Dangerous Girls 2, page 23
“Hmm,” I said. “Anxiety? Worry?”
“Worry,” she repeated slowly. “Whirry. Flurry. McFlurry. McFly. I thought I told you to never come in here.”
I chuckled softly.
“It’s okay to be worried,” I said. “We’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
“We will capture the Mithridate,” she said. “We will put her in a sack and put her in the basement and then put her somewhere else.”
“Just the basement part,” I said. “And then hopefully we can work the poison out of her.”
“But Diana must not know that I was information,” she said.
She frowned slightly as she spoke.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry about that.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I am not sorry. I am just trying to remember all of the things that have happened. That have occurred. That have taken place.”
Her words took on the slightly slurred quality that I was starting to recognize meant she was in danger of losing herself.
“Chanterelle.” I reached out and touched her cheek. “Come back.”
The mushroom girl’s eyes fluttered and then opened wide. She stared at me, then she blinked, sighed, and yawned deeply.
“I had a dream,” she said in a sleepy voice. “I dreamed that you and Artemis were talking, and you told her that you had mastered your power. That you were a magic user and a magical being, and now the power of the air was at your fingertips.”
“Well, kind of,” I chuckled. “That wasn’t a dream. You must have sensed us or heard our conversation or something.”
“You have mastery over the air?” She gazed at me in delight. “That is a very special elemental power.”
“Yeah, I guess it is,” I said. “I’m not a hundred percent sure that it is the power of air, but… Yeah. Downstairs in the shop, when I was waiting for Artemis, I managed to create a breeze with my breath. It’s like it’s all connected up to weird parts inside me. I can feel the power when I inhale and exhale, and I can feel it in my wrists, like I’ve got soda fizzing in my veins.”
“That cannot be,” she said seriously. “You would die if you had soda in your veins.”
“That’s true.” I chuckled. “It was a simile.”
“Simmy-lee.” She yawned again.
“You’re sleepy,” I said.
She nodded and closed her eyes.
“Big day,” she sighed. “Big big biiiiig day.”
“Can I ask you one more thing before you go to sleep?” I asked her in a soft voice.
“Mmhmm.” She nodded with her eyes still closed.
“Do you remember what you said to me when you absorbed David into yourself?” I asked.
Chanterelle’s brow puckered in a slight frown.
She opened her eyes and looked at me with a puzzled expression on her face.
“I absorbed him?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “You just kind of…”
I made a sucking sound through my teeth.
“Oh.” She considered that for a moment. “I don’t remember that.”
“I guess it was a stressful event,” I said.
“He was angry.” She nodded. “And confused. His brain was full of worms.”
“I really hope you don’t mean that literally,” I said.
“A metaphor.” She smiled at me with a cheeky gleam in her blue eyes. “Metty. Metty-four. Petit four.”
“Okay.” I chuckled. “Do you remember anything from that night?”
Chanterelle folded a bit of the quilt underneath her cheek as she thought about it.
“I remember you were there,” she said. “And Artemis. I remember feeling very big. I was hungry.”
“Hungry?” I asked.
“Hungry.” She screwed up her face. “No. Not hungry.”
“Thirsty?” I guessed.
“No.” She frowned. “What is the other thing? When you are not hungry?”
“I’m going to need a bit more than that,” I said with a chuckle.
“When you were hungry, so you ate, and then you ate very much, so now you are not hungry, but then you are more than not hungry.” Chanterelle looked at me with a hopeful expression on her face.
“Oh,” I exclaimed. “Do you mean full? You were very full?”
“I thought there was another word for it.” She frowned. “A special word.”
“There probably is,” I said. “But I don’t know it. Just saying you were full works.”
“I was very full,” she said with a slow nod. “I was so full. I was too full. I was spilling over. My edges were compromised.”
“Oh, I see,” I said as realization struck. “You were so full there wasn’t any space left.”
“So full.” She gave a little sigh. “I suppose I was full of David.”
I didn’t like to remember what happened to David. How mushrooms had burst out of his eyeballs and sprouted from his tongue and climbed up out of his throat. How he’d gurgled and choked as his body was taken over by the power he’d wanted to control.
Chanterelle had absorbed his body and all of that power that was growing inside him. And then she’d kissed me, and kissed Artemis, and left us both glowing with the mushroom’s magical, eerie light.
“You said he was a gift,” I said.
“David?” She yawned.
“Yeah,” I said. “You said you were giving him, and giving me, and it was your gift to me.”
“That was nice of me.” Her eyelashes fluttered drowsily.
It was clear she was too sleepy to talk for much longer. And it didn’t seem like she was able to remember much of what had happened, either.
“It was nice of you,” I whispered, but I still didn’t understand any of it.
I leaned over and gently pressed my lips to her smooth forehead. She gave a little sigh and snuggled deeper into the pillows.
“Goodnight, Chanterelle,” I murmured.
“Night night, Mike Wainwright,” she sighed.
I rolled over to switch off the bedside lamp, then settled down into my spot and closed my eyes.
In the darkness, I heard the soft sound of Chanterelle breathing. Then she spoke again.
“I don’t think I gave you your power,” she whispered. “I think it was something else.”
“Why do you think that?” I whispered back.
“My feeling,” she said. “Kisses. Forehead and lips. May I touch your brain?”
“What?” I blurted out.
All feelings of sleepiness abruptly vanished.
“May I see?” she asked. “Inside your mind to where the power is?”
“I thought you were sleepy,” I said.
“I am sleepy.” She yawned as if to demonstrate that. “But I can do this if you would like me to.”
“Okay, yeah,” I said. “It would be good to have at least some idea of what’s going on.”
The sheets rustled as Chanterelle reached out her arm. Her soft, cool fingers touched my face, grazed my lips, and trailed up to my forehead.
Her touch was so soft and so intimate, it gave me goosebumps.
I swallowed hard.
Chanterelle’s fingers found their way to my right temple. She took in a sharp breath.
And then suddenly, I was somewhere else.
I opened my eyes without realizing I’d closed them, and I found myself down in the store basement.
The false wall was still half-demolished, there were the folding chairs and tables that I kept down here for events and gaming nights, and there was an eerie blue-white light that I recognized as the power of the mushroom roots.
It was the only light in the room. The rest of the space was so dark it looked like the rest of the basement walls had fallen away entirely, and I was instead surrounded by an infinite blackness that reached out forever.
“Mike,” Chanterelle said.
I turned around and found her standing in front of me. She was smiling.
“Where am I?” I asked her.
“Somewhere for the two of us,” she replied. “This is brain. Information. Memory.”
“What if you get lost?” Concern flared inside me. “Chanterelle, is this safe?”
“It’s safe,” she murmured. “You are here with me, and I am here with you. We will be safety for each other.”
She took my hand and squeezed it between her own.
“What is in your pockets?” she asked.
“My pockets?” I looked down at myself.
I was wearing my usual black jeans, black shirt, and black leather jacket. Normally I didn’t keep much in my pockets except my keys, phone, and wallet, but I could feel there was something else in the inside pocket of my jacket.
Chanterelle let go of my hands, and I reached inside and pulled out a small jagged lump of rock.
It was black and shiny, and when I moved it around in my palm, it caught the light and glowed with the mushroom’s icy-blue light.
“What is this?” I asked.
“It is magic,” she replied. “May I see?”
I held out the rock to her. She didn’t take it, but she pressed her fingers gently against the sides. As she touched it, something twitched in my brain, and I jumped– both in the weird dream space and back in my bed upstairs where my real body was.
“Is this my magic?” I asked in a whisper.
“It is.” Chanterelle nodded. “You must be careful with it.”
“I will,” I said. “I am. What can you tell me about it?”
“It is not my gift.” Chanterelle dropped her hands back to her sides, and I put the rock back in the inside breast pocket of my jacket where I could almost feel it pulsing against my chest.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “If it’s not your gift, if it didn’t come from what happened with David, then what is it?”
“I don’t know,” she said simply.
“That’s weird,” I muttered to myself.
“Why?” Chanterelle asked.
“I just assumed this new power was because of you,” I said. “When you were full of power after absorbing David, I assumed there was too much of it inside you, so you gave some to Artemis and me. We thought that’s why Artemis’ magic has grown and she can do things like talk to plants and make them grow now.”
“Artemis would have gotten to that place by herself, eventually,” Chanterelle said. “She is already magic. She is a witch.”
“Yeah, I get that,” I said. “I guess I assumed that whatever happened with me was because of the David thing.”
“But Artemis is already magic,” Chanterelle repeated.
“Yeah…” I frowned. “What are you saying?”
Chanterelle cocked her head to the side. She looked at me with her wide, slightly mad blue eyes. Then she smiled and showed her crooked little teeth.
“I’m too sleepy,” she said.
She reached up and touched my forehead.
And then I was instantly back in my bed upstairs in my bedroom.
My eyes snapped open. I shot upright and fumbled for the bedside light.
Chanterelle blinked as the light fell on her face.
“You saw,” she said.
“Yeah.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “But what does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I can’t remember.”
“You can’t remember?” I stared at her. “But it just happened.”
Chanterelle closed her eyes and pressed her cheek against the pillow.
“Sleepy,” she whispered. “Can we turn the light off, please, Mike?”
“Yeah…” I said. “Yeah, okay.”
I turned the light off and laid down again.
Chanterelle gave a little sigh of contentment, and, within a few minutes, I heard her breathing deepen as she fell into sleep.
I stayed awake for a bit longer and stared up at the dark ceiling. I tried to make sense of everything that had happened.
Chanterelle had taken me to some strange dreamlike place where she could see inside my mind and see what was going on with my power. When she’d touched it, I’d felt it flex inside my brain, in that weird, foreign, secret place I’d managed to access through Diana’s meditation exercise.
But Chanterelle said my magic hadn’t come from her.
Then where the hell had it come from?
It wasn’t like I’d spent my childhood running away from a nebulous feeling of “something” brewing under the town. That sounded like it had been David’s and Artemis’ experience, but it hadn’t been mine.
My childhood had been as normal as the next guy’s.
My parents had died when I was very young, but Uncle Billy had done a good job raising me to be the man I was today, and I was pretty happy with how I’d turned out.
I’d moved away from Wormwood to find my own path, but I hadn’t been traumatized by the town, and I had no problem coming back here to take over Uncle Billy’s store.
So what the hell could this mean?
If I was already magical, then surely I would have been able to feel the ley lines running through the town. There would have been something, some sign or omen that would have tipped me off before this.
The superhero genre might have changed, but it was still pretty clearly consistent in the fact that people usually discovered their magic or their powers or whatever when they were either kids or teenagers. They could fall into a vat of toxic waste at any age, but the innate powers always came out before the protagonist finished high school.
I was thirty-five. My coming-of-age days were well behind me.
I just didn’t know what it could be, and I was going to drive myself crazy if I went around and around in circles trying to figure it out. I made myself stop thinking about it and instead forced myself to fall asleep.
It took a while before I drifted off, but once I was asleep, I fell right into some of the weirdest dreams I’d ever had.
I dreamed I was standing in the middle of the town square. It was raining with thunder and lightning crashing overhead. I looked around and saw the square was full of jackalopes, but they all had Chanterelle’s face.
They saw me looking, and they all giggled in freaky, perfect unison.
The sound echoed around the square and seemed to bounce around inside my skull and trip over that weird, secret magic spot in my brain.
“Chanterelle!” I called.
I reached out my hand and lightning bolts erupted from my fingertips. They struck the ground and plowed a deep furrow in the asphalt. The impact sent chunks of pavement flying everywhere, and they smashed into windows and set off car alarms.
“What is this?” I yelled at the sky.
A jagged blade of lightning leaped out of the sky. It hit the top of my head, and power sizzled all down my body and left my skin smoking and shaking.
I reeled back and looked around frantically.
But then I wasn’t in the square.
I was in the store basement again, but this time it was empty.
The walls were dark, and the only light was the blue-white glow coming from behind the false wall. I walked over to the hole and looked inside.
The cavity was coated with a thick, oozing slime that glowed like radiation. It was blue and milky, and there was a strange, pungent smell that rose up from the slime and clung to the roof of my mouth and inside my nostrils.
I coughed, and as I did, a wind rushed into the cavity and somehow blew the slime and the darkness away. Instead of slime, the walls were covered with mushrooms.
Some were blue, some were white, some were a smooth silvery-brown color, some were olive and tan, and some were covered in tiny specks of black freckles.
“What are you?” I whispered.
And every mushroom on the wall turned to look at me, despite the fact that they didn’t have eyes.
I pulled my head back out of the wall, and then I was in the woods outside of town.
I was standing underneath a tall black tree. It was raining again, and drops of water fell from the overhanging branches and splashed on the ground at my feet. I was suddenly very cold, but I didn’t have a jacket with me.
I pressed my hand against my heart where the magic stone in the pocket of my jacket would have been. And something dug into my fingers.
I lifted my shirt and saw the jagged, black edge of the magic stone sticking out of my left pectoral muscle.
I touched it, and it vibrated, which sent a shock wave through my whole body. It was like every part of me was burning with pins and needles. Like I’d been hooked up to a thousand car batteries.
I quickly dropped my hand, but the sensation continued. It grew and grew until it turned into the agonizing bite of a million fire ants. I writhed and clawed at myself to get the stone out, but my fingers kept slipping over the border between rock and skin, and I couldn’t get enough purchase.
Finally, I threw my head back and let out a yell of pain and frustration.
Instantly the pain vanished.
And very close by, a wolf howled back in response.
That was enough to jolt me out of my sleep.
My eyes snapped open, I catapulted up in the bed and grabbed frantically at my chest.
But there was only smooth skin and taut muscle underneath my fingers.
I let out a long gasp of relief and pinched the bridge of my nose.
Just a dream, Wainwright. It was just a dream.
Chanterelle was still sleeping peacefully beside me, and from the grayish light creeping in underneath the curtains, I could tell that it was very early in the morning.
I carefully slid out of the bed and tiptoed to the bedroom door. The front room was dark, and I could make out a heap under the piles of cushions and blankets that could be either Artemis or Diana still asleep.
I pushed open the bathroom door.
And was greeted by the sight of Artemis standing in front of the mirror.
Completely naked.
Chapter 15
“Oh, shit, sorry!” I blurted out.
My eyes darted from Artemis’ naked body to the pile of pajamas on the floor and then back again to her bare skin like they were hooked by a magnet.
“Come on, Wainwright,” Artemis said with a giggle. “It’s nothing you haven’t seen before.”
She turned to face me and planted her hands on her hips to give me the best view.
