, it seemed like he just pushed it this way and that when he needed to. He was either Mexican or Colombian or Spanish, or something of the sort, or just really damn tanned, but I think I could confidently guess the answer just going by the name.

“I’m Shannon.” I said, and held out my hand as I placed the notebook and pen down on the table. He nodded towards me and took my hand, giving it as much of a shake as he could with the table below us. The table went to his chest or so, and I felt very much like a teenager considering it was three or four inches higher on me. Fucking stupid short stature.

“Ellie.” My friend said and smiled quickly. He shook hers as well.

“Pedro.” He said in a tone that made me aware it was redundant, but he said it anyways.

“Before we start, I’m gonna need to lay down a couple rules.” He waited for us to respond. I looked at Ellie out of the corner of my eye, and we both nodded.

 “No crazy hand gestures, and no pulling anything out of your bags without at least announcing it first, please. And I’m going to need some proof you’re connected to that lady that contacted me. Or whatever she was.”

We both looked at each other again. Well, this conversation could be dead in the water before it had even started. He probably wouldn’t love if we invited him into the woods around this place to show off our transformations, if he was worried about sudden gestures and surprises from our bags. I opened my mouth to speak, but Lady’s voice beat me to it.

“They are indeed with me. I can vouch for them and their role in this. You don’t need to worry about the validity of their humanity, either.” Pedro pursed his lips at that and nodded, and then settled into staring at his coffee cup blankly. I waited for a moment for him to say something, but nothing came out of his mouth, and his stare was getting deader by the minute. I turned to look at Ellie, and she was looking increasingly concerned.

“Can you girls come meet us outside, around where they keep the trash? And he wants you to bring his coffee as well.” With that, the weird feeling of dead air appeared again before I ignored the lack of connection and turned to Ellie. She got up from the booth and moved to let me out. I grabbed he coffee from the table as I did, leaving whatever the fuck that was to sit in the booth alone.

Lady was standing beside the mage as we came around the corner, her tail flicking and waving. She seemed content, and Pedro didn’t look anxious or out of sorts, so I approached with little caution. I extended the arm with the coffee in it, and he took it with a nod of his head as thanks.

“What was that?” I asked as I placed my bag on the ground and grabbed the notebook out for a second time. If he made it three, I was going to be unhappy.

“That was a fairly expensive trick that I was keeping in my back pocket for the right situation. Basically all the glamour I had around a frame of sticks and leaves, and an old t-shirt of mine.”

“That’s paranoid.” I said as I wrote down a small note of what he had said, because Pandora would probably get a kick out of it.

“If you three are as powerful as your friend has made you seem, this won’t be something you’ll have to worry about. But most of us mages don’t have a lot, and what we do have can be taken easily. Including our lives.”

“That sounds harsh.” Ellie said. Pedro blew a raspberry and nodded his head, sticking his hands in his pockets.

“Yeah, it is. C’est la vie, though.” He looked down towards Lady as he finished.

“You girls are going to have to describe the brunt of this situation, considering I’ve been absent for your encounters with this entity. I’ll fill in the blanks when I can.” I could already feel ellie looking at me expectantly.

“Has Lady already told you what we do. Like, how we work and what we fight?” Pedro looked down at the little creature again, and tilted his head to the side and shrugged with his face.

“Kind of. Wouldn’t mind a couple more details.” I sighed.

“We made a pact with her. We can transform into these augmented forms, and we’re faster, stronger, can take more punishment, along with a special gift. I control fire, for example.” I decided to leave Ellie and Pandora’s abilities a secret, for now. Maybe mirror some of that caution he was showing, even though he seemed fine for now.

“You’re more creature than mage, then.” When he I looked at him warily, he seemed to backpedal in his head and realized how that sounded.

“Sorry, that sounded weird to someone that doesn’t know a lot about this stuff, I guess. You’re more like an elemental, maybe, or a vampire. You’ve got certain abilities you’re specialized in, but can’t do much else outside of them.”

“Precisely. Which is why I wanted you all to meet, because knowledge can be shared for power, and vice-versa.” Lady said. Pedro nodded at that.

“So what’s your end of that deal you mentioned?” He asked, crossing his arms. Probably against the cold more than as a body language thing. It was getting chilly, and I was glad I’d worn jeans and a long-sleeve. He was in a plain white t-shirt, straight-cut jeans and nothing else of substance.

“That kinda ties in to why we’re here, I guess. We fight these entities, living in these little pocket realms. They’re vague, and from the way they were described to us it doesn’t seem like they’re as easily categorized as a lot of other stuff, like Faerie and goblins and whatever. They’re old and powerful, and we had a hell of a time defeating one with the power we have.”

“May have heard some rumours of stuff like that. Odd rifts and crooked places mages usually just ward off and stay away from. That’s what you want my help with?” he asked. I nodded.

“We need to close this particular rift. It’s basically leaking these weird shadow-things, and we’re reaching a point where it’s become a nightly thing to go and stop them from whatever they want to do. If we can’t close it, we at least need to block it somehow while we go in and kill the thing that’s making them.”

Pedro looked down at us, and it felt very strange to not have Pandora here, who was basically the same height as this guy. He had maybe an inch or two on her, and I don’t think she was done growing yet. I was used to her being the muscle.

Although that may not be the case if she stopped eating entirely.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath after that hit me. Focus on the very weird conversation at hand.

“You have anything else you can tell me about this rift, this creature? It’ll make it easier to set up whatever countermeasure you guys need.” I was about to open my mouth to try to explain when Lady once again beat me to it.

“These entities can’t be classified like the other things you fight, and I know that’s a tentative thing at best. If you’re thinking of opposing it, like goblin to Fae or fire to water, it’s going to be more difficult than you think. Shannon was correct in saying they were vague beings.”

Pedro pursed his lips at that, and drummed his fingers against his leg. It made a hard sound, and I assumed his phone was in that pocket. Then he nodded again, like he had come to a decision.

“Okay, I’m not a busy guy, luckily. So I can make my way down to- Atwood, right?” We both nodded at him and he continued on: “As long as you can point me to a very cheap motel, and up the promised payment to fit whatever it is I’m gonna be doing.”

“I can handle the latter, but unfortunately I’m not well-versed in the physical and geographical aspects of this town. It’s not what I deal in.” Lady said jokingly. The atmosphere was less tense now, and I could tell she was happy.

“If you give me your number, I’ll text you the address, but be warned, it’s surprisingly shitty even for the price.” I said. Pedro nodded and dug out his phone, handing it to me.

“Yeah, that’s about what I would expect. I can handle up to a certain amount of roaches, fortunately. But I have a limit.” I handed him back his phone and texted him a test message. He shot me a thumbs up, and I pocketed my own phone.

“I’m going to go collect my effigy from the bathroom stall I guided him into and hope some of the glamour is salvageable.” He said, beginning to walk away. He paused for a moment, and then turned on his heel.

“It would be weird to offer you two a ride back?” He squinted as he said it. I think he already knew the answer. We both nodded, and I waved my hand in a so-so motion in front of me.

“Yeah, thought so. Make it home safe, then.” He said, and then he was gone around the corner.

I pulled out my phone again as Ellie crossed her arms and shivered a bit at the sudden coldness of the summer night. She stepped towards me and Lady, either for warmth or just because we were two familiar faces.

Met the mage guy, he seemed decent. We took some notes that we can share tomorrow at lunch, although it wasn’t much. He’s making his way to Atwood to give the whole thing a look over, see what’s up

It looked up at Ellie as I waited for the response. She was hopping up and down in place a little, and eventually just pulled her hood up over her hair. Her ponytail made it bump out in the back slightly.

“The bus back is gonna be here in seven minutes or so, want a hot chocolate for the road? I’ve got some cash on me.” Ellie looked very eager as she nodded at that, and I linked my arm through hers as she rested her hands in the pockets of her hoodie. A buzz hit my other hand, and I turned the phone up to look at what I assumed was Pandora’s response.

Okay

Somehow, this time, I didn’t feel like it was okay.