Chapter 1
Maybe 99% of life, what’s really important, never makes it into the news, or TV, or history books. Yes, the catastrophes, the disasters, war, pestilence, all the four horsemen of the apocalypse, make it there, but life….
Who am I? Jeremy’s the name. No, not that Jeremy, you’ve probably never heard of me.
Who am I? Let’s see….
Live with single mom. Check.
Bored with school. Check.
See dad once in a blue moon. Check. (Parents, here’s a tip. When you stop fighting because one of you leaves, it doesn’t get better, just quieter.)
Skater. Not any more. (But I ruled!)
Cyber-punk. Heh heh. Let me just say that for a short time my GPA was a lot higher than it had any right to be. But I put it back.
Alienated. Check.
Life sucks. Check. Well, not really any more.
Smarter than all my teachers put together. Well, what do you think? Especially if none of them have room temperature IQs.
How I do my math homework:
Step one — look at problem.
Step two: think for a few seconds.
Step three: write the answer.
(Repeat until finished)
The problem is that I don’t show my work. So I never get full credit. Actually since there is no work to show, this seems unfair, but what can I do?
One time I turned in a paper for English. It was about a sci-fi book I read that I really liked. The teacher gave me an F. Said I copied it. Sigh. So I had to go up and explain what the big words meant to prove I had written them. Then the teacher said, “Don’t use such big words in your writing.” I said, “Room temperature. But only because it’s cold today.” The teacher didn’t know what I meant but sent me to the principal’s office anyway.
OK so now you know I’m a disrespectful stuck up know-it-all who hates his school, his family and his teachers. Actually I like the principal. Because when I get sent to the office, which happens maybe twice a week, he just says, “You again,” and gives me one of his books to read. Since he’s actually of at least normal intelligence I usually find the books interesting. He doesn’t send me back because he knows I’m bored.
That should be enough to get you off the starting line so you can understand this story.
So like I was saying there’s a lot of life out there that most people never see. They spend all their time watching TV. But while they watch, stuff is happening that they could only dream of, better than any TV show that’s for sure. And a hell of a lot more dangerous.
For me it started one cold, rainy day. I was feeling “goth” that day, so I dressed the part. Spiked hair (but just black, not colored). Black jacket, black pants, all kinds of metal. But no piercings. I can’t stand needles and piercings. I actually faint when I get a shot. I don’t know what it is, I have no control over it. Call me a wimp, I don’t give a damn. I just can’t stand having something poke a hole in me.
Also I had this cross. I got it from a relative, a great-aunt. She gave it to me one time when she was visiting. She told me in her strange, accented speech to keep it and wear it all the time.
Now this cross is about six inches by four inches. I mean, it’s not a little dangly thing you can put under your shirt. Plus it’s kind of thick and heavy. It’s really intricate, made of black iron. It looks really funky and I like it. I wore it once or twice, and some guy I didn’t like too much gave me a hard time about it. So I started wearing it all the time just to piss him off. Plus I got a funny, weird feeling from it and I kinda liked that feeling. It was like a link to a past nobody talked about, that I didn’t know about until my great-aunt came.
So anyway I had this cross that I wore a lot because somebody didn’t like it. (So what right did he have to say what I wore or not? He was a bully anyway.)
OK so there I am sitting on the bus home wearing my full goth regalia. (Except for piercing.) We stop. Then suddenly it’s like the world changes. The door opens and this girl gets on. Her hair is dark and it is being blown around by a different wind than the one that is blowing the rain against the window of the bus. But strangely it’s like nobody sees her.
Actually I didn’t see her at first either. I was leaning forward on the seat in front of me. Then it was like there was a tingling feeling and there she was. I looked straight into her eyes.
Her eyes went wide in surprise. She walked on to the bus and I watched her as she came toward my seat. Then she sat down next to me.
“You can see me, can’t you.”
“Of course,” I replied.
“You’re not supposed to be able to see me.”
Well, what could I say to that? I said, “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
Then I realized that she was terrified. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m being chased. If you can see me, he can probably see me too.”
I thought for a second. “I couldn’t see you at first. It was like you suddenly appeared out of nowhere.”
She brightened a bit. “Do you have something iron on you?”
“Yes, this cross,” I replied.
She looked at it without touching it. “That’s it,” she said. “You probably touched it just as I got on the bus, and that’s why you could see me suddenly.”
I thought a bit. “Who’s chasing you?”
She shuddered. “I thought he was a friend…I’ve known him for years. It’s horrible to see someone you thought you knew and trusted suddenly change into a beast and a murderer.”
Again I didn’t have much to say. But I wanted…I wanted to feel that different wind on my face. “Can I help?” I asked.
She looked at me. “Can you hide me? Do you know any place for me to go?”
“Come over to my house,” I said. “You can hide in my room. My mom never comes in.”
“I need to find someone,” she said. “I don’t know where she is but she will help me if I can get in touch with her.”
My stop came up. “Come on, let’s go,” I said. We left the bus together.
My house was about half a mile from the bus stop, through a not-too-good area of town. Suddenly I knew something was wrong. I don’t know how I knew it, but I said, “Run!” She looked at me in surprise. I grabbed her hand and started pulling her along. I had the idea of cutting through a back alley and losing–whoever it was, someone I hadn’t even seen yet.
But it was a mistake to get out of plain sight. No sooner had I pulled her into the alley with me than I saw the black, hooded figure standing in front of us. He flung a hand toward me and it was as if I were picked up and thrown across the alley. I slammed into a dumpster and lay there stunned. She was trying to run but he threw a hand at her and suddenly she was stopped as if she were paralyzed.
Then she turned and put up a hand. He grimaced a little. “So, still the rebellious little brat,” he said.
“At least I’m not a murderous traitor,” she replied, though I could see her legs shake.
“Too bad you had to see that,” he said. “I was hoping you would keep thinking of me as your kind old uncle. I didn’t want to shed blood, but I must be obeyed.”
While watching this my head began to clear. I touched my cross and suddenly it was like I was back to normal. The man’s back was now turned to me. Picking up a bar of scrap rebar that was on the ground, and clutching my cross, I stood and started walking up behind the man. Just as I did, the girl fainted. But before the man could do anything I whacked him in the back of the scull fairly hard, and he crumpled.
I went over to the girl and picked her up. She recovered quickly. “Grab that wire,” she said, pointing at some old fencing wire that was laying on the ground. We wrapped the man with the wire so he couldn’t stand or use his hands. “That will keep him busy for a while,” she said. “It should give us time to get away. He can’t do magic while he’s in contact with iron, and the steel wire has iron in it.”
Magic! I had suspected something of the sort, but I hadn’t had time to figure it out. We ran out of the alley and started a zig-zag path that I hoped would mislead the man so he could not follow us. But the girl seemed to have no fears now.
“I can keep him confused for a while,” she said. “He won’t be able to follow us, and I’ll be able to hide.”
She looked at my cross. “Good thing you had that thing to hang on to,” she said. “It made you invisible to him–that is, to his magic sense.”
We soon reached my house. It was a two-story house with an attic, and my bedroom was the attic. I had to climb a steep ladder-like set of stairs to get there, and my mother hated coming up so she never did, she just would stand at the bottom and yell at me.
My dad had put those stairs in and they were one of the things she had yelled at him about when they fought. “Why can’t you put in real stairs?” she would yell. But he just ignored it. (Until one day my mom was sitting on the couch crying, and there was a letter on the coffee table that I could see was in my dad’s handwriting. Since then I’ve seen him maybe twice a year.)
My mom wasn’t home, so I took the girl up into the attic. It was big enough for her to be comfortable there. She could even wash up there and stuff. But I would have to bring food up. I would have to be careful because my mom hated me to bring food upstairs and if she saw me she would make me bring it back down. Then she might even come up to check and see if I had any more up there.
That night we talked until late. The girl told me about her family. They really weren’t her family–she was an orphan. But they had taken her in and taught her the strange things that they did in that place, and she had learned.
She had thought they lived in harmony there, but her illusions were shattered when the hooded man–one of the leaders–had killed the old, kindly man who was the head of their household. Now she had to find his wife–the lady who taught the women, and who had taught her.
“How will you find her,” I asked. “I don’t think it’s safe to go out.”
“No,” she said, “but I can talk to her if I can make the spell work. Then she will come and find me or tell me where to go.”
I yawned. I went over to my desk and did a few homework problems. It took me about fifteen minutes. By that time she had fallen asleep in my bed. “Bother,” I thought. “I’ll have to sleep on the floor.”