Corrupting Power
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Neon Stonehenge - Ch. 2 (ALPHA)
🕑 Added 2023-08-24 01:34:00 +0000 UTCChapter Two – “Goddamn Apples”
It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in the checkout line of a Safeway a few hours after sunset with a bag of apples, a package of carrots and a bag of sugar cubes, and I was quite certain it wouldn’t be the last time either, despite the shady looks the art school dropout student behind the checkout counter was giving me.
“Problem?” I asked her, as she pushed her undercut flop of slime green hair off to one side of her face, trying to keep my expression as politely neutral as I could. She was dressed in jean cutoff overalls and a long-sleeved flannel shirt beneath. She also had a tattoo of a woman in Mexican Day of the Dead makeup on her neck, which put a face beneath her main face. Neither one looked all that friendly.
“Wanted to get some healthy snacks but decided, ‘Fuck it, I might just need to mainline some sugar right away if these veggies don’t do the trick’?” she asked me sardonically.
“That’s cute, but no,” I shot back. “Gotta go see an old friend, who doesn’t like me looking after his health, even if I’m doing him a favor. The sugar cubes are for the tea we’re going to have while I’m visiting,” I lied. Seymour fucking hated tea. I’d tried bringing them some at one point, and they’d threatened to kick me in the chest. Again.
“Uh huh. $23.75.”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a twenty and a five, sliding it across the counter to her. “Keep the change.”
She looked at me as though I’d spoken to her in 12th century Italian about the sins of the common citizen, but when the sentence finally sunk through her overly stoned brain, she frowned at me, like my generosity had offended her. “And do what with it? Buy a can of soda?” She held out the paper bag to me, which I rolled up the top of and then stuck under my arm.
“Buy a better education,” I muttered to myself as I made my way out of the twenty-four-hour grocery store and into the city that was mostly just empty air that time of night.
The thing about San Francisco is that past a certain hour, the streets are basically urban graveyards. Sure, you’ll spot the occasional car driving along, but for the most part, from say two until just a few minutes before five in the morning, the city feels like a ghost town. Which is just how I like it.
Especially if I know I’m going to have to yell.
I knew I was going to have to yell.
If you’ve never been to Pioneer Park after dark, well, congrats on being a noble and upstanding citizen who’s always respected that sign that says, “park closed after dark.” Following rules is how my family got into this trepidatious line of work in the first place, so we’ve given up that practice centuries ago. Rules are there to keep those safe who aren’t prepared to go off exploring on their own.
It’s a hell of an uphill walk, and in spite of the fact that I work within the borders of San Francisco, I fucking hate walking up hills. But at least this late at night (or is it early in the morning? I can never tell), I didn’t have to contend with tourists trying to be cute, taking pictures of Coit Tower, or of the admittedly amazing view.
When you could see it anyway, which wasn’t tonight.
The fog had come in something fierce on this particular evening, which was the perfect accompaniment to my mood. Normally I have a certain sense of relentless excitement that goes along with a new case, but anytime Pioneer Park has to be my first stop in investigating that case, my spirits are a little dampened.
Allow me a slight detour in advance of what’s to come, in which you permit me to dispel a few common myths about unicorns. First and foremost, anybody can fucking see them, okay? That whole ‘can only be spotted by virgin eyes’ is just a practical joke that a unicorn played on a human about a thousand years ago that the unicorns are perfectly content to keep on spreading for their own entertainment. They do have access to the Veil, however, which lets them generally conceal their presence any time they want to, or to appear as a normal horse, by concealing their horn and reducing their general size.
The bits about them being able to cure sickness, nullify poisons and purify sources of water? Those parts are actually true, and they’re the reason people have been hunting unicorns for centuries.
The bits about them being noble and pure of heart? Yeah, that’s the biggest load of shit.
With the fog obscuring the view, I hadn’t been able to tell that the rain meteorologists had told us was going to bypass the city had, instead, decided to say ‘fuck it, let’s go spit onto San Francisco in the middle of the night.’ That meant I was getting a smattering of unpleasant rain squirting down onto me from the pendulous clouds that covered me from foot to sky.
I’d had to walk all the way up Telegraph Hill Blvd, and even when the weather’s good, that’s not a great walk to do, but in the goddamn rain? It’s annoying as all hell. By the time I’d gotten to the empty little circular parking lot, the bag underneath my arm was starting to lose cohesiveness, and my patience was starting to dwindle along with it.
“Alright, Seymour,” I shouted into the dark fog. “You knew when you saw that Detective that he was going to come to me, and that meant I was going to come to you, so here I am! Can we just get the fuck on with it already, or you want to make me sit out here in the fucking rain some more?”
“I like watching you suffer a bit,” came back the reply, the voice an odd combination of feminine and masculine tones, as Seymour trotted out from the trees alongside Coit Tower, the fog only obscuring their presence for so long. “You’re often a bit of a prick to me, you know?”
Seymour had been the Unicorn of Pioneer Park since at least the 1960s, but hell, if someone had told me they’d been around since the park was established in 1876, I’d probably have believed it. I don’t know the actual lifespan of a unicorn – I don’t think anybody does, because unicorns can often be notorious liars when it comes to talking about themselves. When it comes to talking about themselves, they will exaggerate in ways that you haven’t even begun to imagine. Were they all to be believed, then every unicorn in existence not only knew Merlin, but they were close personal friends of the world’s most significant Magus.
What you’re probably imagining for Seymour’s form probably isn’t too far off. A too-large white horse with a rainbow-colored mane that shimmered with what looked almost like gold sparkle, and a long tail, multicolored to match. Giant blue eyes that looked like they could see into the very depths where you kept your innermost secrets. Hooves of black onyx that somehow moved almost imperceptibly in the San Francisco nights but were also capable of raising a loud ruckus whenever wanting to make an impressive entrance. And, of course, the trademark corkscrew spiral horn atop their head, shimmering and gold, about the length of a man’s arm, sharpened into a point that had proven deadly on more than one occasion, when push had come to shove.
Seymour had both sets of genitals, male and female, and as such, had settled on them/they for pronouns, something I’d been happy to respect, even if it’d taken me a little bit of time to get used to. There were rumors that Seymour had become something of a cultural icon to the LGBT community here in San Francisco, with their likeness starting to appear with that movement in the seventies, but there was also a decent enough chance that Seymour had simply been able to capitalize on a lucky coincidence. They’d always been smug to me, even when I’d been barely more than a child, taking his first steps with magic. After a bit of a rocky start, I’d taken over being the Sexton family liaison with Seymour, and we entrusted them to act as a sort of magical screening service for us.
Yeah, me and this particular unicorn had a long and sordid history.
“The Detective,” I said to Seymour. “You made sure he’d see you so that I’d know there was an actual case here, one that needed my skills and wouldn’t be up to snuff for the SFPD.”
“’Course I did,” Seymour said, trotting ever closer towards me. They had a voice that was neither high nor low in terms of pitch, a sort of flat, androgynous tone without much in the way of inflection or accent, although Seymour had definitely been picking up local slang lately, which was part of the reason my sister had nominated me to take over the liaison position – she couldn’t be bothered. “That’s the agreement we have, me and your family. I screen out the fruitcakes who are just seeing things from too many bad mushroom trips, and your family brings tribute. Speaking of which? Where is it? You know I don’t like giving away anything for free, so I demand my tribute.”
“I know the rules as well as you do,” I said. I reached into the bag and pulled out one of the apples, tossing it over towards the massive mythological creature, who caught it in their mouth and snarfed it down before turning to look over at me with annoyance.
“Goddamn apples?” The unicorn whinnied at me, shaking their head disparagingly. “You’d best have the good shit in there too, Sexton, otherwise this conversation’s going to go poorly for both of us.”
“It’s in here too, but you need to look after your figure, Seymour,” I teased. “You’ve put on a few pounds since I’ve been up here last, and it’s starting to make you look… pudgy.”
The unicorn neighed at me, shaking their lustrous locks. “You take that back right now, or I’m not saying another word.”
“There’s sugar cubes in here, Seymour, so don’t make threats you can’t back up.”
The unicorn reared up, trying to put their most impressive threatening pose on display, but this sort of preening display was old hat to me, and I wasn’t buying it, so Seymour put their front legs back down and shook their head. “You’ve gotten mean as you’ve gotten older, Dale. Where’s that wide-eyed little boy who used to look upon me with such reverence?”
“You kicked him in the chest once for moving too quickly behind you.”
“Are you still mad about that?” Seymour bemoaned, looking away from me, almost an admission of how it wasn’t one of their finer moments. “Let it go, Dale. It was a long time ago.”
“I think I’m gonna keep being mad about it a bit longer, if it’s all the same to you. Apples and carrots to start,” I said. “You convince me you’ve got details worth the sugar cubes, I’ll happily break those out as well.” I pulled out a carrot and extended it to the gargantuan unicorn, who pulled it from my hand and chomped it down eagerly. Never understood why they thought carrots were a step up from apples, but that was Seymour’s hierarchy.
“You want the good news, the bad news or the strange news first?” Seymour asked me before nudging me with their nose, encouraging me to fish out another apple to hand off. Even the bottom of the offering totem pole was better than what they could scrounge out in the city on a daily basis.
That was a much more complicated opening than I’d anticipated. The unicorn was known to stick to small details and not volunteer long leads like that, so maybe there was more going on here than I’d originally anticipated. “Let’s start with the bad news and just get it over and done with.”
Seymour nodded twice. “Your Detective’s got the stink of leannán sídhe all over him, although it was good he came to see me when he did, because it was starting to fade a little bit. Too much longer and I might’ve had trouble picking it up off him. And I imagine that’s why he came to you, trying to find her, yeah? The woman he’s got you looking for, she’s faefolk through and through, so I can imagine you’re going to want to schedule a visit to Layla.”
“I never want to see Layla, Seymour,” I sighed. “It just keeps happening, against my will, usually.”
“Are you sure the two of you never hooked up?” Seymour asked. “I’m usually a good judge of character when it comes to these sorts of things and I could swear that—”
“Never happened, saddle brain, so stop thinking about it.”
“But I’ll bet you’ve thought about it,” they joked. “I know she has. She’s made mention of it in passing when she’s been up to visit.”
“Why the hell would she share something like that with someone like you?”
“Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and all that,” Seymour said. “Life’s lonely at the top of the food chain, and you know anyone who you think could successfully challenge that woman at anything?”
“No, that’s a fair assessment of her,” I admitted.
“Anyway, faefolk. Leannán sídhe, and all the complications that that brings. Surely that information’s got to be worth my first sugar cube, don’t you think?” Seymour said, nudging my shoulder with the end of their nose. “Huh? Huh?”
“Fine,” I said. I reached into the bag and tore open the package of sugar cubes, unwrapping one before placing it on the center of my palm so Seymour could lick it up.
“Oh yeah,” the unicorn said like a junkie getting a long-awaited hit of their favorite drug. “That’s the good shit right there. See? You can be rather nice when you’re not being a jackass.”
“I could say the same about you,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I’d wondered if she was a sídhe, based on her name, but it’s good to get confirmation of that in advance. They’ve been rare in meddling with unveiled folks for a long time now, and I can’t imagine that level of crossing was done lightly. And that means Layla will at least know a little bit about her coming and going.”
Seymour nodded. “Not much happens out here without the Queen’s eye taking note of it.”
“Let’s move on to the good news.”
“Sugar cube?”
I waggled a finger at them. “Information first. One of us has a history of welching on promises and it isn’t me.”
“That was one time, Dale, and I was scared for my life that one time, but fine,” the unicorn snorted, dragging a hoof across the concrete. “The good news is whoever’s watching out for your Detective friend, they’re no slouch in the spell slinging department. That little statuette he was carrying contained some of the most powerful warding magic I’ve ever seen. Good thing I hadn’t wanted to harm the guy, because even my supernatural nature might’ve hit a few snags trying to endure the blowback that thing would’ve set off.”
“You recognize the magic?” Seymour looked over at me, and I sighed, grabbing a second sugar cube, unwrapping it and setting it on my palm for them to lick off.
“Yes and no,” Seymour said, licking their lips before digging in on the sugar cube. “It’s Eastern magic, not Western, and whoever’s responsible for it has also done some of the more powerful legacy protection spells over in Chinatown, the kind that most people don’t even know are there, but wait like coiled serpents just beneath the surface, ready to strike at any supernatural predator who might try to attack the residents of Chinatown. Heavy duty shit. Nothing to be trifled with lightly and certainly not anyone I’d want on my bad side. And certainly someone who’s been around the block more than a few times, so don’t expect it to be a new fish.”
“But you don’t know the caster.”
“I’m not up to date on the big players over there these days, Dale,” Seymour said. “But I’m sure there won’t be more than a dozen casters of that level in that tiny little district. It’s the perfect kind of mystery for you – small and self-contained.”
I rolled my eyes in his direction. I was used to the abuse Seymour liked to hurl at me for their own amusement. “I know you meant that to sound like a dig at me, Seymour, but I’m choosing not to take it as one.”
“You can take it however you like it, Dale. It’s San Francisco, after all, so who am I to judge?”
“Let’s move on to the strange news. It’s not like you to play coy when it comes to showing off your impeccable skill at sniffing out magic.”
Seymour shook their head before looking off and away from me, as if meeting eyes with me would be a little uncomfortable. “There was also a distant odor of magic about your Detective friend that I’m certain couldn’t have been what it smelled like, but I also don’t know any other thing that smells even vaguely like that. But, I mean, c’mon, it couldn’t be what it smelled like, so it had to be something else, right? Isn’t that that damn Occam’s Pruner that you were trying to tell me about? That even if things seem highly unlikely, that’s the thing they gotta be if you remove everything else?”
“Occam’s Razor, Seymour,” I said to him, “but yeah, that’s the general concept of it. Why? What nearly impossible thing do you think you smelled on Gao?”
“I mean, the odds of it seem so remote…”
“Seymour…”
“I could just be misremembering it…”
“Seymour…”
“It has been centuries and—”
“Seymour!”
“Right! Sorry, Dale, sorry. I know how off the rails this is gonna sound, but…”
“But what Seymour?”
“But I’m pretty sure I smelled a faint trace of Atlantean on that guy,” the unicorn admitted cryptically. “Not from him personally, but just lingering around him.”
“Could it have been from his Eastern magician friend?”
Seymour shook their massive mane, clearly as perplexed by the mystery as much as I was, sending sparkles of gold dust flying off into the fog. “Negatory, ghost rider, Atlantean has a scent all its own that’s completely unlike anything else. And I got a pretty good whiff of the Eastern caster off of those figurines he’s been giving to your boy.”
“You’re sure it’s a he?”
“Not with 100% certainty, but call it a good 80-90%,” Seymour said, as I fished out another sugar cube. The unicorn’s sweet tooth was notorious to our family, and we’d used it to our advantage as much as we possibly could. “If it’s not a he, they could do with some more fragrances and perfumes. Or, y’know, any perfume at all, other than the scent of their lunch.”
“Atlantean, huh? You’re right; that does sound incredibly unlikely.” Atlantis had been trapped behind the Veil for centuries now, and at a particularly strong part of it, one that didn’t allow crisscrossing, because it was ground zero for where the Veil had been started. Hell, I even know the location of Atlantis, but as good as I am at spellslinging, I don’t know any magics strong enough to get across the Veil at its peak. Neither did the population of Atlantis, at least as far as the magic community at large knew of. Nobody had heard from them since Merlin had thrown up the Veil, to stop there from being the First Human/Atlantean War, back around the end of the first millennium A.D. (If you’re curious where it is, head west from San Francisco until you’re in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean, north of Hawaii, and you’re in the general vicinity. You won’t find it, though.) “Any chance it’s an Atlantean who got caught outside of the Veil’s construction and has just been wandering around since then?”
The unicorn snorted in what could only be considered laughter. “I forget, there’s whole fields of magic you’ve just never done any homework on.”
I clicked my tongue. “They’ve been gone a thousand years, Seymour. I didn’t see it coming up any time in the field.”
“Atlanteans only live to be a couple of hundred years old, so anyone caught outside would be a descendant of those people, and they smell very different. No no, this was the scent of a classical Atlantean, the kind I haven’t smelled since before the Veil went up. But it used to be common enough around these parts.”
“Are you trying to tell me you’re over a thousand years old, Seymour?”
“Four thousand, six hundred and twenty-two,” the unicorn said. “I know you aren’t going to believe me, but that’s completely true.”
“Sure sure, and you fought alongside Merlin during the Megalith Wars,” I joked.
“Oh hell no,” Seymour said. “I’m a lover, not a fighter, and if Merlin ever came to ask me to help his bony ass in fighting a war, I’d show him just where I could stick this horn of mine.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Okay, no I wouldn’t, but I’d definitely think about it. But you’re right. I’m not crazy enough to pick a fight with one of the Big Four. Merlin scares the shit out of me.”
“As well he should,” I agreed. “He scares the willies out of me, too.”
Seymour sighed and then sort of leaned their head against my shoulder. “I’m sorry I’m a pain the ass, Dale. We’re just two lonely souls, stuck doing jobs that nobody wants us to do, the watchers on the wall, the last guardians of a time long forgotten.”
“You almost make it sound like you want me to saddle you up and ride you off into the sunset,” I joked, fishing out a handful more of sugar cubes, letting him scarf them up.
“The day you put a saddle on me is the day this whole planet is well and truly fucked.”
“I’ll remember you said that.”
“I have no doubts that you will. So what’s your next stop?”
“You now what it is.”
“Think she’ll be happy to see you?” Seymour asked me.
“Better me than my sister.”
“Why’s that?”
“Last time, Layla and my sister traded blows.”
Seymour scrunched down a little, wincing as if imaging the two fighting. “Can’t imagine that went well for anyone involved on either side.”
“It didn’t.”
“But…”
“But what?”
“But if your sister was causing trouble…”
“Yeah yeah,” I said, dumping the rest of the apples and carrots from the disintegrating paper bag onto the pavement. “Layla’s probably going to hold it against me, even though I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“You aren’t your sister’s keeper.”
“If anything, it’s generally the other way around.”
“I am a lot more frightened of her than I am of you.”
“You know I carry the SoulEnders on me, don’t you?”
“Sure,” the unicorn said, “but at least that’ll be over quickly. Your sister likes to prolong her prey’s agony.”
“Believe me, I know,” I grumbled. “It’s come back to bite us in the ass more than a couple of times. I keep telling her not to play with her food, but every time, she reminds me that she’s the elder sibling and that I shouldn’t tell her how to do her job, just like she doesn’t tell me how to do mine.”
“Does she tell you how to do yours?”
“She tried. Once.”
“What happened?”
“I threatened make her watch as the SoulEnders did their job, and she politely declined, saying that level of pain and suffering is reserved for the family’s Gunslinger.”
“So at least you’ve got that over her.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, starting to walk away from them. “A’ight Seymour, I’ll be seeing you.”
“Tell Layla I said hello.”
I turned back to look over my shoulder at them. “Really?”
“On second thought, no. Forget my name the entire time you’re around her.”
I chuckled and looked forward again, as I wondered just how pissed off the Barbarian Queen of the Western Coastal Elves was going to be at me this time around.
Comments
Ronan
Lots of info in this chapter. When you first introduce Seymore, you start one sentence with 'when it comes to talking about themselves' and the start the next sentence with the same phrase.
