Dangerous girls 3, p.1
Dangerous Girls 3, page 1
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Chapter 1
“War brews on the lurid horizon. It lurks in the clouds like thunder, its presence hangs in the air and taints everything it touches. The skies dawn a bloody red, and fear swirls like heavy clots in the veins of the world.”
I wasn’t one of those “don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee” people, but this was still a bit much to hear first thing on a Tuesday morning.
Besides, I was already on my second cup, and it wasn’t making any difference.
“The magicians had long foretold that this day would come, and now, like the speckled blooms of the stinking lily that was the totem of the Shadow Diggers, it had bloomed and revealed its open heart for all to see. An ill wind blew through the land and carried with it the foul stench of doom. A rogue assassin–”
“Hold up, hold up,” Travis said in disgust. “What does doom even smell like?”
“It smells like your ass.” Otis rolled his eyes. “Shut the hell up, dude, you’re ruining my narration.”
“Your purple prose is ruining the narration,” Travis retorted. “Just get on with it, no one cares about the stinking lily.”
“He’s setting the scene,” Kayleigh protested. “It’s building atmosphere and tension.”
“He’s just waffling!” Travis gestured wildly and the breeze from his hand ruffled his character sheet.
“Do you want to be Campaign Master?” Otis demanded.
“Yes!” Travis cried.
“Well, you can’t,” Otis replied. “Not until this campaign is over, and it’s not over until it’s been played out, so shut the hell up and play the goddamn game.”
Travis grunted and hunched in his chair.
“I see this WarAxe group is as happy and low-key as yours,” I murmured to Jay.
“They’re so intense,” Jay sighed. “I know it’s great that the shop and the game are so popular we needed to start a second group, but at the same time…”
“They could do with dialing it back a bit,” I agreed.
Jay tutted. “At least only four of them showed up this time. I’ll keep an eye on them.”
“Will you now?” I gave him a sly grin. “I wonder why that is?”
Jay blushed and fiddled with the stack of Post-its by the cash register.
“No reason,” he mumbled. “I just want to do a good job, that’s all. Show you that I’m a hard worker.”
“I know you’re a hard worker.” I grinned and nudged him in the shoulder.
Jay had been working for me for two weeks now, ever since we’d released the jackalopes into the woods, and he fit into the shop like the jelly in a PB and J sandwich. He’d been coming to the shop for years, before I’d moved back to Wormwood and taken it over after its previous owner, my Uncle Billy, died. He knew the stock, the customer base, and how to deal with the tryhards who came in and insisted on making their orders in Klingon.
He was a great guy.
He just wasn’t very good when it came to talking to girls.
“You’ve said hi to her, though, right?” I pushed.
“Who?” Jay mumbled even as his cheeks burned an even brighter shade of red.
“Amber,” I said in a loud voice.
“Shh!” Jay hissed.
One of the girls at the WarAxe table leaned back in her chair and threw a startled look over her shoulder toward the counter.
“Y-yes?” she asked in a voice like she was expecting to be scolded.
Amber was one of the new WarAxe gamers who’d been coming into the shop. She was small and cute with huge, round, brown eyes and dyed-blue hair that she either pulled back into two space buns or let fly free in a fluffy round Afro. She was nerdy, she was cute, she was a gamer, she was exactly right for Jay.
The only problem was that both of them were so shy and awkward that they would never get around to talking to each other without a little assistance.
I was only too happy to help out in that department.
Jay’s face was bright red as Amber shot a hesitatingly confused glance at him, then at me, and then back at Jay.
“Jay wanted to know what you thought about the trailer for the new Poison Ivy series,” I said with an innocent grin at Jay.
Amber glanced down at her black Birds of Prey T-shirt, then smiled shyly at Jay.
“I liked it,” she said. “I’m excited to see what Greta Gerwig does with the characters.”
“Make them into a bunch of tryhard Mary Sues, probably,” Travis snorted.
“Dude, you say every female character is a Mary Sue,” Otis sighed.
“No, I don’t,” he retorted.
“You so do,” Kayleigh said.
“Or maybe there are just loads of really dumb Mary Sue characters out there!” Travis exclaimed.
“Oh, my god.” Kayleigh exhaled.
“I fucking hate the term ‘Mary Sue’ anyway,” Otis said. “It gets overused all the time.”
“Only because the character type does,” Travis said. “I’m telling you, modern writers just don’t understand sci-fi. We didn’t have these problems years ago. I mean, look at the classics, where were the Mary Sues there?”
“They were still there,” Amber protested. “It’s not a new word.”
“What?” Travis frowned. “It is, it’s from that movie.”
“What movie?” Otis asked.
“You know, with Cameron Diaz.” Travis looked around at the others like it was obvious. “Where she’s like so perfect and so hot and everyone wants to fuck her? Just like every Mary Sue character where they’re, like, totally perfect all the freaking time? And the dude gets, like, totally emasculated in front of her because he gets his dick caught in his zipper?”
There was a moment of silence.
I chewed hard on the inside of my cheek in an effort to hold back my laugh.
Jay’s face turned dark red, and he hid the fact that he was covering his smile by shoving his glasses as violently as possible up the bridge of his nose.
“I’m sorry,” Kayleigh said in a disbelieving tone, “are you talking about There’s Something About Mary?”
“Yeah.” Travis shrugged. “I think that’s what it’s called.”
Everyone else around the table burst into howls of laughter.
“Oh, my god, dude,” Otis gasped. “Are you serious?”
“There’s Something About Mary!” Kayleigh wheezed. “Oh, my god, what the hell?”
“That’s– that’s not where it comes from,” Amber said to Travis in a voice that was trembling with her efforts to hold back her laughter and speak kindly.
“Yes, it is!” Travis insisted. “Her name’s Mary, she’s perfect, and–”
“Dude!” Otis gasped. “The name Mary Sue comes from a fucking fanfiction parody from, like, the 1980s!”
“1973,” Amber said with a solemn nod of her head. “It was called A Trekkie’s Tale.”
“Alright, but, like–” Travis clenched his jaw. “Alright! Okay! Fucking hell, I just made a mistake, that’s all.”
“Yeah, no, you’re right.” Otis cleared his throat.
“Can we just get on with the fucking game?” Travis snapped and grabbed his character sheet.
Kayleigh was still snickering under her breath.
Travis scowled at her, and she flipped him off with a grin.
“Yeah…” I murmured to Jay. “They’re intense alright.”
Jay grinned, then looked over and met Amber’s eye.
The two of them smiled shyly at each other before Travis smacked the table to get Amber’s attention and pulled her back to the game.
The door at the back of the shop that led up to my apartment opened. Chanterelle stepped out and wandered over to the counter.
“Hello, Mike,” she said. “Hello, Jay.”
“Hey, Chanterelle,” I replied.
Chanterelle tilted her head to the side and looked at Jay with a slight frown on her face.
I turned to see what she was looking at and realized Jay was leaning on his elbows on the countertop with his chin cupped in his hands and a dreamy look in his eyes.
I grinned and nudged him.
He jumped, looked up, saw Chanterelle, and jumped again.
“Oh!” he blurted out. “Hi!”
A delighted smile spread across Chanterelle’s face.
“Jay,” she whispered in a conspiratorial tone. “Amber is in the shop.”
“I know,” he whispered back.
“Amber is in the shop and your heart rate is elevated,” she added.
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” I chuckled.
Jay heaved a deep sigh and dropped his head.
Chanterelle caught her lower lip between her crooked front teeth and smiled. She was wearing a colorful assortment of clothes: a long, white, sleeveless dress with the skirt hitched above her knees and kept there with safety pins, a red-and-black tartan skirt underneath the dress, no socks, hot-pink flip-flops, a man’s red paisley tie, and a vest made from a patchwork of red an d pink crocheted squares sewn together.
Ever since we’d introduced Chanterelle to the concept of thrift stores, there’d been no stopping her. Clothes were quickly becoming her favorite thing, and there seemed to be no end to the joy that unlikely fashion choices gave her.
I sometimes saw Artemis or Diana’s influence in an outfit. Plaid shirts and ripped tights were Artemis’ inspiration, while bright silky blouses and long skirts came from Diana. But today’s outfit seemed to be entirely Chanterelle’s own choices.
I might have shaken my head about the number of times Artemis and Diana took Chanterelle clothes shopping, but, truthfully, I kind of loved seeing the weird outfits Chanterelle came up with.
The mushroom girl had never been allowed to own anything before, and I wanted her to experience everything independence and autonomy could bring. She’d forgotten a lot of the lives she’d lived before she stepped out of my basement wall, but from what she did remember, it didn’t seem like she’d had the best time.
Chanterelle was a being of enormous but unstable power, and that meant there would always be people trying to control her and use her for their own ends.
I just wanted her to be safe and happy.
And right now, even though she was smiling, I could tell there was something on her mind.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
Chanterelle hesitated. “I don’t know what to say to that question.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Is this one of those questions where you lie to be socially accepted?” Her wide blue eyes looked at me anxiously. “Diana said that if someone asks you how your day is going, they don’t actually want to know all the details, it’s just a feature of small talk. Artemis said that was bullshit, but Diana said it was the truth, and then Artemis called her a repressed Mary Poppins who was going to get an ulcer.”
I snorted out a laugh.
Artemis and Diana had been part of the same coven of witches in Portland. From the way they described her, their High Priestess had been a manipulative tyrant who pitted her witches against each other to prey on their insecurities and fears. It had been more like a cult than what I imagined a healthy working coven should be like.
Artemis and Diana were working hard to move past their historic feud, and they were well on their way to becoming firm and loyal friends. But there were still moments when the old tensions between them boiled to the surface. And apparently, that had been one of those moments.
“Well,” I said, “Artemis and Diana both make good points. Neither one of them is wrong, exactly.”
“I was afraid of that,” Chanterelle said with a sigh. “I wish rules like this made sense.”
“Don’t worry,” I comforted her. “Everyone finds it hard sometimes. You’ll get used to it.”
“Okay.” She sighed again.
“And in this instance,” I added, “when I ask you if you’re okay, it’s not a rhetorical or polite question. I do genuinely want to know if you’re okay and what you’re feeling.”
“How do I know when someone is asking the question genuinely, though?” Chanterelle persisted.
I thought about it for a minute, but it was difficult to know exactly how to explain the problem to her.
“For now,” I said, “assume that if Artemis, Diana, Jay, or I ask you how you are, we want to know the truth. If it’s not us asking that question, then it’s just a person being polite.”
“Alright.” Chanterelle nodded with a slight frown on her face. “The woman in the thrift store the other day asked me how I was doing, and I told her my bowels were unhappy because I’d eaten too many Oreos and I feared that my shits would be as black as Dutch cocoa powder. That was when Diana said it was just politeness and I should lie.”
“Ah,” I said gravely. “I see. Yes, in that instance, the woman was just being polite.”
“I see.” Chanterelle nodded her head. “I shall lie to service workers from now on, and that will help me thrive in society.”
“Perfect.” I grinned. “But to go back to the question that I’m asking you genuinely. Are you okay?”
Chanterelle smiled, then frowned and shook her head.
“I am troubled,” she admitted. “It has been two weeks since we spoke to the Three in the woods, and yet there has been no word from them since. That makes me uneasy.”
Chanterelle’s blue eyes gazed into mine, and I wanted to tell her not to worry about it.
But I didn’t want to lie to her.
Two weeks ago, people all over town had started getting mysteriously ill. We’d discovered that a magical creature called a Mithridate had come to Wormwood. In itself, that wasn’t too weird because ever since the big storm that had swept through the town and woken Chanterelle from her decades of slumber, magical creatures and magic users from all across the state had been coming here.
The problem was that Mithridates were a sect of magical assassins who survived on nothing but various poisons and their antidotes. They consumed so many dangerous substances that their slightest touch could prove fatal. They literally were what they ate.
It had been a struggle to defeat the Mithridate, but we’d managed it, and as soon as the hard part was all over, three mysterious women had appeared out of thin air, taken the Mithridate into custody, and vanished away as quickly as they’d appeared.
The Three had shown up a few days after that to congratulate us for how well we’d handled the situation with the Mithridate and to inform us that our presence would be requested at an assembly they were arranging. Apparently, its goal would be to lay down some rules so problems like the Mithridate wouldn’t happen again.
The town was swarmed with people coming from near and far to try and work out what had caused the huge spike in magical power on the same night as the storm.
Chanterelle had caused the power surge, but if that information got out, she would be in immediate danger. I’d met enough magic users by now to know just how ruthless they were. Power was currency, and the magic world was no different.
It was dog eat dog out there, and I would do everything I could to protect Chanterelle from the desperate people who would hurt her.
So in theory, an assembly to lay down some rules was a good thing.
In practice?
I worried it was just bringing more eyes to the town. More attention focused on the magical activity happening in Wormwood.
It was going to put Chanterelle in more danger.
And, yeah, I’d be lying if I pretended I wasn’t a bit anxious about how it might affect me as well. Because, for some reason, I’d started developing powers of my own, and I was still getting used to having the power of the air and wind at my fingertips.
All in all, I didn’t blame Chanterelle one bit for feeling uneasy.
Hell, if I was her, I’d be shitting myself.
I reached over and touched the back of her small, plump hand where it rested on the countertop.
“I understand,” I told her in a quiet voice. “It’s a scary time.”
“You don’t think I’m foolish to be unsettled?” Chanterelle worried her lower lip between her teeth. “I know we are not powerless, but I still feel as though we are. It is quite a conundrum. A puzzle. A quandary.”
“It’s a real shit show,” I agreed.
“I don’t understand.” Chanterelle sighed and pressed her hand against her heart. “Why is it that I can know things and yet not feel them?”
“It’s part of being alive, I’m afraid,” I replied.
“I miss being information,” she said in a mournful tone. “When I am meat, everything becomes so complicated.”
I might have gotten used to many things about the mushroom girl, but it was still really fucking weird hearing her talk about her body like that.
“That’s called being human,” Jay said with a sigh.
I hadn’t realized he was tuned into our conversation, but he looked at Chanterelle with a sympathetic expression in his dark eyes.
“But I am not human,” Chanterelle objected.
“You’re not not human,” I pointed out.
Which wasn’t the clearest way of explaining things, but I sure as hell couldn’t think of a better way.
“I am mushroom,” she said with a frown.
“But you’re also… meat,” I said, then shook my head. “It’s not meat, that’s a really gross way to think about it. You have a human body, Chanterelle, and it comes with all the difficult human emotions inside it.”
