Chapter #51Happily Ever After by: Masktrix   You’re still in a daze, covered in dust and debris, that you almost fall to the ground again as the Brit helps you up. Your legs are like jelly and feel ready to cave again, but before you can tumble you feel yourself wrapped in an embrace. You see the blonde hair, smell a familiar scent, close your arms around a known pair of shoulders.
Niamh Stirland – the real one – holds you tight. “You idiot,” she says, voice muffled as she leans into your shoulder. “You have any idea the dance you’ve led us on?” She says it with affection, although you have no real idea what she’s been through. Behind, the scruffy Brit is poking at the far end of the garage, near the golem.
“Should have worked! Bugger. Would have worked, too, if Will here hadn’t tried to do something himself.” He pauses and wrinkles his nose. “Sometimes you should leave things to the professionals.”
“Professionals?” You break from Niamh’s embrace, looking uncertain. “And you know we need to get out of here, right? Fake Niamh, uh, Knotts, she…”
“Called me,” the Brit grins. “Don’t worry, that’s all taken care of, intercepting a cell signal isn’t tough. Once you sprinted off from your pastry shop, we figured where you were going and set a trap.” He flicks the tool the Shelly-golem had impaled herself on. “Honestly, you think her mum would leave a giant spike in the shed? I’d set the whole thing up like a game of Mouse Trap, the idea being to snare our corporate stooge here once and for all. Which I suppose we did.” He shrugs. “Oh, hi, by the way. Hal, nice to meet you. I’d say ‘good work’, but honestly you are bloody awful at this whole spy lark.”
You turn back to Niamh. “OK, you’re going to have to explain…”
“I know,” she says. “But not now. All that matters right now is you’re safe, fake-me is –Jesus, is my ass really that big? – fake me is taken care of, and the Stellae are going to clean things up.”
“Stellae?”
She gestures to Hal, busy looking at the golem, poking it and prodding it with utmost fascination. “Short version? Secret society of super-magicians. You can trust them. And, Will, I’m going to have to ask you to trust me, OK?”
“With what?”
Niamh sighs, and looks a little embarrassed. “Our plan had been to get you away from her before any of this went down – or before she realized you couldn’t help her and decided to tie up a loose end. I’ve been trying to get close enough to you to slip a mask on you, copy you so we could replace you. But, genuinely, it was just to keep you safe. We figured this ratty b-word here wouldn’t notice a fake Will, and that’d help us when we had to take her out. It’d also give us a chance to put you somewhere out of harm’s way, and explain to you everything that’s been going on while you’ve been running around with a cheap-ass version of me.”
“You were at the donut shop,” you say.
Niamh gives a nervy laugh. “Actually, that was Shelly. I could hardly move her out of the church on my lonesome, so I copied a stranger and used her as a normal golem. It’s fine – she’s safe under there. At least, we think so. I…” she pauses. “I sort of borrowed your new girlfriend’s face for a while. Cassie Harper? Oh, she’s fine! I just thought it was the easiest way to get close to you, is all.”
You wonder if there was more to it than that (a desire to reconnect, maybe?) but you don’t press. Nor do you throw her hypocrisy at her – replacing Cassie wasn’t much different to you replacing Mariah Alloway, all those weeks ago. But you don’t want to start a fight. There’s too much going on.
“What do you want me to do?” you ask.
“Let us put a replacement Will Prescott in your stead,” Hal says. “Just temporarily, while we undo all of this stuff. Knotts here – two t’s, in case you’re wondering – is a very small cog in a large, multinational capitalist Satanic behemoth called Fane. You, Niamh and Michelle are all on their radar now. And, trust me, comrade. That is not a place you want to be.”
You sigh, and glance around the room. You look down at the fake Niamh on the floor, the golem, the Brit wizard, the girl who you sucked into this mess. In her hands, she holds a blue, polished mask. Quietly, you nod.
“Put a mask on me,” you say, laying yourself on the floor to get comfortable. “Just do me a favor, in the future?”
“What’s that?” Niamh says, as she kneels.
“Don’t lie to me and say it’s temporary.”
If you’ve learned anything, you think as Niamh gently lowers a mask toward you, it’s that magic will be part of you for the rest of your life.
***
It’s sunny when you open your eyes. The room is unfamiliar, but the bed is comfortable and the place exudes a sense of safety and calm that you haven’t felt in far too long. It doesn’t take long to realize you must have been placed under a golem mask after they created their Will copy that night. A month ago you’d have raged about it, branded it a personal betrayal. But somehow it doesn’t feel right to do so.
The Stellae, as they call themselves, are hospitable. There’s more than just the Brit; two brothers who seem to have more mysteries than answers; a surly investigator that calls you ‘squirt’ whether you like it or not; an entire family of disparate skills and abilities, all linked to the planets. And, what’s more, there’s interested in you. As you tell your story from the beginning – from the first moment you clasped hands on the book to their intervention that night in the Nolan garage – you see faces interested in parts of the tale you thought inconsequential.
You never thought much about why Abigail Steiner and her lackeys didn’t see you in the church that night; nor did you really ask why you found it so easy to pick up memories from the mask, and yet Shelly and Niamh both struggled. The Stellae introduce you to a new word: Sulva. And with it, there’s talk of sending you to Los Angeles, under the tutelage of someone called Kali. Magic, it seems, goes so far beyond the reaches of the Libra. And the Stellae believe you may have an innate ability… one you could never have imagined as you drifted, aimlessly, through high school.
You get explanations too, with patient voices willing to fill in the blanks of the story. Niamh never went to Cambridge; she stayed in Saratoga Falls, sending a fresh golem, created as she had worked her way through the book, in her stead. Over in the UK, the golem had asked about the Libra at the university, only to be ensnared by a sinister corporation called Fane. When the golem suddenly went quiet, Niamh had realized something was amiss and had moved her base from St. Xavier’s church, taking the book and Shelly with her.
Fane, meanwhile, had found out about St. Xavier’s and the Libra. They’re used their own, industrial take on magical disguises to turn this ‘Knotts’ into a replacement Niamh, and sent her to obtain the artifact. To do so, she’d decided to enlist your help in tracking it down, all the while pumping you for information.
Fortunately, in the UK, Hal Swann – the Stellae agent you met – had already been tracking Fane. He’d followed ‘Niamh’ back, only to run in to the genuine article. And, together, Hal and Niamh had ‘struck a blow for workers against corporate oppression’. They’d also made a deal. The Stellae would take the Libra for safekeeping and deal with Fane. And in exchange, they’d do the one thing you – and Niamh – couldn’t do.
And so you find yourself in a clean and splendid room, sat with Niamh, unsure what to say. Uncertain what the future holds. Niamh herself is of no interest to the Stellae, but with the shadow of Fane looming large, she knows she can never return to her old life. There are tough decisions to be made.
“So,” you say, smiling over at her.
She nods, and blows out her cheeks. “So.”
“They’re dealing with the book. The Libra. Mount Doom treatment, like you wanted. Or at least the Raiders of the Lost Ark treatment.”
“I know,” Niamh says. “Good. It’s what needs to be done.”
You scratch the awkward tufts of beard poking through on your chin. “Yeah,” you agree. “For what it’s worth, I’m still sorry. About everything. About how I dragged you into this in the first place.”
“I’m not,” Niamh says. “I mean, I’d rather you hadn’t started off by stealing my identity. And I’d rather be home with my folks. But, Jesus, Will. We’re one of the few people in the world who get to see things exactly how they stand. We get to see something we would never have known otherwise. That magic—” ¬
“— Is freakin’ real.”
You both pause at the new voice. You both stand, turn, and stare at the newcomer who’s entered the room. A short girl. Plain with unkempt, wild red hair. The kind that, only a few months ago, you never noticed as you passed her in the corridor.
Shelly Nolan. Alive. Back from petrification. The corpse-golem spell’s magic unwrought by the Stellae and her death unwritten.
You can barely process your emotions as she rushes over, arms open as she wraps you in an embrace, tighter than anyone’s ever hugged you before. From out of the corner of your eye, you see Niamh’s face break into the largest grin you’ve ever witnessed.
“Yeah,” you say, as you squeeze Shelly tight and break down and cry tears of drunken, delirious joy. “Magic is freakin’ real.” |
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