Chapter Four

She was chasing them, of course. Once one of her number caught sight of her old quarry, it was easy to track his position.

It had been a long, long time. But she was one to hold grudges.

Allie sat on her bed that morning, staring at the bottom of her top bunk, and wondered.

It was a trick. Had to be a trick. Because if it weren’t—

Allie felt as though the universe was playing a very cruel trick on her. On one hand, she’d met herself last night. And every dream she’d ever had came true. And the stories were real, and she was going to live forever.

On the other, it was completely illogical and impossible and stupid. There wasn’t even a good plot in that. She’d be a Mary-Sue; some stupid little girl who had all her dreams come true, saved the day, and fell in love by the end of the book. Dumb and airheaded and perfect.

Allie didn’t even really want that. It didn’t fit reality. It didn’t fit—

Anything.

Because she wasn’t perfect, she was human. She wasn’t a storybook character—there was nothing special about her at all. Allie was twelve years old, overweight, insecure, and she wore glasses. There were countless girls like her across America—across the world.

Honestly, other than the fact that she read a bit much, she wasn’t any different than anyone else in her school. Every teenage girl was awkward. No woman in the world saw herself as beautiful, not at her age.

So, she thought, what made her special, then? Why should she, some dumb little twelve-year-old girl, be able to run off to some magical world, fight evil villains, and live forever?

What, exactly, was the point?

Her mother called her once, then twice, and then Allie sat up and stared at the wall for a while.

She dressed in an odd daze, oddly aware of the sensations of fabric, skin, air on the tips of her fingers. The room was suddenly, somehow, more real—the edges of her room seemed more defined for some reason.

“Allie,” her mother said, poking her head nosily into Allie’s bedroom. “Allie, come on. School starts in ten minutes. Hurry up.”

“Mom,” she said. “God. Some privacy? I’m changing.”

“So?”

“So I’m twelve! I’d like to be able to lock my door without—“

“Hon,” said her mother, “I changed your diapers. Don’t worry about it. Now hurry up and get downstairs, we gotta go.”

She sighed as the door slammed and changed slowly. Like she really gave a damn about school.

Zephsilens would have hardly remembered the meeting.

One bar fight out of many. He’d been drinking himself to death lately, the most recent in a line of bad habits; have enough alcohol to reach absolute incoherence before picking a fight with the toughest-looking person in the pub.

He’d goad them until they killed him, because he was immortal and he was depressed.

And while the woman with the black hair and the navy dress was hardly tough-looking, she was beautiful and she was dangerous and Zephsilens knew her name. Hardly anyone in the area at that point didn’t.

What he didn’t know was that she kept the bodies, sometimes, to scare off others.

He would have hardly remembered the meeting, only when he woke up, she was watching.

He would have hardly remembered the meeting, except Daemonicus was the one person in the world that you did not want to reveal your immortality to, and he figured that out the hard way.

She was late, of course, which made her mother mad again. There were snappy words throughout the entire five-minute car ride—why Allie couldn’t walk, she didn’t know. Hardly three miles later, she was dumped onto the school grounds, and slunk her way into school.

The line at the attendance office was unusually long today. There was someone in front of her.

“Let me get this straight,” said Mrs. Hudson Of The Attendance Office. “You’re late because someone in your house… forgot to pay the time bill.”

“Correct,” said the boy in front of Allie—entirely serious, for all appearances.

“And it got—what was the word you used?”

“Wonky.”

“Wonky. The time in your house got… wonky.”

“Correct.”

“Alright, DeChristo,” said Mrs. Hudson. “What’s your mother’s number?”

“Not sure, ma’am,” said the boy—Eric, actually, wasn’t it? The kid who lived next door. She used to talk to him, once upon a time. Thought he was cute, once. Hadn’t seen him in a while.

“Stay here.” Mrs. Hudson eased herself out of the chair and thudded out of the attendance office in search of the still-paper student files.

“Crap,” said Eric. He glanced at Allie. “You got a cell phone?”

“Um, sure,” said Allie. “Who doesn’t, these days?”

“Can you make a good Mom voice?”

Allie grinned. “Want my number?”

“Please.” He typed it in quickly under “Mom”, and made a shoo-ing motion. Allie, grinning, stepped into a bathroom and waited for the phone to ring.

Jade sat on the bow of the boat, letting the wind whip through her hair—long, blonde, and beautiful, although she’d decided to cut it at some point. Green eyes scanned a violet horizon line, looking for—

What, exactly? Her father’s ships? Nobody knew she was out here. Tarn didn’t even have a digital out here—most ships these days came equipped, but Jade wasn’t sure that this thing really qualified as a ship. She was surprised it stayed afloat.

“You ever gonna tell me what you were running from?”

And lo, the sulky teenager had arisen from her spot at the helm.

“No questions asked, remember?”

“Yep. Except now you’re at my mercy, in the middle of the ocean, with nobody around. Not to mention, puella, I could bring you right back around to the place we left from—and you’d never know it until we saw the coastline, would you?”

Jade sighed. “Shouldn’t you be driving?”

“In this weather?” Tarn glanced at the glassy water. “Complete doldrums? No wind. Nothing to sail.”

Jade shrugged.

“You’re avoiding the topic.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s kind of a painful topic,” Jade said, lying through her teeth. Her life wasn’t painful, just crappy and boring and full of hideous marriage arrangements. But if that didn’t throw the girl off, at least with a bit of shock, then she didn’t know what—

“The woman I considered a mother just died,” said Tarn, completely out of the blue. “If it’s more painful than that, puella, I gotta tell you, you’ve got more than escapism to worry about.”

And then she stood and went off to do whatever it was she did when she wasn’t bugging Jade.

The little boat sailed on.

“Hello?”

“Why yes, this is Mrs. DeChristo.”

“Oh, of course. Silly me, I’m so sorry. I get so caught up in work, you know, dahling, the bills just slipped my mind.”

“No, of course, I’ll make sure to pay it as soon as I get home.”

“Well, I’ll try. Time makes things a little wonky, you know.”

“You haven’t paid it, either? Dahling, that is not good, no, no, no! You can’t steal from the government!”

“Dahling, there is no need for that tone of voice.”

“Well, then.”

“You have a good day, too, ma’am! And thank you so much for calling.”

“Thanks,” Eric hissed to her as they passed in the hallway.

“She bought it?” Allie asked, incredulous. Mrs. Hudson was no genius, but no moron, either. Time bill? Really?

“Not in the least,” he said, “but now she’s convinced that my parents are in on it, and there’s absolutely nothing she can do to save my soul.”

Allie grinned. “Have fun with that.”

“I shall.” He grinned at her. “See you in English.”

“See you,” Allie said.

They had English together?

Since when?

Deciding to ignore this, Allie went off to explain herself to Mrs. Hudson. The school day dragged on.

This happened before Zephsilens found Marliana again, before he found the cure, and before he found himself competing with a scholarly, albeit alcoholic, elf. It’s just that this writer hates filler and travel, so she’s filling her story with pasts.

Before he’d found her again, and before he found the cure, and before he found the annoying drunken elf, Zephsilens found himself hanging from his wrists. The rope she’d used was rough and fraying, and the branch he was hanging from was high up. He’d been drained of blood and was therefore light-headed—not all of it had been made up for by his immortality, not yet.

“Awake, then?”

He blinked.

“You started breathing about an hour after you died,” said the woman in the blue dress. “And I don’t know about you, darling, but I found it odd.”

Zephsilens, hung over and in pain and dead, blinked again. “Guess I wasn’t dead, then.”

“Oh,” said the woman in the blue dress. “Well, then. I suppose I’ll have to finish the job.”

She had a beautiful smile.

Allie sat down at the only available seat in English class, which was in the front, right next to the teacher, which meant she’d actually have to take notes today. No writing poetry in her English binder. Tragic.

The girl sighed and reclined lazily in the hard plastic chair. She tried to focus for the next half-hour, and pay attention, but that just did not happen. She started to doodle a picture of an older woman with glasses, who wore her hair in pigtails just like Allie did. Last night kept washing into her head, some sort of high tide of the imagination—was that real?

Logic. Logically, it couldn’t be, because. Really. Time travel. It didn’t exist and was, furthermore, impossible.

And anyway, the story didn’t make sense with reality, if you thought about it. Because in the story, the immortals never aged. And the woman she’d met last night was a lot older, right?

And. And. And dammit, nobody in the world knew about that scene, or what she’d thought of Eric when she was little. Nobody in the world knew that—except for a strange woman she’d met in the middle of the night. Go figure.

The teacher was waving her hands and counting—well, congratulations, she could count to ten—oh, wait, no. They were being divided up. Into partners.

“Joy and brimstone,” Allie said, and looked around for her fellow #9. Marci was paired up with the lovely and blonde Sammie Smith, which meant she’d be stuck with some—

“Well, what d’you know?”

Allie tried not to laugh. Oh, irony.

This happened after Zephsilens found Marli again. They’d foun72d5e cure, and he was competing with a scholarly and romantic, albeit alcoholic, elf. It’s just that this writer hates filler and travel, so she’s skipping directly to the point.

After walking for a time so long that it drifted into obscurity—or perhaps it was merely the company, really, and the fact that it was flirting with the woman he loved—they stopped one night and rested, and then he woke up in a familiar situation.

His wrists were chafed again.

And she was younger now, but she still had a beautiful smile.

Allie felt herself laugh and marvelled at the feeling. “Oh, irony,” she muttered, grinning at Eric.

“Irony indeed. Please tell me you were paying attention to the assignment.”

“Nope,” said Allie proudly. “Were you?”

“No,” said Eric, rolling his eyes. “This is going to be problematic, isn’t it?”

“Most likely.”

Tarnmare Yallen was sixteen and cynical. A lifetime of bad memories could do that to a girl. The way she saw it, life liked to throw bombs at you—and hey, why not, she’d probably do the same in its place. The crappy bits of life made it interesting.

She was allowed to be flippant. Her family was dead, and her family was dead twice-over, so she was allowed to be flippant.

And she was allowed to be angry. Tarn wasn’t blind. She knew what the Princessa Inherent looked like. The blonde bimbo sitting on the deck had nothing in the world to worry about. Money, power, and any man she could shake a stick at, right?

Sure.

Who the hell ran away from being the princessa?

The teenager sighed, and closed her eyes, focusing her mind on the calm, smooth wood of her craft beneath her fingers. There was power in a ship, more power than any Princessa Inherent could ever have. Her home, her life, even her dumbass charge, were suspended miles above the solid ground in these waters—solid physics was all that kept them from crashing to their deaths. At the slip of her hand, they could crash into a reef or a crest that would tumble the boat, tossing them into oblivion.

Granted…

Tarn smiled at the ocean around her, feeling the sudden welling-up of comfort inside her at its presence. Something about the sea calmed her down, no matter the temper it displayed. It was alive, and it was real, and she loved it more than anything else in the world.

“An essay on… home,” Allie said, once the scowling glare of the English teacher had passed the by. “How are we supposed to work on an essay on home with another person?”

“I think we’re supposed to focus more on the format of the essay—you know, organisation? And less on the actual topic.”

“Yeah, but, I mean… Home. It’s such a personal topic.” And she doubted that Eric would understand if she told him she’d like to write the essay on literature. 221B Baker Street—that was home. Or the vast library of the Nautilus. Or Malacandra. Hell, even the spindly cities of Mars, with the pagan gods and the soft wine canals…

A Study In Scarlet. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Out of the Silent Planet. The Martian Chronicles. Allie’s home was inhabited by egotistical detectives and mad submarine captains, by hross and over-sane spacemen. And she doubted Eric would understand if she told him she wanted to change this into an essay on literature.

“Maybe. How much you wanna bet most of these kids are gonna write about their oh-so-wonderful houses?” Eric grinned. “Home is 12345 Perfect Street, and I love it there! O-M-G let’s all be friends!”

Allie smirked. “Yeah, because I’m sure friendship is a part of it.”

“Of home? Well, yeah. Home is where the heart is, right? So friends…”

“And if you have no friends?” Allie wasn’t sure why her mouth said that.

“Everyone has friends,” said Eric. “Most people just have different definitions of what, exactly, that means.”

Allie smiled, and turned back to the paper.

“You told her.” Walter crossed his arms and leaned back in the comfortable sofa, eyebrow raised, pupils locked dead-in with the immortal Allie. “You told her… everything.”

“Yup,” said the Generalla, grinning from the reclining chair that had, about five years ago, decided to grace the shared living room with its tacky presence. Someone had apparently snared it from the glory days of the sixties and dropped it off on a curbside somewhere, and despite the pleading arguments of Daria and Zephsilens Allie had claimed it as her own—the whole thing, complete with flower-print beanbag cushion. That had been a fun decade.

“You told her what we are.”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“I don’t believe you,” Walter muttered, shaking his head. “You’re just trying to get me to tell her the story’s true, aren’t you?”

“Not in the least. Mini Me followed you home last night.”

“She what?”

“Yep. Snuck out the window. You broke my heart, you know that?” Allie grinned. “Poor little me. Faced with growing up in a world where she doesn’t belong…”

“You know perfectly well that doesn’t happen.”

“I do.”

“But you can’t just tell her that! For Pete’s sake, Al, that’s. That’s.”

“That’s what? Why the hell can’t I tell her that she’s to be immortal? Why can’t I tell her that the story’s real? What’s the point of keeping it secret? I mean, hell, Zeph, we know how I turn out.”

“And if you tell her you may—“

“Turn out different? Not gonna happen. You can’t change the past. It’s already happened.”

“But. But it’s bad storytelling. You’re doing it all out of order!”

“Maybe. But it’s a damn good story. I don’t know how much the telling of it matters.”

“So why are you so reluctant to write about this?”

“No real reason.”

“There’s got to be. Home’s not such a hard topic.”

“Depends on what you think of home as.”

“Exactly.”

“So what if you think of home as nonexistent?”

“Write about that.”

Eric smiled.

And now it’s time to introduce a secondary villain.

Look at him, now, a man in the shadow of elegance. His face is scarred and his arms are beaten, but reader, can you see the devotion in his eyes?

He fades into the background, invisible, a street once-child. The bruises are his camouflage, the scars his soldier’s medals. There is a crescent on his arm where he wrestled a bull shark for food, once, and a long thin line on his leg from the slice of a carriage’s wheel. The rich woman inside hadn’t stopped, hadn’t even noticed.

His name was Malus, because when he was little people called him puero’malu, and he hadn’t known what that meant—a vulgar, stinking street rat. He was the one people didn’t give money to, when he was reduced to begging, because he would obviously spend the money on the drugs he’d never done, or the alcohol he didn’t drink back then. He was the little kid that everyone looked over, because nobody wanted to see him. Other people didn’t like knowing that kids like him actually existed, because then they’d feel like they had to go and do something about it.

Yes, reader, pity this man. I mean for you to pity this man.

You’re going to hate him in a chapter or two.

“Do you know what they say about age, madam?”

A sigh, a roll of perfect eyes.

“That it is, after all, merely a number?” he asked.

“Malus, I am fifty-four years old. To be blunt, dear, that is what I would rather focus on at the moment.”

The young man knelt by the young girl, clasping a soft, flawless shoulder in a callused hand. “Then think of your body as merely a shell. It’s your mind’s got us this far. We are loyal. I am loyal. None of them are going to leave because of this little mishap, hm?”

She glared at him, the image of a beautiful, petulant child.

“I’ll never leave,” he muttered.

“I certainly hope you will,” the girl said back, ignoring the tender intonations of his words. “We seem to be in my bedroom, and I need sleep. I also need you, Malus, to see to it that… oh, whatever alchemist it was who developed that so-called Fountain Substitute is promptly drawn and quartered.”

Malus’ face fell at the blatant dismissal. It was a scarred face, yes, but it was a devoted one.

“Of course, milady,” he whispered. “And lady, it is only temporary.”

“If you tell me I’ll grow out of this, I’ll have you drawn and quartered as well,” the girl said. He never could tell when she was joking. Malus decided to smile and hope. “I’m fifty-four years old. I should not have the body of a twelve-year-old.”

“I’ll make sure you’ll have a good seat, then. For the quartering? I assume you wish to watch.”

“First thing in the morning.”

“Of course, Lady Daemonicus.”

And he left her bedroom, shutting the door behind him. The lock gave a small click as she turned the key from across the room.

Malus did not leave immediately. As always, he stood outside her room for a long while, listening to the soft sounds across the wall as she changed her dress, brushed the long black of her hair, and slipped into the silk blankets of her bed.

And after that, when the room was silent and the light beneath the crack of the black door was out, and he was sure that she was sleeping, he finally treaded away through the sparking, dark hallways, heartbroken and bitter with reality.

It should be noted, reader, that Daemonicus is more than beauty. She is clever and intelligent, and the three put together with insanity are a deadly combination. Men fall for her like leaves from a tree; she’s had years upon years to perfect the degree of a smile, and the angle of a glance.

Because for people like her, romance is a science, a strange blend of physics and chemistry. There’s no love involved, not on her end. It just doesn’t calculate in.

an: I coulda sworn I updated this at some point. Ah, well, ch. 5's well underway, so.