Corrupting Power
patreon
Neon Stonehenge - Ch. 14 (final)
🕑 Added 2025-04-24 08:34:17 +0000 UTCChapter Fourteen – “Is it all over?”
At that point, I didn’t have much left but the cleanup. Still, more often than not, that work’s even harder than the actual sleuthing, because you’re trying to make people whole again who you know are never going to be fully right. You know that far better than they do. They’re still hoping that at some point in the near future, they’ll have forgotten all about the ordeal, and life will be simple, like they remember it before everything got so fucked up that they couldn’t tell which way was up.
It never quite worked out that way, though.
Not for anybody.
On my walk down, I’d called Elton and told him to take his van and his team to Seymour’s Grove, to pick up the body of the dead Atlantean, and to add the cost of its disposal to the Gunslinger account. As always, Elton didn’t ask any questions beyond the perfunctory one – ‘how many pieces is the body in?’
Always a professional.
At the bottom of the hill, Charlotte was waiting for me, rifle case at her feet, leaning her back against her Mini Cooper, looking at her cell phone without so much as a care in the world. Charlotte’s built like me – death doesn’t affect us the same way it does civilians. We grew up around it, embraced it when we were young and never let it go.
The only way not to be bothered by death is to familiarize yourself with it to the point that its very presence is second nature. I see death all the time, practically weekly, and have since I was a young child. I understand that bodies are going to be a part of my normal life, and so there’s only so much impact another dead guy’s really gonna have on me. It might sound cold, but that’s just the way things go.
“How are you feeling, Dale?”
“You know I hate that question, Charlotte,” I said to her. “I’m fine. I’m always fine. The problem’s in the ground, the asset’s back with the client, and the job’s nearly done.”
“Nearly?”
“I still have an Atlantean queen to deal with,” I said to her, pulling the two halves of the pendant out of my pocket. “Speaking of which, we should get going back to the Manor. The last thing I want is that hibernation enchantment to go up in flames because we didn’t haul ass.”
Charlotte grabbed her rifle case and tossed it into the back seat before I hopped into the front passenger seat while she got into the driver’s seat. We weren’t going to waste any time, and the streets were obviously more than a little dead this time of night, so we were cutting across town like we were trying to set a land speed record, sparks flying off the car’s underside, not that it was causing any real damage to the car. She’d never told me exactly how many layers of enchantments were on the damn thing, but I was fairly certain it would take something the size and/or power level of a dragon to be able to put even a scratch on it.
We made it across the Golden Gate in record time and were back at the Manor much faster than even I would’ve thought was possible, but then again, when it comes to fast drivers, Charlotte’s always been able to beat me on four wheels. (On two, I’d have gotten there a couple of minutes faster, but I also would’ve zipped through some places cars don’t exactly fit or are supposed to go.)
As we arrived back at Sexton Manor, I could feel the power pregnant in the air and wanted nothing so much as to get things set right. The hope had been that the hibernation enchantment on the Queen would simply fizzle out, and she would awaken naturally, but it was painfully starting to sizzle the general area instead. The temperature was rising uncomfortably fast.
“This doesn’t feel good, Dale,” Charlotte said to me, concern in her eyes. “I think the spell’s starting to breakdown instead of resolving cleanly.”
Thoypsynx came sprinting out towards us, waving his hands above him like his hair was on fire and he desperately wanted us to put him out. “Thank Alanakesh you’re back!” he said, his eyes wide and desperate. “The spell’s in its final stages of collapse! Do you have—”
“Right here,” I said, sprinting past him, heading straight for the shipping container. I could’ve taken the couple of minutes to explain to him what I was going to do, but we just didn’t have time for that. I needed to get down to work. The guards Charlotte had stationed outside of the container tensed up when they saw someone charging at their security point but relaxed as soon as they recognized me, parting way for me to just sprint on into the container.
Inside the box of steel, the air was even worse than it was outside. It tasted coppery on the tongue with a hint of sulfur and brimstone, but there was an acrid, putrid aftertaste that lingered uncomfortably in my mouth. The things that had been powering the hibernation spell were beginning to rot.
The amulet itself was relatively simple, and the enchantment was nothing all that complicated, but there was an underlying danger to it that made me very glad I hadn’t tried to force-rig the spell or just let the SoulEnders take a swing at disrupting them. The power source might have been the most reliable thing in the world when they’d installed it, but years of slow continual usage had caused the batteries to degrade and become volatile.
I brought the two parts of the amulet together and then began to read the scrawled Atlantean text that lined the outside ring of the conjoined amulet. Not only would the spell not work without both halves of the pendant, but also the words themselves wouldn’t be legible without them, as the division point ran right through the inscription, giving each amulet half of it.
(Don’t ask why I can read and speak Atlantean – I’m a little rusty, but you never know when you’re going to have need use of a nearly unused language to deal with an ancient curse. I think I’ve got close to a dozen obscure languages floating around in my head. Nobody writes curses in Esperanto, or whatever.)
My first attempt at reading the evocation wasn’t good enough, so I gave it a second go, and then I felt the amulet start to heat up in my hands, as streaks of white light rushed from the shipping container walls around me at the bit of metal I clung to. They started as thin bands, almost threadlike, but they were followed by thicker and thicker ropes of energy, flooding from their reservoirs and into the amulet, stripping the spell away, layer by layer. The air around them sizzled, like frying bacon, and I could see sparks blooming from the walls where the jets originated.
As the power continued to flood into the amulet, the jewelry was growing hotter and hotter in my hands, not quite burning me, but certainly very uncomfortable to hold until finally the streaks of white light turned yellow, then orange, then red, then suddenly stopped with a soft popping sound and a rushing in of cool air to fill the space.
I started running out of the container and ran towards the courtyard, shouting as I did, “Hot potato! Coming through! Steer clear! Out of the fucking way!” while I tried to keep my grasp on the thing as best I could. I didn’t have time to explain to anyone what was going on; I just had to get it done.
Ain’t that the motto of my fucking life?
Once off the patio, I sprinted towards the far end of courtyard, near the end of the compound closest to the Bay itself, even as I could feel the amulet threatening to burn through the skin of my right hand.
My left hand reached in beneath the collar of my shirt and touched a tattoo on my right shoulder, holding my fingers there for a three-count before I said, “MadBum’s Arm: Activate.” I could feel the tattoo ink beneath my skin dissipate as the one-shot spell flooded through my right arm. I took another three-count to make sure the spell was active, and then I chucked the amulet out through the cove entrance with the sort of force you’d expect from Superman pitching a baseball.
The amulet left my hand like a rocket, leaving a streak of fire and light in its wake as it shot out several hundred feet, double or tripling the world record before it erupted into a ball of green and orange flame the size of a Volkswagen Bug for mere seconds, and then snuffed itself out, dropping harmlessly to the bottom of the San Francisco Bay.
I turned around to see Charlotte standing there, looking a little winded, having seen me running off the patio and then sprinting to catch up to me. “We okay, Dale?”
My fingers pulled my shirt open a little more, glancing at the newly pale section of skin on my shoulder where there’s been a tattoo spell just moments ago. “Yeah, I’m going to have to get another ink-spell redone, but that’s what they’re there for, right?”
“What did you say to activate this one? I couldn’t quite make it out as I ran up.”
I chuckled softly. “MadBum’s arm. If you’re talking pitchers, Madison Bumgarner’s tough to beat, y’know?”
“I can’t even with you,” she sighed exasperatedly. “Even in your emergency spells, you’re still a Giants geek. Besides, he’s been with the team less than a year.”
“Don’t you start with me, sis. We’re going to the World Series this year. I can feel it.”
“Can we get back to crisis at hand, please? Did you get the spell removed safely?”
I glanced at her in confusion, tilting my head to one side before gesturing behind me wildly with one arm. “It depends on if you call that ‘safely’ or not!” I said in annoyance. “But yes, the Queen should be waking up any minute now, and all the leaky power sources got drained of what they had left in them, and that’s what you saw pop out there over the water.”
“Do you want to handle the diplomacy, or should I?”
“It’s probably best if you do most of the talking, sis,” I said. “It’s not like the Gunslinger is supposed to be a negotiating role. When I’m tasked to do something, it’s generally long past the point of negotiations, isn’t it?”
“That’s fair, but I don’t want you to wander off,” she said. “I might need you around to explain some of how we got here, or how long she’s been asleep.”
I rolled my eyes slightly. “You’re worried your Atlantean’s too rusty, aren’t you?”
“It might also be a concern, yes.”
“Fine, fine.”
We headed back to the container, which no longer felt as dark and ominous as it had before. Whereas once the box had felt almost tomblike, now there was a sort of dynamic warmth about it. The guards looked as though their duties came easier to them, like there wasn’t a lingering pressure weighing them down. The very space of the air around the place had changed. I no longer felt like I had a brick of TNT sitting on the family estate.
I stepped back into the container, hearing a pair of voices in hushed conversation, one of them obviously Thoypsynx, the other I suspected to be his queen. The container walls were no longer covered in barnacles, stone and coral, but instead had returned to their normal corrugated metal sides, letting the space feel much more open and far less claustrophobic.
Standing near the far back of the container I saw the two of them, although the Queen was crouching down a little, so as to not hit her head. She was… much taller standing up than I had thought she was. I’d sort of pegged my expectations on how tall Atlanteans were based on Thoypsynx and Nigel, both of whom had been approximately my height. But perhaps because of her royal heritage, or perhaps just because she was female, she was a good foot and change taller than I was, and she had to stoop a little to not bang her head on the top of the container. Her skin was a light blue shade of aqua, with heavily braided inky black hair in pair of intertwined ropes running down the center of her back, and her eyes were large yellow saucers that seemed to my eyes to be more cat-like than fishlike, but what the hell do I know about such things? Her attire was a heavy crimson robe, with bright gold woven filigree running through it like herringbone, hanging well down to her ankles.
She was a very good-looking woman, despite the whole, y’know, fishiness of her being. She had some pretty kickin’ curves, although considering she was seven foot something, maybe they were the appropriate proportions for someone her size. I know there are the bold sexual adventurers who loved to play around outside of their own species, but for the most part, I wasn’t one of them, at least, not at that point in my life. As I’d grow older, I’d definitely experiment around with plenty of folks beyond the Veil, including some truly exotic sexual encounters that even I have trouble believing happened, and I was there. But you have to remember, this was a much younger, rougher-around-the-edges me, one who was still green to the role that would come to define my life in ways that version of me couldn’t possibly understand.
Still, I remember that moment in time, when I first saw Queen Xfra, thinking to myself…
“Yeah, I’d hit that.”
I was a younger, more impetuous and coarse man then. What can I say?
“Is this my savior?” Queen Xfra asked in slightly accented English, as she turned to look at me, the Atlantean accent something like a Russian accent while still being distinguishably different. “Are you the one I have to thank for my continued existence?”
“Your Majesty let’s not stay in here while you’re cramped. We can step out of the container and onto land itself. You’ll be safe here. I’ve seen to that,” I said.
“You’ve seen to that?” my sister mouthed at me with a mocking smile.
The Queen either didn’t see my sister being petty or chose to give it no mind, as we all walked out of the container and headed back out into the open expanse of the estate’s courtyard. “So much time has passed since one of our kind walked among yours,” she said, her voice containing multitudes of sadness. “Well, other than the outcast, I suppose. Speaking of which, does that problem still plague us?”
I shook my head as I looked up at her. “No, your Majesty. He challenged me to a duel in order to keep me from turning off your hibernation enchantment, but when he was losing, he tried to cheat. He’s dead now, so he won’t be troubling you again.”
“I hope your aid doesn’t end here, Druid King.”
I scowled a little bit at that then put on my best courtly smile again. “Druid Gunslinger, your Majesty. We in the Druid Order don’t take kindly to so-called Kings and Queens among our ranks. Not saying your country has to follow our order’s rules, but the one time we had a Druid King, shit went sideways fairly badly. We collectively made a vow – never again. We respect foreign monarchies, but we’re never going to have one. Hell, I’m one of the backstops in place to ensure that we don’t.”
“My apologies, Lord Gunslinger; I meant no offense.”
“None taken, your Majesty,” I replied as we moved towards the back of the pier. “Just setting expectations fairly. Now, I understand you’re here to talk with the Mage Council about creating a more usable tunnel in the Veil keeping Atlantis protected, so your people can come and go. While I can’t speak to how easy or difficult that would be, I can put you in touch with the people who can.”
“I would be most grateful for such assistance, Lord Gunslinger,” she said, walking alongside me. “Atlantis does not forget her friends lightly.”
“Why don’t you wait here, while I make some calls?”
Twenty minutes and three phone calls later, I’d gotten five very excited mages out of bed, and they were all heading straight to the airport to fly to San Francisco as quickly as they could. The idea of opening Atlantis to the modern world had woken up all of them more than any shot of coffee would ever do. They were scrambling to come and meet the Queen, to discuss what could be done to get their people out of the dome, and to figure out some way to reintegrate them in the culture behind the Veil.
I left the Queen in the care of my sister, who would guarantee her safety until the mages arrived. I would’ve stayed and looked after her myself, but I had loads of things left to do, and babysitting wasn’t the best use of my time.
(Charlotte prefers to call it ‘bodyguarding,’ but who’s kidding who here, right?)
It was far from my last encounter with Queen Xfra anyway, although those are stories for another day. Needless to say, there will be a lot more ink in those pages later, but only when the time comes to tell those particular stories.
Although now that I stop and think about it, maybe I should have spent more time getting to know Queen Xfra upfront, because it would’ve saved me a load of problems later. If only I’d stopped and taken the measure of the woman rather than writing her off as just another royal who couldn’t be bothered to learn the concerns of her people. Ah well. The folly of youth, I suppose.
From Sexton Manor I headed back into the city, to Detective Gao’s home in the Sunset District, which is thankfully on the northwestern side of town. The lights were on, and thankfully I think while they may have been having some romantic reuniting time, things hadn’t gotten too steamy yet.
Besides, I wanted to meet this Saoirse Staire that gotten mixed up in so much shit above her paygrade just because of some gift her boyfriend had gotten for her.
My hand knocked on the door and a minute or so later, Detective Gao opened the door and let me into his home, inviting me into his living room, where I found Saoirse, the leannán sídhe who’d been at the center of this whole mess, sitting on one end of the couch, wrapped up in an oversized sweater that had to be Gao’s.
She appeared slightly older than I’d expected, and I expected that was partly because the luster of her personal glamour was weak from her time spent in captivity. She had a mass of long red hair than hung in tightly curled ringlets down over her shoulders, and her face looked tired, although she offered me a kind smile. “You must be Dale Sexton, the Druid Gunslinger,” Saoirse said to me. “Your reputation precedes you, M’lord.”
I offered a dismissive, curt laugh. “It’s just Dale, miss, or Mr. Sexton if you must. Most people just call me Gunslinger, but nobody with any sense in their head refers to me as a Lord. How are you feeling? Nothing permanently damaged or destroyed?”
“My personal sense of security, maybe, but no… no, physically, I’m just fine,” she said, with a calming smile. I could see why Gao liked her. She had an inviting way about her, one that didn’t have anything to do with her nature as a leannán sídhe. “Is it truly over?”
“Nigel, the guy who kidnapped you, he died a few hours ago, and nobody else will be coming after you,” I told her. “Not over this, anyway. It wasn’t even about you in the first place, when all is said and done. It was all about that pendant Gao gave you.”
“Are we going to get those back?” Gao said, holding out an opened beer bottle for me.
I shook my head as I took the bottle from him. “Sorry. We used them for the spell they were intended for, and then they basically self-destructed. I figured you’d rather have the lady back instead of some piece of jewelry.”
“You’d figured right,” Gao said to me as he slipped down onto the couch next to Saoirse, sliding an arm around her shoulders as she leaned in against him, clinging to him for support. Physically she might have been fine, but there were emotional scars that were going to be there for a long time to come, and I remember hoping that Gao would do everything he could to get her through the hardest parts of putting herself back together again. “So again, we ask, is it all over?”
“You’re free and clear of this mess. Like I said, it didn’t really have much to do with either of you. Just the pendant. The guy who was protecting you, Detective, knew you had half of it, but couldn’t see the other half, so he wanted to keep you safe until he saw both halves of the pendant, but by that point, Nigel had already kidnapped Miss Staire, and we were off to the races. But now that you’re back, there’s no reason you can’t just go back to living life the way you were before. Your marriage has already been approved by your Queen, Saoirse, and she even seemed a little jealous of your happiness when I spoke with her, so you may even find her in attendance at your wedding.”
“I almost just want to go and have a justice of the peace do it right now, just so it’s done,” Saoirse grumbled. “But I know Artie cares about the ceremony and whatnot, so we’ll do it right.” She paused and then smiled, perhaps the first genuine smile I’d seen from her since I’d walked in the door. “You’re invited, of course. I’ll make sure we get a formal invite out to your office.”
“I appreciate that, and I’ll do my best to make it,” I told them in between swigs of my beer. “I mostly just wanted to swing by and see if you had any other questions about what happened, or anything else you wanted to know about. Mostly, I figured you’d just want assurances it wasn’t going to happen again, and to know it wasn’t really about anything you said or did.”
“You said the pendants did what they were supposed to?” Gao asked me.
“Yeah,” I said, “and that’s probably going to have saved a lot of lives because of it. It’s going to open up a people formerly thought to be lost forever, and it’s going to bring some real positive change into the world, so yeah, as much as it sucks what you went through, it’s nice to know there were at least some positives that came out of that whole mess, yeah?”
“It’s not like he was cruel to me,” Saoirse said, her face taking on a slightly distant look. “He barely even seemed to register I was there. He wanted the amulet, and I was merely a stepping-stone to get it. The few times he’d tried to get me to convince Artie to give it him, I’d told him that Artie wasn’t going to do anything to a guy who’d taken his fiancé hostage. That seemed to annoy him further, like, how dare a person not do what they were told? If that makes any sense? Like, the very idea that someone could refuse a hostage demand or ransom seemed to really tick him off…”
“He never asked me for the amulet, though,” Detective Gao said. “I would’ve given it to him in a heartbeat, just to get you back, babe.”
“Well, it’s a good thing that he believed me, then, because I think if you had given him the amulet, he would’ve just killed me, since he never bothered to hide his face,” she shivered. “I was a means to an end, but I don’t think he saw me as anything other than that. I certainly wasn’t a person to him, and he was holding onto me as leverage.”
“Can I send you the rest of your fee later in the week, Gunslinger?”
“That’s fine,” I told him. “If you forget, I know where to find you, considering I know where you work and how often you folks call me in for things.”
“Speaking of which,” Gao said, grabbing a Post-It note off his fridge. “I have a note from one of the coroners, Doctor Erika Shirow, asking me to have you swing by the morgue after you’d finished up my case. I think she might have another one lined up for you. Something about a corpse she didn’t know what to do with. She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask. I haven’t a feeling I’m going to get caught up in your shit a lot more than I’d like to, now that I’ve had a look behind this Veil of yours.”
“Well, you’re marrying into the Veil, Detective,” I laughed. “And that’s both a special kind of brave and unique brand of foolish. But more power to you. You found out about it all and you held your ground, rather than turning tail and sticking your head in the sand. That makes you okay in my book.”
I held out my hand for him to shake, and he did, with a firm confident grip. It was always good to pick up another ally along the way. I didn’t consider him a friend, though. Not at that point, although I eventually would, years further down the line, when he’d earned it, and I’d felt like it would have been rude to not have him as a friend. I didn’t like taking friends into my trust lightly. Most people didn’t deserve to live their lives under such risk. I’d learned that lesson early on in life – my friends tend to get their lives screwed up incidentally without me even trying.
I leave a lot of collateral damage in my wake. The job comes with a lot of carnage.
From Gao’s house, I headed all the way across town, right over to the very edge of the Bay itself, on the eastern side of San Francisco, where the Office of the Medical Examiner is, better known as the SFPD morgue, over by Lash Lighter Basin.
Normally, at that time of night, there weren’t a lot of people hanging around the morgue, but Gao had called Dr. Shirow and told her to expect me, so she’d gotten to the office before I had, even though the streets were completely empty. I didn’t know Dr. Shirow all that well at that point. We’d met a couple of times, and she’d called me in for a consultation once before, but our level of interaction hadn’t been all that much, which was why it surprised me that she beat me to the morgue. I didn’t know she lived just down by Hunter’s Point.
When I got to the building, the night guard gave me a friendly wave and let me on through. He didn’t know me personally, but he knew that me and my sister would only be down there if there was good cause for it.
I headed into the building and deep towards the back end, towards the morgue chambers they kept for stuff they wanted to keep off the books. Usually, it was someone’s death that they were trying to keep out of the public eye, just for a little while, but sometimes it was… well, it was something they didn’t know what to do with.
That’s where I come in.
Dr. Shirow was standing outside of an autopsy room, pulling her hair, mostly jet-black with a bright blue stripe on the left side and a bright violet stripe on the right, into a bun, yawning a little bit as she jutted some chopsticks into it to hold it all in place. She was of Japanese heritage, in her early thirties, good-looking and seriously not when I expected a coroner to look like. To be honest, the first time I’d met her, I thought she was there to identify a body, not cut one up. On this night, she looked like she’d just been woken up after a hard night of raving at dance parties. She was always easy on the eyes, but worked for local law, which meant it was best if I just steered clear from anything more than acquaintances. She was comfortable around the weirdness, though, and so she’d been tasked with picking up any of the corpses that came in that weren’t what one might call ‘from around these parts.’
“Fuck’s sake, Dale, you didn’t have to come straight over,” she grumbled. “It would’ve kept until tomorrow. We’ve got these amazing new things called ‘refrigerators,’ and they can keep bodies cold and prevent them from decomposing almost as long as we want.”
“Doc, if you’ve got something I need to take a look at, it’s probably best we don’t let it linger around the morgue any longer than necessary, before somebody decides they’ve found Bigfoot or something,” I told her as she opened the door to the autopsy room and stepped inside, flicking a switch on to set off those horrible fluorescent lights, coating the whole room in a slightly bluish glow.
“It’s funny you mention that Dale…” she said, moving over to open the door to the attached freezer before rolling out a body that made me nervous just from the size of it, a big mammoth of a body beneath a sheet, at least seven feet tall and built like a 49ers’ linebacker. But when she pulled the sheet down, I couldn’t help but let out a heavy sigh. “Tell me this isn’t what I think it is.”
I shook my head slightly, scratching the back of my neck. “What do you want me to say?”
“Tell me I don’t have a dead sasquatch on my gurney.”
I chuckled slightly. “You don’t have a dead sasquatch on your table,” I told her confidently as I started to examine the hulking corpse, covered in fur, which had a large stab wound in its chest.
“Thank god for that,” she said, letting out a sigh of relief.
“Sasquatches are mostly light brown to dark black, whereas you’ll notice the fur here is mostly a paler shade of white, which means this is a yeti, who are more snow-driven, and certainly aren’t native to the Bay Area,” I said. “Best guess? He’s in from the area around Tahoe, but that’s just speculation. My ties to the Abominables are dicey at best, but I know who to call. Where was the body located?”
“Tuna fishermen picked it up just off the coast. Got it caught up in a net, and when they hauled it up, they didn’t know what the fuck to make of it, so they called the cops. They thought it might have been a person.”
I scowled a little bit. “He was a person, Doctor, and if you’re going to stay in my good graces, you need to start thinking of him as such. I know you don’t know any yetis and it’s easy to otherize anything you don’t know personally, but the yetis, the sasquatches… They’re mostly tribal communities, but they’re smart and some are incredibly well-educated. They’re just another group of people living behind the Veil, trying to get by day-to-day in the little bit of natural beauty we’ve left for them to hide in. I can take the body off your hands, and get it to the right people,” I said, texting my sister, telling her we were going to need to relocate a body from the SFPD morgue back to Sexton Manor, where we could go about identifying who we needed to notify in terms of next of kin. “Leave me the file and we’ll also take care of the fishermen.” I raised my hand defensively. “Don’t worry; they’ll be well compensated, and the lost memories won’t cause any problems. We’ll get it all handled.”
“Is it a murder?” Dr. Shirow asked me.
I shrugged a little. “Hard to say. Large wound like that… could’ve been something like a harpoon, but if that had been it, you’d still probably have the hook in the corpse. Same if it had been like a cannonball or the equivalent. First thought? Just by looking at it, I’d speculate it was picked up by a roc and somewhere along the way of hauling it to its nest, the roc decided it was more trouble than it was worth and just dropped it into the water. I’ll do my own autopsy back at the manor, and after that I’ll have a better idea of what we’re dealing with. Based on the lack of secondary wounds, though, natural… well, supernatural causes seems like the most likely option.”
“Roc?”
“Giant birds large enough to haul an elephant around in their claws if they want.”
“And normal people wouldn’t see them because…?”
“Because the Veil is doing what it’s supposed to, Doctor Shirow,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t worry; rocs can’t prey on anyone who can’t see them. That’s part of how the Veil works. Anyway, like I told you, I’ll handle it. My sister should be here soon enough, and we’ll have this body out of your hair in no time…”
“Does it get easier, Mr. Sexton?”
“Does what get easier, Doc?”
“Dealing with the supernatural world…”
I gave her a sly little wink and shrugged as I started to head out to await my sister’s arrival. “It’s the world we got, Doc. I just work here…”
THE DRUID GUNSLINGER WILL RETURN IN:
“HAVE TOTEM, WILL TRAVEL”
Comments
Fumtu
I agree with that! I don't think it needs to get more meta than that, though, especially since none of the other authors (that I know of) have characters who are doing the same, unless you include Otterly Mindblowing's QR:RW, which has the writer of its story be a character within that story, a different kind of meta... The whole bunch makes for a really entertaining flower garden!
Fumtu
I'd guess "to", at least not until he'd gotten his fiancé back, but he wouldn't do anything "for", without trying to get her back, first. A side note, something I'd otherwise msg CP on: I suspect that "to give it him" should be "give it to him"; otherwise, he'd be giving the Atlanean to the amulet. Great finish to the story, so now all I have to wait for the next story to start getting unlocked... I'll have to d/l NS complete, anyway, and see if I see it there.
patient1
[The few times he’d tried to get me to convince Artie to give it him, I’d told him that Artie wasn’t going to do anything to a guy who’d taken his fiancé hostage.] "Anything to" or "anything for"?
ReadingRed
So serious question, if you publish it under Andy Rook could you have Andy's biography state he's a fictional character in one of your other books and that you were forced to bring his supposed works to life by the demand of your fan base? And if you couldn't would you explain that in the start of each book? I believe that would bring more readers to your other not so SFW stories as well as be really funny
