Corrupting Power
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Have Totem, Will Travel - Ch. 1 (all)
🕑 Added 2025-06-06 22:17:48 +0000 UTCHAVE TOTEM, WILL TRAVEL
Book Two of The Druid Gunslinger Legends
A Blake Conrad tale
Chapter One – “Whole Room Marked ‘T’”
“Do I look like FedEx?” I asked my sister as she and her friend sat in my office in downtown San Francisco. My sister, Charlotte, the Huntsmistress, wasn’t one you turned down a meeting with without a good reason, but we Sextons were also historically pranksters to our family members, so it was entirely possible this whole thing was some elaborate joke I just hadn’t sussed the meaning out of yet. “Or UPS? Or the postal service for that matter?”
I had my leather boots up on the desk, which was fine, because it was my desk, and in my office, and, specifically, because I knew it annoyed my sister when I did it. She hated pretty much everything about my office. The place was a second story office above a wine shop and distributor, which was the cover for the family fortune. Even with magic, you have to provide a paper trail to cover where the money comes from.
The room was stocked with books, scrolls, maps, drawings, photographs, notes and sketches, all strewn about in the most carefully chaotic masterpiece of a filing system. For example, the notes on the rogue roc I’d had to hunt down last month were in the stack of things marked ‘T’ for ‘Threat,’ although I suppose I had the whole room marked ‘T.’
Much of the walls were covered in trophies and mementos from previous cases, and I’d recently just hung a badge that the Queen of Atlantis had given me after I’d saved her life, proclaiming me an honorary member of her Royal Guard. A handful of the objects on display were weapons, which was one of the reasons the locks on my office made it perhaps the most secure room on the planet.
The desk my feet were resting atop had been hand carved almost three hundred years ago and might’ve been one of the first hundred or so pieces of furniture assembled in the New World by the settlers. It had been passed down in our family for generations.
Across the desk, to the left of me sat my sister Charlotte, who I know hated asking me for favors, which is why generally anything she wanted me to do she did herself. And yet, here she was, asking me to play messenger boy on a cross-country trip for a friend of hers. “You have to admit, it’s significantly more complicated than you’re making it, dear brother,” Charlotte said, her smile just that slight bit of condescending that she reserved just for me. “It’s not like we’re asking you to pick up a truck full of Coors and to drive it to Atlanta.”
“You’re certainly not offering a TransAm for me to do it in.”
“It’s important that it be done with an eye to security,” the other woman, Ali Wind Rider, said to me. “We know there is some level of danger associated with its transportation, and so we have come to you as someone capable of handling such a concern.”
She was a Native American woman of no small beauty, although I was likely too young for her tastes, as I would’ve put her age at about fifty. Much of her skin was covered in tattoos and ink, but all of that didn’t go above her neck, and none of it was symbolism I could divine meaning from. She was dressed in a brown leather fringe jacket, a flannel shirt and a pair of blue jeans that looked like it had lived a few rough lives of its own. Her hair was very simply swept back, devoid of any overly visible fashioning.
“It’s a totem,” I said to them. “What sort of security do you need for transporting something like that?”
“Our kind,” Charlotte told me. “The totem is a vessel keeping the spirits of the ancestors of the Yuma shamans, and it needs to make the journey from California to upstate New York.”
“Yeah, I caught all that the first time, sis, but I still don’t understand why you want me to do it.”
“I don’t.”
“But I thought—”
“I want you to help me do it,” she said.
“A family roadtrip?” I asked her.
“If you like.”
“And why aren’t we flying there?”
“The totem does not handle flying very well,” Ali said. “The last time someone tried to take it on an airplane, the plane was forced to turn back and make an emergency landing.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“They call it ‘birdstrike.’”
“I’m sure the birds don’t think of it that way,” I sighed. “So, road trip then? That’s, what, 3-4 days if we’re driving nonstop?”
“It doesn’t have to be so fast, Dale,” Charlotte said to me with a slight smile. “When was the last time we took a trip together?”
I thought about it for a second before answering. “Havana?”
“That was mostly a job.”
“This sounds like mostly a job, sis.”
“It’ll be somewhat of a job,” she said with a soft smile. “I’ve already contracted the Lord of Daggers to cover your responsibilities while you’re gone.”
I rolled my eyes a little bit. “I mean, Simon’s fine, but he tends to adhere to the rules a bit more than my liking.”
“So, he’s going to follow everything you told him to, to the letter.”
“Right, but a lot of times in this job, adhering too closely to the rules can get you killed.”
“Then you’ll be able to say ‘I told you so’ when we get back.”
“I do like being able to be a smart-ass to my sister,” I said with a smirk, rubbing my chin. “Okay, as long as I can fly back, and you assure me you’ve got both your and my day jobs covered for while we’re gone. The last thing I want to come back to is a hot mess that would’ve been avoided if I didn’t agree to this road trip.”
“I’ll be back first thing tomorrow to scoop you up on my way out,” Charlotte said to me as she and Ali Wind Rider were both getting up from my desk. “Don’t pack too heavy, but don’t forget to bring the SoulEnders.”
“Never leave home without’em.”
After Charlotte and Ali left, I started setting up things so the office would run smoothly while I was away, or as about as smoothly as they possibly could while the Lord of Daggers was overseeing things. I knew I was being overly critical of Simon, who was about as good as anyone could be in trying to be a temporary replacement for me and Charlotte while we were gone. The Lord of Daggers would be excellent in making sure nothing broke, no one got out of line and nothing violent happened. I just worried about what would happen if someone came to him with the sort of weird and wild shit it seems like I spend many of my days dealing with. He would be fine with the big stuff, but bad at the mysteries and mayhem. Still, Charlotte had come to me hat in hand asking for a favor for her friend Ali, and there was no small percentage in that. Charlotte hated asking me for favors, which meant there was a lot more going on below the surface of this one than she wanted to tell me upfront.
Ali wasn’t someone I knew that much about, other than she’d been one of my sister’s friends for the last four or five years, most particularly since she became Huntsmistress. She was of the Yuma people, a First Nations tribe prevalent around the West Coast, although they weren’t one of the biggest ones. The Yuma people were powerful enchanters, which was part of the reason why Charlotte had gotten to know them initially. She’d needed help is building a particularly strong lock for a demon that she’d captured, and long-form magic had never been Charlotte’s strong point, so she’d turned to the Yuma shamans to help her build a capture box to keep it in.
Some people have asked me what the difference between the Gunslinger’s and the Huntsmistress’s responsibilities are, and I’ve often stressed that it comes down to a level of discretion. The Gunslinger works on single targets, generally, or more specific, high-impact problems. The Huntsmistress works on larger scale issues – gangs, factions, invasions, packs or riots, as well as the occasional Treaties violations. The Gunslinger works on things that require more precision or finesse. I think I’ve usually said if you need a surgical strike, call The Gunslinger; if you need a carpet bombing, call The Huntsmistress.
The fact that Charlotte wanted both of us transporting this totem meant she wasn’t sure what kind of problems we could be encountering, but also that she wasn’t entirely comfortable trying to handle it on her own or letting me handle it on my own. That certainly made me a bit more nervous the longer I thought about it.
There was clearly a lot more going on here than Charlotte wanted to tell me about up front.
That meant to pack for combat, not for traveling light.
I stood up and opened the door of my office into the outer waiting area. My personal secretary, Ruby, had just gotten back from maternity leave a few weeks ago, and things had just been starting to feel normal again.
Ruby, like her two sisters, Topaz and Sapphire, had been working for me almost since I’d started as Gunslinger. The trio were all fae shapeshifters who’d entered my employ as part of their way of saying thanks for me saving their tiny enclave out in the Sunset District from a hunter with a generational grievance that predated anyone still alive in the group. It was one of my very first cases, and the three of them had been in my employ ever since. We also had a rule – no fooling around with each other. I’d actually found that not too difficult to maintain, and Ruby was married, and Topaz said I wasn’t ‘edgy’ enough to be her style (which was good, because she was way too pierced to be mine), but Sapphire had been forced to be reminded a few times that our relationship was strictly personal.
Ruby, unlike her sisters, looked mostly like you would expect someone’s high-end personal assistant slash secretary to look like. Business casual but just expensive enough that people understood I was paying her very well. Blood wine colored hair done up in a bun, a relatively tanned face, and she didn’t show a sign of her baby weight sticking around. She was wearing a blazer and a long skirt with black stockings, although I’d told her time and time again that if she wanted to be more casual around the office, she could be. She’d told me just as often that ‘somebody has to look respectable around here, Lord Gunslinger.’ I’d worked very hard not to take offense at that. If anything, I enjoyed the air of organization having her around afforded me.
Oh, I’d also seen her take down a werewolf bare-handed once, but that’s a different story for another time.
“Ruby, I know you just got back into the office, but it seems I’m going to be out for about a week,” I said to her, leaning against the wall next to her desk. “Charlotte’s made a request of me, and you know how rare that can be.”
“What, she wants to see the Hope Diamond and can’t do it on her own?” Ruby asked me, looking up from her typing, as she clicked her tongue disapprovingly. “I’ve told you time and time again your sister is a bad influence on you.”
“You know she says the exact same thing about you and your sisters?” I replied with a chuckle. “Says having fae folk in the office is just asking to stumble into trouble.”
“She’s just saying that because my cousin Amber doesn’t return her calls anymore,” Ruby sniffed dismissively, saving her file. “And that’s on her, not on Amber.” She looked up at me, her attention now squarely on me. “But if Charlotte’s asking for your help, we both know it must not be a small ask.”
“It isn’t, or… at least I think it isn’t.”
“You’re not sure?”
“I mean, on first description, it sort of sounded like a milk run, other than the fact we couldn’t do it by plane.”
“Then it’s a transport job. What are you moving, boss, and where’s it going?”
“It’s just a tribal totem that needs to go from here to upstate New York.”
“And it can’t fly… why?”
“Owner says it induces birdstrike.”
Ruby scowled. “Mmm. You and I both know that typically only happens around objects of quite significant magical power. How strong did it look to you?”
“Not that strong, but there were a lot of enchantments on it, to mask what it truly is and how strong it is, as well as what it can do,” I told my secretary. “But Charlotte says that’s mostly for Ali, the owner, for her privacy.”
“Do you believe her?”
“Why would Charlotte lie to me?”
“Maybe she’s not the one lying…”
I frowned at that, but it was a good point, and one I uncharacteristically hadn’t stopped to consider at the time. “Anyway, the two of us will be moving the totem by car cross-country, driving it there ourselves, so I expect we’re going to be a bit hard to reach for a while,” I said with a sigh. “Some of those stretches haven’t got a whole lot in the way of cell towers for them, so if you need to get ahold of me, expect it to be when I get a chance to reply. You might even have to resort to email instead of voicemail but do what you think is best.”
“Wait,” Ruby said, her face tightening up a little. “If you and your sister are going to be gone for this trip, who’s going to be on protectorate duty? Don’t tell me it’s that pompous git, Simon.”
“The Lord of Daggers is next in line to be head of the regional defense while both the Gunslinger and Huntsmistress are away on business, Ruby,” I said, placing a hand on her shoulder. “You know that.”
“I also know Simon’s got an entire redwood tree lodged up his arrogant ass, Dale,” she said with a tired laugh and a smile. “Yes, he’s good in combat and yes, he’s capable of keeping things from getting too far out of hand, mostly, but he’s also not exactly what anyone would call ‘subtle.’ He’s more like your sister, and is better suited to handling her responsibilities, not yours.”
“Then hopefully there won’t be anything needing my particular skill set while I’m gone, and just the sort of day-to-day shit Shar takes on,” I said. “It’s not like we’re going on holiday for a few months, Ruby. It shouldn’t be any more than a week.”
“Do you want me to cancel your appointment with Detective McArthur?”
I bit my bottom lip, having forgotten all about that. “Shit, just reschedule it. Tell her emergency family business came up and I needed to head out of town. We can meet up when I get back.”
“Was that supposed to be business or pleasure, boss?”
“Aren’t you the one who told me never to date a cop?”
“She’s a detective, Dale. That’s different. That shows at least a baseline of intelligence.”
“It’s strictly professional.”
“Are you certain?”
I chuckled softly. “I mean, she’s hot, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think she’s into me.”
“You don’t ever think anyone’s into you, Dale, because you’re an idiot.”
“Am I wrong?”
“Yes, frequently, especially when it comes to women,” Ruby grinned at me. “But fine. I’ll let the good detective know your meeting will be pushed back a few weeks. Should I expect her to be mad?”
“Annoyed maybe, but it’s a cold case she wanted to talk about,” I said. “It’s not going anywhere.”
“That’s something, at least,” Ruby said, making a note of it on her calendar. “Do you know the route you’re going to be traveling?”
“I think it’s just I-80 most of the way there, Ruby, unless Charlotte’s got some detours planned for us along the way that she wants to take in.”
“Do you think that’s likely?”
“I think I’ve never done a road trip, just me and my sister, in our entire lives, so I think anything I tell you is me grasping at straws that I’m pulling out of my ass,” I say with a little laugh. “But it’s probably good. It’ll be the most time we’ve spent together continuously since Dad died.”
“You and she seem to get along alright?” Ruby asked me and I nodded.
“We do… we’re just not quite as close as we were before we took on our new jobs,” I said. “I think part of it’s just both of us having to deal with the life and death stuff so much. She’s worried about the toll the SoulEnders are taking on me, and I worry that she’s gotten a little too callous and shrugs off collateral damage too lightly. It’ll be a chance for us to talk that over.”
“You think she’s going to take that as you interfering with her life?”
“I’m her brother, Ruby,” I sighed. “If I can’t tell her when she’s fucking up, who will?”
“Well then, I expect you to let her know how cross I am at her for doing Amber dirty like she has.”
“I’ll labor the point with her at the first chance I get.”
“You know, since you’re heading out that way anyway, you could swing by Wamsutter, say hello to Arcane Alice,” Ruby said to me. “It’s right off I-80. You’re practically driving right past her.”
I chuckle softly, nodding a little bit. “I’ll give it some thought. There’s lots of people we could stop and see along the way. It’s more a question of how much time do we want to be not moving towards our destination.”
“You’re gonna need to sleep, eat and shit, Dale,” Ruby said to me. “And if you and Charlotte are thinking about driving around the clock, I’ll whip both your asses as soon as you get back.”
“The thought had crossed our minds.”
“Well, uncross it, right fucking now,” Ruby said, pointing a pen at me like a sword. “I’m not kidding. Do you have any idea how fucking undignified it would be, having to explain the Gunslinger and the Huntsmistress died, not in combat, but in a fucking car accident because one of them fell asleep at the wheel? No, Mister, I will not fucking have it.”
I raise my hands in surrender. “Eight hours a night, every night, in a motel or hotel of some kind, I promise, even if I have to take the car keys from Charlotte by ritualistic combat.”
“Silly girl always throws ‘rock’ first and you know that.”
I rubbed Ruby’s shoulder affectionately. “It’s good to have you back. Baby’s doing well?”
“Well enough,” she said with a slight grumble. “Fae children are basically feral, so you have to make sure they’re not trying to eat everything that isn’t nailed down until they’re three or four.”
“You don’t mean that literally.”
“Afraid I do. I’ve got a two-month-old that keeps trying to gnaw wooden furniture, and she’s got the teeth to do it. Fae babies are crazy,” she said, shaking her head. “You humans have it easy.”
“Well, fae babies can also take care of themselves at birth, meanwhile humans are left thinking over and over again, ‘Please don’t let it die, please don’t let it die, please don’t let it die…’”
Ruby laughed, nodding at me. “That’s true, we don’t have to worry about them randomly dying. Running off, hunting something like a loose squirrel, on the other hand…” She grabbed a pad, and started scribbling notes on it, much like I do when I’m taking a new case. I saw her scribble GONE A WEEK first, but then SIMON STANDING WATCH beneath it with a frowny face drawn next to it. “I suppose I can deal with Simon if it’s just for a week or so, but you go much longer than that, and I’m certain the wheels are going to start coming off.”
“I hear you, Ruby, and I’ll make a point to be sure it doesn’t go quite that long.”
“You said you’re going to be taking I-80 all the way to New York?” She scribbled down I-80 and NEW YORK on her notes.
“That’s right, although we might make a few detours along the way,” I said. “The plan is to try and go as fast as we can, but we’re not above stopping places and doing a bit of sight seeing while we’re traveling. Hell, we’ll probably encounter at least one mess we’ll need to clean up, because there’s no way Charlotte and I go a week together without stumbling into some kind of mess.”
I very slowly leaned down to Ruby’s desk, trying to be as subtle as I could in my movements, before I picked up a letter opener from her workspace, poised it just so between my fingers and then suddenly moved to snap fling it across the room, impaling a little tiny red demon against the wall, hearing it shriek out in shock before the life drained out of it.
“Gods, Dale!” Ruby gasped. “What the hell is that?”
I moved over to the wall and prying the letter opener and its victim out of the wood, its tiny twitching body leaking green blood onto my fingers. “Gremlins. Buggers aren’t supposed to be in season for another few months,” I said, looking at the corpse with disdain.
The damn things generally didn’t become a problem until the winter, when the cold winds and rain forced them to tunnel into buildings to stay safe. We’d thought we’d hunted them to extinction within the San Francisco city limits back in the 90s, but the varmints were worse than cockroaches, and the last three or four years, they’d been worse than ever. The last thing I needed was them chewing at the wiring or the embedded spellwork within the walls of my office. I had long standing spells cooked into this building, not just of mine, but my father’s, my uncle’s, my sister’s and my mother’s as well. This structure had been in our family’s possession since the great rebuild, and I would be damned if I was going to let a bunch of minor scrapling demon scavengers take it down on my watch. “Sir?” Ruby asked me.
“Call Atomic Carol, tell her we’ve got a level three Red Rager problem, and if she needs to fumigate the office, you can work from home while I’m gone,” I said to her, watching her scribble down LVL3 RED RAGER – ATOMIC CAROL. “Don’t worry, whatever Carol says to do is fine, and she knows better than to poke around in my office at things she doesn’t need to. We trust her to walk around the office unsupervised and not blow herself up.”
“Ex-girlfriend of yours, sir?” Ruby asked with a giggle.
I had to work very hard not to shudder visibly at that. We called her Atomic Carol because she was probably in her prime back in the 1940s. She only had about half of her original teeth left, and those that had remained had purely done so out of spite, not because of any particular health. She had skin like leather, deeply tanned and faded, like a prospector who’d never found a single bit of shade her entire life. No, she was not a handsome woman, but she knew poisons better than anyone else on the West Coast, and I’d never seen her fail at an extermination gig. Rats, grubs, wights, locusts, snakes, gremlins, you name it – if it could infest you, she could rid you of the infestation. “Not even if my life depended on it,” I grumbled.
There were a surprising number of ‘specialists’ working behind the Veil with analogous jobs to people you’d meet every day. There were communication lines that needed to be fixed, there were offices that needed repairing, there were specialty tool orders that needed to be filled, there were exotic groceries to be ordered – a whole second world existed with so many parallels to the first.
“You want me to swing by and feed Quincy?” she asked me. “I know he’s generally good to get his own food, but it probably doesn’t hurt to let him have some company.”
“That’s fine, but don’t give him whatever you gave him last time,” I told her. Quincy was the strangest pet I’d ever owned. He was a kaare, an elemental cat, meaning much of the time, he was invisible, well, when he wanted to be. Actually, that’s not technically accurate. He wasn’t invisible – he was made of wind. When he chose to be. He could also be made of fire, earth, water or electricity or plasma if he wanted to be. I’d seen him pull tricks converting his body to titanium or diamond. He could change the composition of his body to whatever he wanted, meaning despite his small and slight build, he was basically one of the supernatural apex predators of San Francisco. He was intelligent but not capable of advanced communication, and I’d learned that he liked me well enough so that my apartment was one of the places he enjoyed regularly hanging out in. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what level of intelligence Quincy possessed – he might’ve just been refused to talk to me for reasons of his own. But I knew he’d adopted my apartment as his impromptu home the day he’d slunk into the building, wounded and looking for some place to lay low, and I’d brought him into my apartment, tended to his wounds and gave him some place to rest and recover. Since then, he’d sort of doubled as the apartment guardian.
“If Atomic Carol comes by to fumigate the place, do I need to move Quincy for the time being?”
“Yeah, see if you can get Quincy to come with you if Carol insists she needs to tend to the entire building, or if not, she can leave my apartment alone, and Quincy’ll just hunt down any rogue gremlins that try and make their way in there. I’m a little surprised he hasn’t cleared the whole building already, but he may be hunting other things these days.”
“Got it,” she said, writing VISIT GOOD BOY Q on her pad. “Oh, one last thing before you head out on your little adventure. That package was delivered by bonded courier while you were in your meeting with your sister. It’s from your cousin out in Cheyenne. The courier wanted to make sure it got put into your hands directly, but I assured them, I’m just as good as.”
“How’d they take that?” I asked her, looking over at the package, seeing a square box just a tiny bit too small to fit a bowling ball inside of, wrapped in heavy layers of leather and enchanted twine. I recognized Little Larry’s handiwork anywhere. If he was sending me a package, it was probably important and it probably shouldn’t be something I should let wait until after I get back.
“Like they wanted to wait until you came out of your office, but I shooed them off, and promised them everything would be okay,” Ruby said. “How is Little Larry these days?”
“Not entirely sure,” I said, struggling to pick up the box. It was far heavier than it looked, and it looked pretty damn heavy to begin with. “Haven’t talked to him in, what, three or four years? Not since he was in town for the thing with the guy and the telescope.”
“How could I forget?” she said, mocking me.
“Why wouldn’t you,” I countered. “Little Larry isn’t exactly the most interesting of people on his best days.”
“Which days are those?”
“The ones that don’t end in ‘Y.’”
“Oh, that often,” she said with a matronly smile. “Anyway, off you go, then. Take your box upstairs and pack your things so your sister can come squirrel you away off in the middle of the night.”
I tried not to put my back out as I grabbed the box and lifted it upwards, clutching its heavy weight in my hands as I headed out of the office and down the hall, to the half of the second floor that constituted my apartment. I still wasn’t getting much use out of the house in El Cerrito, so I was starting to think maybe I should make this my official residence whenever I wasn’t up at Sexton Manor.
After unlocking the door, letting myself in, closing the door behind me and relocking it, I set the heavy box on the dining room table, hearing the wood creak a little in protest. “Yeah, I know it’s fucking thick,” I muttered to the table. “Get used to it.”
I grabbed my box of tools to safely cut through Little Larry’s layers of mystical twine and protection, the kinds of things that would ensure nobody but me or my sister could open the box without putting in some serious magical firepower. But with family heirloom tools, the twine just sliced open and I began unwrapping the box, which turned out to be a wooden chest of some kind with large hinges on it. There was a small combination lock on the front of it, a dial with one hundred almost randomly drawn characters over each decimeter, but I knew the ones I was looking for.
“Open,” I said, as I turned the dial to the first symbol. “Seh.” Back to the left to the second symbol. “Sah.” And back to the right again to the third symbol. “Me.” We’d made up our own three icons to use on a lock, and so Larry, Charlotte and I had all memorized them, but we’d mostly just used them as a lark. I pushed the dial inward and heard a click as the top latch opened and I lifted the cover to look inside, only to find a large ball of amber the size of my two fists put together, with a tiny little dragon embedded in the center of it. It rest inside of a cradle of velvet cushioning.
A single piece of paper was tucked into the box as well, so I took it out and started to read.
Dear Cousin Dale,
If you’re reading this, odds are I’m dead, and if I’m not dead, I’m prob’ly wishing I was, because it means something’s gone real bad in the amber mines. This box is set to be mailed to you automatically if nobody’s heard from me in a week, so no need to rush on my account – I’m likely gone already. But if so, I need you to come and drag my body out of the amber mines and get it back home to my wife. And you need to be the keeper of this, the greatest discovery we’ve made in the mines. Head to Cheyenne as soon as you can, and my assistant Betty will have more details.
Hoping like hell it’s just a case of me forgetting to reset the autosender’s date, but if it isn’t, you were always kind to me, cousin, and I appreciate you never mirroring your father or your uncle’s casual disparagement. That meant the world to me.
--LL
Well, shit.
Comments
Tzunamis
Just light drama and suspense to start the new book I see :D Noticed in this line. " but Sapphire had been forced to be reminded a few times that our relationship was strictly personal." Did you mean to say "strictly professional"? after how you described how they needed to be kept to work arrangements.
