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05/19/2019 03:35 PM
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A RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS NOVEMBER 23, 1982
Daytime never felt too far away in the city. Bright lights buzzing atop lamp posts, and spilling off of tall buildings and out of the headlights of suffocating traffic made it so the night could never feel too dark. The sun had long set by the time William Barclay stepped out of the front door of his apartment building and into the chilly late autumn night, but he wasn’t left in the shadows. Will buttoned up his jacket, scratched his beard, and stepped out into the glowing yellows, oranges, and reds of a night in the city, as he ventured out to the corner store.
Will — by all accounts — was a good man. When he was young he was a good son, someone who took care of his mom when his dad had too much to drink and got a little rough. He was a good brother who set an example for his younger sisters to follow. He was a good soldier when his country needed him, even if he was fighting for a war he didn’t believe in. The only time he had ever left Chicago was when Uncle Sam shipped him off to Vietnam to put together trucks that took his friends off to get killed. Will Barclay was a good worker, boss, friend, and husband, but now he had to figure out how to be more. Now, Will had to figure out how to be something new. It was time for him to learn how to be a good father.
Being a new father was something that took a lot of getting used to, but Will knew he was up to the challenge. Andrew Barclay was only two weeks old, but already Will knew that there wasn’t a goddamn thing he wouldn’t do for that kid. His wedding day had always been the highlight of Will’s life, the one special moment he could take for himself, but the day Andy was born Will found that these moments didn’t have to be one offs. That baby filled Will and his wife Karen with so much joy and love they didn’t know what to do with it. The sleepless nights, the normal worries that came along with being a new parent, none of that mattered. Their son was everything.
HONK-HONK!
“Hey! Watch where you’re goin’, pal!” a driver yelled out of his window with an accompanying hand gesture as Will jaywalked in front of his Ford Pinto.
Will waved apologetically back at the driver and hustled across the street the rest of the way. He dug his hands into his pockets to keep them from getting cold and made it to the corner store where he stepped out of the artificial light of Chicago’s night into the blinding, artificial fluorescent light of the convenience store.
“Hey, William, how’s it going, man!”
“Hey, Samuel,” Will smiled and nodded toward the Haitian man who worked behind the counter.
“Long time no see, my friend.”
“Yeah… yeah, life’s been crazy,”
Will walked down one of the long aisles, eyes glancing left and right for what he was looking for, but he soon realized he had gone the wrong way. He doubled back, plucking some chips from a rack on his way, and then worked his way over to the back freezer display where he found the ice cream. Karen didn’t have any cravings all throughout her pregnancy but now that the baby was here she had been craving up a storm. Tonight, her cravings came in the form of Double Chocolate Chip Ice Cream. She had been a champ through all of this, and there was nothing Will wouldn’t do to make sure the mother of his child was happy. She felt bad sending him out so late, but he promised her that he would always make sure she had everything she needed. She sent him out to get a carton. He picked up two.
Stacking the ice cream, Will set the chips down on top of the stack and was coming back around for the counter, but he stopped when something caught his eye. There was a pile of chachkies sitting on a rack to his left. Most of it was dumb — useless trash — but among the nonsense was a tiny stuffed bear, white with little black eyes, and it wore a blue Cubs hat on its head. It was the perfect size to set in a crib. He thought for a minute, trying to figure out if he had enough cash on hand to cover it. He put the chips down and picked up the little bear.
“Wanna add the usual?” Samuel asked as Will set his stuff down on the counter.
Will nodded. Samuel dipped back to get a pack of cigarettes and Will gave the little black and white cat sitting on the counter a scratch behind the ear, “Hey, Brigitte. Good girl.” Samuel came back around and set the cigarettes down beside the stuffed bear. “It’s not gonna be my usual anymore though,” Will told him. He held up the cigarettes. “This is my last pack. I’m quitting.”
“Good for you,” Samuel said cheerily, almost as if he was just playing along and didn’t believe it.
“Karen had the baby,” Will beamed. “I gotta start being a good influence now.”
“Congratulations, man, boy or girl?”
“I was praying for a girl,” he shrugged, “but I think Karen might’ve been praying harder. We got a son. Andrew, little Andy. Two weeks old.”
“That’s beautiful, man, really beautiful. A future Cubs fan in the making.” Samuel gestured to the bear before packing it away in a plastic bag with the rest of Will’s purchases.
Will nodded and paid in cash “Have a good night, Sam.”
“You too, William, you too, and best of luck with fatherhood, man. Give my love to Karen.”
The night felt colder, even though it had only been a few minutes since Will had last been out there. The wind picked up and it nipped at him a little. He hustled, eager to get home to his family — his wife and child — but also wanting to get warm again. He looked both ways and crossed the street on an angle, cutting through the reds, and oranges, and yellows, of the night, expecting to make the two blocks between the corner store and his apartment in no time at all.
When Will reached the other side of the street he dug through the plastic bag in his hands and fished out the pack of cigarettes he bought. He wasn’t joking when he told Samuel that it was his last. His vice had one last hurrah before it went away for good. Will was a man who gave up drinking at twenty-two, after seeing how it shriveled and morphed his old man. He walked into a bar, ordered one last beer, and enjoyed the hell out of it, but hadn’t touched the stuff since. It was going to be the same way with the smokes. He was doing it for himself, for his future, for his kid, and that made the hard stuff easy.
Will tucked the cigarettes into the pocket of his jacket and carried the rest in the bag. He was a block away now, almost home, when the skin on the back of his neck prickled up. He didn’t know what it was or what it meant, but he felt off — strange. Things felt, dangerous. He stopped, as if acting on some sort of instinct, and he noticed that things were kind of dark. Will was at the lip of an alley, where shadows spilled out, in one of the few small pockets where the stretching glow of streetlights, business signs, and the rest of the light pollution of a city didn’t reach, and it was cold in the dark.
A soft whimpering cry leaked out of the shadowy alley. Will had to squint into the darkness to make out the shape of a small person standing just out of visual range with their back to him. It was a woman, maybe, but it was hard to tell. They were just standing there, crying to themselves, alone.
“You okay?” Will called out to the stranger. It was the sort of man he was.
The person in the shadows didn’t respond, but the crying continued. Will was a half dozen yards away, maybe, and he just stood there. He wanted to help a stranger who looked like they were in need, that was who he was, but he didn’t know how to help this person. He wasn’t sure if he could. He was seconds away from starting on back down the street, seconds from heading home to his wife and son — to his life — when the person in the alley turned around.
There was a flash. There was a bang. There was a biting pain in the lower left side of Will’s abdomen.
Will reached for the pocket where he had tucked away his last pack of cigarettes. He put pressure on a fiery pain that hadn’t been there a second ago, and when he lifted his hand again it came back red and slick with blood. His eyes were wide. His heartbeat was somehow steady. The person down the alley stared at him, tears in their eyes, and he could see the smoking six-shooter still aimed in his direction.
“Please…”
BANG-BANG-BANGBANGBANG
The plastic bag filled with Karen’s ice cream and Andy’s bear dropped to the concrete as five more bullets ripped Will apart. Lead bullets tore into his chest, gut, shoulder and throat, and he stepped back into the artificial light of the city. He stumbled off the curb, into the street and managed to hear the car horn but not see the car itself. He was hit on the side and the world flipped over, though his vision was already blurry and stained with blood from where his head hit the windshield of the car that struck him. He flipped and rolled across a pot hole in the street. Everything was sounds, and shapes, and smells, but nothing made sense. He choked on the fumes coming out of the tailpipe of the car that hit him, and his body shook a little as he lay face down in the street. People were scattering, rushing in a panic — voices, noise, voices — it was all blood, chaos, and nonsense to a dying man.
“Karen,” he choked out, spitting out blood. “Andy…”
Shadows moved above him, people coming to see if he was okay. He wasn’t.
William Barclay choked on blood, but when his dying eyes looked up, he could see something cutting through the shadowy shapes of the onlookers and washing out the artificial lights of the city with a bright, sunny white light that made everything else melt away. There was a person in that light, swooping down from above, drifting on big and beautiful wings.
The last thing he smelled was cigar smoke and rum before the light took him away to become an angel.
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05/14/2019 04:52 PM
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NUMBER PROMPTS III
death dealer (003) “You look absolutely terrible.”
Andy had known that Mollie’s girlfriend Aurelia was something of a hot head, which was saying something for wolves who were usually fairly hot blooded to begin with, but this was the first time she had come head to head with the young wolf after one of her… skirmishes. She was dirty, and covered in blood, but didn’t look as though she had any bruises or cuts or wounds of her own. It was a classic ‘you should see the other guy’ situation, though Andy was pretty confident that she didn’t want to see the other guy. Aurelia looked like a kid who just got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, and a long silence lingered between them for a moment.
“You look absolutely terrible,” Andy said, breaking the silence to state the obvious.
Again, silence came back. Aurelia probably didn’t have anything good to say about any of this so she played it smart. She chose not to say anything at all. Andy let the moment stew. It was a thing some of her foster parents would do every now and then whenever a kid did something wrong and knew it was wrong right away. Stewing was a parent’s greatest weapon. Andy wasn’t Aurelia’s mother, but the kid didn’t have much in the way of parents these days so Andy stepped in however she could.
“Okay, let’s get you cleaned up and changed. You can tell me what you did in the morning and you can stay here tonight. I’m sure Mollie will be happy to have you.”
Boozyaunt (010) “Are you out of your f***ing alcoholic mind?”
Desperation bred the most difficult of conversations. Those conversations tended to be even more of a challenge if only one of the parties involved was desperate. Andy had come all the way to Greendale looking for help from a witch. She didn’t like coming to Zelda, she didn’t particularly like or trust Zelda, but it didn’t change the fact that Zelda had a good track record with this sort of stuff. And, well, desperation and all that.
What Andy needed was fairly simple. She had a very powerful teenage witch back home and she needed Zelda to whip together a potion of some sort that would help said teenage witch manage her powers. Despite coming with plenty of goodies that she thought Zelda would appreciate in exchange for her service, the old witch seemed more interested in giving Andy the work around and drinking than anything else. It wasn’t until Zelda sarcastically suggest arsenic as an appropriate potion-substitute for dealing with teenagers that Andy lost her patience and had a bit of an outburst.
“Are you out of your f***ing alcoholic mind!?”
A drawn out quiet followed. Zelda only sipped at the booze in her flute.
This was going to be a long night...
Claire (009) “I set the car on fire.”
Vicious orange flames licked at the night sky as the inferno consumed the Mini Coop in the middle of the long gravel driveway. Andy came marching out of the house, her Sumerian spellbook tucked under her arm. Avery, the teenage witch that Claire had rescued from an evil vampire queen, and a recent ward in the Stoddard-Barclay household, stood in front of the blaze, staring at it. Andy stood shoulder to shoulder, trying to process what she was looking at. She had been unpacking some things in the house when she heard all the ruckus.
“I set the car on fire,” Avery said matter-of-factly.
“I see that,” Andy replied with the same level of sardonic wisp to her voice.
She opened her book and flipped through to the page connected to the magicks of the Euphrates. The bottom of the book had a small but sharp pin prick sticking out of the spine. Andy pushed her thumb into it—enough to draw some blood—and she drew a symbol across the page and muttered a few words in ancient Sumerian. The page glowed, spilling golden light out into the dark night, and Andy tilted it, having the open pages face the flames. “You may want to stand back,” she told Avery, and a moment later there was a great rushing of water. Andy struggled to hold the book as rapids gushed out from a portal within the page, drenching the inflamed car with the cold waters of the Euphrates River. The fire went out quickly, but it took Andy a second to get the strength it took to close the book and break the spell to stop the water. When she did so, and everything was calm, she caught her breath and looked back to the trouble making witch.
“Alright,” she said. “Wanna tell me why you set the car on fire? Also… wanna tell me whose car it is?”
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05/01/2019 05:18 PM
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NOT WHO YOU ARE
May 01, 1995 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
211 Edgehill Road had green tiles on the walls of the bathroom, all lined up in a neat little row. Every other tile was a shade lighter, which created the most boring pattern in the world. The last bathroom had speckled wallpaper, the one before that was painted the color of puke. 211 Edgehill was the third foster home of the year already. Twelve year old Andy Barclay wondered what the next bathroom was going to look like. There surely would be another.
The kid was tall enough now to look into the mirror above the porcelain sink without needing a step-stool or even the benefit of the balls of his feet. A recent growth spurt saw to that. Long, dark-blond hair that came down to his shoulders covered his face and hung over one eye. Unlike other kids in the system who let their hair wrap up into knots and tangles, Andy’s was smooth and cared for. He could smell the sweet scent of the conditioner on the strands that dangled in front of his nose. Sloppy kids went unnoticed. Sloppy kids didn’t get adopted. The last thing a potential parent wanted to see when shopping for a new tax exemption was a reminder of the trauma and sloppiness that led the kid into the system in the first place. So Andy cared; he cared because no one else could or would. Andy wasn’t sloppy.
Sliding a rubber band off of his wrist, Andy pulled his hair back and used the rubber band to tie it off in a messy ponytail. It helped keep the hair out of his face, but it also made it harder to hide the black and blue ring around his left eye. The kid at school who gave it to him was almost a foot taller—it wasn’t a fair fight—but at least he had the courtesy to not call Andy names before cold clocking him across the face. He got right to the point, so that was something.
The black eye was tender and sensitive, it hurt when he blinked, but the swelling had gone down. Andy didn’t really care about the pain. He cared because it made him sloppy; it made the worst parts of him on the inside apparent on the outside, and he couldn’t let that happen. He opened up the mirror above the sink and searched for something in the medicine cabinet hidden back there. It took him a second but eventually he found some of his foster mom’s old foundation. He didn’t know enough to realize that it was a few shades away from his naturally pale complexion or that it wasn’t advisable to cover up a black eye with makeup, but it was something that made sense in the moment. It was a way to not be sloppy.
It stung a little as he rubbed it on, smearing it around the top of his cheekbone with his fingers. It was clumpy, and discolored, and maybe doing more harm than good but Andy kept going. To him, the ineffectiveness and uneven distribution of the makeup didn’t matter. It was like warpaint, covering up the weakest part of himself that was leaking out, concealing the patchwork kid hiding underneath. It made it okay to hide, hide long enough for him to figure out how to put himself back together. An attempt was made to sneak out of the house and get to school before either the new foster mom of 211 Edgewood or the new foster dad of 211 Edgewood, noticed him. An attempt was made, but it was a total and complete failure. Andy tried to sneak past the kitchen—where a foster brother was getting his hair buzzed by foster mom and a foster sister was eating a bowl of cereal by foster dad, who buried his face in a paper. He didn’t even get halfway to the door.
“Eh, not so fast, young man,” Foster Mom 211 called out before Andy could make it past the kitchen’s threshold. “You put it off long enough. Haircut time, then school.” She pulled the smock off of Andy’s foster brother and let him run off. She dusted off the chair as Andy sighed and slumped into the kitchen.
“I don’t want to,” he complained.
“Well, I don’t want to either,” Foster Mom 211 shook her head, “but you don’t see me complaining.”
Foster Dad 211 chimed in with a well-timed, “Are you wearing makeup?” as he peered over his paper.
“Andy,” Foster Mom 211 patted the chair. “Sit.”
“I like my hair how it is,” Andy pushed back. “My hair’s nice.”
“You look like a girl,” his foster sister jumped into the mix, milk dribbling through the gaps in her baby teeth.
“Come now, son,” Foster Dad 211 set his paper down and stood up. He was dressed in beige and burgundy, with a pencil necktie dandling over his protruding belly. “The faster you sit, the sooner you can be off to school. Your hair will be nice when it’s short, too, trust me.” He smiled and ran his hand over his neatly buzzed hair. When he made his point, he licked his thumb and wiped the foundation off from around Andy’s eye. “Hair that long, it’s sloppy, parents looking for a little boy want to see a little boy, now don’t you think?” Andy was sitting now. He didn’t remember when he sat. Foster Mom 211 put a cape around his neck and Foster Dad 211 finished his spiel. “Easy peasy, Andy, trust me. We’ll find the fine young man in you under all that mess. This,” he pulled at the rubber band and Andy’s hair fall down over his shoulders, “it’s not who you are.”
***
OUTSIDE OF CHICAGO, ILLINOIS EARLY OCTOBER, 2018
Andy’s new, small hands shook as they lit a cigarette. The new body Andy found in that morgue may have saved them from certain death, but it came with a nicotine addiction that Andy still had to get used to. Though, if everything went right, that wouldn’t be something that they’d have to get used to for long. If everything went right, this cigarette might be the last. Andy smoked that cigarette in the back of an open hearse behind the funeral home they had just broken into, taking a moment to acknowledge the new body that had gotten them this far before they moved on to something new, something more like the old. Chapped lips suckled the cigarette. The body—this body—had been in rough shape when Andy found it, though options were limited at the time. Whoever this woman used to be, she had bruised knees, and tension in her shoulders. There was a constant pain in the left breast which was a totally new experience for Andy on several levels, and her long red hair was constantly getting into Andy’s eyes and mouth. Though, maybe that part wasn’t so bad. Andy forgot how much they liked long hair.
It had been a week since Andy Barclay nearly died and managed to find a new body. But this body was transitional body, the only one Andy had access to that night. Tonight, the transition was going to come to an end. Andy found a newer body, one that would be easier for their mother, or step-father, or friends to recognize as Andy. They told themselves that it was a something that had to be done, but Andy had a hard time understanding why—as they sat out there enjoying one last cigarette—they felt bad about giving this new, achy, broken body away. Why was it so hard to say goodbye?
When the cigarette was done, Andy stomped it out and headed inside. The funeral home was dark and quiet, pretty much what one would expect a funeral home to be like when everyone was gone. It was eerie in there. It was the sort of place where it felt like a funeral was going on even when no one else was around. There was the smell of flowers and freshly vacuumed carpet. The people there worked hard to hide that it was a place of death. They did a good job, but Andy knew where to find death.
The dressing station was in the basement. It was where the funeral director prepared the corpses and readied them for their viewing. It was down there that Andy found the body that they figured would be suitable to live out the rest of Andy’s second chance at life. The corpse was a man once, a man with a name, and a family—a family that would be heartbroken to learn that their loved one disappeared before his own funeral—but Andy couldn’t think of a way around that. They weren’t going to take a body from a soul that was still using it, not like what Chucky had done to Nica, but it wasn’t like there were a ton of nameless bodies out there volunteering to be used. Andy had to make the most of what they got.
The dressing station was dark. Andy only turned on some of the lights, enough to show the corpse they’d be taking—stiff and splayed out on a cold metal table, waiting to be dressed. The corpse had short blond hair, not unlike what Andy was used to in the original body, and he had a rigid jaw line and a handsome face. Andy ran their hand over the corpse’s cheek but pulled back. They had smeared some of the makeup on the cheek, and Andy’s fingers came back slightly pink.
“Sorry,” Andy apologized, unsure of what they were actually apologizing for, or even who they were apologizing too. Andy wiped their fingers on their pants and sighed, turning back to the backpack they brought with them to pull out the Heart of Damballa amulet they would need for the spell. “Let’s get the show on the road, I guess.”
The sting of regret pulsed under Andy’s skin, a sting they couldn’t explain or make sense of. Andy believed that this had to be done, but as they prepped everything, it felt like shears cutting away long locks, exposing a naked scalp underneath. It felt wrong.
Andy took up a position at the head of the metal table. They were wearing the heart of damballa around their neck.
“Ade… due… damballa…” Andy chanted. “Ade! Due! Damballa! Give me the power, I beg of you!” Even though they were in the basement, Andy could hear the swirling wind racing outside, competing with the crack of lightning that made the lights flicker. Andy continued the chant, careful to get all the words right, pronouncing them exactly as they were meant to be pronounced. The lights hissed above her, flashing on and off, filling the dressing room with sharp shadows and pulsating light, but Andy didn’t stop. They put their small hands on the shoulders of the body that they felt obligated to jump to. “ADE! DUE! DAMBALLA! GIVE ME THE POWER, I BEG OF YOU!”
POP!
One of the lights above snapped and exploded into a shower of sparks. Everything calmed down after that, but the room was even darker than it had been, with just a single fluorescent light shining down on Andy and the corpse on the table. The corpse. Andy opened their eyes and realized that they were the same eyes they closed a second ago. They looked down at their hands, and touched the Heart of Damballa around their neck. Nothing happened. It… it didn’t work. The corpse on the table was still a corpse.
“What…”
The quiet didn’t last long. A metal cabinet across the room, the size of a dresser, began to shake. Andy watched as their reflection in the foggy metal shifted and blurred and changed into something else. Andy was still, but the reflection was moving. The cabinet moaned like it was being squeezed and then the metal started to dent. The reflection opened its eyes and Andy saw they were yellow, streaked with bits of red. The reflection was unclear and foggy but the eyes, the eyes were perfectly focused. Andy wanted to scream but nothing came out of their mouth. The reflection smiled at them and a loud BANG followed as the cabinet scrunched in at the side. The cabinet door opened slowly with a loud squeak, taking the reflection with it, and something else was standing in the darkness inside. Andy held their breath as that something stepped out, and they saw a duplicate of the body they were currently in, only paler and with darker hair.
Again, everything went quiet.
“Who… who are you?” Andy asked.
“I have a couple of names now,” the girl replied with the same voice Andy used. “You can call me Mia though. That’s probably easiest. Mia Allen.”
“Mia Allen,” Andy repeated in a whisper. “You’re… you’re who this body belongs to…?”
“Belonged to,” Mia corrected. “Past tense. Other things belong to me now. That body’s yours.”
“Mine?” Andy squinted and shook their head. “No, no I was trying to move on, to find something like before.” Andy gestured to the unmoving corpse on the table between them. “When I do you can have your body back. I’m sorry I took it I only—”
Mia raised a hand. “Don’t be sorry, Andy Barclay. You needed it. I was done with it. Our circles aren’t dependent on one another, they’re complimentary.”
“I don’t understand,” Andy said. “You just… you just like crawled out of Hell and you’re telling me you don’t want this body back.”
“To me this world is the hell now,” Mia shrugged.
Andy took a second to process this. It wasn’t clear if they were talking to a ghost, or a demon, or some combination of the two, but one thing was certain; Andy knew that this was real. Now what it meant, that was a whole different story, and Andy wasn’t sure that story had an ending.
“The spell didn’t work,” Andy said. “I said it right but… it didn’t work. I’m still in the wrong body.”
“In the wrong body?” Mia smiled. “Is that what we’re thinking now?”
A cough interrupted the conversation. Both Andy and Mia looked down as the corpse in the middle twitched and coughed, life slowly coming to him. Andy’s face twisted in confusing. “I… I don’t understand.”
“You tried to move consciousness,” Mia explained. “But you merely copied it. Like your enemy, you duplicated your soul and found it a new vessel.”
“No… no, I didn’t mean to… this wasn’t what I was trying to…”
Mia raised a calming hand. “I know your intentions, Andy Barclay. But that doesn’t change the facts of the situation. The man waking up right now is as much you as you are. It upsets the balance of things, and I can’t oblige it.”
“What are you going to do?” Andy’s eyes teared up.
“I’m going to even things out,” Mia said. “I’ll take one of you with me.”
“With you where?”
Mia blinked and her eyes turned yellow, peppered with daggers of crimson red. A crown of fire ignited above her head, floating inches over her hair and giving more light to the room. Andy took a cautious step back and watched in amazement, eyes wide.
“You want to take one of us to hell?” Andy asked.
“It’s not as horrible as they would lead you to believe,” Mia’s voice sounded different now, like two voices in one. “But yes. I can take care of one of you down there. You’ll know no pain, you’ll have no strife, but I cannot allow two of you to roam the earth at the same time.”
Andy looked down at the body on the table. His eyes were still close but he was rolling his head, like a person on the verge of waking up from a dream. “I have to choose?”
“The original?” Mia pointed to Andy, and then pointed to the waking corpse. “Or the copy.”
“I… I didn’t mean to do this,” tears streamed down Andy’s cheeks now. It took every bit of strength they had to keep from falling into a panic attack. “I was just trying to set things right, not be sloppy… I’m the copy, not him…” They shook their head and put their hand on the waking corpse’s shoulder. “I’m the copy… aren’t I supposed to look how I’m supposed to look?” Andy looked to Mia with tearful, pleading eyes as if it made sense to cry for help to a Hell queen.
Mia came around the table and put a warm hand on Andy’s cheek.
“You are…” she said, and then looked down to the waking corpse as he opened his eyes. “This is not who you are…”
Relief washed over Andy for the first time maybe ever. It was like hearing a truth that was always there somewhere deep down, but it didn’t make sense until it was spoken by someone else. Andy smiled and hell broke loose in the dressing room. There was a blinding red light and a heat that was all consuming. Something opened up in the floor—a pit, or portal, or door—something, and a giant hand reached up, clutched the copy of Andy lying on the table, and dragged it down into the fire. Andy stepped back, holding their hands over their face as objects flew across the room. Andy managed one last look to Mia before she disappeared. The Hell Queen smiled at her and vanished in another flash, taking the portal with her.
A small metal trash can zipped across the room on a dying wind and clocked Andy in the left eye, sending them to the ground into a dark state of unconsciousness.
It was hard to say how long Andy was out, but when she blinked back into the waking world everything was sort of quiet and calm. She could feel the pulse in her left eye and when she reached up and touched it she winced from the sting. Andy sat up and looked around the trashed dressing room. The floor was littered, the table and the corpse were gone, and half of the lights dangled from broken sockets. It took a little while for her to manage to get up to her feet, but eventually she did. Every part of her hurt, and ached, but at the same time… those things really didn’t bother her much.
By the time Andy limped out of that basement, morning sunlight was coming in through the windows and she realized that she had to get out of there quick before trouble came down on her. She passed a mirror on her way toward the back door, and stopped for a second to take note of her reflection. Sloppy red hair covered most of her face, but when she pushed it out of the way she saw the new black and blue shiner she got right over her left eye. She touched it again, winced again, but smiled. It hurt, it hurt like a bitch, but the pain felt different.
Nothing from before went away, none of the trauma, or the guilt—new or old—or regrets that Andy had accumulated over a long life, but everything felt different now. It made sense, like the first time putting on a pair of glasses after a lifetime of seeing everything blurry. Andy… Andy was the original, and maybe she was who he always had been.
Smiling made the bruise hurt more, but it didn’t stop her. She smiled on the way out the back door and went off to find another cigarette to smoke.
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04/29/2019 03:50 PM
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COPY
The ground around the new house was strong but soft. It helped that it was late Spring. Andy managed to dig a hole—big enough for a corpse—in half the time it would’ve taken her up in the hard compacted cold earth of Illinois. Texas dirt pushed smoothly under the spade strokes of Andy’s shovel. It was enough work to build up a sweat, but nothing too stressful. Andy dug her hole far enough away from the house to be safe, but not too close to the woods that she’d have to deal with roots or animals. She was burying something she didn’t think she’d need any more, but it was important to make sure that it was all safe.
When the hole was dug, Andy jabbed her shovel into the soft mound beside it. She wiped sweat from her brow with the back of her forearm and she turned around to the collection of guns, baseball bats, and other objects of destruction that were splayed out across a dirty tarp, waiting to be buried. Andy lowered herself to her knees and ran her hand across the weapon she enjoyed most; her chainsaw. Her fingers—dark green polish chipping from the nails--ran over the cherry red case of the motor, trailing across the long toothless blade. It was hard to say goodbye to things, specifically inanimate things that had saved her life more times than she could count, but she made a promise and promises meant something, they had to, especially when she made them to her.
It had only been a few days since Claire asked Andy to marry her. It was an easy question to answer, even if it brought change along with it. The two promised each other that they would try something different going forward. They were going to make their upcoming marriage mean something. The two agreed to try and live a normal life, to set all the dangers of a supernatural world behind them. They had a house of their own, a found family of blood and strangers they met along the way. They had a reason to want to build something new together. It was a promise. It was a promise, and Andy was going to take it seriously. What was the point of starting over, of having a second chance at life if you didn’t stop and take the time to actually live?
Andy sighed and prepared herself to wrap up her weapons and bury them in the ground, but she only managed to flip over one end of the tarp they were splayed out on when a rumbling engine disrupted her quiet and demanded her attention. Andy looked up as an old jeep was pulling up their driveway. This house was on private property, specifically picked out for the privacy part. It wasn’t the sort of driveway that people got lost down. Grabbing a hatchet, Andy used it to help herself up to her feet, and she marched off toward her driveway to meet the jeep as it pulled up, grip tight around the handle of her small ax.
The jeep stopped at the edge of the driveway, and Andy stopped a dozen or so yards away. It wasn’t until the engine cut off and the driver stepped out that she recognized who it was.
“This is private property, Tyler, and we’re in Texas,” Andy called out to him. “That’s a sure fire way to get yourself shot.”
“That’s an ax you got there, Barclay” he said, “You gonna shoot me with an ax?”
“I can do more damage with this than I could with all the bullets in the world.” Andy smirked, which prompted her guest to smirk back.
Ronald Tyler was thin and lanky. He was a black man in his late twenties with a scruffy beard on his chin and a stone amulet around his neck. The two of them went way back, all the way to military school, back when Andy was a moody teenager and Ronald was a scrappy young kid. Their paths first crossed back in the late 90s when Chucky paid a visit to the Kent Academy, and Ronald’s been mixed up in the fight ever since, helping Andy when he can. Most recently that help came with moving a vampire that had attacked people Andy cared about, which explained how he knew where the house was. It didn’t explain why he was there though.
“What are you doing with all that?” Ronald pointed behind her at all the weapons she was burying.
“Feels safer than keeping it all under the bed.” Andy gave him a shrug, but never bothered looking back at the hole she dug. “I don’t need it anymore. I’m turning it all in, Tyler. I’m done. Walking away. I made a promise. I’m getting married.”
Ronald smiled, “No sh*t? Congratulations, Barclay. It’s that wolf lady you were telling me about? Damn, your luck never ceases to amaze me.”
“Yeah. I’m pretty f***ing lucky,” she smiled. “Are you going to tell me what you’re doing here?”
“I came for your help,” He said. “Last week I got a weird text message, wanted to look into it.”
“You can handle it yourself, Tyler, you’re more than qualified. You don’t need me, and like I said, I’m done.”
“This one specifically has your name all over it,” Ronald said. He pulled out his phone and read the text message in question. “Quote: ‘Andy Barclay. Please help. They have hellfire.’ End quote.”
Andy raised an eyebrow. “The text was asking for me but it was sent to you?”
“I know, weird, right?” Ronald laughed. “I got no reply back, but I tracked the signal on the phone that it was sent from. It’s coming from a warehouse a county over from here. I was thinking that maybe you and me, we could check it out. Old time’s sake, you know? But I get it… retiring… marriage. I get it. I can go on my own if—”
“One county?” Andy asked. “Which way?”
***
ONE COUNTY OVER, ONE HOUR LATER
Dusk turned the sky purple and made everything feel both cold and uncomfortable at the same time. Ronald parked his jeep just past the gate at the abandoned warehouse and the two went by foot the rest of the way. Andy pulled her red hair back before grabbing her hatchet, making sure it was out of her eyes. Ronald was armed with a shotgun that he held low as the two closed in on the warehouse in question. There didn’t seem to be anyone around, but they talked in whispers anyway.
“You really should’ve brought a gun,” Ronald said.
“I really don’t need one,” Andy replied.
There was some quiet walking that the two of them shared before Ronald broke that silence and asked, “You really think you can walk away from all of this? I’ve known you a long time, Barclay, not even death could make you a quitter.”
“I’m not quitting,” Andy explained. “I’m just… starting a different game. Look… that what we’re looking for?” Andy pointed with her hatchet. Ahead, two skeletons—armed with swords and animated by glowing red hellfire—stood guard in front of the entrance to the warehouse. Ronald pumped his shotgun and looked down the barrel as he moved in closer.
“Looks like our sort of weird.”
“Hold up,” Andy pushed his gun down with the flat side of her ax-head. “There could be more. They’ll hear you.” She moved in on her own, leaving Ronald behind looking mighty perplexed.
“They don’t have ears…”
The glowing skeleton guards saw Andy coming, but she didn’t need the element of surprise. The first guard that she reached swung his clumsy, rusted sword down at her and she blocked it with the top blade of her hatchet. She pushed the sword out of her way and spun the hatchet around, splitting the skull in two, flying off into the air in two directions. When the skull was destroyed the hell flames went away, and the rest of the bones collapsed into a pile. The second guard was even easier. It didn’t even have a chance to attack before Andy knocks its skull from its neck. In seconds, they were both piles of useless bones.
“I could’ve done that,” Ronald said as he caught up.
“It’s not a competition, pal.” She gave him a pat on the back and stepped out of the way, giving him the courtesy of opening the door at least.
It was darker on the inside of the warehouse than the outside, but that was to be expected. It was a large open space where light could only get in through narrow windows at the very top of the towering walls. Whatever light did get in was distorted by the tall empty shelves lined up all throughout the space, making tricks out of the light and causing shadows to dance. Andy and Ronald marched in, shoulder to shoulder, unsure of what they were looking for but confident that something was there. Regular buildings didn’t have skeleton guards.
They were careful, slow, and mindful of every footstep. Andy was fairly confident that this was the last supernatural adventure she’d be going on, but she wanted that to be true because of the promise she made her fiance, not because of a stupid mistake that would end her up dead. She knew Ronald Tyler would be respectful of that too, which was maybe why he was a half step ahead of her by the time they got halfway through the warehouse. They didn’t have to go much farther to find some strange. Around a corner, some weirdo was on his knees—back to them—praying in some strange language to a glowing marking on the ground. He was hooded and gloved and hellfire swirled around him.
“Ever fight a warlock before?” Ronald asked.
“Hey, look,” Andy nodded. There were two more skeleton guards, just like the ones outside. They spotted them and were marching forward, swords raised. “I got—”
BOOM!
BOOM!
“—them,” Andy sighed. Ronald took them out without moving, one shot each. They turned to dust, but it also got the warlock’s attention. The warlock got off his knees, floating up and spinning around, powered by the red magic and hellfire that danced around him. His eyes were glowing and he smiled when he saw them.
“You arrived,” The warlock’s voice sounded like many voices in one, echoing in his own mouth. “The Source. It was foretold that you would come. It was foretold that it would be I, Number Four, would be the one to find you and bring you back to—”
SCHLITCK!
It didn’t take much of a throw to bury the hatchet in the warlock’s face. Andy wound back, gave it a toss, let it fly head over end through the air, and watched as it sank into the shadowed skull of the warlock, silencing his bad guy speech before he could really get started. The hellfire and magic circle went away and the warlock fell to his knees, falling down to the ground; dead. There was a sort of windy sound as the magic left that place and then the warehouse was quiet, like a normal warehouse.
“Damn,” Ronald nodded his head up and down.
“I told you I didn’t need a gun.”
Andy moved forward, passing the dead warlock on the ground and going to a table full of stuff that was a few feet behind. Ronald went over to the warlock and gave his body a kick to make sure he was dead.
“You want your hatchet back?” Ronald asked, nudging the ax in the dead warlock’s face with his foot.
“He can keep it,” Andy said. “I don’t need it anymore.”
Andy’s hands trailed over all the crap cluttering the table. There were spellbooks—but they were written in Hell languages Andy didn’t recognize—but there was a bunch of other garbage there, too. Like, literal garbage. Old newspapers, hamburger wrappers, empty beer bottles. The dead warlock liked to play dress up and Dungeons and Dragons with his skeleton army and what not, but under all that hellfire and magic he was still just some schlub. Mixed in with all the trash, Andy found a flip phone.
“I think I found what we’re looking for,” Andy waved it in the direction of Ronald, who came and met her. He took it, flipped it open, and found the one message that had been sent to him. “It’s a burner,” she said. “I used to use phones like this back in the day when I needed to contact you or Kyle or any of the old team.”
“So…” the wheels in Ronald’s head were turning, “Maybe the message wasn’t for you… maybe it was for me.”
“Andy Barclay. Please help. They have hellfire,” Andy said the text out loud.
BANG. BANG-BANG.
Metal thudding made both Andy and Ronald turn their heads. Ronald has his shotgun ready before either of them took a step in the direction of the noise. Andy didn’t bother getting a new weapon, but she stayed close to Ronald. Her gut was telling her that something was off, but she didn’t feel in danger, and she normally trusted her own gut.
The banging continued. They followed the noise down a dark aisle until they sourced it at a sliding metal door. They took a second to listen to the noise more carefully, and Andy quickly realized that it was the sound of a ball bouncing up against the metal. She shared a look with Ronald and he nodded back, getting his gun ready. Andy grabbed hold of the door’s handle and the bouncing on the other side stopped. She sucked in a quick breath and yanked the heavy door open. It slid down the tracks with a clutter and light spilled into the dark room on the other side. A man sat in the corner, like a prisoner. He turned and looked at his rescuers, who stood blocking the light, ready for whatever happened next.
“Tyler?” the man said, as his eyes adjusted to the light. His face lit up and he stood up. “Oh my god, you came! You came!” The guy lurched himself toward Ronald, which was not the safest move considering that the ex-marine was armed and aiming his shotgun at him, but he managed to get in a hug without gaining a hole in his chest. “I knew you’d come, I knew it.”
“You sent the text,” Andy nodded.
“Do I know you, man?” Ronald asked.
The stranger from the dark room took a step back. “Yeah… oh right, you wouldn’t recognize this face, but you got my message, right? I told you who I am in the message. You found me, god damnit, I knew you’d find me. You’re a world class friend, Ronnie, you know that. Kyle was up there but…” he whistled. “You just jumped, top of the charts.”
“I’m sorry, who are you?” Ronald looked confused as hell. Andy squinted, putting it together.
“Get the f*** out here…”
The stranger looked over at Andy, as if noticing her for the first time and his eyes went wide too. “Holy crap, it’s you… he brought you. Of course he did, that makes so much sense. You bring in the source to rescue the copy. Duh.”
“Someone wanna fill me in here?” Ronald threw a hand up.
Andy stepped forward, looking up at the stranger. “It’s me.”
“Come again?”
“Yes, well sort of, almost yes,” fake Andy corrected.
“Are you from a parallel dimension?” Andy asked.
“Parallel dimen… what? There’s parallel dimensions?” Copy Andy asked. “No. No I’m from this dimension, I think. You’re the real deal, but I’m a soul copy. New body, I think his name used to be Tommy, or something. Something Doyle. But I’m Andy Barclay. You can call me Copy, if it’s easier. The others called me Copy Six, or sometimes just Number Six, but you’re the source so… you can call me anything you want.”
“Others?” Ronald asked. “What is this?”
“I didn’t make you,” Andy said, still squinting. “There aren’t any living copies of my soul out there.”
“You didn’t make me,” Copy said. “But that last part is not true… unfortunately. It’s a long story. I’m happy to tell it. Maybe I can shower first?”
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04/28/2019 02:35 PM
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AN EASY ANSWER
[This drabble is adapted from a Discord story and is co-written by Claire. All of Claire’s dialogue, action, and choices have been written by her: https://www.roleplayer.me/1427501]
“Why do you love me so much?”
Claire’s question came out of the ether. She had been out back talking to the teenage werewolves she felt responsible for before coming in, finding Andy on the couch reading a book, and resting her head in her lap. Andy wasn’t one to care where the question came from. She’d answer anything Claire asked her. She tucked some golden hair behind Claire’s ear and brushed her cheek with a gentle stroke of her thumb. “Because you’re a good person, even when you pretend not to be.”
“That’s it?” Claire said, looking up at her with curious green eyes. “Because I’m a grumpy werewolf with a heart of gold?”
“I mean, that’s not it. There’s like a thousand reasons why.” Andy shrugged. “You okay? What’s going on?”
“Yeah, I’m just curious.”
“Okay.” Andy accepted that. She smiled gently, thought for a moment, and then amended her answer. “The simplest answer might also be that I think you’re my best friend. You get me like no one else does, and I think I get you, too, mostly. What’s that if not the foundation of love?”
Claire smiled up at Andy, their eyes locked for a little while before Claire reached up and caressed Andy’s chin with two fingers and pulled her down into a kiss. When the kiss broke she whispered, “Luckiest sneeze ever.”
It was impossible not to smile when thinking about how they met, and how far they came. It started with a sneeze, a simple sneeze into enchanted moondust that happened to drift onto the right stranger. It was an act of chance, or fate, or luck, but that sneeze down near Jupiter, Florida changed everything for Andy. She had been drifting before that, lost at sea, trying to figure out her new lease on life, trying to find a purpose. She didn’t know it that day, but there was hidden purpose in that sneeze, in the ray of sunshine that caused it, in the enchanted moondust… in everything.
The two lovebirds took a brief stroll down memory lane, recalling that day they met and how it all started. It was the sort of drifting conversation that Andy adored most with Claire. They could just talk, find something—anything—to talk about and there was pure, one-hundred percent love in everything they had to say. That conversation drifted into another, and another, somehow leading to the topic of body switching, as it sometimes did around Andy, who was the only one of the two of them who had ever had a different body.
“Would you still love me if I was human?” Claire asked, still looking up from Andy’s lap.
“Claire, I’d love you if I woke up the next morning and you were suddenly a talking can of cat food,” Andy smiled.
“That… wait… how would we… you know?” Claire made a V with her fingers on both hands and sort of bashed them together, simulating sex like a sixth grader would. It only made Andy laugh more.
“My love isn’t dependent on our ability to have sex, that’s just a bonus,” Andy said. “But, if we really wanted to I’m sure we could find a way.”
“I suppose can-openers become a kink in that case,” Claire laughed a little. She smiled up at Andy and took the redhead’s hand into her own, bringing it to her lips to plant small kisses along her knuckles. In the most casual—and Claire—way ever, the blonde nonchalantly asked, “Wanna get married?”
It was so casual that Andy had a hard time realizing if it was serious or not. Her smile melted into a slight squint. “Are you teasing me?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know how we’d do it legally, since, ya know, both of us are legally dead and all. But no, I’m not teasing. We don’t need a piece of paper, do we?” It was obvious that despite it coming out in a lackadaisical way, Claire had been thinking about this. She looked up at Andy, like she was searching for something in her eyes.
“You’re serious,” Andy’s voice was a whisper. She got lost looking down at Claire. “You want to marry me?”
“Well, yeah, I wouldn’t have brought it up if I didn’t,” Claire said. “Why, is that a bad thing?”
Andy answered Claire with a kiss, leaning down and pressing her lips against hers, unsure of why her stomach was aflutter or why she could feel her heart beating in her throat. “I can’t think of anything that makes more sense than marrying you.”
“Peanut butter and jelly. Cheeseburger and fries. Cake and ice cream.” Okay, now she was teasing.
“That’s fine if that’s your list but all I want is you.” Andy beamed.
“No, I mean those are things that make more sense than us getting married,” Claire said. Her face was flat for a second before she allowed herself to grin. “Now I’m teasing.”
Andy didn’t care if she was being teased, she couldn’t stop smiling. “We’re really going to do this?”
“Yeah,” Claire nodded, looking up at Andy. “Andy Barclay, will you marry me?”
Andy didn’t realize she was tearing up until she felt a tear roll down her cheek when she nodded. “Yes, yes please, yes.”
The two pulled each other into another kiss, making a new sort of promise to one another. In that moment, like the moment before, during, and after the sneeze that started it all, things were different. It didn’t matter that they had only been doing this for four fast months. Andy was lost before she found Claire, unsure of what she was meant to do, or how she was meant to be now that she had this second lease on life. Claire was her tether, her anchor, her support, and Claire’s question had an easy answer.
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04/26/2019 02:27 PM
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CANDY SHOP
The tape ripped off the cardboard packing box with a satisfying tearing sound that Andy didn’t realize she liked until after she heard it. Moving in the new house was slow going, but that was just fine by everyone because there wasn’t a real reason to rush. Furniture was still needed to fill the bigger space and there was a lot that simply needed to be bought, since some of the people moving in didn’t have much to move. Andy and Claire were used to living light, the teenage witch Avery that Claire was protecting from Vampires had a fair number of belongings but not a ton considering she had to flee her home quickly, and Mia—their sixteen year old daughter from a parallel dimension—escaped her dying world with nothing more than the clothes on her back and whatever was in her pockets, so she had to get everything new. So yeah, it was slow going, but that was okay. When you lived a life that was full of violence and chaos, a little slowness was nice every now and then.
Andy sat in the empty living room tearing open boxes that her mother shipped her from her cabin in Illinois. Some of it was useful, like clothes and such, but others were things she just didn’t trust out of her sight for too long. Andy was cross legged on the floor, and the house was quiet, but outside she could hear the muffled screams of AC/DC turned up to eleven but garbled by the thick walls. Claire was out in front of the garage working on her car with Mia and her daughter Mollie. The quiet was nice, but quiet was sort of a relative thing when dating a werewolf.
The top of the box Andy just opened had a layer of folded flannel shirts. When she moved that out of the way there was a layer of newspaper cushioning what was below. Andy went to reach for an old clock that sat in the corner, wrapped up in more newspaper, but something else caught her eye first and she ended up pulling it out of the packing box instead. The object in question was an old looking cigar box. On the outside it didn’t look like anything special but that was sort of the idea. She opened it up and found the Nocul Amulet inside; a solid gold circular talisman allegedly made from the golden blood of a god. It was the artifact that brought Andy and Claire together in the first place, and even though it packed some crazy power and was dangerous in the wrong hands—like end of the world dangerous—it made Andy smile. That one, dumb piece of gold changed her life forever.
“Stahp!” The giggle of a couple of teenagers pulled Andy’s attention away from the amulet. She stood up, leaving the cigar box behind but holding the Nocul Amulet in her hand, and she went to the window and peeked through the nice curtains that Claire’s sister Erin helped hang for them. Apparently, they had moved from working under the hood of Claire’s car to washing it. It was hard to tell who started it, but Mollie was chasing Mia around the car with a hose, spraying her on low, and Claire was already covered in suds. They were giggling and laughing, and even Claire was smiling. It was hard to believe that this was really their life. It was hard for Andy to believe that she could actually be attached to something so… nice.
It was extra comforting seeing Mia feel at home here. She lost everything, her entire universe was destroyed, including her version of her parents who’d she never see again. Andy and Claire could do their best for the girl but they’d probably never be able to replace what Mia lost. Andy’s thoughts drifted a bit, now thinking about the ever infinite multiverse and all the other versions of her that were out there. She wondered if those other versions of her had it this good, and her curiosity got the better of her. As if it was listening to her thoughts, the Nocul Amulet started to glow in her hand. She looked down at it and the magic pouring out of the gold disc surged through her fingertips and across her body.
Andy’s eyes rolled to the back of her head and the amulet gifted her a glimpse of a different world… of a different Andy.
***
DIMENSION 4-2-HB
Glimpses and images rushed to Andy’s mind, though it was hard to really qualify what that meant. Andy could sort of see bits and pieces of everything like some sort of omnipotent cloud. The Nocul Amulet showed her a world that was not totally unlike her own up to a point, but diverted off significantly after a while. In this world, Claire’s daughter Mollie was able to convince Claire to have Andy and the witch Avery help them move their souls into new bodies, bodies that weren’t werewolves.
So that’s just what happened. In this world, both mother and daughter soul-hopped into new vessels where they could live a life that resembled something normal. It worked for a while… but once you lived a life that was abnormal you really couldn’t go back to normal. Not fully, anyway. Eventually, Claire’s past came up to bite her. The vampire queen that Claire stole Avery the witch from returned with a bloody vengeance, and with no werewolf powers to easily defend herself, there was no stopping the slaughter that followed. Mollie was killed first, then her friends, then Claire’s sister Erin, and the vampire queen saved Andy for last. The vampire queen ripped Andy’s throat out and let her bleed out in Claire’s arms. Andy tried to mutter her spell, she tried to summon the power of Damballa in order to find a new vessel and live on so she could always be there for Claire, but it was hard to mutter anything without a throat. Her soul escaped but it was unguided and for a while Andy was just dead.
It wasn’t until months later that Andy found a third life, this time in the form of a distant Barclay cousin. His name was Bert and he passed away in his sleep on a lazy-boy in front of a TV after drinking so much that his heart gave out. When Bert’s soul slipped out Andy’s was able to slip in, and just like that Andy Barclay was back. Andy and Claire reunited and used their grief to motivate them. They only had each other, but in this world that was all they needed. They left Texas, hit the road, and killed every vampire they came across. It was never enough to bring back what they lost, or to fix the broken relationship between the two of them, but it was better than nothing.
***
A coughing fit knocked Andy out of her vision, and she had to lean up against the window for a minute to support herself. She blinked slowly and looked around, she was back in the living room of her new house. Outside the window, Claire, Mollie, and Mia were still having their water fight around the car, but instead of basking in that moment, instead of smiling at those she loved having fun, Andy looked back down to the Nocul Amulet in her hand and gave it a squeeze.
“Show me more,” she whispered.
The amulet glowed again, as if in response, and another vision overtook Andy Barclay.
*** DIMENSION 9-9-NO
In this vision, Andy didn’t see things from above. She wasn’t a cloud, but a shadow, a transparent fog that drifted around everything, haunting each corner of that reality like a stuck and angry spirit. In this universe, Andy Barclay was dead, and he was dead because Mia Allen was still alive. In this world, when Andy was stabbed half to death and managed to make his way to the morgue where he was meant to find a new body—a second chance—the morgue was empty, and he bled out on the floor all alone. Mia Allen never died in that world, but that didn’t mean her time in hell didn’t change her. The drugs that she took to help cope with her experience in hell didn’t kill her, but they did force her into a life of crime to help her afford them.
Andy watched as Mia fell darker and darker into her life. The longer she lived, the more corrupted and broken she became. This was the woman who allowed Andy a second chance at life, the woman Andy and Claire named their daughter after in another world, but here she was shattered and destructive, and there was no fixing her.
Though it seemed that destiny had a strange sense of humor in every universe. Andy saw as Mia Allen eventually found a way to die. She robbed the wrong house, trying to rip off a couple of werewolves. It didn’t end well. It was Claire—the burglary victim, in this case—who ended Mia Allen’s life. She slashed her throat open with her claws and gutted her in the living room of her sister’s house.
***
A tear ran down Andy’s cheek as she came out of the second vision. The amulet in her hand was quiet, almost mockingly so, and she hated it for it. “No,” she said harshly at the piece of gold in her hand, as if it could respond. “No, show me happiness. Show me this,” she pointed out to the window where Claire, Mollie, and kid Mia were having fun. “This can’t be the only one.”
The amulet glowed again, and Andy closed her eyes, preparing herself for what she was going to see next.
*** DIMENSION 2-2-3-RG
This world, Andy saw as the sun saw. She was rays of light shining down on the new house. It was like she was seeing this day, this very day, but in another world where things were slightly different. The Andy of this world sat on the porch reading a book. She seemed more or less the same except for the fact that her hair was blonde. Claire was out in front of the garage working alone under the hood of her car. She seemed the same, too—was even listening to the same AC/DC song, only her hair was red.
Avery the witch came up the porch from around the side of the house. She was carrying some of her stuff and taking it up to her new room. She waved to blonde Andy and went inside. There was no Mollie. There was no Mia. Mollie existed in this world, sure, but without a Mia popping in from another dimension there was less of a push for her to connect with her mother, and less reason to be around.
Things were quiet and nice in this universe, and people were happy, but something was missing.
***
The sound of a hose spraying up against a car and Claire yelling for them to watch the paint job brought Andy back into the moment of her own reality. She was quiet when she came back, blinking slow blinks and thinking about everything she just saw. She looked down at the Nocul Amulet in her hand. It didn’t do anything—didn’t glow, or make noise, or do anything at all—but it still felt like it was trying to say something to her.
Andy sighed and turned back to her moving boxes. She put the amulet back in the cigar box, folded it all up back under the newspaper, and retreated to the kitchen where she found a mop bucket that she could fill up in the sink. Andy went out through the back and circled the house. It was hard to sneak up on people when two of them were werewolves, but she figured she might be quick enough to get Mia. She joined in on the water fight before Claire could get bored of it and get grumpy again.
How things were in other worlds… it didn’t matter. It couldn’t.
Andy had her world, and it was up to her to make the best of it while she could, and that water fight was a moment she didn’t just want to watch. She wanted to live it.
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04/05/2019 02:48 PM
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MIA STODDARD-BARCLAY OF DIMENSION 1-1-QT
The mother f***ing world was ending.
We’re talking red skies, lightning shooting upside down, blood rain, the whole shebang. Wind whipped in every direction like it didn’t even care anymore. Little whirlwinds picked up houses, carried them away, and tossed them wherever, but it wasn’t like any of that damage was going to mean anything. The sky cracked, the earth cracked, space itself was starting to crack; it was Armageddon, no one was going to be left behind to worry about a downward spike in property value. All 18 year-old Mia Stoddard-Barclay could do was run, haul ass down the path as fast as she could go and hope that she could make it to the cabin in time. She was the last girl on earth, or at least she was pretty sure she was, but that title wasn’t going to last long if she didn’t make it to her mother’s cabin at the end of the trail. Tears stung her eyes as the blood-rain splattered against the umbrella she held up over her head as she ran. The tears stung more than any tears she had ever cried before. It wasn’t because it was the end of the world, or because all of her family was dead… it was because it was all her fault.
The hinges to the front door nearly peeled off the wood when Mia kicked the door in. She tossed her still-open umbrella onto the floor and threw herself up against the door, struggling to close it against the rushing death-winds that blew so hard it sounded like the world was laughing at her. The door clicked and she let out a breath, a sigh of relief. The inside of the cabin was quiet compared to the world beyond the walls that was tearing itself apart. Mia wiped some blood-rain off of her hand onto her AC/DC t-shirt. She peeked out the window just in time to see the blood-rain turn into fire-rain, and a bunch of bat creatures drop down out of the crack in the sky to go around picking up all the trees. She didn’t stay by the window long enough to watch where they were taking them. She had some sh*t to figure out.
“F***, f***, f***ity, f*** f***,” she nervously hummed to herself as she crossed her mother’s old cabin—a place she hadn’t been to since she was a kid—and subconsciously rubbed the buckthorn wood ring necklace she wore around her neck.
Saying that all of this was her fault was not an understatement or some sort of half-truth. The world ending had a direct connection to Mia Stoddard-Barclay and, well, she had no time to process it, though she figured that if she somehow survived all this noise she would have to deal with that baggage eventually. The true story of how Mia single-handedly destroyed the world was far too long, and far too complicated to go over, but the important takeaways from it are: she didn’t mean to, she was only trying to stop another problem—which she kind-of-sort-of did considering all problems were stopped with the destruction of an entire universe—and she was really sorry about it. The sorry part was probably the truest of it all. The universe ending, that was a bummer, but it was the cosmically small stuff that was being taken away from her that hurt the most. Mia had to watch both of her mothers die in front of her, she saw her sister Mollie get swallowed up by a wormhole. It all made Mia ache with grief and guilt, but it wasn’t enough to get her to stop, or stand-still, or give-up. She wasn’t raised to give up. She’d beat this, survive this somehow, and live to hate herself another day.
“Come on, think, think, think, you got this,” Mia paced back and forth as the apocalypse shook the walls of the cabin. Her thumb anxiously rubbed circles around her necklace, a gift from her mother Andy.
If anyone was going to think of a way to survive the end of everything, it was Mia. She was clever, always had been, sometimes too clever for her own good. When she was five she had the hypothesis that her mother Claire and sister Mollie were werewolves, but she knew they wouldn’t admit it if she asked, so she had to test the hypothesis herself. At least, to a five year old little girl it was just a test, but her sister Mollie made the argument that sneaking flakes of silver into the breakfast cereal was more of a poisoning than a test. Mollie was never one for science. She didn’t get it. The following year was when she was pretty sure she figured out that she was adopted, though the truth of her origin was far stranger than anything a six year-old girl would be able to make up. Her moms explained that Andy was both her biological mother AND father—though it wouldn’t be until years later that she figured out it all had to do with frozen sperm from mama-Andy’s old body and eggs from the new one. The point was, Mia was smart; she was a problem solver. The world was ending and time was limited, that was the problem. So all she had to do was figure out what to do about it.
Some sort of monstrous death god screamed outside and all the chairs inside of the cabin melted into soup.
It was the end of days… things didn’t need to make sense anymore.
“Stop being stupid!” Mia chastised herself as she burned a hole in the carpet, pacing small circles in the middle of the living room, keeping far from the walls. “You killed everyone because you’re so stupid and now you’re going to die, too, because you can’t figure out how not to. GAH! Are you this big an idiot in every universe?”
Light bulb.
Mia froze mid-pace. Other universes… she could escape into another universe. All she would need is… Mia looked down into her hand that had been clutching her necklace, a personal object that she had a strong connection to. The wheels in her mind were spinning too fast to keep up with herself. She didn’t have time to let the cement dry on her plan anyway, so she darted off to the basement, hoped that there still was a basement, and did the only thing she could think of to not die.
In theory, the quantum mechanics of magic were straight forward if you knew what you were looking for. The universe was eating itself, Mia’s universe, but in the multiverse there was an infinite number of universes out there where things weren’t going tits up. But Mia had to be careful. She had to find a parallel universe where she didn’t exist, otherwise she’d be dooming that universe to the same fate, if two identical doppelgangers touched it was so-long sailor to whatever universe was unlucky enough to be hosting that connection. But in a multiverse of infinite possibilities she figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find some place where she was never born. But the hop couldn’t be completely random either, she needed a tether, something to direct her some place relatively safe otherwise there was no saying where she would end up, and plopping down in a universe where the earth was still run by dinosaurs didn’t sound much better than however she was going to die here.
The calculations were already running through Mia’s head as she took the stairs down to the basement two at a time. The house above her wept and cracked as doomsday pulled at its foundations. There wasn’t much time left. The earth was going to be gone soon, so she had to work fast. She jumped down into the dirt floor of the cellar and bolted to her mother’s chest sitting in the brick corner. Thank the gods it was still there.
The plan was incredibly complicated, but also sort of simple in a way. She searched through the chest full of old books and found the necronomicon buried at the bottom. Relief washed over her when she saw it was still there and she yanked off the buckthorn necklace around her neck. She knew a spell that would work, the necklace would be her tether, and the necronomicon would be the energy source. In theory, she had everything she needed, er, almost everything. The energy would come from destroying the old, cursed book, so she still needed something to get that done. She dug around in the chest again and found one of her other mother’s old knives.
“Good enough.”
The house ripped free from the foundation, disappearing above Mia and leaving her alone in a house-less basement. She had seconds at best. It was now or never.
“Ade, due, Samedi,” she chanted, clutching the buckthorn necklace in one hand while the other raised the knife high up above her head. “Give me the power, I beg of you!” She brought the knife down over and over again, stabbing into the face of the skin-bound book. Death moans of the dying planet screamed around her and the book she stabbed started to bleed and leak out blinding white light as its energy eked around the oozing blood. “Ade, due, Samedi!” She chanted again, still stabbing, “GIVE ME THE POWER, I BEG OF YOU!”
Mia looked up as the crack in the sky spread to the space above her. She watched as two behemoth hands stretched their tree-length fingers through the crack and the face of a massive monster poked through from the other side, whatever the other-side was. It had a face of bone and stone, and only had sunken cavities where its eyes should be. The creature opened its beaked mouth and cried out, stretching its neck through the crack and into the dying universe. It came to eat what was left. It was unmeasurable in size, yet Mia felt like it was staring right at her. All the while, the damaged necronomicon burned hot in her hand, pulsing with light like it was getting ready to explode.
“Not today, f***er,” Mia smirked.
BOOM!
The book exploded in a contained ball of bright white light that expanded over the basement before collapsing in on itself. The light evaporated as quickly as it appeared and when it was gone, so was Mia and the necklace. All that was left behind was the knife and the tattered pages of a now useless book. At the end of the world, all books were useless. The pages floated around the air, wafting down to the dirt floor, and the hell-beast in the sky came down and swallowed the earth as the universe continued to shrivel up and die.
DIMENSION 6969 -- YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED UNIVERSE
Andy Barclay was out of town. She never really had a town, not anymore, but sometimes it was just easier to say she was out of town. By out of town we mean, Andy Barclay was not currently wherever Claire Stoddard was. Recent events had made it so that they tended to congregate around Claire’s sister’s home in Texas, which was all great and positive news since it meant Claire was finally able to spend more time with her daughter Mollie. Andy didn’t mind Texas, she loved spending time there, she loved Claire’s family, but she wasn’t there 24/7. Sometimes… she was out of town.
A day or two earlier, Andy had left Erin’s house to go get something important done. It involved werewolves, and a cult, and some sort of moon juice thing, the details of all of that weren’t terribly important, but Andy said she would get it done for them, so she went off to get it done. She didn’t leave much behind—a bag of clothes maybe, a toothbrush—but there wasn’t a ton of Andy Barclay hanging around in Claire’s bedroom there at the house when she wasn’t there. There was one thing, though, something deliberately left behind, something she left for Claire so that she would think of her when she went away. It was a small buckthorn wood necklace. The wood was nice, carved in a circle and strung on a simple string. It had belonged to Mia Allen, the body Andy currently inhabited, and it was something Andy had grown kind of attached to in the time since she got the new flesh. Because it meant something to her, she wanted to leave it behind for Claire to hold on to, so she could give it back when she returned. So, before she left, Andy hung the buckthorn necklace on the knob of the top drawer of the dresser drawers in Claire’s bedroom. She didn’t know how long it would take Claire to find it there, or if she even would, but for now there it hung.
All in the house was quiet.
The buckthorn necklace started to shake, rattling up against the dresser. It was subtle at first, a simple shimmy, but eventually the wooden circle vibrated with an unearthly energy and glowed white-hot.
BOOM!
The middle of the circle filled with that white light and blasted its energy into the floor at the foot of the bed. It created a portal that burned through the ground, tearing up wood and pipes and wires, and something dropped down through that portal and landed in the living room below with an awkward thud, and just like that… BOOP, it stopped, and the necklace went back to being a necklace.
The redheaded kid that dropped down from the hole in the ceiling let out a groan as her bones cracked when she moved. Everything felt… well, it felt like she just fell through dimensions. She looked down in her hand. She was still holding her end of the buckthorn necklace. She pressed her other hand to her chest to make sure her heart was still beating under her AC/DC t-shirt, and once she was sure she wasn’t dead she let out a sigh of relief and chuckled.
There was a hole in the ceiling above her, which was not ideal, but she was alive. Mia Stoddard-Barclay was mother f***ing alive! She threw her hands up to cheer and celebrate, but that’s when she noticed that she wasn’t alone in the room. Mia turned around and saw that she had a crowd, some faces familiar, some not, though her eyes immediately fell to the face she recognized most of all. Claire was front and center, her arms crossed over her chest.
Mia’s eyes darted around the room. This was going to take some explaining.
“Ummmm… hi?”
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04/02/2019 04:01 PM
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CAN'T TAKE MY EYES OFF OF YOU
The El Royale was a novelty hotel that finally closed its doors before the 1960s were through. Positioned on the border of California and Nevada, the hotel offered its guests the option of which state they preferred to stay in. California was dry but had nicer rooms. The Nevada side let you drink and gamble. In its heyday, the El Royale attracted some of the biggest names in the world; Elvis, Frankie Valli, a few presidents—but like all things it didn’t last. Everything died, even ideas, and the El Royale was nothing more than a decaying skeleton rotting off the side of a back desert highway that no one used anymore.
Little swirls of smoke wafted off the end of the lit cigar dangling from Andy’s lips. She sat at the bar in the hollowed out lobby of the El Royale, her back to the door. A glass of rum sat on the counter in front of her and a machete was beside it. Andy was in one piece, mostly. There was a cut on her forehead that was leaking a little, smearing a bit of red down the side of her face, but it wasn’t anything serious. She puffed at the cigar, savoring the moment as her drinking partner, the Vodou Loa Baron Samedi reappeared behind the bar with a fresh bottle of rum to refill his empty glass.
“This is de ting right here,” the Baron sang the words in his thick Creole accent as her poured, laughing with anticipation of the treat he had waiting for him.
“I never really know what to expect when you come around, Samedi,” Andy said, resting her cigar in an ashtray by her glass and exchanging it for her drink. “But I always know I’m going to be drinking well.”
The two held up their glasses in a silent toast and tipped their heads back to drink. Baron Samedi towered over everything, a truth exaggerated by the fact that Andy was seated, which made her seem small. He was more than a man, but in this realm at least he appeared as a tall man with dark skin and a skull painted over his face. He wore a ratty suit and had an old top hat perched on his otherwise bald head, but the peculiar nature of his dress didn’t matter. The Baron carried with him a degree of power that couldn’t be ignored.
“I like dis place.” The Baron set his now empty glass down and filled it again. “There’s life here.”
Andy looked left and right. The El Royale was a dead place, but that didn’t mean much when someone like Baron Samedi was around. What was usually dark was lit with ghostly light, like the light was slipping through time and arriving there from decades earlier. But the lights weren’t the only ghosts that followed the Baron around. All around them, in the hauntingly abandoned hotel lobby, spirits wandered about. They were drifting wanderers slipped free from time, aimlessly pacing from California to Nevada. They ignored the living—Andy—and otherwise acted as if they didn’t know they were dead. It made this dead place feel alive again, and even though Andy knew it wasn’t real, or at least real in the sense that would make any difference to her, it made for an interesting place to drink.
“This place was a means to an end,” Andy set her drink down—only half drunk—and picked up a napkin that she used to wipe the blood off of her face. “It worked in a pinch.”
“No, chéri,” the Baron shook his head. “I worked in de pinch.”
Andy chortled. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess you did.” She tossed her bloody napkin down and finished her drink.
“We’re even now, okay?” The Baron refilled her glass. “Dis right here? Dis is de last favor your gettin’ from me, child. Are we understood?”
“About that…”
“Are you serious now?” The Baron smiled. “And-y Bar-clay, do you not know what bein’ even means?”
“I know, I know, I just need one more thing. One more favor.” Andy held up a single finger. “Your debt is paid. So put me in yours.”
The Loa took a moment to think it through. He reached down and plucked the cigar Andy had been smoking from the ashtray and took it for himself, chomping down and letting the wisps of smoke sting his eyes. After a short while he said, “What is it dat you want now?”
“They’re called The Vision,” Andy said, her face growing serious. “They’re some sort of group, or corporation, or thing.”
“You want to get more specific?” the Baron asked.
“Look into mind, Samedi. You’ll see who I’m talking about.” Andy stared right at him. “These people hurt someone that I care about. I need you to find me something that can hurt them.”
The Baron took a long puff of his cigar and nodded. “It will take some time.”
“I have all the time in the world.” Andy gulped down every last drop of rum that was in her glass.
“What are you going to do about ‘tem over der?” the Baron pointed somewhere behind Andy. She spun on her stool and looked past the wandering ghosts that were sprinkled across the lobby and to the five vampires the Baron was pointing at. They were all tied up—wrapped in chains and bound to a chair—gagged, and stuck inside a voodoo trap known as a Saturday Circle which made them vulnerable in lots of fun ways. The five blood suckers glared at Andy and the Vodou god who helped trap them there, and all but the leader—a woman in the center of the five—muttered muted curses from under their gags. The leader was content to simply stare daggers.
“I can take it from here,” Andy said. “I appreciate the asset, though.”
“I appreciate de drink,” the Baron raised the bottle of rum up and brought it to his lips. Andy blinked and he was gone, though the ghostly atmosphere he brought with him remained, at least for a little while.
Andy shot out a quick breath and rolled her neck, cracking it and getting herself ready for what she had to do. She got up, straightened out the dress she was wearing, and reached for a small personal-sized bottle of rum that the Baron was nice enough to leave behind. She took a swig, set it down, and picked up her machete before heading over to the vampires. The ghosts around them ignored everything, but the vampires… the vampires were zero focused on the redhead in the dress.
Andy stood there in silence for a little while, four feet or so from the Saturday Circles, and she thought about what she was going to say. Eventually, she settled on, “Are we going to do names or should we just skip that part?” The vampires didn’t say much back, and whatever they did say was garbled by the cloth gags in their mouths so it didn’t really matter. “Well, you know my name already. I’m sure of that. Your boss sent you because she knows my name, too. I’d ask how she found out about me but… I guess it doesn’t really matter.”
They had been following her for as long as New Mexico, at least. It could’ve been longer, but Santa Fe was where she first picked up the trail. They had a hundred opportunities to grab her, to attack, but they stayed back. They were watching her, following her, hoping that she would lead them back to Claire. Once Andy clocked that she swerved west instead of going back to Texas and the house there where Claire’s family was safe. The truth was, Andy didn’t know where Claire was. She took off after an incident with her daughter Mollie and her friends and things just sort of slipped away from Andy. She couldn’t stop Claire from doing whatever she did to that other young werewolf, she couldn't stop Mollie from lashing out at her mother, and she couldn’t stop Claire from taking off. There was a lot Andy couldn’t do, but dealing with monsters was not on that list. These vampires thought they could use her; thought they could make a victim out of her. They thought that they could make Andy into a means to hurt the woman that she loved. She wasn’t interested in playing that game.
Andy led the vampires on her tail farther away, all the while planning how she was going to deal with them. Everything sort of fell in to place naturally after that. She led them to the El Royale, a place she had used before, a place she knew would be isolated. She called in her favor with the Baron. It took some doing, but eventually the hunted became the hunter, and the vampires were the ones now who were going to be used.
The lead vampire muttered something under her gag, speaking for the first time since she was captured. Andy yanked out the cloth so she could repeat herself. “Your tricks won’t last forever, witch.”
“Oh, I’m not a witch,” Andy smiled, setting her machete down on a table. “I’m worse. I’m a thingy-ma-bob. And thingy-ma-bobs are more dangerous than witches, you know why? Cause we don’t really have rules… Anyone have a quarter?”
Andy turned toward the vampire who was the first to look away and she dug around in his pocket and fished out a shiny new quarter. She thanked him and made her way over to the jukebox behind the vampires. There was no reason why it would work—this place had no power—but the Baron’s magic was still lingering about so she had a good feeling.
“Your vampire queen is going to learn a very valuable lesson today,” Andy said as she flipped through the music options in the jukebox, her back to the vampires. “She’s going to learn that Claire’s girlfriend is not a damsel in distress OR a pawn in this stupid game she’s playing. She’s going to learn that if she’s going to send some sh*t my way there are going to be consequences. AH, oh I love this one. Perfect!” Andy put the quarter in the machine, pressed play and turned around as ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,’ by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons started to play with his sharp horns and steady baseline.
Andy’s hands flared out dramatically to the sides and even some of the ghosts around the place took note of the music.
YOU’RE JUST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE I CAN’T TAKE MY EYES OFF OF YOU YOU’D BE LIKE HEAVEN TO TOUCH I WANNA HOLD YOU SO MUCH
“Here’s the thing you need to know about me, I absolutely hate being jerked around,” Andy made her way back through the now swaying ghosts over to the vampires. “I realize that you’re not going to be able to directly pass this message on to your boss, but I have a feeling that the message will reach her regardless.
YOU’RE JUST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE CAN’T TAKE MY EYES OFF OF YOU
“You’re dead, you know that?” the lead vampire growled, her voice sounding like a mouthful of pennies.
“You bad guys really need more creative threats,” Andy swayed a little bit with the music, and some of the ghosts moved closer to her.
PARDON THE WAY THAT I STARE THERE’S NOTHING ELSE TO COMPARE THE SIGHT OF YOU LEAVES ME WEAK THERE ARE NO WORDS LEFT TO SPEAK
“You better kill us now,” the vampire snarled, “You’ll need your energy for those who come to avenge us.”
“Shh, I’m dancing,”
BUT IF YOU FEEL LIKE I FEEL PLEASE LET ME KNOW THAT IT’S REAL YOU’RE JUST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE CAN’T TAKE MY EYES OFF OF YOU
The horns came in and Andy, slightly drunk, and moved by the music and her power over the chained up predators she had trapped in the Saturday Circles, danced freely. She shook her hips and popped her hands up, and the ghosts around her did the same, matching her moves and blending into the living world in a way that made the barrier between the living and the dead as thin as it had ever been. They moved in unison until the horn break drew closer to its close and Andy ended up back by the chained vampires. She picked up her machete and danced behind them while the ghosts kept on around the rim of the lobby.
I LOVE YOU BABY!
SH-CLUNK! Andy swung the machete like it was opening day at Wrigley Field and the vampire on the end of the row of five lost his head with a brutal swiftness. It rolled into his lap and down to the floor as a plume of blood sprayed up from the stump of a neck.
AND IF IT’S QUITE ALRIGHT, I NEED YOU BABY
SH-CLUNK! SH-CLUNK! SH-CLUNK! She went down the line, skipping over the leader in the middle, dirtying the lobby with showers of blood and rolling heads.
TO WARM THE LONELY NIGHTS I LOVE YOU BABY TRUST IN ME WHEN I SAAAAAYYY
Andy paced around to the front of the vampires, er, well, vampire now that there was only one left. Both women were coated in thick layers of vampire blood and for the first time the leader vampire looked scared, genuinely frightened. Andy raised her worn blade and rested it on her shoulder so she could feel the cold by her neck.
“Please, please, no, I can keep you safe, if you keep me alive I can keep you safe!” She begged.
Andy just stared.
OH PRETTY BABY DON’T BRING ME DOWN I PRAY OH PRETTY BABY NOW THAT I FOUND YOU STAY AND LET ME LOVEEEE YOU, BABYYYY LET ME LOVEEEE YOUUUUU
Andy wound back and brought her blade through flesh and bone. An explosion of blood blasted her in the face, but she only flinched enough to close her eyes. The song continued, the ghosts kept dancing, but Andy dropped her machete. She was going to burn them, but she needed another drink first. As she made her way back to the bar she could see some of the ghosts fading away. The side effects of the Baron’s magic were evaporating. Even the music was drifting off, but Andy was okay. She sat back at the bar, bloody and a mess, and the lights in the lobby started to dim back down to its natural darkness. She poured herself one more drink and smiled.
There were a lot of things that Andy Barclay couldn’t do.
Taking care of herself was not on the list.
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03/19/2019 09:02 PM
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MORE PROMPTS
IGNACIO: 6 Stuck in an elevator
“Keep breathing, Nacho Supreme. Everything is going according to plan,” Andy looked down at her stopwatch as the elevator the two thieves were in eased up and up and up, the floors ticking away as red little numbers ahead of them. “I timed this out to the letter. We’re on schedule. You know if you don’t learn to lighten up some you’re going to—”
CA-CHUNK!
The elevator jerked to a stop and everything went dark. The lights flickered back on a second later but… they weren’t moving anywhere. The floors no longer ticked by, but the stopwatch in Andy’s grip didn’t slow down.
“Okay… maybe now would be a good time to stop breathing because we are fuuuuuuuuucked.”
BOOZYAUNT: 7 Tripped down the stairs
Stealing from a witch was never advisable. Stealing wine from a witch like Zelda Spellman… big no-no. It was a long, complex, and altogether boring story that led Andy Barclay to this moment, but that story didn’t matter, the only thing that mattered was that Andy was currently running for the stairs, the stolen bottle of Chateau Cheval Blanc 1943 tucked under her arm like she was a running back for the Bears rushing for the sideline. Zelda’s cigarette smoke lingered somewhere behind Andy, taunting and burning her nostrils, but whatever was chasing after her wasn’t the moody witch. No, whatever Zelda sent after her was much, much worse.
“Sh*t!”
The rug at the top of the stairs scrunched up, a shag foot sticking out from out of nowhere. Andy’s toe caught it at the worst time possible and the Spellman Mortuary went topsy-turvy for a second. The wine flew up in the air, arching down, and Andy Barclay fell head over heels down those stairs, the whole thing happening in what felt like slow motion.
“Ouchsh*tf***ooodamnsh*tgahnoouchf***uh,”
Andy rolled out at the bottom of the stairs, splayed out with her arms off to the side. She took a deep breath as she stared at the ceiling. She was still alive so… that was something. Sitting up, she wondered what horrors awaited her next, but that was when the 1943 Chateau Cheval Blanc caught up to her and clocked her in the temple. Everything went black.
MOLLIE: 11 Stuck in a tree
“Okay it was funny at first, totally not funny now!” Andy yelled. She could see the light on in Mollie’s bedroom, she knew that the little wolf could hear her—it was only the backyard, she’d be able to hear her even without heightened wolf hearing—but there was no reply. The sun was starting to go down now and it was getting cold. This was not how this quality time bonding exercise with Mollie was meant to go.
Andy was stuck in a tree, about seven feet off the ground. Her foot was wedged in a tiny little knot between branches and there was no wiggling out of it. She was having a good time with Mollie before she got stuck, and Mollie used the opportunity to laugh at her. Sure, maybe some things were said about boundaries and this and that about Andy’s relationship with her mother but it was still all in good fun, or at least Andy thought so. Mollie walked away laughing, but Andy expected her to come back eventually. Her leg was going numb and it was starting to not be so funny.
“Mollie! Come on!” No answer. “Erin? Alex? Anyone? I’m stuck!”
CHERRY BOMB: 12 Stolen coat
“That’s my coat.” Andy stopped short of the truck, struck all of a sudden by the apparent realization that Jennifer was stealing her clothes. Jennifer didn’t stop, however, she was smirking, pulling one of her annoying games or something, and she got in Andy’s truck, ready to head off to the next monster hunt without addressing the coat thing. “Wait, no, for real. That’s my coat.”
Andy went to Jennifer’s door, hoping to address this before they took off. She knew that if she didn’t it would just distract her the whole time and they were meant to be fighting a Ghoul, which was not the sort of thing to be distracted when up against. Andy tried to open the door but the locks clicked into place.
“What? Hey, open up. That’s my coat. You stole my coat.”
Whatever Jennifer said back to her was muted by the rolled up window, but Andy got the impression that she said it softly on purpose.
“Hey, no, no, no, we’re not doing this,” Andy banged on the window. “Open up, this is my truck and that is my coat.”
Jennifer stuck her tongue out, and Andy sighed, deflating from her apparent defeat.
“I hate you sometimes.”
VICTOR DRAGO: 1 Under the bed
Andy was getting ready for sleep. She finished up in the bathroom, flossing and brushing her teeth, and she was about to jump into bed when she stopped suddenly in the doorway. She squinted, reached for the pistol she kept hidden behind her dresser, and aimed it at the dark shadow hiding under her breath.
“Alright, mister, you have three seconds to start explaining yourself before I turn my mattress into swiss cheese.”
Hiding under her bed, out of nowhere and with no explanation whatsoever, was a man Andy had never seen before. It looked like he was in a nice suit, which only really made this all that much weirder, and he didn’t look comfortable. There wasn’t a lot of space down there.
“Three. Two… one.”
(CATALYST): 4 Caught in the rain
It was a dare. Well, not really a dare, Andy just didn’t believe it. She knew all sorts of magic and what not existed but when this guy told her that he could make it rain with just a brief wave of his stick she absolutely didn’t believe it. She called “bull sh*t,” as she was prone to do when she was looking to be proven wrong, and she stood with her hands on her hips until he did just that. Everything else happened so quick. The guy said something about her being a silly muggle or something he waved a little twig toward the air and said some funny words. The next thing she knew, the sky darkened with clouds and started to leak.
“Whoa,” Andy looked up, rain spitting down on her, smacking her across the face with thick drops. She stuck out her tongue to make sure it tasted like rain. The water was cold, but it felt and tasted like every other rain Andy had ever been in.
“I am so glad I didn’t bet money.”
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03/04/2019 04:03 PM
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EL VERANO DE 1999
JUNE, 1999
There was nothing in the world more volatile than an impulsive teenager. That’s what it was, impulse—boiling emotions bubbling under the surface—that sent 16 year old Andy Barclay speeding down to the border. It was summer break at Kent Military School and Andy slipped through the cracks. When he hopped in his car and started driving south he wasn’t sure if he would come back or not. He could only focus on what was directly ahead of him, and he couldn’t see past any of that. He just drove, and drove, and drove, compelled to do something with his young life, compelled to take the trauma that had shaped him and instead shape it into something useful. It was the summer of 1999, and Andy Barclay was on his way to Mexico.
He was off to kill a monster.
When Andy was six years old his mom brought home a doll that was possessed by the soul of a serial killer, a doll who killed a bunch of people around him and tried to take Andy’s body. When Andy was eight, that doll came back to upturn Andy’s already upturned life for a second time. Then, a few months back, Chucky found Andy again, this time at the Kent School, and more lives were lost. It flipped a switch in the boy. He wasn’t going to sit back anymore, he couldn’t sit back knowing that there was so much evil out there and no one was doing anything proactive to stop it. Andy knew he wasn’t alone—he wasn’t the only child ever disrupted by monsters—but he was a survivor, and he owed the other children out there something. He survived, he had to make that mean something.
It was rumors that led Andy to Tijuana, rumors of missing children and other strings of disappearances in the border town. El Cucuy—they called it—a boogeyman, a bedtime story parents told their kids to get them to behave. You better watch out of El Cucuy will get you. Andy was free falling without a shoot. He was a kid, he didn’t know what he was doing; impulse got him there but it was only going to get him so far. When he got to Tijuana he found a cheap room to rent—something that was significantly easier than he was expecting considering he was 16—and he started digging. The more he looked into these missing children, eight of them by that time, the more he heard stories of El Cucuy. It looked like he had his monster, he just needed to figure out what to do next.
JULY, 1999
The first month in Mexico went okay. Two more kids disappeared without a trace, but Andy was getting closer. He could feel it. He read up on everything he could about that boogeyman el Cucuy and listened to the stories the locals shared with him. He narrowed in on specific hunting grounds and even found a way to kill the son of a bitch. That last part wasn’t easy. Some local scammer tried to sell Andy some bullsh*t with claims that it was the only way to defeat el Cucuy once and for all. When Andy called the guy out for his bullsh*t it started a fight and Andy got his ass kicked. He did find someone legitimate to help him eventually, though. He made sure everything was on the up and up first but eventually he bought himself a blade made from conquistador steel. It was said that the blade was enough to kill a dragon, and some even spoke of el Cucuy as if he was a dragon. A slice across the throat, a stab to the heart; that was supposed to be enough to kill the beast. Andy practiced with that knife every night. When the time came… he was going to be ready.
The Week of the Dead festival was a tourist trap, an excuse for vacationing coeds to dress up, get drunk, and appropriate cultures out of season. It didn’t matter if it was the middle of summer, Tijuana sparked to life with dancing, and music, and skeletons as if any day could be Dio de los Muertos. The celebration meant crowds, and rowdiness, and distractions. It was the perfect hunting ground for el Cucuy, which meant Andy was on the hunt, too.
As the sun started to set, Andy walked around the festival with a jacket on. It was too hot for the jacket—even with dusk settling in—but he needed it to conceal the conquistador steel knife he was gripping underneath. The weapon was enchanted, you see, infused with magic that was supposed to give a the user everything he or she would need, if they were noble enough. Or at least that was what Andy was told. The handle would grow warm if he was near el Cucuy and the closer he got the hotter the blade became. He just had to keep holding on. So he wandered through the festivities—past the parades and drinking and parties—and he moved with the flow of the crowd, trying to find his monster.
There were American college students drinking as they walked down the street, pretty girls with their faces poorly painted to look like skulls, and there were children, some local some tourist, laughing, and playing, and having a good time as fireworks cracked and boomed in the dark sky above them. Andy’s gaze kept falling to the children. He thought about the monster he was after and how evil he had to be to take something as innocent as that and devour it. It made him angry, he boiled as he thought of his own childhood and the pain that came along with it. Andy’s grip tightened on the handle of the blade and he felt it start to grow warm. The warmth made him freeze in place; the monster was close. He looked right, then left, then right again. There were tons of people around him but nothing seemed monstrous. Andy took a step to the left, but the handle went cold. He doubled back and when he went to the right it grew warm again. He pushed through the crowd, following that direction, and the knife only grew warmer, and warmer, and warmer.
Andy stepped out into a courtyard, shouldering past the crowd that was in his way. This area wasn’t too crowded. There were a few people hanging out their windows in the buildings that surrounded the courtyard—smoking cigarettes or enjoying an evening beer—and there were a few other individuals, locals and tourists alike, passing through. The handle Andy held on to was burning hot now, and he had to white knuckle it just to hold on. Still, he didn’t see a monster. Standing in the center of the courtyard there was a woman who stood out from the rest. She was a teenager, maybe around Andy’s age. She wore a beautiful red dress with matching red ribbons in her long night-black hair. Her face was painted in a traditional Day of the Dead manner, with a deep black around the eyes and pale whiteness around it, as if her face was a skull, but compared to the tourists whose makeup was rushed and sloppy, this woman looked perfect. Andy could only stop and stare, forgetting to blink and forgetting about the knife he held under his coat that was burning marks into the palm of his hand.
The girl with the skull paint on her face started to dance for no one in particular. She pulled out red fans and danced to the music seeping into the courtyard from the main street around the corner. As she started to dance, people stopped to watch her. Some were just tourists passing through, others were children who poured in from the streets around them, smiling and laughing and enjoying the dance. Some kids danced along, and the girl with the skull paint on her face welcomed them to dance with her.
The burning in Andy’s hand became too much, it snapped him back into the moment and he realized that the knife burned more when he saw this woman. He dropped the knife to relieve some of the pain in his palm and the knife sat in the bottom seam of his jacket. He looked up and the girl with the skull paint on her face looked back at him as she continued to dance with the children. All the other adults around them had gone, it was just Andy, the girl, and the children in that courtyard. When Andy looked up even the smokers and drinkers hanging out of their windows were gone. Around the corner, the band that was playing the music ended the song and a splattering of drunken applause followed. In the courtyard, however, the children that were dancing with the girl with the skull paint on her face cheered and called for more. The girl spoke to the children, but Andy couldn’t hear what she said. He watched her put her fans away, focus in on one child in particular, and take that child—a shoeless eight year old boy who smiled widely despite the fact that he was missing baby teeth—by the hand and guide him away. The girl with the skull paint on her face looked back toward Andy and made eye contact, and Andy didn’t need to touch his blade to know that he had found his monster.
While the other children scattered and ran back to whatever lives they had, unaware of how close they came to disaster, Andy moved through the courtyard. He grabbed at the knife hidden in his jacket again and felt that the handle was searing hot. He followed in the direction that the monster made up to look like a beautiful girl took the child, and he sped up with every step forward. Ahead, he saw the girl with the child, he watched her leading him away by the hand and saw that the child was still smiling. The knife burnt at Andy’s hand but he didn’t care. He thought of himself from years back, small and helpless, and wondered what life would’ve been like if he had someone to step in and save him before everything he had known in life was taken away. The monster and the child turned a corner, disappearing down a back alley. Andy sped up, jogging to close the distance but when he reached the corner something strange happened, the grip on the knife went cold. He spun around that corner but froze… it was a dead end, an empty alley. El Cucuy, or whatever that thing was… was gone, and so was the child. All Andy could do was stare down that empty alley and let his failure wash over him.
AUGUST, 1999
Everything quieted down after the Week of the Dead. The boy Andy couldn’t save, he was the last kid to disappear. He found out later that he was the son of a local mechanic; a mean sonofabitch who reportedly beat his son and wife but was now so consumed by loss and grief that he didn’t have the strength to be so cruel anymore. Andy walked around Tijuana with his conquistador blade every night but he never felt it get hot again. The girl was gone. El Cucuy had moved on, which maybe was a good thing… the children were safe again, but Andy couldn’t help but feel disappointed knowing that he couldn’t kill the monster in time, that so many children were already gone and that so many more were still at risk because the monster still lived. Eventually, he stopped his patrols. He gave up trying. He wasn’t sure when he was going to go home yet but he still had a month before school started back and he had to return to Kent Military Academy, so he decided to drink the rest of the summer away in a local cantina.
For three nights in a row, Andy sat at the same table with his head slumped forward and disappointment leaking out of him like a flooded lake. No one ever paid him much attention. He sat there with a beer on one side of the table and his useless magic knife on the other side of the table. He was so lost in those doldrums that he didn’t even notice someone take the seat across from him.
“¿Está ocupado este asiento?” The girl’s voice was gentle and kind. Andy looked up and saw her already helping herself to the seat, and his jaw hung open with disbelief and his eyes squinted to make sure he was really seeing what he was seeing. Across from him was a beautiful young girl with jet black hair, ruby painted lips, and enchanting eyes. She didn’t need the skull paint on her face for Andy to realize who he was staring at. His hand instinctively reached for the knife on the table but it was hotter than he was expecting, and he had to pull away to keep from getting burned.
“You don’t need that,” the girl shook her head, speaking in English now. “You already know who I am, and if you were capable of killing me you would’ve done so weeks ago, I think. You know who I am, don’t you, Andy Barclay? That’s why you came here, isn’t it? You came here to kill me?”
Andy stared without blinking. Eventually, he spit out the words, “El Cucuy.”
The girl laughed, “La Coca… but it’s okay. I have lots of stories about me, most empty and useless. I don’t blame you if you’re only working with half-truths. You can call me Rosa, though.”
“You’re a monster,” Andy shot out, trying to keep from raising his voice. His eyes were watering. “You took those kids, you killed them, ate them? I came to stop you.” Andy grabbed at the knife, now not caring that it was too hot. Little wisps of smoke rose up from under his grip, but he held on anyway.
“You’re holding on,” Rosa said, almost impressed. “Maybe you could kill me. But would you really want to?”
“You’re evil,” Andy said through gritted teeth.
“Evil?” Rosa replied. “Is that so? A monster, maybe, but evil? Are all monsters evil, Andy? Have you met many monsters?”
“I’ve met enough.”
Rose shrugged and reached across the table for Andy’s beer. He flinched and she froze, but when she saw that he wasn’t going to swipe at her with the knife she took his beer and helped herself to a sip. “Lo siento, I’m just very thirsty.”
Andy glared as he watched her bright red lips wrap around the tip of his bottle. She set the bottle down on her side of the table, and Andy glared. “Give me one reason not to kill you.”
“I can give you more than one, if you’d like,” Rosa smiled. Despite all of this, she was smiling. “I didn’t kill those kids. I didn’t eat them.”
“But the stories—?”
“—the stories were stories, Andy. People use stories to make sense of things they can’t make sense of.” Rosa leaned back in her seat and Andy looked down at his hand holding the smoking knife. He set it down and let his burned hand relax.
“How do you know my name?” Andy asked.
“I am la Coca,” Rosa shrugged. “There isn’t a suffering child out there who I don’t know. I feel the pain inside of you, Andy Barclay, just as I felt the pain in all of those niños I helped this summer. I took them, yes, but I didn’t kill them, I didn’t eat them. The stories say I take bad children, that isn’t true. I take children from bad parents. I feed off of the grief and pain left behind, which may be enough to label me a monster, sure, but we all need to eat. The children are in better places, with families who will care for them, with people who will care.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Believe me, don’t believe me, it makes no difference to me, Andy. But this is my truth. I came to share it.”
Andy sniffed. “Who gives you the right?”
“Who indeed?” Rosa took another sip of the beer and set it down again. “I’m going to use the restroom. If you still feel the need to kill me, go straight for the heart. That’s the easiest way.”
Rosa stood up, let her gaze linger on Andy for a second, and turned around to leave. Andy simmered with confused rage as he watched her disappear into the lady’s room. He didn’t know what to do. His body was frozen with indecision. Even if she didn’t do the things her story said she did she was still a monster, right? Monsters had to be dealt with. She took those kids away from their families like the state took him away from his mother. She did it to feed, to eat the grief left behind, what if all that other nonsense about them being in a better place was bullsh*t? Andy rubbed his temple and bounced his knee up and down as nerves consumed him. A second later, he gripped the burning handle of his magic knife, stood up, and marched into the ladies room.
He found her standing in front of a mirror at the sink when he got in. She was touching up her red lipstick, and she made eye contact through her reflection, noticing the knife in his hand.
“If you’re going to do it, do it.”
Andy hesitated. A tear rolled down his cheek. Rosa turned around.
“I’m not evil,” she said. “I may be a monster like you call me, but I am not evil.”
“What I’m feeling,” Andy banged on his chest with his free hand. “Are you feeding off of this? My pain? Is it tasty, is that why you came here?”
Rosa shook her head, “I have no interest in your pain, Andy Barclay. I feed off of the misery of the miserable, those who make the world suffer to match their level of discontent. You are not a meal for me, you are like the children. You’re someone who needs to be guided back to happiness.”
“No, no that doesn’t make any sense,” Andy looked down at the knife he was holding. It didn’t burn anymore. “I don’t have anyone. I’m alone… I came here alone. There’s no one to take me from.”
“I’m not guiding you now, I’ve already guided you.” Rosa smiled. “You came here searching for me. In a way, I led you away from home, made you missing. The social workers and teachers who treat you like garbage and look at you as a burden, they’re the ones I’m feeding from, but the meal has dried up. Their grief was a surface grief, pain over the consequences of their failure and not the fact that you may be in trouble. But I didn’t do it for me, for a meal… I led you away for you.” Rosa moved in closer. “I needed you to see that the world is full of evil, and the world is full of monsters, but not all monsters are evil.”
Rosa was right in front of Andy now. She reached for his hand, and he dropped the knife when her fingers touched his wrist. The knife hit the bathroom floor with a clatter. Andy breathed deeply and let shock wash over him. This had never been a hunt… it was a lesson. Rosa put a hand on her cheek and lifted his face so he had to see her.
“I know the pain you’ve gone through, Andy, I know how Charles Lee Ray destroyed your life… but you’re almost a man, and you must understand the difference. Evil. Monsters. Once you can tell the difference, nothing will be able to stop you from helping those who need you most.”
There was nothing in the world more volatile than a impulsive teenager. Andy pulled Rosa in close and kissed her, unsure of what the kiss meant or what it could mean, but knowing that he needed to do it. She kissed him back and on her lips he could taste the sour residue of his own pain, but through it, searching for the truth against her tongue and in her mouth, Andy saw what that pain could become. There was evil. There were monsters. They didn’t have to be one in the same. Andy kissed Rosa for a while more until she was gone, disappearing in his hands. He looked down and his magic knife was gone as well. He stood alone in the women’s room, exhausted and in need of processing all of this, but he didn’t stay long.
Andy turned and left and the next morning he was heading out of Mexico. He wasn’t sure what his future had waiting for him—if he would return to Kent and finish his time at the military school or continue on with his new lease on freedom—but he didn’t let the unknowns of the future slow him down. It would take him some time to fully understand the lesson La Coca wanted to teach him, and it would take some time for that lesson to come in handy, but eventually it would, and every time Andy Barclay met a monster he or she liked in the future, Andy thought of the summer of 1999 and the time he spent trying to hunt la Coca.
It changed him forever.
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