Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

“So here’s the thing,” Jonathan said. “I’m a real asshole sometimes. I didn’t mean to—”

“I am asshole too,” Lohengrin said, putting his hand on Fortune’s other shoulder. Jonathan caught their reflection in the vanity mirror. With Fortune’s head low and the pair of them flanking the guy, it looked like an old print he’d seen of Lancelot and Merlin supporting King Arthur.

Nice detail , he thought. He filed it away for when he wrote the book. Fortune’s head came back up.

“I know where it is,” he said. Before Jonathan could think through what the words really meant, Fortune was gone. Jonathan and Lohengrin fouled each other trying to get out of the dressing room door, so Fortune got to Peregrine’s study well before them.

It was another beautiful room—soft light, teak furniture, soft carpet. One wall was dedicated to images and mementos of the life of one of the world’s more glamorous wild cards. Magazine covers, newspaper clippings, plaques with her name and the appreciation of President Barnett and Senator Hartmann. Three Emmy awards. A People’s Choice award. Trophies and plaques detailing her charity work and other random appreciations. Pictures of her floating above the New York skyline, flying past the Eiffel Tower. Standing, wings spread and eyebrows raised, before the pyramids. Jonathan was struck by how young she looked back then. 1987. He’d been six years old.

Fortune sat on the corner of the wide, low, wooden desk. A simple loop of leather cord hung from his hand, a red bauble at its end. In the dim light, the setting looked brass. Jonathan and Lohengrin both stopped dead.

“Fortune,” Jonathan said, and licked his lips. “You should maybe put that down. You know, just for a second.”

Fortune looked up. He was smiling. He shook his head. If they hadn’t been drunk, Jonathan and Lohengrin might have found the right words to talk him back. They might have had the presence of mind to leap forward and snatch the thing from his hand. If they hadn’t been drunk, they wouldn’t have been there in the first place. John Fortune tossed the amulet in the air, caught it, and dropped the cord around his neck. The red stone bauble struck his chest with a low, heavy sound, and then hung there, innocuously.

Jonathan Hive stared at the thing as it shifted slightly against Fortune’s shirt. After a moment, he remembered to breathe. Fortune laughed ruefully, touching the amulet with his fingertips. “Nothing,” he said. “Just another fairy tale that didn’t come true.”

“Look, Fortune. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

John Fortune started screaming. Lohengrin’s mystic armor appeared, a white luminous medieval knight. Jonathan hopped back a step and then forward again. The brass setting lay on the floor, two hollow half-rounds, like a walnut shell with the nut missing. The stone was gone. Fortune was ripping off his shirt, shrieking like a girl.

“What!” Jonathan shouted. “What is it?”

“It’s inside of me! Holy shit! Get it out!”

A lump moved under Fortune’s dusky skin, something forcing its way through him, up his chest, over his collarbone.

“Lohengrin!” Jonathan screamed. “Knife! The big knife! The sword! Get your sword! Cut it out!”

“No!” Fortune cried, but whether he meant the thing crawling in his flesh or the plan to cut him open wasn’t clear.

The knight shifted his attention from Fortune clawing at his own flesh, to Jonathan’s trembling finger. The lump passed under Fortune’s jaw, and then up through his cheek. As Lohengrin stepped forward, the sword glowing into being in his hand, the thing reached John Fortune’s forehead. Something like a detonation filled the room: light and heat and a kind of shockwave that Jonathan felt in his bones though it didn’t blow back his hair or his clothes. The air smelled of dust and overheated stone.

“Mem Gott.”

Where John Fortune had been, a huge she-lion crouched, light streaming from her like a small sun. She bared her teeth at Lohengrin, who stepped back, his sword held at the guard before him. The lioness howled.

“What the fuck! “ Jonathan shouted.

The lioness turned to him, startled by his voice. When she opened her mouth, he saw the billowing flame in her throat. He barely had time to expand out, wasps exploding in all directions, before the blast of fire passed through the space where he had been.

The study descended into chaos. Lohengrin swung his sword, the tip cleaving pits of lathe and plaster out of the walls. Flames burst over him like water while the lioness leaped and roared. Jonathan, not sure whether to flee or try to save Lohengrin from Fortune, or maybe Fortune from Lohengrin, buzzed madly around the room.

The lioness leapt and snapped, growled and screamed. Jonathan split himself, rolling and dodging every time the lioness shot at him.

Fire , Jonathan thought as he fled out to the hallway, why does it always have to be fire?

Lohengrin staggered out, victim of a lucky swipe of the lioness’s huge paw. The lioness followed, pressing her advantage. The screams from the beast’s throat were terrible.

Lohengrin seemed to be fighting a defensive battle, keeping the lioness at bay and trusting to his armor for protection from the flames. The lioness had no such compunction. Her lips were pulled back in a snarl that would have made Jonathan certain that he was about to die if he’d been back in his human form.

With a howl, the lioness leapt past Lohengrin and into the main room. The open architecture served her. There was no way to block her path, and she was able to leap from one end of the room to the other, claws digging into the walls and floor.

“Stop!” Lohengrin shouted. “You must stop!”

Fuck that , Jonathan thought. Go! Let it go! But without the benefit of lungs or a throat, all he managed was a slightly louder buzzing.

An alarm blared. Jonathan felt a few of his wasps cook off and die. And then a few more. Either he was getting worse at dodging the lioness …

No, no—the house was on fire.

In the study, flames had taken the desk and the wall of awards. The hallway was also alight, tongues of blue-and-orange flame licking at the walls and ceiling. The lioness roared again, and flames belched out, breaking off Lohengrin’s armor and setting the curtains on fire.

Jonathan condensed back into human form at the front door. Another fire alarm went off, the high squeal like the house itself screaming in fear. The sound seemed to shock Lohengrin and the lioness both. Two heads—one armored the other leonine—turned toward Jonathan. He threw open the door. “Get out! Now! Out!”

For the first time, both the lioness and Lohengrin noticed the flames sheeting up the wall, the swaths of sword-slashed and burning furniture. To Jonathan’s profound relief, they bolted for the door.

The lioness paused on the lawn, her head shifting from Jonathan to Lohengrin and back.

“Ah. Good kitty?” Jonathan said. The lioness howled, turned, and sped away into the night. Lohengrin took two fast steps after her, and then stopped. The lioness was already half a block away, and still accelerating. Lohengrin’s sword and armor vanished.

Flames flickered inside the house. Smoke was billowing out of the movable skylight in Peregrine’s bedroom. Jonathan sat on the lawn. Lohengrin stepped over and squatted down beside him.

“The house,” Lohengrin said.

“Yeah,” Jonathan said. “We torched it.”

“Where are your clothes?” Lohengrin asked.

Jonathan sighed. “In the house,” he said.

“Und the key for the auto?”

“In the pocket,” Jonathan agreed. “With my wallet.”

In the distance, sirens were just starting to wail. Jonathan sucked his teeth, Lohengrin looked around, shamefaced.