Only Echoes Remain Read online

  ‘Only Echoes Remain’

  By AJ Kalliver

  Copyright © 2012 by AJ Kalliver

  http://www.ajkalliver.com/

  This story is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and situations are products of the writer’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living, dead or mystical, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All rights are reserved.

  Cover Art by Ronnell Porter

  K.ver1.0

  Dedication

  I know this is only a short story, so a lengthy dedication isn’t usually called for, but this is my first one, and I can’t help myself. However, since it did run a bit long, I moved it to the last page. Make sure to read it when you get there, okay?

  The short form runs something like this:

  Diana. Mom. Diana. Jeff, Russ, and especially John. Also Diana. Everyone who knows me as ‘DreamSmith’, from the Buffy fandom. And, finally, Diana.

  Thanks, guys, you rock. Each and every one.

  Nineteen years ago:

  I was suddenly, instantly there; without transition, without preparation, without anything so natural and normal as being born. Standing over her body, looking down at her broken and bloody form, I knew she was the one who had brought me forth, just as I knew the reasons why.

  “Unclean!” screamed someone close by, and I looked up to see a half-dozen men and women crowded into the tiny bedroom, their hands still covered with the blood of the young girl on the floor. “More witchcraft!” yelled the tall man with the white collar, even as he brandished a bible with one hand and a heavy, club-like cross with the other. “The pit has vomited forth more of its evil spawn, but the righteous shall prevail! Smite it down, brothers and sisters, smite down Satan’s servant, and reclaim the world which God has promised—“

  I stopped listening; nothing he had to say mattered to me. The girl on the floor mattered, or at least she had until a cross-shaped club had fractured her skull a few moments before, killing her instantly. Isondra; her name had been Isondra. I had never met her, never spoken to her, yet I knew a great deal about her nevertheless. What I had to decide now was what to do next.

  “Let the evil be cast out!” The man with the collar hurled a container of water at me, and even though it was charged with the power of his faith, it failed to do much more than sting me, and turn the skin it touched a bright pink for a few seconds. His followers grew braver, though, seeing me standing there motionless with holy water streaming off my body and dripping from my hair. The fact that I was female, completely naked, and somewhat smaller than any of them might also have helped them find their courage.

  The nearest one took a tentative swing with the length of iron pipe he held, and I swayed back to let it pass by. Again, I wondered what to do; with the girl dead there was no compulsion holding me, I could simply leave, and go anywhere I wanted. Fighting these fools was pointless, now, so I might as well—

  Another scream, a woman’s this time, sounded from down the hall. I had never heard the voice before, and yet a jolt of recognition struck me like lightning.

  “Mom…” I whispered, though of course the woman was not actually my mother. The distraction let one of the men land a solid blow across my shoulders, the axe-handle he wielded driving me to my knees. It hurt, some, though that faded as I found myself face to face with the dead girl who lay on the floor. Her staring eyes should have been blank, in truth they probably were. Even so, I thought I saw something there, a silent plea, a desperate wish that she would never manage to speak aloud, but which I heard with perfect clarity.

  So I raised my head, used my hand to catch a descending club in mid-swing, and rose to my feet. Even as the priest continued to rant, exhorting the mob to further violence in the name of their god, they grew still, staring with dread at the silent promise written on my face. Moments later, as my wrath was unleashed upon them, their despairing screams sounded through the little apartment.

  * * * * *

  The here and now:

  My day-to-day existence can be summed up pretty well with four basic concepts. The first one; try to be nice to people, try to help them, whenever you can. Yeah, I know, it sounds lame, but… well, take Edna for example.

  “—and with my arthritis acting up, this cold makes me ache something terrible!”

  I nodded to show her that I understood, though obviously I’d never had arthritis. Edna was a nice old lady, and it bothered me that she was in such a bad situation. Living out on the streets was tough enough for her during the summer. Now, with the bitter winds of January whistling through Chicago’s filthy urban wasteland, every night held a very real promise of death for anyone without shelter. Looking at the poor old gal standing there with her shopping cart filled with her every worldly possession, I had to wonder if this might be the last time I’d see her alive.

  “It’s cold,” I agreed, making a show of huddling in my ragged coat. I’ll admit to having some serious love for that coat, tatters and all. Made from some kind of worn, dark blue cloth, it was really too thin to wear in the middle of winter. Fortunately, it was much too big for me, and would wrap nearly twice around my body, so nobody commented on my apparent desire for frostbite. I didn’t care about how warm it was—or how warm it wasn’t, to be more truthful. No, all I cared about was how it worked more like a cloak, or cape, than a worn out, half-shredded long coat. Wearing it made me feel all ancient and mysterious, especially when the wind swirled it around me in the coolest possible way.

  What can I say, I’m stranger than most, even when you leave out the obvious stuff.

  Some people, though, were a little more sensitive to the weather, and I hated finding my friends lying frozen in alleyways. Unfortunately, at the moment there wasn’t much I could do to help her, except root through my pockets until I found the half-eaten sandwich I’d put there the day before.

  “Here,” I said, offering it to Edna. It was still wrapped in the foil from the sandwich shop, so it was pretty fresh, just slightly squished from being in there for so long. And no, don’t go thinking that I could have afforded to buy it; one of the guys who works there kinda has a crush on me.

  “Oh, you sweet girl!” Edna took the little package eagerly, started to tear into it right on the spot, then stopped, giving me an uncertain look. “You’re sure you don’t want it?” she had the courtesy to ask, even though I could see her hands were practically shaking with hunger.

  “Nope, I’m good,” I assured her, patting my slightly concave tummy and doing my best to look all stuffed and contented. “You need it more than me anyway; I only eat ‘cause I—“ I caught myself before I could say ‘because I like how food tastes’, and finished instead with “Because I get hungry, sometimes. Not now, though, right now I’m fine.” Edna didn’t notice, she was too busy working her way through the roast beef on wheat bread. When she’d finished it she smiled, and gave me a grandmotherly hug which warmed me more than a dozen coats could ever have managed.

  “Bless you child,” she mumbled into my hair. She didn’t smell too great, nobody living like this did, but I didn’t mind so much. Of course, seeing someone besides himself getting attention and affection didn’t sit too well with Tun, and he came bounding up, demanding to be noticed.

  Not that it’s really possible to ignore Tun; he’s gifted that way.

  “Eeeek!” cried Edna, as my dog, without actually meaning to, nearly knocked her flat. He paid no attention to her flailing arms, being too busy snuffling at her hands to see if any of the food he smelled was still there. Finding nothing, he gave a little whine of disappointment, licked once at her face, and then turned to me.

  “Bad! Bad dog!” I told him, grabb
ing a fistful of his thick ruff to keep him from swabbing me down with his tongue. He sighed loudly in reply, but lowered his head obediently. Luckily I’m a lot stronger than I look, or else I’d never be able to make him behave as well as I do. Not that everyone would agree that he’s well-behaved.

  “You and that, that…” Edna, obviously, wasn’t one of Tun’s fans. She wiped at her face for a moment before gathering her dignity once more. “I don’t understand why you let that monster follow you everywhere you go,” she finally managed, looking at him with distaste, if no real fear. Tun’s ears drooped at that, as if he understood her; which was entirely possible, since he’s not exactly your average dog. I ruffled his fur to cheer him up, and wrapped my arm around him in a hug as I smiled at Edna.

  “Hey, don’t be mean! He’s not a monster, he’s my little puppy-wuppy.” This of course started Tun’s tail to wagging, which was nearly enough to knock over the old lady’s shopping cart. Edna rescued her possessions, pushing the cart out of range before pausing to see if I was coming with her. Not having anything pressing on my schedule for the morning, I gave my puppy’s ears a vigorous rub (“You are my puppy-wuppy, yes you are, yes you are!”) (WAGWAGWAG!) and walked alongside her as she headed down the street, Tun trailing along close behind. When I got around to answering her question about my dog, I could only shrug. “He follows me around because he likes me, I guess. Or maybe he’s insecure, since he’s so small and frail.” Edna snorted at that, and came close to actually smiling. I grinned back at her, looked down at my battered shitkicker boots as they scuffed along the concrete, and shrugged again.

  “And… well, he keeps me company. We watch out for each other.” He really was well-behaved, for what he was, and the locals knew it. All the same, habit had me keeping an eye out for the animal control goons. Even though Tun’s breed wasn’t hunted down like some paranimals within the city, they were a long way from being universally accepted. This part of town was ragged and run-down enough so that we normally didn’t have any trouble; the people who didn’t know us were too busy scratching out a living to bother with phoning in complaints about my somewhat… odd choice of pets. So far today things looked safe enough. The street folk were minding their own business, the somewhat more well-off types were driving to or from work in their cars, and me, my dog, and a nice old lady were just strolling down a sidewalk, peaceful as could be.

  “You tore through that sandwich like you were starving, Edna,” I said after a couple blocks had rolled by in silence. “What happened, you didn’t like the sermon the bible-thumpers were serving with breakfast this morning?”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute, concentrating instead on guiding her shopping cart over a particularly rough bit of cracked sidewalk. When she did answer, it was barely above a mumble.

  “Didn’t get no breakfast, nor no bed last night, neither.”

  That sent a belated stab of fear and worry through me. It had been cold last night, and the old woman didn’t have the luxury of a warm and fluffy dog to curl up alongside her.

  “The mission on fourth street kicked you out?” I asked, stopping at the corner and putting out my arm to make sure she didn’t walk out in front of an oncoming bus. Edna’s eyes didn’t work so well anymore, though she was still pretty sharp in most ways.

  “They surely did!” she answered, peering at the passing traffic for a moment before looking down at me. “And all I did was read my cards for some of the other people there.” Her gnarled, wrinkled fingers tapped her coat pocket; inside were the old-fashioned tarot cards she always kept close at hand. “This nice old gentleman was so worried about his granddaughter, so I did a reading, and told him that she’d get over her cough just fine. And the little boy asked me if I could tell him anything about his friend who’d gone missing, and I saw clear as day that his friend’s father had moved them both down to Dayton—“

  “Edna!” I interrupted, unable to hold back any longer. “You just can’t do that! Not anywhere, and for sure not in the middle of some bed-and-bible soup kitchen!”

  Fundamental rule of the cosmos –according to me-number two; people are dumb, and they get downright stupid when faced with something they either can’t have or don’t understand. Case in point, magic.

  Yes, I said magic. Anybody who tells you that those two things way back when, what the news people called the ‘events’, anybody who says those weren’t magic, they’ve had their heads stuck in the sand for thirty-some years now. The first one, in nineteen seventy-seven, that was the start of the whole thing; the northern lights danced all the way down to Mexico City, waterfalls ran backwards for a couple of hours, and half the people on the planet got a visit from the ghosts of their dearly departed. Even after things settled down, nothing was ever quite the same. ‘Unexplained phenomena’, got used a lot, but it was magic, plain and simple, and after a while people started calling it what it was. For the first couple of years it was pretty subtle stuff; people like Edna got a lot better at reading their cards, a few folks figured out they could juggle paper clips with their minds or light matches just by concentrating really hard. Most people couldn’t do anything, and even the special ones couldn’t do much, so if it had stopped there then everything probably would have been okay.

  Then it happened again.

  December thirtieth, nineteen eighty, the world shook, the sky sang, and myth stepped out from behind the trees and said ‘hello’, sometimes literally. The mystical aftershocks faded away like they had before, but this time all that ‘phenomena’ stuff that got left behind was a hundred times stronger, and the Talented folks could do more. Some of them could do a lot more, and even the people who thought of themselves as liberal and open-minded got a little scared. The fantastical animals and monsters that had showed up out of nowhere didn’t help, especially when some of them, like dragons and vampires, were just plain nasty. Civilization didn’t end or anything like that; six billion people aren’t going to lose control of the planet just ‘cause some freaky beasties show up and carve out some fresh niches in the ecosystem. Still, the world changed again, and most people didn’t think it was for the better.

  So, I guess given all that, it wasn’t any big surprise when the United States jumped all the way to the political right, and welcomed the fundies into office with open arms. Magic pretty much got labeled as devil-worship, even the stuff like healing magic that could have helped a lot of people and saved a lot of lives. Anybody who showed even a shred of magical talent got hit with discrimination and harassment at best, and outright hatred and brutality at worst. I’m only nineteen years old, and I’ve seen a man lynched for using an air elemental to put out a burning house, I’ve seen a woman beaten unconscious for using magic to make a rapist confess his crime, and I’ve seen a little girl—

  No, never mind that last one. The point of this whole big rant is that in this day and age, you do not casually pull out a deck of tarot cards and start answering questions for people, not even—especially—if more often than not you’re right. Old Edna just didn’t get that, which of course meant the bible-thumpers tossed her out into the cold night, probably while telling her that God would have a nice warm place ready for her in hell.

  “Isa? Isa, are you listening to me?”

  I blinked, looked up at the old woman’s face, and realized that I’d kind of tranced out on her there for a minute.

  And here I was thinking she was the one skipping happily off into senility-land.

  “Yep, I’m listening,” I told her, and with one hand on her arm I led the way across the street and down the litter-strewn sidewalk. Tun bounded off to noisily investigate an alley; it took a lot of careless rats and torn-open garbage bags to feed that much dog. We were on the edge of what was definitely one of the roughest and most run-down parts of the sprawl, but at least that cut down on the amount of grief we both tended to get; Edna because she’s got that trace of talent, and me because… well, I’ve got other stuff going on that makes me a target. Some of it I
can hide, some of it, not so much. Sometimes it gets me in trouble, too, like now, with the three gangers who walked up on us with shit-eating grins on their faces as they sized me up.

  In my defense, I have to say that I didn’t have any input so far as what I look like, okay? Not only that, but I can’t change it, either, any more than you could cut off your own head to change your face. So when I say that I’m strikingly beautiful, it’s not me being all smug and bitchy, it’s just a fact that I’ve got flawless features, perfect white skin, eyes so big and dark you could drown in ‘em, blah, blah, blah. Seriously, I’d be happier if I were plain. At least then, I wouldn’t get stuff like this, with these three guys blocking the sidewalk, checking me out like I had a ‘for sale, cheap’ sign stuck to my forehead, and without so much as a word reaching out to rip my coat half off me.

  Edna gave a little shriek of outrage, and maybe I could have done something flashy to stop things right there… only I didn’t. Nope, I took a moment to recall that cosmic principle number one was ‘kindness to others’, and I didn’t unleash any of my mojo on them. Instead, I let them take their look, watched them register the fact that even though I’m five-feet-nothing and only ninety-some pounds, I’ve still got a very nice slim-yet-curvy thing going on. Oh, and the acres of glossy black hair that spilled out when they pulled my jacket off was probably kind of eye-catching too. Yep, it’s silky, it’s soft, and it falls all the way to my freaking knees. Let me repeat; not my idea, and if cutting it off didn’t hurt like hell (imagine hacking off your arm at the elbow with a meat cleaver and you‘ll be pretty close), and if it didn’t all grow back by the next day anyway, then I’d definitely go for a more conventional look. Looking like a teen-Goth supermodel isn’t a great survival tactic these days; too many people equate ‘edgy and different’ with ‘magical and evil’, and react accordingly.