Knight Watch Page 5

  “There are two of you,” she said. “Is that new?”

  “I’m sorry?” I asked. “New in what way?”

  “Have you always been two people, or is this new? Am I looking at a Janus situation? Do I need to have the two of you bound into shackles of fell-born steel and welded back together, one piece of soul at a time?”

  “Try it and I’ll tear your eyeballs out,” Chesa said simply.

  “It’s not new,” I said, before the steel-haired woman decided to use the rather large grenade launcher in her hands. “For us, anyway. We’ve always been different people. I mean, these people. I’ve always been me. And Chesa’s always been Chesa. Right?”

  “So you’ll probably want different chairs, I assume. One for each of you,” the woman said. “Can someone get me another chair?”

  One of the guards snapped to attention, then hurried out the door and returned mere seconds later with a folding chair, which he deployed right behind Chesa, then returned to his place at the door. The whole operation took no more than ten seconds. It was as if they had a stockpile of folding chairs just out of sight.

  “So we’re good? You can sit down now? I’m not missing anything?” the woman asked.

  “Pretty sure we’re missing something,” Chesa said, but she sat daintily in the chair, crossing her long, armored legs. I realized I was staring and fumbled my way into my seat.

  As I sat down, the woman leaned the grenade launcher against her chair. Chesa cleared her throat and shifted a little farther away.

  “We’re hot?” the woman shouted. When no one answered, she twisted around and looked at the empty control room. “Miriam, are we good to go? You can hear me? Okay. First thing, I’m going to need your name. Rast, we have on record.” She pointed at Chesa, who gave her full name. Chesa Glorious Lazaro. I always thought she was making up the middle name, but she insisted it was real. After Esther had finished writing this down, she turned back and looked us both up and down. “Sounds familiar. Might be something in the archives on you. And Rast, you’re looking rough. The janitors didn’t wash you?”

  “I was already awake,” I said. She nodded, as if that explained everything. “You’re the boss?”

  “Cellular degradation and the inevitability of death are the true bosses, aren’t they?” She asked, then lay the open folder on the table. I could see pictures from the day’s events. The crumpled front of Mom’s car, burning faire displays, the torn sod of the soccer field...all of it framed by the mound of scales and muscle that was Douglas “Kracek” Hosier. Chesa creased her brow and leaned forward to examine the photos, then opened her mouth as if to ask a question. She never got it out, and the woman continued talking. “But yes, I’m as close to a boss as the Knight Watch has. Not an elite, mind you. Just the organizer. Esther MacRae.”

  Chesa was still going through the photos. She picked up a picture of Kracek’s broken skull lying next to the ruin of Mom’s car. I glanced over at her. Deep confusion was running through her eyes.

  “They didn’t give us a secret decoder ring when we woke up. Or much of an explanation at all, so you’re going to have to go slow,” I said, then nodded to Chesa, hopefully in a way that Chesa didn’t notice. “Maybe slower for some of us than others.”

  “Gods, I hate when I have to do this part...” Esther said, rubbing her eyes. “What did they tell you?”

  “Let’s start easy. What’s an elite?”

  “Tembo, Clarence, Bethany...maybe you. Folks with an affinity for the unreal. They have a connection to their mythic identities and are able to affect the myths. They really didn’t explain this?”

  “This is a dragon,” Chesa said.

  “Yes. And your friend here killed it with his car. Which is impossible.” Esther fixed her steely gaze on me, and I found myself squirming. “And impossible things interest me.”

  “But...it’s...” Chesa looked up at me. “That’s a dragon. Where are the propane tanks?”

  “Yeah. Not your typical renaissance faire,” I said.

  “We can add renaissance faires to the things I hate. Just tempting fate, those places. We try to keep the mythics away from them, but Kracek had a lot of influential friends, and let’s be honest, if a dragon wants to go somewhere, you’re not going to stop him by waving around a copy of the Treaty of 1876 and threatening to start an inquiry.”

  “No, I suppose not,” I said. “So he wasn’t supposed to be there?”

  “None of us were. But the actuator picked up some weird activity, and then we found out the dragon was in attendance, so we mobilized the team and set up a perimeter. And then you happened, and all hell broke loose.” She shuffled her papers and then pressed her palms into the table. “Which brings me to my next topic. I’ve got some questions for you, Mr. Rast.”

  “Please just call me John. My father—”

  “God, please don’t say your father is Mr. Rast,” Chesa snapped. “This is serious business. Do you realize that this is a dragon?”

  “We’ll get to that later. After you’ve answered my questions,” Esther said.

  “Actually, let’s start there,” I said. “Why don’t you explain how a dragon came to be in a soccer field during a renaissance faire? Because that seems kind of important.”

  “This is my interview, my safe room, and my team. So we’re going to start with my questions,” Esther said. “Unless you think you can make it to that door before my guards bring you down.”

  I looked up at the guards, both of whom looked eager for us to try. I didn’t think they would shoot us, but I also didn’t want to learn the sorts of nonlethal methods they had at their disposal. I glanced over at Chesa. She shrugged.

  “Always good to start with a threat,” I said. “Sure. What are your questions?”

  “This is your car?” she asked, flipping a photo across the table to me. I looked down.

  “My mother’s car, actually. She’s going to kill me.”

  “Do you know where she got it?”

  “Not really. She’s had it for ages. I think she got it used.”

  “Anything unusual about its origin? A used-car lot she had never been to, for example, and was never able to find again? Might it have been a gift from a one-eyed man with a little dog, who appeared in her dreams and offered great power, if only she would keep the car safe for a thousand years? Just as an example.”

  “Just as an example,” I echoed. “That’s an awfully specific example.”

  “It’s happened before. Only that was for...” she shuffled the papers in her folder, finally reading from one of the many handwritten pages. “For the care and protection of a boiling cauldron of giant’s blood.” She glanced up at me again. “So no?”

  “No. There might have been a down payment, but I sincerely doubt it was in blood, or for blood, or written in blood,” I said. “It was just a car.”

  “No. No it wasn’t. ‘Just a car’ doesn’t kill a dragon. And what about you, Mr. Rast. You seem suspiciously comfortable discussing blood contracts. Have you ever spoken to a goat?” I stared at her for a long moment, hoping she would hear the words she had just said and choose to say something else. Something rational. When she simply returned my stare with that same no-nonsense look on her face, I gave up. I shook my head. She nodded, glanced down at her notes, and continued. “Danced with, or on top of, or through, moonlight?”

  “I’m not really a dancer.”

  “He is *not* lying about that,” Chesa said.

  Esther nodded noncommittally and shuffled through her papers.

  “Have you ever engaged in drinking competitions with any of the elder races? For the purposes of this question, I would accept dwarves, darrow, underkin, feral janitors, certain Presbyterians, and any of the usual types of devil.” She had a checklist, and a pen at the ready. “Ring a bell?”

  “I once drank beer out of a boot in Cincinnati,” I said. Her eyebrows went up.

  “Possible Germans,” she said as she wrote herself a note. “But nothing
else?”

  “I’m not even sure how to answer that question,” I said. “I’ve lived a nice, boring life. I’m a nice, boring person. There’s nothing interesting about me.”

  “Also not a lie,” Chesa offered helpfully. She was getting over the dragon thing pretty well, to my unending misery.

  “Nice, boring people do not kill dragons,” Esther said. “Though you’re right. Outside of your sword-related hobbies, there’s not much to commend you to the life of a hero.” She fanned out her papers, tapping absentmindedly on the scroll to the side. “Must have been the car.”

  “I think I’ve had enough of this,” I said. “And, though I’m getting a little tired of asking, I’ll give it one more go. What the hell’s going on here?”

  She ignored me, scanning through the papers and muttering to herself. Finally, she called over her shoulder. “Turn it off, Miriam. Investigation’s over.”

  “Investigation?” Chesa asked. “You think we had something to do with this...this...”

  “It’s a dragon. Just get used to it,” I said.

  “I do,” Esther answered over me. “Or more accurately, I think it had something to do with you. I don’t know what, yet, but I’m really looking forward to finding out.” She moved the papers around on the table, then drew a whole new sheaf out from the back of the folder and set them in front of us.

  “What are these?” I asked.

  “Applications,” she said. When neither of us said anything, Esther creased her brow. “You want the job, don’t you?”

  “And what job is this?” Chesa asked warily, in exactly the same way you’d ask a crazy person which voice in her head she was talking to at the moment.

  “Heroes,” Esther answered. “We’re in the hero business.”

  Chapter SEVEN

  THE HERO BUSINESS

  “A job? You’re offering us a job?” I asked. “You’re crazy. No. Wait. This is crazy. All of it.” Chesa was staring down at the application like it was a thinly smeared turd that she had just found at the bottom of her lunch salad. “All we want to do is go home and forget this even happened!”

  “Not many people make it this far,” Esther said, squaring the pages and closing the folder. She pushed a couple of pens in our direction. “Again, not a threat, but most people die before we get them in this room.”

  “The janitors?” I asked, cringing.

  “John, you and Chesa experienced a complete collapse of the mundane world. You more than her, but it’s clear you’re both involved, or you wouldn’t have ended up here. All those people picked up by the containment team are now telling the police stories about a gas accident. Even the first responders have formed a convenient fiction about propane storage and a fire-breathing carnival prop that went wrong. The evening news will cover it without mentioning dragons, or swordfights, or any of that. The mundane world will go on thinking this was a tragedy and nothing more. But not you. You saw, and killed, a dragon. With a car.”

  “Yes?” I said.

  She slammed the folder down on the card table. “It shouldn’t be possible!”

  It was all I could do to not laugh in her face. She didn’t seem the kind of woman who dealt well with laughter, even in laughter-appropriate environments, which this was not.

  “That shouldn’t be possible? That?” I finally snapped. “Lady, have you walked outside this room? There’s a guy with an octopus for a hand, another whose eyes glow and can fill a cup with his mind, and I’m pretty sure Tembo is more than a clever sleight-of-hand guy! So if you think driving a car into a dragon is an unreasonable strain on your credulity, boy, have I got news for you!”

  She waited patiently while I yelled, watching me as I paced back and forth in front of the card table. I didn’t even remember getting up. Chesa was watching me curiously, clearly waiting for me to run out of steam. Eventually I got dizzy, either from lack of blood or general hysteria, and sat back down. But I kept yelling for a while.

  “And the girl with the daggers! I knew there was something kooky about her, I knew it! No one fights dagger like that, but there she was, jumping around like a horsefly at a picnic, one place in one breath, completely gone the next. And Clarence? First off, what kind of name is Clarence? And what was he thinking, with that ‘This is tough enough without keeping the idiots safe’ line? Could he have been more of a jerk?”

  “Clarence nearly died on that field. He may walk again, someday, but he may never again carry the sword into battle outside of his domain. So. A little respect.”

  “Look, this hasn’t been my best day. You have to admit that freaking out is a perfectly acceptable response in this situation. So why don’t you stop screwing around and tell me what this is all about?”

  Esther tapped the folder against her palm for a while.

  “Are you going to take the jobs?” she asked.

  “We don’t even know what you’re offering,” I said. “And furthermore—”

  “I’m in,” Chesa said. She scratched her name across the bottom line of the application and flipped it back to Esther. “You probably have some magical way of filling the rest of that out. I’m no sucker.”

  I turned to her slowly and blinked once.

  “But, but...the dragon,” I said.

  “Sure, a dragon. And monstrous janitors, and knights, and mages...it’s pretty clear what’s going on here.” She snapped her fingers and smiled. “This is the entrance exam for some kind of magical realm. Next level Hogwarts bullshit. I can’t sign up fast enough.”

  “Ten seconds ago, you didn’t believe in dragons at all. Now you’re fully on board? Just like that?”

  “Of course. I can’t believe you aren’t,” Chesa said. “John, the only thing I ever liked about you was the fact that you wanted to be a knight nearly as badly as I wanted to be an elven princess. And,” she deflected her attention briefly to Esther. “Correct me if I’m wrong here, sister, but I’m pretty sure we’re being offered the opportunity to do precisely that.”

  There was a long moment of silence. I raised my brows at Esther.

  “Right?” I asked.

  “More or less. You’ll have to figure out your roles on your own, but that stuff is often driven by internal priorities and your connection to your own mythic past. It works differently for different people. I can’t make any promises.”

  “Elven princess!” Chesa sang. She sprang to her feet and pirouetted around the room, bopping each of the guards on the nose and even smiling at me once, briefly, before she returned to her chair. She sang the whole way. “Princess princess elven princess yay!”

  When Chesa was settled, Esther looked at me and gestured to the paper.

  “And you, Sir John of Rast?”

  I didn’t answer. I just signed the application and shoved it across the table. I was a little miffed at how quickly Chesa was accepting all of this. I was the one who had killed the dragon, after all.

  Esther collected the applications, squared them up, slipped them into her folder, then nodded.

  “You can turn it back on, Miriam.”

  “You know there’s no one in that control room, right?”

  “A lot of our staff is already dead, or at least stuck somewhere between living and dying,” she said. “You’ll get used to it. So. This is how things work. The world, unreal and mundane, fantastic and drab. This is the secret that will change your life.

  “Myths are real. They’re not true, not in the way you think about truth, but they’re very real. Dragons, djinn, oni, the Ramayana and Tuatha De Danann...you name it, I’ve seen it, tracked it, and then either killed it or given it a stern lecture and made it sign a release form. There’s even some stuff out there we don’t know the origin myth for, the legends of dead traditions, forgotten by everyone but the legends themselves. But they’re out there, and they’re just as dangerous as the rest.”

  “Get to the part about elves and unicorns,” Chesa said anxiously.

  “Don’t interrupt. I’ll lose my place.” E
sther looked up at the ceiling and started mumbling to herself.

  “Djinn, lecture, dead traditions, dangerous...right. Got it.” She cleared her throat and continued. “These things aren’t content to live on in storybooks, or in the dreams of children. They break loose into the world, using their powers to manipulate and control the simple minds of mundane humanity. And the mundane world has little defense against them. The world has passed so far from its mythologies that unbelievable events are just that...unbelievable. Reality warps itself in such a way that the mundane world is protected from these unreal creatures. Djinn appear as charismatic humans, dragons mask themselves as accountants, or CEOs, or rock stars, and trolls make history in professional sports. Even—”

  “Wait, sports?” I asked. “You’re saying mythological creatures come to earth, disguise themselves as humans, and...play baseball?”

  “There was a devil, a goat, who lived in Chicago. One day—”

  “No, never mind, I don’t want to know. But why would they disguise themselves? Why not just, you know...be a dragon?”

  “Given a choice, I would be a dragon, personally,” Chesa said. “The most beautiful dragon. With shimmering scales, and—”

  “Don’t make me regret bringing you in on this, lady. We could just wipe you and drop you in a cornfield somewhere, and then it’s between you and your therapist.” Esther rubbed her face in frustration then started over. “It’s not a disguise. It’s reality, protecting itself. I imagine Kracek would have preferred to walk around in his scales and claws if he could. But reality wouldn’t let him. Kracek truly was Douglas Hosier. He was able to tap into certain powers of his kind...mind control, weaponized greed, even physical strength...but when those powers manifested in the mundane world, reality would twist itself into a knot trying to hide them. Rather than mind control, Doug would just be a very convincing speaker, with a knack for the stock market and too much gym time. It’s not an illusion. It’s just a false reality.”