AM7: Durance, chapter 5 (Patreon)

I am going to go ahead and make a commitment to writing the last two Aberrant Magic books the way I originally conceived of them. This chapter drops some pretty "unmissable” hints about what that might look like. And yes, I am on track with Nano, so I think I'm going to take time out this weekend to finished Saddled.  

 ---------------------------------

Darren scrolled through his texts as he waited for Les to answer. The man had been more than freaked out, and now Kavon was meditating up on the terrace. The only part of their apartment that even approached luxury was the second floor office and large attached terrace overlooking D.C. Kavon  retreated to the space when he needed to recharge his magical batteries or when he wanted to panic in private.

Darren’s phone chimed as a new text came in.

--Nope. Anita=work :(

Darren cringed. Usually Les texted in sentences. For all his informal language in person, his written work had a formality that rivaled Kavon’s. For him to break out the sentence fragments, times were tough. And if Anita had gotten stuck working late, Les didn’t have anyone he could talk to about this shit. And since Kavon and Coretta had only put magical protections on the team members’ phones, not the phones of their significant others or family members, Les couldn’t call anyone else and talk to them on a potentially compromised line. Darren pulled his legs up under him on the couch and dialed the phone.

Les answered with, “If you’re calling to tell me the world is ending, don’t.”

“Once upon a time I asked if you would want to know if the world was going to hell in a handbasket,” Darren reminded him.

“Did I give you a sane answer and tell you to leave me to revel in my ignorance?” 

“Nope,” Darren answered.

“Damn.” Les’s humor reasserted itself with his exaggerated tone.

Darren hated that he had brought so much misery into his friend’s life. But at the same time, he couldn’t imagine hiding the truth from Les. “Are you okay?”

“Do I sound okay?” Les asked, but then he sighed. “I’ll be fine. I’m just feeling a little stressed.”

Darren snorted. “Yeah, tell me about it. Look, I didn’t want to ask around Kavon, but have you kept in touch with Angel?” 

“No… why?” Les asked, and a half second later, he said in an exasperated tone, “Bruh! He’s a baby. Don’t drag his ass into this mess.”

Darren was fairly certain that all of them were babes compared to Bennu and the other ifrit. However, they didn’t get to sit out the coming battle. “If history repeats itself, the evil ifrit will make it hard to hide from trouble.”

“Evil ifrit. That’s a mouthful.”

“What should we call them?”

“Demons?” Les suggested.

Darren sighed. He wondered if he had been this annoying when he’d first found out that he’d landed in the middle of a prophecy. Probably. Luckily, he couldn’t remember his own annoyingness. “I think that's a little inflammatory.”

“Good,” Les said firmly. “I think this is a time for some inflammation. Besides, have you looked up ifrit on the Internet? Man, that is the stuff of nightmares. I know the mythology isn’t the same as reality, but if these guys have even a fraction of the bad mojo I read about, we are in serious shit. We’re also in serious shit if Muslims hear you say ifrit. You might as well call them demons. Calling them evil demons seems a little redundant, though.”

“That’s what the Egyptians call the old jinn.”

“Jinn?”

“Shamans, adepts, and guides. They see them as the same species, and that species is separate from humans.”

“I’m fairly certain I should take offense,” Les said in a flat tone. “Calling shamans and adepts something other than human is pretty much step one toward convincing the mundane world that hunting us to extinction is acceptable.”

Darren hadn’t thought of it that way. Most of what they knew came through Salma, and none of them had questioned her language. However, as an FBI agent, he knew the dangers of incorrect labelling. The second agents put a label on a crime or an unsub, the ability to see past that label and investigate new avenues nearly vanished. In the early days of the team, Kavon had assigned agents to play devil’s advocate and chase leads that contradicted the team’s theories. That had been before Darren finely tuned his ability to go off on a tangent.

He reached for his laptop and pulled up a thesaurus. While he typed, he asked Les, “So, who do you think our jailbreaker will target as a partner?”

Les snorted. “You’re assuming either of us can think like one of this old guides.”

Darren put guide into the thesaurus. “It’s just the two of us brainstorming. I’m not asking you to present an argument in front of the director.”

“True.” Les sighed. “Honestly? I have no idea who he would choose as a partner. I still can’t believe one picked your sorry ass. But if this guide or his shaman are smart, they’ll make sure to keep any criminal activity inside the shamanic community. I’m not kidding when I say that too many of our people still don’t go to the police.”

Darren hated that, but he did understand why it happened. His gaze landed on one of the synonyms. “What about calling them vanguards?”

“You mean an advance group in front of an army? I don’t know… how do you feel about making mundanes irrationally insecure and defensive?”

Darren grimaced. Les had a point. “I hate that we have to worry about anti-Talent hate when we have bigger fish to fry.”

“Yeah, you won’t feel that way if we all get burned at the stake.”

“Speak for yourself,” Darren teased. “My guide will get me out of trouble.” The second he said the words, butterflies woke in his stomach. Bennu would save him if he could, but his absence worried Darren more than he wanted to admit. He offered Les the next word on the list that might work. “Guru?”

Les quickly retorted, “Naked guy on a mountain. Roue?”

“Roo-ah? What the hell is that?”

Les’s emotionless voice suggested he was reading straight out of the dictionary. “A debauched man, especially an elderly one. The sample sentence makes it pretty clear this is a mighty negative word. It might work for these jailbreakers.”

“No way in hell will people use a stupid sounding name like that, and it’s not related to being a guide, and most English speakers know our partners as guides.” Darren frowned. “These guys have been locked out of earth for a long time. Salma and Thuya both mentioned that the ifrit want to explore the world and experience new things. I get the feeling that Bennu doesn’t understand the concepts of time and change. I wonder if they’ll go for someone interesting rather than someone with power. Maybe we should look at celebrities or adrenaline junkies. Everyone puts their lives on social media these days, so we should be able to find a list of people whose hobbies include jumping off cliffs and cave diving.”

“I dare you to suggest that to Coretta or Wyatt,” Les said in a disgusted tone. “And I double dare you to ask Milton for that list. That man does not have much patience for anything he perceives as stupid, and that’s a stupid idea. So, rapscallion sounds too goofy and potentially culinary, but what about profligate?”

Darren frowned. “What the hell are you looking up?”

“Villains,” Les said. “If you’re going to drag me into a comic book plot, then I’m giving these evil ifrit a comic book name. And face it, we need a name that doesn’t have the baggage ifrit does. If these old guides are evil, then it’s too easy for anti-Talent groups to make the argument that other guides are simply a lesser form of evil. I had to leave Hawaii to get away from the asshole shamans who thought I had an obligation to serve them, but I still miss the way the islanders saw guides as just one more part of nature. When I transferred here…” Les sighed, but Darren had known the man long enough to hear what he hadn’t said. He had struggled with the depth of the prejudices that existed in the DC area and even in the rest of the country when they travelled.

“Docent,” Darren said.

“What’s that?”

Darren read from the definition. “A person who is a knowledgeable guide, especially one who conducts visitors through a museum and delivers a commentary on the exhibitions.”

Les didn’t answer immediately, which was usually a good sign. “That works for your ifrit. In fact, I think it works better for guides like yours and the one who partnered with that detective in El Paso.”

“Zach Johnson,” Darren offered.

“Yeah, him. So, we call the good guys docents. It’s got a nice boring connotation. No one is irrationally afraid of museum workers. So, for our jail breakers, how about durance?”

“Endurance?”

“Nope, no en. Just durance. It’s an archaic word for imprisonment. Yeah, I know these guys were technically exiled, but we keep calling them our jail breakers. I mean, if we didn’t have to worry about bad PR, I would be happy to call these guys ifrit, evil… I would even add irresponsible, immature and psychopathic, but since I would prefer to avoid that sort of rhetoric…”

“Durance it is,” Darren said. Anything he could do to make his friend more comfortable with the way the world was changing, he’d do it. He only wished he could stop the battle from coming at all, or failing that, find a way to protect his friends. For the first time, Darren had a bone-deep understanding of Kavon’s overprotectiveness. Les didn’t have a docent. He didn’t have enough Talent to defend himself. And worse, he had a wasp guide. The two of them would throw themselves into any fight, no matter the cost to themselves. That terrified Darren.

And while they didn’t know whether they were hunting one durance or several, the ice walls of the ifrit prison were cracking. Darren had no idea what would happen if that ancient prison failed. And he had so little power to stop any of it.

Chapter 6: https://www.patreon.com/posts/am-7-durance-6-22652631 

Chapter 7: https://www.patreon.com/posts/am7-durance-7-22675390 

Chapter 8: https://www.patreon.com/posts/am-7-durance-8-22684193 

Chapter 9: https://www.patreon.com/posts/am-7-durance-9-22744305 

Chapter 10: https://www.patreon.com/posts/am-7-durance-10-22817775 

Chapter 11: https://www.patreon.com/posts/am-7-durance-11-22905312 

Chapter 12: https://www.patreon.com/posts/am7-durance-22974766