Authors: Felicia Jedlicka
Third wheel didn’t begin to describe how she felt running behind the Batman and Robin of the Kola Peninsula. She already knew that Gypsy was proficient with a sword, but Cori was starting to suspect that she slept with her pistol under her pillow. Ethan outran them both and stopped just outside the seducers level.
When they caught up, Ethan glanced at her. “Maybe you should stay here.”
“She wanted to come, Ethan,” Gypsy scolded him. “If she can’t handle this then she shouldn’t be taking my place.” Gypsy checked the bullets in her cartridge before slamming it in and offering Ethan a childish tongue thrust.
“Have you ever dealt with Nikusui?” he asked blocking the door with his foot so Gypsy couldn’t go ahead of him.
“No,” Cori said sheepishly. “I know they’re flesh eaters.”
“Nikusui are bitches from hell that can suck harder than a thirsty prostitute.”
“Christ Gypsy!” Ethan glared at her.
“I’m sorry, is this turning you on?” Gypsy asked with a well performed fake sympathy in her voice.
Ethan opened the door for her. “Go!”
“Ladies first,” She offered him the lead.
“Just stay back, and don’t use your gun unless your life is in danger,” Ethan said to Cori before he shoved Gypsy through the door ahead of him.
Cori looked down at the freshly assigned gun. It felt strange, just being handed one, without any concern of who she might shoot with it. She was a decent shot, but she was far more comfortable with her rings than the gun. She hoped that was a good thing.
Just outside the door, a young woman stood facing Ethan and Gypsy, eyeing them carefully. Cori’s approach offered little interruption to her examination. She seemed to know who the threats were.
“Hey Nuki, whatcha doing outside your cage?” Gypsy drawled sliding to the woman’s right side. To Cori’s confusion, Gypsy slipped her gun back into its holster and locked it down tightly. Ethan did the same and moved to the woman’s left side.
Not sure what to do, Cori lowered her weapon, but didn’t put it away. Ethan signaled her to stay and she nodded. The woman before them resembled a reject from the cast of “the grudge.” Her long black hair was intentionally tied to drape over her face like beaded curtains. Her eyes split and looked at both Ethan and Gypsy as they approached.
Ethan attacked first, and landed his face squarely in the woman’s recently extended leg. Gypsy took her turn and ducked a fist, only to be met with the knee of the same leg that had hit Ethan.
Even with Ethan’s lightning fast return, his punch was blocked. Gypsy jumped back to her feet like a good martial arts student should, and took a few punches as well. The Nuki may have looked human, but her movements were inhuman. She countered each punch and kick as if her two sides could work independently to defend themselves.
Cori took a few steps forward drawn in by the teamwork that Ethan and Gypsy used. Ethan and she had spent so much time on separate paths lately. They never had a chance to work together like this.
After several lost blows, they started synchronizing their movements. Her left punch to his right was a mirror image. The duplicity must have confused the demon, because her defensives started to slip.
“You should of stayed where you belong, sucker fish!” Gypsy chastised as they both got in a good kidney shot.
The Nuki bucked forward and her eyes shot forward, looking directly at Cori. Gypsy and Ethan noticed the change immediately and grabbed her arms to pull her down. The woman’s mouth unhinged. The hissing sound she made sounded asthmatic, but the strong inhalation causing the noise was not debilitated in anyway.
Cori could feel prickling on her skin. When she looked down she could see flakes of skin peeling from her body like the remnants of a bad sunburn. She felt the pain familiar only to those who have dared wax their legs. The pain radiated her body making her eyes water.
Ethan and Gypsy pulled their guns, but the woman pushed back against their restraining arms and threw them on either side of Cori.
She raised her own gun to shoot, but stopped when she felt a familiar pain. Her rings were burning. The hot glow of warded power dissipated the pain, and she no longer saw precarious levels of dandruff coming off her.
The Nuki tried harder, but to no avail. Finally, she released her maximum inhalation and stumbled from the effort without conclusion. Cori lifted her free hand and focused on the woman’s body. She didn’t want to kill her or hurt her, just offer enough of a blow to knock her off her guard.
The ball of fire wasn’t large, but it shot out fast, hitting her in the chest. She flew back against the concrete wall behind her. The fire ball hadn’t done much damage, but her head meeting the wall probably was more than necessary.
Ethan and Gypsy rushed over to collect the woman. Ethan took her torso while Gypsy held up her legs. “You okay?” Ethan asked as they carried her away.
“Yeah,” Cori said checking herself. She looked pink, but she wasn’t in any pain. If anything the experience was like a full body exfoliation.
When she looked back up to ask if they were okay, she caught sight of the glare Gypsy was offering her before they ducked into the back hall. Apparently, Gypsy didn’t appreciate her help.
“How mad is she?” Cori asked when Ethan joined her in the cafeteria. He tossed her a bottle of aloe to soothe the pink of her skin.
“Don’t worry about her,” he said slumping down in a chair across from her. He rubbed his forehead like he was coaxing away a headache.
“Are you mad?” she asked wincing at the answer before he gave it.
“What’s to be mad about?” he asked lowering his hand to look at her.
“I tend to make a mess of things.”
“What mess? The creature is imprisoned. No one got hurt. You got a free skin peel. It’s a good day to me,” he said returning to his massaging.
“Still, I bet Gypsy ripped you a new one for letting me come along.”
“I said don’t worry about her,” he snapped. Before Cori could decide how to feel about that, he reached over the table and touched her hand. “Gypsy’s just Gypsy, I’m used to it, but it doesn’t mean I want to relive it, or let it centralize our conversation. Okay?”
“Okay.” She nodded and he let go so she could rub the aloe on her body. “Can I ask you a bunch of annoying questions now or would you rather fetch an aspirin first?”
She could see his smile under his hands. She liked making him smile. It seemed to be a rare thing for him in this version of things. “Go ahead.” He sounded exhausted, but the amusement in his voice, told her he would rather be interrogated by her, than reprimanded by Gypsy.
“How come the rings repel some powers and not others, and for that matter, why am I able to get shot while wearing them?”
“You’ve been shot?” He said uncovering his eyes.
“Yeah, never took though, so it doesn’t count.” He narrowed his eyes at her and she smirked. “If I tell you everything we’ll never get back to my questions, and I really need to have answers.”
“Cori, I’m not the ring keeper. Honestly, last night was a lucky guess.”
“An educated guess,” she corrected and he shrugged. “I need a few more educated guesses. Just help me understand what I’m missing. Fill in the gaps.”
“Okay, tell me what you’ve absorbed and not absorbed.” He sat up straight and leaned over the table for a proper conversation.
“I’ve absorbed the elemental powers, and Cleos’s psychic power. I may or may not have absorbed some of the time bubble. I’m not really clear on how that particular nugget worked. I was trapped by a transmorph for several weeks without any major repercussions, and I got healed by a disperser without any interference by the rings.”
“What’s a disperser?”
“I only know of one, but you probably haven’t met him. He’s your best friend.”
“I have a best friend?”
“Well, I can’t qualify that. Heaton and Duke could be considered your best friends as well.” He pinched his brow no doubt surprised by at least one of those names. “Anyway,” she touched his hand to draw his attention back to her. “About the rings?”
His attention turned to her hands instead of her questions. He drew her hand upward and slipped off a ring to examine it closer. In the meantime, he kept her hand in his. “If the disperser wasn’t hurting you, the rings wouldn’t have blocked it.”
“But why can’t I disperse things then? Not that I’ve tried, but the only thing to ever come out of those rings has been tangible power.”
“That’s the answer then,” he said slipping the ring back on her finger. You likely have to touch the person to absorb the power, but more importantly that power has to flow out of them and into your grasp.
“Nuki today, was trying to hurt you. Once the rings established that, they blocked her power, but touching her would not transfer or initiate anything, so you could never absorb the power. So in that sense, yes, only tangible powers that are activated by touch may be absorbed.” She must have looked confused because he repositioned to explain further. “Your rings are the plug. The person with the power is the socket. You can’t get power unless you touch the plug to the plug in.”
“Once I have the power, I seem to be charged indefinitely, but it’s hard to make them work on command. Some powers come out better with some emotions. As you’ve seen, I tend to have accidents when I get overly agitated.”
“The rings are designed to protect you. If you are in danger, your defenses rise. I can only assume that the emotions get earmarked during the absorption. If you want to keep wearing them, assuming Danato allows it, you will have to show him you can wield them as well as a gun.”
Cori sputtered an objection that made him raise his brow. “Sorry, I probably should have mentioned that my gun privileges were revoked.”
“Why was that?”
“I shot Belus,” Cori said it so matter-of-fact-ly, that she was surprised when Ethan started laughing himself into tears.
“It’s not funny, I almost killed him,” she defended firmly, but she giggled at his uncontrollable reaction. “Speaking of guns,” she spoke up to be heard over his riptide of guffaws. “Why can I be shot with them?” She leaned back to wait for an answer.
“That’s easy,” he said bringing down his laughter to a finale of coughs. “Magic protects you from magic. Once you introduce manmade pain, you imbalance things. That’s why there’s no magic left in the world. The artificial energies cancel out the metaphysical ones, which by design are far weaker. That’s why this place harbors so many piggy backing creatures. Not a lot of technology, along with a high concentration of magical energy.”
Cori smiled at him. She was starting to like this Ethan a lot. She wondered if her own Ethan might someday harbor the knowledge that he did. She was far from studious, and didn’t have high hopes to know any more than she had to, but she could definitely see her Ethan someday knowing as much as Belus and Danato.
“Hey, what do you say we see what those things can do?” He smirked.
She intended to ask how Danato would feel about that, but she realized she didn’t care. She wasn’t really responsible for any repercussions in this version of reality, so there was no sense in getting excited about breaking a few rules.
Gypsy had lost face. It wasn’t about Cori specifically. She would have been pissed about anyone usurping her efforts. She had managed to restrain herself in front of Cori, but holding back that tide of emotions only left Ethan to take the brunt. She couldn’t remember everything she said to him, but she definitely remembered slapping him. It wasn’t the first time she had hit him, but this was the first time she thought he might actually hit her back.
That only added to her irritation. The game was being skewed by Cori’s presence. She had long since held Ethan under her boot heel, but he was getting bolder and cockier. She didn’t understand how mere hours could change him so fast, but it was just one more reason for her to put a stop to this whole genie business before time was up.
Cori’s yawn prompted a chuckle from Ethan. “How can you still be tired? You were asleep for nearly an hour.”
“Yeah, thanks for that by the way,” she said unable to contain another yawn. “I thought you said the rings would protect me from that?”
“They did.” He snorted. “If they hadn’t you’d be asleep for a week.”
“That’s a pretty hefty risk for experimentation.” She stopped midway through the section. The usual tweets, screeches, and chitters echoed around them. “I could get stuck here.”
He stopped with a sigh. “A very high dose of adrenaline would have brought you out of it for long enough to make the request. I wasn’t plotting against you.” His voice lulled with disappointment at her accusation.
“Sorry,” she mumbled and walked on with him.
“Since we are on that topic…” His feet slowed, but he didn’t look at her as much as his own feet. “When were you planning on going?”
“Trying to get rid of me already?” She smiled.
“On the contrary,” he stopped and met her gaze. “I just want to know how much longer I get to have you.” Ethan offered no apologies for the subtext of the statement. Her lips and tongue felt too dry. She swallowed and remoistened before she could speak.