AM 7: Durance, chapter 11 (Patreon)

Kavon heard voices before he even reached the open door. “Bruh, I can't leave you alone for any time at all without you getting yourself in trouble. You just about scared Anita out of ten years of life,” Les was saying.

“Yes, I'm sure that's what he's concerned about. Me.” Anita’s voice was desert dry.

“I'm also concerned about the fact that my buddy keeps getting himself in trouble.”

Darren spoke as Kavon came around the corner, and never before in his life had Kavon been so happy to hear someone’s voice. “It's not like it was my fault. I was just walking down the street,” Darren said. He grimaced and shifted his weight, so he was clearly hurting, but he was awake and talking and able to exchange quips with Les. That was enough for Kavon.

Kavon let the door close behind him, and he felt the whisper of magic as a privacy spell settled over them. “You’re awake,” Kavon said. “How are you feeling?”

Darren smiled. “Like I was in a car that got thrown into a building. It doesn’t feel good.” 

Kavon reached for Darren’s hand. “Let’s avoid repeating that.” Kavon squeezed.

Darren squeezed back. “Right. No more getting thrown into buildings. Should I add that to the informal employee handbook Les and I have going?”

“Yes!” Kavon said firmly. “Put it on page one.”

“On it,” Darren said. He shifted, and immediately grimaced. Kavon felt a ghost pain in his own side, and he hurried to support Darren as he shifted to a more comfortable position.

“Don’t push yourself,” Anita said firmly, “or I’ll kick everyone out so you’ll rest.”

“I’m fine,” Darren said with a smile, but Kavon felt the ghost pain. Darren was usually better at hiding his injuries.

“No, you aren’t,” Kavon said firmly. “So listen to her or I’ll be the person kicking the others out.” Darren sagged back against the pillows, and Les patted his leg.

“Sucks we they gang up, huh?” he asked.

Darren rolled his eyes. 

“So.” Les clapped his hands together. “Since Coretta is stuck on scene coordinating the cleanup, she sent me to get the full story about what happened out there.”

Kavon tensed. He knew everyone in this room could be trusted, but he still had that bone-deep unease at talking about these issues. “How strong is the privacy spell on this room?”

Anita answered. “My guide and I have a lot of experience with privacy spells and we’re very good.” Anita’s monkey guide appeared at the end of Darren’s bed. It immediately jumped up on Darren’s bed, and from the Darren’s and Les’s reactions, the guide was visible to everyone.

“You are feeling friendly,” Anita said to her guide before giving Kavon a stern look. “Either that or you’re resenting the fact that someone is challenging your ability to do a simple privacy spell.”

“The potential enemies are far more persistent than the normal patient would have to worry about,” Kavon said. “My concerns are reasonable, especially since monkey guides are not known for their innate skill with privacy.”

“Monkey?” Anita’s voice was sharp with anger, so much so that Kavon might have retreated a step only Darren had his hand.

“Oh boy,” Les said, his tone edging toward amusement. “You’ve totally stepped in it now.”

“Hey, no killing Kavon,” Darren said firmly.

“That’s up to me, isn’t it?” Anita demanded. “I’m the one with the offended guide. She’s a chimp, not a monkey, and for your information, Agent Boucher, chimps are the most highly evolved of all the animals. They have cultures and create tools. They are, in fact, ninety-eight percent human, able to grieve, aware of themselves, and masters at learning new skills from watching.” Anita crossed her arms, and Kavon thought about how frustrated he got when someone called his guide an ox. His guide was not a castrated farm animal, and he was ashamed of making that mistake with another’s guide.

“I apologize,” he said.

Darren snickered. Some days his immaturity grated just a little.

Worse, it set Les off. “This shit is great now that I’m not on Boucher’s team anymore,” he said with a cackle.

Kavon frowned. “I wouldn’t have punished you for laughing at my mistake, although I might have sent you for a refresher on team dynamics and personal leadership skills.” 

“And that would be the punishment,” Les said. “But hey, at least this way she has someone new to be angry at.”

“Oh no,” Anita said as she transferred her glare over to Les. “I can still hold it against you that you made the same damn mistake, Kaleolani Gillette.”

Les flinched. “So, back on topic,” he said with exaggerated enthusiasm. “What happened out there?”

Technically no one had answered Kavon’s question about the strength of the spell, but he had felt the barrier and he decided to trust rather than to verify. Even he knew when he had stepped on too many toes for one day. He reclaimed his hand from Darren and tried to find a professional façade he could plaster over the fear. “We were attacked by a guide.”

“A guide? Not a shaman?” Anita immediately asked.

“That’s the question,” Darren said. “If there was a shaman, I didn’t see him.” He looked up at Kavon.

“I didn’t either.” Kavon wished he had. Most guides had a limited ability to interact with this world without a human partner to act as an anchor. If Kavon could have identified the partner, he could work on severing the connection. That would be a more effective strategy than trying to confront the monster head-on, but either that ifrit or his human partner was too savvy. 

“Maybe I didn’t see the shaman, but I sure saw the freaky durance,” Darren said. “At least that's what I assume it was. If that thing was a normal guide, it was clearly having species identification issues.”

“Meaning?” Les asked.

“A little bit of this animal, a little bit of that one, a skeletal face with bone-like armor, wings and a mammalian body. It was definitely isssuey. And based on the bone plating and big-ass talons, I’m saying that thing was built for battle.”

Kavon agreed. “If it was on earth before the purge, there may be some mythology about it. I’ll call Salma and have her do some investigation.” He hated interrupting her work in California. If the East Coast got all the Egyptian resources, the resentments would grow dangerous, so he hadn’t wanted to distract her from her mission to help the L.A. center. 

“We could research the mythology,” Anita offered.

“I appreciate that,” Kavon said, “but Salma will probably know the guide immediately, and I couldn’t describe it accurately enough for you to search the Internet. So I appreciate your offer, but you should focus on your work here.”

“Which is his way of saying he doesn’t like that you ran toward the parts of the city that were blowing up,” Darren said. “He gets a little papa bearish when civilians are in danger.”

Kavon frowned. He absolutely had not said that, and her offering to do research was substantially different than her rushing into an active scene, although he was annoyed by the latter.

“Oh, I think Supervisory Agent Boucher knows better than to tell me how to handle patients,” Anita said before Kavon would object to Darren’s characterization.

Kavon narrowed his eyes at the unambiguous challenge. “I would never question your medical judgment, and I will always be grateful for what you did out there on the street.” He paused as he tried to arrange a diplomatic phrase.

“But?” she prompted him.

Kavon straightened up. “But a battle zone is dangerous for a civilian. I don’t want you to get hurt. You have no idea how much power these old guides can access.”

Anita nodded. “You’re right that battle zones are dangerous. Do you know what I did before I took this job?”

Kavon looked over at Darren since he regularly socialized with Anita and Les, but Darren shrugged. He then winced as the damaged muscles made themselves known.

“I was an Army nurse,” Anita said. “I know battle zones, and I know what it means to shield my patients during a magical attack. Egypt likes to pretend it’s the center of Talent because they have the lore and history; however, you haven’t fought shamans until you’ve gone up against some of the warriors who live in the mountains around Afghanistan. I’m not an FBI agent, but don’t assume I would run into a battle zone unprepared to defend myself or my patient.”

Kavon felt a steady throb of power fill the room, and her chimp puffed up her upper lip and opened her mouth to show impressive lower canine teeth. 

“Understood,” Kavon said as the energy took on an aggressive edge. “But realize that you’re putting yourself, Les, and Coretta in a difficult situation if you rush into the fight. If someone found out that you had put a tracking spell on a federal agent, that would raise red flags.” Kavon held up a hand to stop her from interrupting. “And if Agent Gillette’s girlfriend shows up on our scene, someone is going to start asking questions. Dangerous ones.”

“I don’t like it, but I do understand,” Anita said. “However, if I have to choose between saving a life and protecting my position or Les’s, I will focus on my patients. And you need to understand that Darren was very badly hurt. If anyone else had appeared on scene, they would have noticed something wrong because a mundane or even a low-level shaman would have died out there. The magic was scraped off his soul.”

Cold fear washed over Kavon.

Before he could recover, Anita headed for the door. “Les, come on. They need time to recover and recharge.”

Les hesitated, his gaze going from Darren to Anita several times. “But I haven’t gotten the full statement about what happened out there.”

“And you're not going to.” Anita caught his arm and tugged at him. 

Les allowed her to pull him toward the door, but he complained the whole way. “If I don't get a statement, Coretta is going to kill me.”

“If you stay to get one, I'm going to kill you,” Anita said. “So decide which of us you are more concerned about displeasing.”

Kavon was starting to warm up to her.

“That’s a closer call than you probably want to know,” Les said. “But since you’re standing here and she's not, so I'm going to go with pissing Coretta off.”

“Good choice,” Anita said. She ushered him out of the room and let the door fall closed behind. The second they were gone, Kavon mentally pulled on the tether that tied him to his guide. Sometimes his bull would fight him for minutes or hours. When he was young, he'd had one particularly notorious fight that had lasted for nearly three weeks. The only person who could out stubborn Kavon was Kavon's bull. But this time, the guide came immediately. And like before, he projected emotions on a level that Kavon had not experienced in the past.

Kavon closed his eyes and focused on building a bubble around them. He had no more than constructed the mental image before the bull created the actual shield.

Darren must have recognized the magic because he rolled his eyes. “Paranoid much?” he asked.

“Aren't you a little paranoid considering what we just fought?”

“Perhaps a little.” Darren held up a finger and thumb to show the relatively small size of any worry he might feel, but the bond revealed the truth. “Should I call Bennu?”

“No. He and Pochi appear to be patrolling the area, so I don't want to distract them,” Kavon said.

“Patrolling?”

“When I got angry with Assistant Director White, Pochi showed up, and I'm almost sure he was offering to blow the director up.”

“Well I assume you didn't take him up on the offer,” Darren said dryly. He raised an eyebrow.

“No. I think that would probably look bad on my service record.”

“No doubt. And the pieces of Assistant Director White would be hard to get out of your suit.”

The flippancy caught Kavon off guard, but Darren’s emotional pile felt more stressed than irreverent. While humor wasn’t Kavon’s primary form of dealing with stress, he’d lived with Darren long enough to understand his need to make jokes when he couldn’t deal with the hard reality. Kavon quickly retorted, “That he would.” Darren grinned, and Kavon held out his hand. They threaded their fingers together and Kavon leaned in and rested his forehead against the side of Darren's head. “Don't ever scare me like that again.”

“I'll work on it. In my defense, I was actually trying to clear a path for us to retreat.”

“That didn't work well.”

“You don't say.” The stress of lifting his hand to touch Kavon was enough to make Darren’s arm shake.

Kavon stood. “Let me scoot you over so that I can lie next to you,” he said. He got his arms under Darren's thighs and shoulders and carefully pulled him closer to the edge of the bed before he walked around to the other side.

As Kavon was carefully sliding into the bed, Darren said in a wistful tone. “You know, I did hope that we would spend some quiet time together in bed on vacation, but I was envisioning us at home or maybe even in a five star hotel. This? Not so much. I really have seen the inside of this Djedi Center far too much.”

“I agree. I'm starting to think you have a crush on Anita,” Kavon teased.

“I kind of do,” Darren said in a conspiratorial whisper. “But she’s my best friend's girl, so I'm going to avoid hitting that.”

“If she ever heard you talk like that…” Kavon let his tone carry all the dire warnings about what she might choose to do to him.

“She’d skin me alive,” Darren finished for him. “I am fully aware. She may not be the sort of arrogant, pushy shaman that chased Les off the island, but she's not a pushover.”

Kavon agreed with that assessment. He wondered what rank she had risen to in the Army, but it felt a little manipulative and intrusive to use a federal database to look up one of his agent’s girlfriends. Hell, Les wasn't even his agent anymore. Kavon propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at his battered lover. “How bad does it hurt?”

“Not at all,” Darren said, and then he added, “unless I’m breathing or not breathing or doing anything except lying unconscious. I’m great when I’m unconscious.”

Kavon had never wanted Darren hurt, and right now, he didn’t even trust himself to speak because he wanted to scream at the unfairness of the universe, and that would not make Darren feel one ounce better. Kavon understood that he couldn’t be overprotective of Darren and interfere with his job. He got it. But no one had ever warned him that he might fail at the job of protecting him at all. Sometimes being in love sucked. No one had warned him about that.

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

Chapter 13: https://www.patreon.com/posts/aberrant-magic-7-24757990