Published at 8th of March 2024 7:44 am

Book 2, Chapter 1

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

“I am so fucking nervous,” I said.

“Don’t be a pussy,” said my best friend in a rare showing of commiseration and understanding.

I glared at Alice, which had minimal to no effect on her. Alice looks like what would happen if God couldn’t decide if he wanted an Amazon or a supermodel, so he tried to do both. She is taller than most men, stronger, with athletic limbs while somehow maintaining a narrow waist despite the batshit core workouts I’ve seen her do. Caramel skin, long hair styled with what I learned was a $300 haircut (“Are you shitting me?” I had exclaimed. “Looking this good is expensive,” Alice had replied.) that framed her face in that way you find only in Hollywood or shampoo commercials. Her wide, expressive mouth was twisted in a smirk of amusement while her green eyes studied me in my discomfort. I would say she was absolutely perfect if it weren’t for her slightly bent nose she had gotten from her first car crash, when she had broken it on the steering wheel—which was then exacerbated by a certain forgettable warlock on an island last year when he used her face as a punching bag. She was wearing a large, loose gray t-shirt today, with black yoga pants and two-inch black heels. Many gold bracelets hung off each wrist, and two gold necklaces circled her throat.

All in all, she’s a knockout.

I, on the other hand, look like if you took Finn Wolfhard’s head, starved it, aged it up thirty years, gave it an obnoxiously big chin, and stuck it on top of Slenderman. I’m tall and lanky, have hair that in certain light looks like a Muppet made of coal is growing out of the top of my head. I hadn’t cut it in a while so for once it was obeying the laws of gravity and gathering around my shoulders instead of reaching in every direction at once. Despite the late September in southern California(meaning, mid to high 80s in temp), I was wearing black slacks, a long-sleeved (also black) shirt and leather gloves. I flexed my toes in my steel-toed army boots, gripped the steering wheel hard enough that I heard it creak in protest, and generally behaved like I was going to an execution.

Alice rolled her eyes. “It’s just a doctor's appointment.”

I didn’t reply. I looked away from Alice, towards the small, nondescript building across the street from the small parking lot we were in. Just a white building with a door. No signage. Sandwiched between a liquor store and a pawn shop in east LA. I knew it was our destination only because of the push I felt on my mind, telling me to ignore the small building. A slight, if pervasive, defense. Good enough to keep most of the general public away, but not remotely strong enough to keep a practitioner at bay. In fact, it probably acted as its own kind of signage, as it was as attention-grabbing as a small neon sign.

I felt Alice shift in the passenger seat, a quick glance telling me her expression had softened. “You’re here for a week, right? We can reschedule for tomorrow. That way you don’t have to deal with the doctor and a Martinez fiesta on the same day.”

My only reply was a deep inhale through my nose. I slowly relaxed my grip on the steering wheel, settling back into the seat. I rolled my shoulders as I began to chant “fuck” under my breath, finishing with a strong “FUCK IT” as I got out of my green nineteen ninety-two Honda Accord (Don’t judge, it still runs perfectly with two hundred and fifty thousand miles on it. I had a guy in Reno redo the interior in black and green because I’m a dumb ass. The only good thing to come from it was the guy swapped out my old console with a newer one with Bluetooth.) Alice got out with me and kept pace as I stalked towards the small building, pausing briefly to make sure I wasn’t about to be hit by cross traffic as I jaywalked.

I stopped with my hand on the doorknob (not the handicap kind, I noted). I stood there long enough for Alice to fidget before she placed her hand on mine. “We don’t have to do this now,” she said.

“But I have to do it,” I said. “If not now, soon.”

“Yeah,” she said.

Muttering a string of “fuck” under my breath I gripped the doorknob and pushed.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but a normal doctor’s office receiving room wasn’t it. Alice had described the lady as a “Witch Doctor,” so I guess I was expecting masks, bones, dolls, Loa, needles (both medicinal and magical)… you know, voodoo shit. I wasn’t expecting daytime TV mounted to the top corner of the room and a receptionist who looked bored out of her mind.

“Mr. Avery?” The receptionist asked, looking up from her phone. She placed it aside at my nod and beckoned me forward. I glanced at Alice who gave me an encouraging smile before crossing to one of the half-dozen chairs and getting comfortable.

I approached the counter and was handed a sign-in sheet and a medical questionnaire. My unease was slowly being subsumed by the familiarity of the process and soon I was filling out my name and things I wanted to discuss with the doctor. I crossed the room and sat next to Alice, filling the forms out on the clipboard and stubby pencil I had been provided. It became apparent after the first page that this was a normal medical questionnaire, and I assumed it was to help maintain the image of a legitimate practice.

“This isn’t what I expected,” I said as I wrote.

“Oh?” Alice asked, scrolling through Tiktok on her phone.

“You know,” I said, interrupting the word I was writing to gesture at the office. “I was expecting some voodoo shit.”

Alice looked up from her phone and gave me a confused stare.

“You know? Witch doctor?” I explained.

Alice’s confusion compounded until she burst out a laugh right in my face. “Colm, you fucking dumb ass,” she said, her voice bubbly from contained laughter. “I said she’s a witch. She also happens to be a doctor.”

I blinked in confusion. “I guess… I guess I missed that part in my anxiety. Just—combined those two thoughts.”

She shook her head and went back to her phone. “You big goof.”

My mood significantly improved. Not because I was seeing a witch who happened to be a doctor instead of a witch doctor, but because I had made Alice laugh—even if I had done so by being a moron. I like making people laugh.

I finished the paperwork and handed it back to the receptionist, who scanned the first page and entered my information into the computer. “How will you be paying?” She asked.

“Bill the Martinez account,” Alice called from the other side of the room.

The receptionist nodded and began typing away at her computer. I noticed from her name tag that she was a registered nurse. I wish I knew enough about medicine to know if having an RN as a receptionist was weird or not.

“Okay,” the receptionist, whose name was Kathy Cuper, said. “Have a seat and you’ll be called in a couple of minutes.”

“Thanks,” I said and went to sit next to Alice again. She kept me distracted by showing me videos of an incredibly attractive, tiny woman absolutely destroying large quantities of food.

“Why is this so fascinating,” I muttered.

“I know, right?” Alice replied.

“Mr. Avery?”

I looked up and saw the receptionist at the doorway to the left of the desk, holding it open. With a last look at Alice (who gave me a thumbs up), I went with the receptionist, who took me to a new room which still, strangely, looked like any doctor's office I’ve seen in my life or on TV. A little sink, cabinets along the wall, a glass… what do you call that? Cylinder? What do you call the container full of tongue depressors? Anyway, there was one. Three boxes of rubber gloves of different sizes, that thing they use to look in your ear mounted to the wall. The nurse sat me down and proceeded to take my blood pressure, weight, and height, finishing by waving some burning sage around me. The last one was new. She watched my reaction critically before writing something down on the chart. She hung it on a peg by the door, instructed me to sit on the big doctor's chair in the middle of the room, and told me the doctor would be with me shortly.

I rolled my shoulders and settled in to wait, wishing I had a smartphone like Alice so I could watch videos of people doing stupid things. Whatever calming effect the front office had was dissipating, as the longer I sat in this room the more uncomfortable and twitchy I felt. I really wanted to leave. I started to look around the room, studying the various doctor stuff—

Why did I not want to look in the corner?

“Oh, that was quick,” said a thing in the corner who had not been there a second ago.

I reacted before I could think. My heart simultaneously started beating like a drum solo and dropped into the pit of my stomach as I rolled off the chair in the opposite direction of the thing, decided against throwing the big chair at it as it was bolted to the floor, and instead slammed my fingers through the counter at the edges of the sink, gripping the sides of it, ripped it from its plumbing and heaving it with all my might at the thing in the corner.

“Oh, my—“ the thing said as the sink slammed into a previously unseen barrier. “I think that’s enough.”

Suddenly the thing, which I couldn’t get a good look at but just registered as some kind of threat, resolved itself into a pretty older woman in a lab coat. She stood relaxed, in a long tan skirt and blue blouse, sensible flats, one hand in the coat pocket while the other held a gnarled stick. She had the kind of ageless beauty I associate with Jamie Lee Curtis or Helen Mirren. She was looking at me with a slightly impressed expression.

“I have to say, having a sink thrown at me is a new one,” she said.

“What—“

“Why didn’t you use the chair?” She asked, making what I assumed was an arcane gesture with her hand.

Whatever had set me off suddenly left my system, leaving me confused and breathless. “I wasn’t sure I could get it loose fast enough,” I said after taking a deep breath.. Then snarled in anger and threw up my mental defenses Alice had been helping me build.

The woman nodded, not reacting to my outburst. “You’re probably right. Only one person has been able to get it loose, and he’s part ogre.”

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked, in a reasonable tone of voice that in no way sounded like I was close to violence.

The older woman smiled kindly. “Dr. Agatha Cross.”

“Why the fuck did you make me attack you, Doc?” I asked. As I spoke I glanced at where the sink used to be housed and noted that while it had been hooked up to pipes, the pipes had no water running through them.

“The sage test was inconclusive,” The doctor responded. “There’s a magical frequency that the possessed find soothing. For non-practitioners who aren’t possessed, it’s vaguely irritating. Sadly, for a large percentage of practitioners, it instills paranoia and a strong fight-or-flight response. Hence the very robust interdiction field.”

She glanced down at the sink by her feet.

“Some have a stronger reaction than others,” she deadpanned.

“And that’s the best test you have?” I asked, incredulous.

“The fastest and least expensive,” she replied.

I glanced down at the sink I had thrown at her, then at the ruined counter and plumbing.

“So, this is usually the part where I convince my patient that yes, my methods are extreme but you still want me as your care provider. I’m not a part of the Concord and thus I do not report to them. This is a freedom I have defended for the last half century and will defend until the day I die. Because I am outside of their umbrella I have had to put in some policies to ensure my safety as I tend to attract some patients that are… outside the norm, the sage and following test you experienced are just a couple of the minor ones. Alice was tight-lipped about what is affecting you, but if what I have seen is any indication, you’re going to want to stick around for the physical.” She said the last bit while looking at my hands.

I looked down and swore under my breath. My nails, which were black with a metallic sheen, had burst through my gloves when I had jammed my fingers through the counter. They didn’t narrow to hooked points like claws, but at a glance they were claw-like.

I had a long internal debate over the next thirty seconds that was the mental equivalent of “I NEED TO KNOW WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME” arguing with “AAAA I’M SCARED OF FINDING OUT” and “THIS BITCH SEEMS CRAZY!” What finally won out was that Alice had sworn up and down that this lady was legit and that Alice was footing the bill.

I straightened out of the fighting crouch I had adopted by reflex and took a deep breath. “I hope I don’t regret this,” I muttered before backing away from the woman.

She did something and a hum I hadn’t noticed until it went away dispersed. She went to the door and held it open for me. “Most don’t,” she said.

For some reason, that comforted me. I appreciated the bluntness of it.

***

Doc Cross took me deeper into the building, past a bunch of identical examination rooms (sans ruined counters) until she opened a door that led to a staircase that went down. And down. And down.

After about five minutes we came to a landing with a couple of chairs and a water cooler. Doc Cross turned and looked at me with a critical eye. I raised an eyebrow at her. She nodded to herself and started her descent again.

“Was that the halfway point?” I asked.

“Yes,” the doc replied. “Some people need a break to catch their breath.”

I was so insanely curious why she would build so far down in California of all places, with its many earthquakes. The question bubbled up out of my throat almost of its own accord.

“Some of the enchantments and procedures I use don’t react well with modern technology,” the doctor replied. She wasn’t winded in the slightest. “It was either this or move the practice out in the boonies, which would cause its own problems.”

“What if they aren’t mobile? Or have a broken ankle?” I asked.

Cross looked at me over her shoulder, a conspiratorial smile on her lips. “They get to come down the fun way.”

“What’s the fun way?” I asked, my imagination filling the void her non-answer created.

“Let’s hope you are never in a position to find out,” she replied.

“Spoilsport,” I said.

We finally reached the bottom of the stairs in a little over ten minutes, which is a lot of fucking stairs for a stairwell with no switchbacks, to get a medical exam. The average person would probably be winded just from going down the stairs or have sore knees if they weren’t doing it properly. I almost died many, many times in a short span a year ago. Because of that, I’ve begun to work out every day because I learned what it meant to be out of shape while in a crisis situation—the result being that these stairs were no problem. Also, I’m like D-list superhero strong and durable thanks to a little haggling I did with a nigh all-powerful extra-dimensional being, so the stairs probably wouldn’t have been a problem if I did nothing but play video games all day.

The doc unlocked a reinforced steel door with a key she took from her pocket and a muttered phrase I politely tried not to hear, followed by a rapid series of knocks that sounded like it should really hurt her knuckles. The door clicked and swung open of its own accord.

I followed her through and found another room I had not expected. It was like someone combined a cooking show kitchen with a fey-style garden that sandwiched an operating room between them. I frowned at the floor, which started as a half-circle of cement going out about five feet from the door. On my left, the floor became polished hardwood, well-maintained and shining with fresh polish. That side of the room housed the kitchen, with a large granite top island (the kitchen had three sinks, two of which were on the island), with one of those herb racks above it. It looked more like a pot rack but the herbs… on closer examination there didn’t appear to be any herbs I recognized. In fact, many of the items turn out to be dried animal parts. The ones that grabbed my attention the most were the dried eyes, as I recognized a couple of what appeared to be human eyes among them. Hanging two rows down, past a various collection of hooves and what I can only assume to be calcified penises, was a string of mummified hands, tied together like you see garlic in some delis and supermarkets.

The floor to my right was grass, about four inches tall and lush. That side of the room was a garden that looked like a firm hand had told it to do what it wanted but to behave. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the garden except for a small path that wound around the surprisingly large space and ended up at a little pond with a splashing waterfall that emerged from the ivy-covered wall.

In the middle of the room, right on top of the division of hardwood and grass, was an examination table surrounded by medical equipment.

Doctor Cross had already moved over to one of the sinks and was washing her hands thoroughly. “Hop up on the table while I finish over here,” she said, her voice easily carrying across the room.

I went over to the little table, which resembled a bed more than a table upon closer inspection. I sat on it and took off my ruined gloves with some irritation, putting them next to me on the table. Cross came over at that moment, stretching a couple of blue rubber gloves over her hands. “So what seems to be the problem? And please tell me as much as you can. If you leave out important information it will impact how much I am able to help you.”

I sighed and ran a hand through my mop of hair, undoing a snag by virtue of cutting it with my sharp nails. “Whelp,” I said as I pulled up my sleeves, showing my ink-black skin that went from my fingertips to the tops of my biceps. “I had an incident last year and… had to… well, I had to rely on some tools for protection that I don’t know a lot about but after using them for a prolonged amount of time did this to my hands and feet.”

The doctor took a pair of glasses from her breast pocket and put them on, motioning for me to lift my arm for her to inspect them without touching me. She did the same with my other arm and then had me take off my pants and shoes so she could inspect my legs.

“Is it spreading?” She asked.

“Yes,” I said, a defeated note in my voice. “It’s the main reason I worked up the balls to come here.”

“Is going to the doctor really that terrifying?” She asked, shooting me a disapproving glance.

I sighed. “Not really, no,” I admitted. “But of the people I have interacted with over the last nine years, the majority have been murderers and literal monsters. The incident I mentioned resulted in many deaths and I’m—I’ve got a lot of stuff I’m dealing with. Mentally. Alice is helping.”

“With her gift?” Cross asked as she swabbed my skin with a giant Q-tip, squinting at the result.

“No,” I said, perhaps with a bit more force than I should have. “No, she’s just being a good friend. Getting me to see… to see that there isn’t violence behind every corner.”

“That’s great,” she said with a smile. “After the examination, I could recommend a therapist that does good work. He’s in the know.”

“In the know” was practitioner code for “knows there’s magic and other fucked up shit.”

“I ah… don’t know if I’m ready for that,” I said. “I’ll keep it in mind. Baby steps.”

Cross nodded knowingly. “What were the tools you used?” She asked after a beat, pausing her examination to regard me expectantly.

I sucked air in through my teeth and blew it out, blowing my hair out of my face. “I don’t… know? Exactly? The… peerrrson? I got it from. That person called them the Limbs of the Other Side.”

“What is this person called?” Cross asked with deliberate slowness.

I wanted to lie. But then I remembered all the times I’d yelled at the TV during a medical drama when the patient lied to the doctor and they had to browbeat the information out of the idiot to save his life. And, again, Alice vouched for this lady. If I was going to find a solution to my problem, I (and by extension, the people I went to for help) would need more information.

“The… Orphan,” I said.

The doctor's eyebrow rose in surprise. “What? Really?”

I nodded.

“What did you trade?” She asked, her professionalism dissolving into pure curiosity.

“Is that medically relevant?” I asked.

Cross sighed and shook her head. “Probably not, no. But thank you for telling me. About the Orphan, that is. That both narrows down the possibilities and also increases them exponentially.”

“What?!”

Cross snapped her fingers and a previously unseen stool in the corner walked over and slid under her. It looked like a regular stool except the legs looked like the gnarled roots of a great old tree.

She began gesturing and a big old cauldron I hadn’t noticed lifted itself out of the plants of the garden behind me, dipped itself in the pond, and began to—carefully, oh so carefully—tip-toe on four iron legs over to the other side of the room where a big hearth revealed itself on the north wall, on the hardwood side.

“The fuck? I feel like I’m in the Sword in the Stone suddenly,” I said.

Cross cackled. Actually cackled, like a classic 1940s witch. “I got the idea from that film,” she said. “I loved the way the furniture danced.”

The next three hours were taxing, to put it mildly. The first hiccup came when she tried to draw blood, but the needle snapped in the crook of my arm. She very calmly plucked out the piece of metal while I all but shouted “getitoutgetitoutgetitoutgetitout,” then once it was out, she had to convince me to allow her to use a much bigger and stronger needle. Then it was a cavalcade of tests, ranging from normal reflex tests where she bonked my knee with a little hammer, listening to my heart, checking my ears to having me hold things and watching my reaction, drinking awful concoctions from her cauldron, allowing her to cast spells over me. At one point she took some of my blood she had drawn and flicked some of it onto a hot pan (cast iron) and watched it sizzle, which made her eyebrows raise. Any questions I tried to ask at that point were shushed as she went into a whirl of activity, pulling wands out of drawers and waving them at me one after another, throwing feathers at me and watching them fall on and around me. If I hadn’t seen her demonstrate real magical aptitude, I would think this was an elaborate prank.

Finally, she collapsed in a slump on her walking stool and entered the last piece of data on her tablet. “So, I have good news, medium news, and bad news.”

I grimaced and gestured for her to lay it on me while I slipped back into my pants.

“Good news is that you aren’t, as far as I can tell, under outside mental influence, and you aren’t in immediate danger,” she said, looking up from her tablet with a smile.

I sighed explosively. “There’s that, at least.”

She looked down at her tablet. “As for the medium news… There’s a lot of conflicting data. Things I’ve never seen before. I’ll have to go over everything and compile it, plus I need to see what the blood work brings up. I may need to schedule you to get an MRI, which will be interesting as the nearest one that’s in the know and not under Concord control is in Sacramento.” She saw the concern on my face. “I’ll go through the data first and see what I find, and we’ll go from there.” I nodded, slightly relieved.

“The bad news?” I prompted, sliding my shirt over my head and sitting on the table.

Doctor Cross set the tablet aside on one of the rolling tables that surrounded the exam table and looked me in the eye, her demeanor serious. “The bad news is that I don’t recognize what’s happening to you.”

“You’ve never seen a transformation?” I asked, incredulous.

“No, I’ve seen plenty,” she said. “What I mean to say is I don’t know how the transformation is progressing. I don’t see the method or spell or contaminate. Hopefully, the blood work and the scrapings I took will reveal something, but I have a feeling you stumbled onto something unique.

“What this means is that we are in new territory, and I want to manage expectations,” she continued. “New territory means I’ll be figuring this out as we go along. There will be very little for me to base my decisions. Since the contamination is happening at a very slow rate, I am confident that I will be able to eventually develop a treatment… but there’s no guarantee.”

I nodded. “There’s a reason new diseases are named after the people that get them,” I muttered.

She patted my knee in a motherly fashion. “Don’t forget the good news,” she said. “We have a long time to figure this thing out. Having said that… I will need to look at the tools that gave you this condition.”

I nodded tiredly. “I figured,” I looked around the room. “Do you have like, a… cage? For things that can slip through tiny cracks?”

“How big?”

“Big enough for me to stand in, with my arms to my sides,” I demonstrated for her.

Her eyes widened. She took off her glasses and cleaned them with a cloth she took from her pocket. “Are they that big?

“No,” I scratched my head as I debated how much to tell her. Fuck it. “I store them in an interdimensional cubby. The last time I interacted with them they were… reluctant to follow orders.”

She frowned, placing her newly cleaned glasses on her nose. “They’re sentient?”

I shrugged. “They don’t talk or anything. They… got a taste for blood during that incident I talked about, and didn’t want to come off of me. I had to literally shove them in a hole and slam the door on them.”

The doctor brought her hands up and clasped them in thought, looking off into the distance. “I’ll have to prepare a space,” she met his eyes. “I should have it ready by the time your blood work is done. We’ll arrange it then.”

I nodded and slapped the tops of my thighs. “So, is that it? Any changes to my diet? Get more iron?”

She shook her head. “You’re free to go. Health-wise, you are beyond what is peak conditioning for a standard human. Whatever you’re doing to improve your body is working well. I would suggest that, if you’re able, you focus on increasing the functionality of your key organs. Heart, liver, kidneys, skin… maybe not skin,” she said, glancing at the ink-black skin of my hands. “More stress on the body means more work for your organs, and if they can’t keep up they will be more likely to develop complications or fail.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “Thanks, doc,” I said as I slipped my socks and shoes on. She waited patiently for me to lace up my stupid army boots (my toenails damaged my other shoes too easily) and walked with me up the long set of stairs.

When we got up to the main office, the receptionist gave me some paperwork and Alice practically attached herself to my side, she was so bored. She pestered me with questions but I muttered “Not now,” as I made my way to the car.

I sat in the driver's seat, staring into the middle distance, ignoring Alice’s concerned look.

So, not in immediate danger.

But the clock is ticking.

…

Fuck.

I grabbed a new pair of gloves from the glove compartment, momentarily amused once again that I’m using it for its original purpose, and pulled them on.

I turned to Alice. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

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