Anthology - SHADOWRUN - Spells and Chrome

Dog, ever battle savvy, found a spot a few meters in front of me and sat down. He looked expectantly from one ork to the other, as if hoping for a treat, but none of them acknowledged his presence. Apparently unbothered by the lack of attention, Dog yawned hugely, then rolled his head over his shoulder to cast a sideways look back toward me.

It took me a moment feel safe taking my eyes off the ork turks. I turned my attention to the curly mass of black hair pressed against my chest.

"Monica," I murmured. "Look at them."

She scrunched against me tighter. In her heart I was her kind; her protector. The protection part was a given, but the her kind part was no longer true-her genetic expression was unstoppable. In another-day? two?- she'd be fully ork and this scene would not be happening. She was already ork enough that the three thugs-and by extension their distant leader-read her as one of their own. Which, from her size, meant a child of five or six. Hence the chivalrous hostility.

"It's all right, kid." I was getting sick of that phrase.

Monica pulled her head away from my chest and tilted her face up toward mine.

"They need to see so they can understand."

She hunched back down. Pressing her forehead against my sternum, she rocked back and forth. I could imagine her eyes scrunched shut in denial.

Guttural growls made what the gang imagined clear.

Focus.

A new scent. A fifth ork; female. Near the fourth, wherever that was.

The breeze swirling in eddies worked against me. I might never have gotten a fix if Dog hadn't simply pointed his nose left to sniff the new smell. A shape-two shapes-in the dark beneath a stoop across the street. A doorway I'd walked past ten steps before getting shot at.

Now that I knew where to focus my senses, I picked up the heady tang of magic. There was a weaving back and forth between the spaces surrounding the ork woman in the shadows. She was one used to both worlds.

I tasted long enough to be certain this was not the magic that had blanked the alley, then withdrew.

"Kid," I said, keeping my voice low and comforting.

I pulled my left arm-the one on the side away from our audience-down and got my hand between Monica and my chest. Finding her chin, I lifted gently until she was looking up at me. Her face, shielded from the others by the hunch of my shoulder, caught a few rays of sodium light. It wasn't as wet or as blotchy as you might have expected from the amount of crying she'd been doing-which was good, because I wasn't sure I could keep a grip on the situation if our ork audience thought I'd been hurting her.

"You got choices. There are places besides the sprawl, orks that aren't squatters," I explained, pitching my voice to her alone. "Don't think facing these guys means you have to stay with them or on these streets. I got places you can go, people you can count on."

I cocked an eye at the three ork toughs. They were about where I'd left them, shuffling their feet and growling ork-like noises. I didn't speak or'zet well enough to track everything, but the gist of it was spurring each other on mixed with hints of disgust that no one had smashed my skull yet.

I was peripherally aware of the two shapes beyond them moving forward.

I looked back down at Monica, her chin still between my thumb and finger. She was gazing at me with something like surprise.

"You've got choices," I repeated with better grammar. "And the first one is how we go about getting out of here.

"These young gentlemen," I tilted my head in their direction, inspiring a fresh chorus of growls, "Are trying to rescue you and I do not want to hurt them. We need to show them what's going on before things get out of hand. Okay?"

Monica licked her lips, flinching slightly when her tongue hit a new tusk. She nodded.

I let go of her chin and put the arm back around her shoulders. Lowering my right arm, I turned her slowly until our audience could see her clearly in the streetlights.

There was a moment of silence.

"Huh," minimalist ork quipped cleverly.

The two from the stoop paused mid-street. Standing in the full glare of four sodium lamps, they were still shrouded in shadow-as though they'd brought the gloom of the hidden doorway with them. I knew the reality was I was being persuaded not to look directly at them, but I didn't bother pressing the issue.

"She got dumped," I explained. "She asked me for help."

"How you plan on helping, ujnort?" middle ork demanded. "What you think you going to do with her?"

My ears pricked at his awkward phrasing. My guess was street jive was not his default argot. Which appeared to support Julius' Sons of Sauron theory-you'd expect ork separatists to speak or'zet exclusively.

"I was thinking I'd take her home."

"You got a nice apartment?" Second ork, ranged to my right, gestured vaguely with his club. "Maybe some pretty pictures and toys for her to play with?"

"Pasadena," I said, keeping it simple.

"What's that? A Humanis dumping ground for freaks?"

Second ork was clearly the humorist of the group.

"It's a blended community," I said to Monica. "No ghettos. And between the college and the university there's a lot of opportunities."

I didn't come right out and say she could do a lot better in Pasadena than in the L.A. refugee camps, but no one in the alley misunderstood what I meant.

"She belongs with us."

The woman's voice was low, but it seemed to resonate off the plascrete beneath my feet. The alley walls didn't so much echo as repeat her words.

I was not surprised to discover the middle of the boulevard was no longer shrouded in darkness.

The speaker was ancient by ork standards and wrapped in several layers of symboled robes. Her hair was gold. I mean the metal, not blonde. Most folks would have thought it was a wig, but the filaments grew from her scalp. Fine as optical fiber, they were braided into intricate patterns-an echo of the web that connected her to the astral and to the city.

Her eyes were white with cataracts but she had no trouble keeping them locked on me as she strode forward. The black staff in her hand rang softly against the plascrete; metal, no doubt crafted from whatever she considered the bones of the world around her.

Middle ork shifted, making way for the street shaman without looking at her.

"This is our child, a daughter of this city." The resonance wasn't illusionary. I felt the vibration through my soles. "She belongs with us."

I felt Monica tense beneath my arm.

Another step, halfway between us and Monica's would-be rescuers, the shaman stopped as though she'd hit a wall. Her eyebrows-silver wire, I noticed-climbed toward her hairline. She looked down at Dog, sitting with his tongue lolling from his grinning mouth, and then back up at me. It took no great leap of logic to deduce what had happened; Dog had raised the astral curtain enough to let her know what she was up against.

The shaman gathered herself, and for a moment I thought she was going to try to overcome. I braced myself as well as I could while maintaining my reason, and tried to anticipate what attack would make sense to an urban.

Instead, she relaxed visibly. "Respect."

"Respect," I agreed and dropped the confusion spell. If she was giving respect, the three tough guys weren't going to give trouble.

For their parts, the bully boys blinked and muttered, looking disoriented as their minds suddenly cleared. The erstwhile comic gave me a bug-eyed stare, apparently the only one to realize why they'd been too bewildered to attack.

Monica stood straight as her own uncertainty evaporated. She didn't pull free of my arm, but she was no longer leaning against me for support.

My own cranium took a deep, cleansing breath. Don't try this at home, kids.