Reuben: 1/19/97 (11/2-3/96)
8:30 PM, Saturday, November 2, 1996
"Oh, that's just great," I muttered as I dove to catch Kasee before she tumbled down the stairs. She was out cold, but the blood seemed to have stopped flowing from her ears. I looked at Dog and got sort of a mental shrug from him - no help there. OK then. I looked around to see if there was anything I could use like, say, a first aid kit, but all I noticed was the fact that the basement was starting to flood. Looked like a do-it-yourself job, then.
I rubbed my hands together and started humming a repetitive little tune. Using this to still my thoughts, I relaxed until I saw Kasee's pattern, and saw the places where it had a wrongness to it. I reached out slowly and placed my hands on either side of her head. I shifted her pattern subtly back into its normal configuration, and drew my hands away. I slumped back against the stairs, the tune allowing the tune to trail off. Kasee sat up slowly and looked around, at me, at Dog.
"What happened?" I asked
"Well, I don't know. I was trying to see what Inspector Torres wanted but I couldn't hear him so I used correspondence which is this really cool thing that Daedelus told me all about and expanded my awareness to hear what was going on but all I could hear was this really high pitched noise and then I blacked out."
Uh huh. Well, that made more sense than most of her pronouncements. Before I could ask her anything else, Kasee scrambled up the stairs and eased the door open. I saw her wave at someone, then Eric came down the stairs. "He's asking about the dead policemen from Halloween," he explained. "He's gone to talk to Renee. I think - " He stopped, because the lights had gone out.
I heard some walking upstairs, then the sound of the front door closing. The door at the top of the stairs opened, and Renee stood there in the flickering light of a candle. "You can come up now," she said. "He said he'd come back when the power was back on."
I went upstairs with the rest. I walked into the kitchen to grab a Coke. As I reached into the fridge (reminding myself that we wouldn't want to open the refrigerator that often if we were going to be without power for long - and I suspected we were), I heard a creak above me. I looked up and saw that the ceiling was actually started to bow inward from the force of the rain.
I walked out into the living room and nodded to John. "Think we can persuade some of the water spirits to take their show elsewhere?" He looked at me, and cocked his head in a canine manner as he thought about it. "I think it is possible." After a little preparation, we both stepped sideways and walked up to the roof. It wasn't raining in the Umbra, but we saw water elementals everywhere, kneeling and slapping the ground for all they were worth. I pulled out a crystal and sketched a square within a square in the air, using the language of spirits to summon a water elemental. Sure enough, one of them came over to us quickly, kneeling between us, still slapping the ground.
I looked at John, and said, "I suspect you are more adept at communicating with them than I." He shifted to wolf form and stared intently at the water elemental. It looked at him, then got a confused look on its face. Suddenly, it smiled and started waving other water elementals over to join him. Quickly, we had six or seven water elementals around us, slapping the ground merrily. I guessed that this was very bad, since that was more rain concentrated on the Chantry. I pulled out my crystal and tried to lull the spirits, but screwed up the effect as my circles in the air started crossing each other and turning into ovals. Just when I was about to frantically try something else, there was a flash, and a dome appeared off to our right, where the weakest parts of the Chantry were. The water elementals, pushed aside by the dome, looked offended and stalked off. I looked at the wolf, and he looked back at me. "Didn't work very well, did it?" I said ruefully. He just snorted and stepped sideways. I followed.
Eric had erected a force dome over the areas of the Chantry that were leaking the worst. He went to the library, saying he was going to try to connect the dome to the node - an excellent idea. I got a mop and bucket and helped Renee clean up the kitchen and sitting room, which had flooded in the deluge. I heard Renee ask John what had happened, and he just said he didn't want to talk about it. She looked at me, and I shrugged. I didn't want to make him look bad in her eyes, if they were actually starting something.
After the cleanup, I retired to my bedroom. Dog sat quietly on the bed, staring out the window at the rain, as I centered myself and touched the node. After an hour or so, I stood up and stretched. *You're glowing,* Dog said. I stopped in mid-stretch and looked down at myself. I didn't see any glow. *Not in reality, silly. Spiritually.* Ah. Quintessence. "And tell me, O spiritual type familiar, what would you do for some of that quintessence?" And he proceeded to tell me. And when I started to blush, he shifted to human form and investigated just how far my blushing reached. I wonder if all mages have this much fun with their familiars?
Sunday, November 3, 1996
I woke at 8 AM to the dreary, rainy skies I expected. I got up and was in the kitchen filling the coffeepot before I realized that we didn't have any power to make coffee. Damn. I'd have to wait until Eric was up, I guess. I peeked down into the basement with a flashlight and saw that there was two feet of water down there and still rising. Great. The only thing down there was Nathaniel's toolbench, and I wasn't about to go messing with that.
As I heard a shout of surprise from the front door, I ran over to the foyer. When John moved out of the way, I looked into the slack and dead face of Maxwell Blake. Oh, shit.
He was hanging in the doorframe by a huge spiderweb (I thought of how big the spider would have to be to do this and shuddered). John wrestled his body down and laid him on the floor, then went back to struggling to clear the remaining webbing from the porch. Funny, all I could think about was, "What will the neighbors think?" Of course, the way things had been going, the neighbors were probably vampires, and the nice family across the street were really Black Spiral Dancers. Sheesh.
I knelt beside Blake with Renee and checked him for any signs of life. Nope. Nada. Nothing. He'd been dead for at least a day. And there was absolutely not a drop of blood in him. I shuddered again. We gingerly rolled him over and quickly deduced the cause of death - a fist-sized chunk of flesh taken out of his back, right over his heart. I stared at the corpse for a few moments, while Renee, who had more presence of mind than I, searched his pockets. She came up with only a small calculator-like device, a set of car keys, and a business card case.
While Renee was fiddling with the calculator - she said it was some kind of PDA (personal data assistant), Kasee walked into the room and gave a "Eep!" of surprise. After we'd explained why we had a dead man in our foyer, she nodded, then said, "You know, after I went after Betsy yesterday I saw a blob of blood outside and I didn't know what it was but maybe it was him and something did this to him right outside the Chantry." Lovely. Talk about your mixed blessings - we don't have to worry about Blake, but we had to worry about whatever killed him. I got the feeling there were many, many thing going on in Raleigh that we didn't know about. Or didn't want to know about.
John stuck his head out the door, looking at the river that had once been New Bern Avenue. He muttered about disposing of the body, but stopped when he spotted someone go by in a boat. Renee, John, and Reuben moved the body to the bathroom. Renee asked John, "Do you want to supply the blood, or should I?" At this point, I decided to leave. Verbena blood magic has always squicked me, and I had no desire to stand around and watch whatever they were going to do.
A few minutes later, John and Renee came out of the bathroom. Kasee asked what they had done with the body. "Well, you know how the human body is said to be 98% water?" Renee asked. "Let's just say that there's not a lot left when you remove the water. And it can be disposed of down the drain." Ick.
I puttered around the Chantry a little more that day, cleaning up some of the mess left over from the mini-flood of yesterday, then retired to the library to read while the light was still good. Around mid-afternoon, I heard strange voices coming from outside of the library. I got up and walked out into the living room. The voices were coming from my bedroom. Curious, I walked in.
Dog was sitting in his usual place on the sofa, only instead of looking at the TV, he was looking at two small spirits. They looked sort of like little trolls, only with shorter hair. He appeared to be watching a soap opera. The strange thing was, the two never changed their appearance, but they acted out all of the parts in the soap opera that Dog was watching. "Cool. Can you get the news?" *But of course.* Dog changed his paw into a human hand, and reached out and twisted the head of the nearest spirit. Suddenly they both sat down on the floor side by side and started delivering the news. The one on the right said, "We don't know if anyone can hear us, let alone see us, but we here at WRAL-TV will stay on the air for as long as we possibly can. Raleigh, and all of the area, is without power right now. All telephone lines are down as well..." They went on with the news, but I stopped paying attention after they started talking about the heartwarming story of a cat who saved its owner from a burning building. Bah. I hate local news.
I returned to the library and studied there until dark. After a quick sandwich, I went back to find that Eric had lit the whole place with candles, so I read some more. At around 10 PM, I heard a squeal from Kasee's room. I rushed over, but she said sheepishly that she had tried to meditate and touch the node, but the node bit her. Huh. Sounds painful.
Dog was still watching his spirits when I walked back to my bedroom. I sat down next to him. He was apparently watching a rerun of "The Love Boat" because one of the spirits kept calling the other "Julie, Your Cruise Director." I started to nod off, and got ready for bed. He politely turned down the sound of the spirits and I faded off to sleep.
Last modified: Wed March 19 17:19:00 1997 by tabrady