Chapter 7 - Very Wrong

When Mrs. Park and I got back to the mansion, we found Iset, Igor, and Conrad still in the kitchen, talking about how to prepare for an unknown amount of time without water, gas, and electricity. They were surprised to see us back so soon, and it wasn’t the happy kind of surprise either.

Things didn’t get any happier as I told them about the barrier. Or the line of magic I’d found.

“It was coming up from the ground?” Iset said.

I nodded.

That was why it had looked muffled. It was coming up through the dirt, grass, and leaves to reach me. Real light never would’ve made it, but no matter how similar they looked to me, magic didn’t behave like light.

“And you say it was moving?” Iset prompted.

The rate was slow but steady. At a distance, it was hard to notice, but when I got up close, I could watch it creep from one grass blade to the next at an unvarying pace.

“Is that possible?” I asked.

It was a stupid question, really. Maybe I was hoping she’d tell me it was a weird new strain of bioluminescent glow worm that only I could see, and not an ominous blue line of magic creeping toward the mansion like a tightening noose.

She didn’t bother answering my question.

“Conrad, Emerra,” she said, “go out and learn as much as you can before it gets too dark.”

“Iset, the sun is already down,” Mrs. Park pointed out.

“There’s some light left,” Conrad said as he grabbed his boots.

“And Conrad has pretty good night vision,” I assured her.

“But you don’t,” Iset said.

There was an unusual firmness to her voice that made me pause.

She went on, “There’s no point in staying out if you can’t see. Learn whatever you can, come back when it gets too dark.”

The problem with the phrase “too dark,” is that it’s so subjective. While Conrad and I were out inspecting the magic line behind the mansion, we got into a spirited debate over what qualified as “too dark.”

“Iset wants us back,” he insisted.

He must have noticed how firm Iset’s voice had been too.

“The line is plenty bright,” I said.

“If I can’t see it, it doesn’t count.”

“If we wait a few more minutes, there might be enough starlight—”

“Do I have to carry you?”

“What? Like, princess style? In your arms?” My eyes narrowed, and I tapped my lips a few times. “I think piggy-back would be easier.”

“Over my shoulder. Like a sack of potatoes.”

That sounded uncomfortable enough that I decided to put off the rest of the investigation until the next day.

When we got back to the mansion, we found Iset in the library. Her desk was littered with books. Three of them were open in front of her. There were two battery-powered camping lanterns, one on each side of her desk.

“Did you learn anything?” she asked.

I collapsed into the nearby armchair. There was no road to where Conrad and I had wanted to go, so we had to go there on foot. Since we were short of daylight, I had run as much as my injured foot would allow. I was tired, and the cuts were a chorus of throbbing pain.

Maybe I should’ve had the wolfman carry me.

“Not much,” I said. “The barrier and the magic line are behind the mansion, like we thought they would be. We can check tomorrow, but at this point I’d be surprised if there were any gaps.”

“Do you think the magic was moving in from the barrier?”

“We think so,” Conrad said. “At least the line of magic followed the shape of the barrier.”

“The shape?” Iset said. “I thought the barrier was a circle.”

“That’s its general shape, but it isn’t a perfect one.”

“It’s more of a circle-esque blob,” I said. I tried to picture the sections that I’d seen as if I’d been viewing them from above. “Like a circle drawn by someone with a shaky hand.”

Iset sat back in her chair. She seemed to be staring at the nothing past my shoulder.

“Iset?” I said.

“I thought it would have been a circle,” she muttered.

“Why?”

“Because that’s the easiest shape for magic to take. Circles and spheres. If it isn’t a perfect circle, it’s because someone went through a lot of trouble to change the shape.”

When I don’t know what’s going on, I tend to look at other people to gauge what kind of an emotional reaction I should be having. I glanced at Conrad. He was frowning, his ears were out to the side, and his brows were low over his eyes. Whoever had gone to the trouble of shaping the magic had managed to annoy a lycanthrope.

“Tomorrow I’ll have to ask you to go out again,” Iset said. “We need to know how big the barrier is, its exact shape, how fast the magic circle is shrinking, and, if possible, what both of them are centered on.”

“We’ll need the topographical maps of the area,” Conrad said.

“Of course.”

Iset stood, picked up one of the lanterns, and disappeared into the bookshelves. Conrad and I followed her over to the antique flat file at the edge of the room. It looked like a large square dresser with sixteen drawers. Most of the drawers were only two or three inches deep. On a boring March afternoon, I’d snooped through it. That was where Iset kept all the maps, prints, and bizarrely oversized books.

Big Jacky owned a bound series of Audubon’s Birds of America, Double Elephant Folio size, from 1838. The only reason I didn’t spend hours a day admiring them was because I was afraid the friction from my eyes moving over the pages might ruin them.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Do we have any maps or plans of the mansion?” Conrad asked.

“Yes, but those I’ll have to search for,” Iset said as she pulled out a map and laid it on top of the flat file.

“Where are they supposed to be?” I asked.

“They’re supposed to be here,” Iset said, “but I suspect they’re lost in Big Jacky’s study somewhere.”

My stomach let out a growl that would have been comically loud if it hadn’t been so tragic.

Conrad looked at me.

“Sorry.” I put a hand over my belly. “Igor’s spoiled me. My stomach thinks it has rights to dinner every night. ”

Iset finished shutting the drawer of the flat file. “Neither of you have eaten yet.”

“We’ve been distracted,” Conrad said.

“Do you think Igor made anything to eat?” I asked.

The wolfman nudged my arm. “You go check on that.” To Iset he said, “I’ll start searching Big Jacky’s study for the plans.”

Since the electricity was out, the antique brass wall sconces had been brought out of retirement. I walked down the main hall, through the gentle glow of a dozen taper candles. The tall brass backs of the sconces reflected their flickering light.

Igor was in the kitchen, surrounded by more burning candles. He had pulled one of the stools around to “his” side of the kitchen island. He was sitting on it while writing at the counter. When I asked him if there was any dinner, he said that he’d prepared some cold food for us. I could make sandwiches or eat it as a charcuterie selection.

“Try to open the fridge as little as possible. The power is out,” he reminded me—as if I was likely to forget.

He bent back over the paper and grumbled as he worked.

His grumbling lacked its normal energy, but I couldn’t tell if he was tired or despondent. I decided to give him some space. That meant that I wasn’t going to ask him what he was writing or what a charcuterie was.

I did, however, peek over his shoulder at the paper when I walked by him to grab a plate.

It was no good. Igor wrote in a delicate, flowing cursive that fit the deftness of his hands and nothing else about him. It would’ve taken me a full minute of staring to decipher it.

He noticed me leaning over him.

“It’s a list,” he explained. “Since there’s no way of knowing how long we’ll be stuck here, I’m taking stock of the food and how we might be able to prepare it.”

“Oh.” I stopped leaning.

“Don’t worry. You won’t starve.” He added in a much darker grumble, “At least not for the first three weeks.”

“Thank you, Igor.”

The sincerity in my voice was too obvious to hide. When Igor heard it, he scowled at the paper and let out a loud humph, which was the closest the man ever got to “you’re welcome.”

“Kappa will be the problem,” he said. “Almost everything he eats requires refrigeration to stay fresh.”

A shot of panic lit up my brain, but with everything else going on, my head already resembled the Las Vegas strip. What was one more light among so many?

“Will he be okay?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Igor said.

For some reason, I found Igor’s standard bluntness comforting. He would never tell me what I wanted to hear, but I never had to worry about him lying to me or trying to sugarcoat an unpleasant truth.

He went on, “I’ve already moved most of Kappa’s food to the freezer. With luck, it’ll take longer to thaw. We can supplement with tuna, but we have to be careful about the salt.”

He dropped the pen and used both hands to rub his forehead.

A new wash of nervousness rose through my body, drowning out all my other vague fears, and leaving me cold.

An invisible cage, a magic noose, the threat of starvation—yes, it was scary, but all of it had felt far off and somehow surreal. The threat was out there. Nothing immediate. Nothing I could really sink my anxiety into.

And Igor had always seemed so unflappable. I had unconsciously assumed that there would never be a situation so dire that our master chef couldn’t gripe, grumble, and complain his way through it.

But in that moment of weakness, Igor hadn’t made a sound.

He’s tired, I told myself. That’s all.

I didn’t believe me.

I forced myself to sound casual: “Where is Kappa, anyway? Did he already go to bed?”

Igor picked up his pen. “I haven’t seen him.”

“You mean he hasn’t come in for dinner?”

“Not yet.”

I looked at the clock, then I looked out the window at the darkness which, at that moment, definitely struck me as being “too dark.” Not that Kappa would care. The only person with better night vision than him was Count Darius Vasil, the vampire.

I still didn’t like it.

“I think I’m going to go find him,” I said.

As I walked over to the French doors, Igor said, “Watch yourself.”

I nodded without bothering to ask what I was supposed to be watching for. It was that kind of an atmosphere.

I stepped off the deck and into the yard while calling Kappa’s name and listening for a response.

The moon hadn’t risen yet, but there were plenty of disjointed stars to cast their silver light over the scene. The highlights of the trees and plants looked blue and teal while the things in the shadows were navy, gray, or black. Here, away from the city lights, being outside at night always made me feel like I was living in a painting from Picasso’s blue period. There was something somber and beautiful about it.

I wandered past the short stone wall that marked the edge between the cultivated yard and what Conrad called “the wild yard.” The manicured grass tapered off, and the natural forest floor took over. Through the years, various groundskeepers had made some changes to the wild yard, but not many, and each one was carefully constructed to blend in with what was already there.

One of the changes had been to add a koi pond. Kappa claimed it was his. He had no real right of ownership, but no one had challenged him, so it had become (at least in my mind) Kappa’s koi pond.

He wasn’t there.

I followed the footpath back to the opening in the stone wall but turned away from the mansion toward Conrad’s bench.

That was another unofficial ownership. Conrad hadn’t installed the bench, but he was the one who used it the most. It was off the footpath, at the edge of a small clearing. When you were sitting down, you could look up and see the sky. Cold weather didn’t bother a guy who wore a permanent fur coat, so I would find Conrad out there even on winter nights, relaxing in the silence—which my arrival promptly ruined.

I was born noisy, and I would probably die noisy.

The bench was empty, but I stopped beside it and called Kappa’s name again. Then I shut my mouth and listened hard.

Further out, I thought I heard the soft, whiny mewing of Kappa in distress.

I ran toward it.

As I got closer, the sound grew louder. He was bawling. It was a sound of sadness, and the only time it stopped was when he had to breathe in. His blue-green-brown skin blended into the night, making it hard to spot him, but when I honed in on the crying, I could make out his shape.

Kappa was beyond the last trees in the wild yard, where the woods dropped away for a space, leaving an open area that sloped toward town, giving us a wide, beautiful view down the mountain. He was sitting on his butt with his webbed hands on the ground between his legs. All of the fins on his head drooped, and as I caught sight of him, he opened his mouth wide to let out another heart-breaking cry.

I was already shooshing him when I ran up to his side. “No, no, Kappa. Buddy—baby—what’s wrong?”

He heard me and turned with a gulp. When he raised his arms, I scooped him up and held him to my chest. He wiped his slimy face on my shirt and tried to stifle his crying. It made him hiccup.

“Come on,” I cooed. “I’ve got you. Are you hurt?”

He shook his head, wiping yet more slime into my shirt.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

He paused with his face still tucked against my chest, then nodded.

I laughed. There was, maybe, a smidgen of relief in it. I had found him, and he wasn’t hurt.

I stroked one of the fins on the side of his head. “I get it, buddy. That’s how I feel when I haven’t had dinner. Let’s go in and get you some food.”

He mumbled into my shirt. If the night hadn’t been so quiet, I would’ve missed what he said.

“I’m lost.”

My breathing stopped. When it resumed a moment later, my heart was beating faster than normal, and my breathing was shallow.

Bog-monsters didn’t get lost. Bog-monsters had a bunch of senses that gave them a natural GPS that human technology could only be jealous of. The world was not a mere half-inch crooked; if Kappa had lost his sense of place—in his own territory—then something was very wrong.

As I struggled to think of anything I could say to comfort him, my eyes drifted over the area where the open space met the scattered woods further down the mountain.

There was something there. Moving.

My eyes narrowed.

It was a line of somethings. Dark shapes crept out of the shadows. At first I guessed there were a dozen of them, but more kept emerging from the trees as I watched. I couldn’t keep count. Many—that was the best I could do.

And the way they moved was weird. I would’ve called it a shamble, but it was too fast for that. The upright figures lurched forward by a series of clumsy jerks that moved each leg in turn. Their arms moved too, out of rhythm from their legs. It was a wonder that they could stay upright, let alone walk—

But they weren’t walking. They were running. They were still a ways off, but I could tell by how rapidly they grew in my field of vision that they were covering the distance faster than I could at my best sprint. They were coming toward me and Kappa, and everything about them screamed “danger.”

Now, that was an immediate threat that I could really sink my anxiety into.