C. E. Murphy - No Dominion - A Garrison Report

Her fingers were two inches from the hoodie when the air shriveled up against her skin, turned cold, and pulled her backward through a hole the size of a pinhead.

There was power. That was all she could tell. Power latching on to her own magic, hauling her up a slick emerald path full of loops and twists and turns, like a roller coaster. More like a waterslide. She’d never liked waterslides. The joinings weren’t smooth enough and the water wasn’t deep enough, so she always fell out of the inner tubes and scraped herself up on the joints. This one was smooth, though, and fast enough that the friction made her skin burn. It burned the itch away, which helped. It also buffed her like she was a diamond—an emerald, she guessed—so that she wasn’t so much glowing as shining. Like a star, if stars were green.

She ran up against another pinhead-sized hole, and got shoved through head first onto a shag carpet floor.

For a minute she couldn’t see anything. There was light, lots of it, but it was all coming from her, drowning out everything else. She wasn’t even afraid yet, but something was bubbling deep inside her chest. A warning, one that ran deeper than anything Suzy had ever known. A warning that up until now she’d used her magic for others, but that she had no sense at all of the depths she could plumb if it was herself she needed to protect. It gave her confidence, though at the same time it ran so deep it was itself a little scary. She was the child of gods, and no one in their right mind messed with gods.

Weirdly, the thought calmed the deep warning inside her. There couldn’t be much that threatened gods. Joanne Walker did, but Joanne knew where Suzy lived. She would have called if she needed her, not magicked her away. Anybody else who thought they could hold even a semi-god like Suzy was either very, very powerful, or very, very dumb. She could give them the benefit of the doubt for a little bit, and assume they were dumb.

The itching had stopped. She thought that was the other reason she wasn’t going absolutely crazy with fear and anger. She’d fought zombies, after all. She’d gotten through the horror of her parents’ murders, and then she’d watched her birth father sluff off mortality to become the Green Man. She thought she could handle anything as long as she didn’t want to scratch her skin off.

Joanne was always using her powers to discover things. Suzy’s didn’t work like that, or at least, she didn’t think they did. But at the same time, she felt confined somehow, like she’d been pulled into something with a specific size and shape. She stretched out her hands and encountered resistance. A flare of her own magic shot around that sensation, exploring it in the same way Suzy had explored parks when she was little: up, down, under, over, around, in. That had been what her mother called organic exploration, using her whole person to learn the world. This was the same thing, except Suzy’s wholeness included magic now.

She’d never explored a pentagram before, though. It surrounded her, wobbling with paltry human power. It would barely hold a mouse, much less her. Suzy laughed. Someone would have the scare of their life and end up grateful that they’d conjured a polite modern teenage granddaughter of a god into their flimsy pentagram instead of one of the much, much worse things that were out there. She would start by shattering the pentagram, just to show them how much trouble they might have been in. She reached out to flick it away with a fingertip.

Just before she did, a high-pitched, familiar voice squeaked, “ Suzy ?”

Suzy froze mid-motion, then moved her hand above her eyes, like shading them would help her see out of the pentagram when she was the one emitting the light. “ Kiseko ?”

“Holy crap holy crap holy crap holy cra—” The litany came in a whisper, followed by an even softer, “How do we shut this thing down , Rob? That’s Suzy , holy crap it’s not a nature god you dork it’s my friend Suzy how did we call Suzy OMG WE DID MAGIC—”

The last part was overrun by a boy’s intense, soft voice: “Kiseko, be quiet or we’ll wake your parents up—”

“Well I told you we should’ve done this at your house, your parents are all big into the paranormal thing—”

“First, my parents would have noticed us raising a pentagram in the basement,” the boy said very dryly, “and second, they’d ground me until I was fifteen for messing with this stuff without supervision. Kiseko, stop panicking, you’re just feeding the power circle with your emotion. That’s not Suzanne Quinley , is it?”

Kiseko blurted, “Yes!”

The unseen boy groaned and muttered something Suzy couldn’t hear, then stepped up to the pentagram, putting his hands against it. Suzy could see him then, a tallish boy of twelve or thirteen, with a serious, apologetic expression. “Aunt Jo’s going to kill me,” he announced. “I’m really sorry. We’ll get you out of there in a minute.”

“Who are you? What are you—oh, nevermind. Kiseko talked you into this, didn’t she?” Suzy sat down and put her face in her hands, not sure if she should laugh or cry. “Kiso, what did you do ?”

“Oh, I just wanted to try a little magic,” Kiseko said with an impatient stomp of her foot. “Robert, why won’t this thing come down?”

“You’re putting too much energy into it,” Robert repeated. “You need to calm down.”

“Kiseko,” Suzy said into her hands, “doesn’t do calm. She’s Kiseko Anderson, Superhero.” Which was nicer than super-emo, which was what Suzy’s mother used to call Kiseko. She used to say that Kiseko was hysteria waiting to happen. She’d said it with a smile, but she hadn’t been wrong. The first time Suzy had met her, Kiseko had been sprawled full-length on her belly, sobbing piteously into her arms. There had been no one else around. Suzy, concerned, had crouched to ask what was wrong.

Kiseko, seven years old and dripping snot, had lifted her head, discovered her parents had gone inside rather than remain on the street to observe her tantrum, and shut off the waterworks as if they’d never happened. Her face wasn’t even red from crying. Kiseko had sat up, wiped her nose, and shrugged. “I don’t want to live in Seattle. My parents made me move here.”

“Oh! You’re the new family? I watched you move in. I’m Suzy.” Suzy had offered her hand like a little adult. Kiseko had burst out laughing and hugged Suzy instead. Overwhelmed, Suzanne had thought Kiseko was the strongest, wonderful est, and most dramatic person she’d ever met. They’d made friends, been friends, through everything, right up until Suzy’s parents and four high school students had been murdered.

Kiseko hadn’t come to school for a week, not even for the memorial services. She’d barely been able to say goodbye when Aunt Mae had come to take Suzy to Olympia. It wasn’t that Suzy blamed her. It was only that she’d never seen Kiseko take the world at anything less than full tilt, and her friend’s pallor and quietness still haunted her.

It wasn’t in evidence now, thought. Kiseko tossed her hair proudly. “Superhero nothing. Super witch ! I built a power circle! I still don’t get why you’re in it.” She squinted through the brightness at Suzy. “Or why you’re glowing.”

Robert mumbled, “She doesn’t know about y—” and then more clearly said, “If you don’t know about Suzanne, why did you want to try magic in the first place? How did you know it was real?”

Kiseko stopped with arms akimbo and looked at Robert like he was about half his actual age. “The zombies , hel lo ? OMG, don’t tell me you didn’t even notice the zombies —!”