Have Totem, Will Travel - Ch. 3 (alphas)

Chapter Three – “Just a man”

The next morning, I woke up to the box with the relic in it leaking green light around the edges where the box wasn’t sealed. The shades of emerald and gold poking out around the edges cast just enough light into my spartan Motel 6 room that was thankfully a good distance from my sister’s. She would’ve been bothered by the relic casting light unprovoked early in the morning, but I can’t imagine it would been any worse than the sounds of her and her latest hookup would’ve been to me.

Look, I love my sister dearly, but apparently in the three years between her birth and mine, all the sexual luck in the entire damn Sexton family gave out, or somehow she got twice the normal dose and I got half, because I kid you not, my sister has always been able to pick up basically anybody she wants, man or woman, since she goes both ways, with the absolute bare minimum of effort. If that.

She tells me it’s all about confidence, and I suppose that’s probably true. I guess I do alright in terms of hooking up with beautiful women every now and then, but for me, it often feels like a lot of work, whereas I think my sister can trip and stumble across people eager to sleep with her without even trying.

Really.

I wish I was joking.

I get it – she’s gorgeous, but I’ve also always said that I’m surprised more people aren’t put off by her hard edge. Yes, she’s got a very lovely face, but she’s slender and certainly isn’t as curvy as I think some men would prefer. Someone once asked me who I thought my sister looked most like and I said, “Linda Hamilton in the beginning of Terminator 2,” and I stand by that, as she is very ripped, easily as muscular as I am. She doesn’t have any piercings, other than her ears, nor any tattoos other than one, which I gave her, because it’s a defensive spell for her to use in case of emergencies. (At least that I know of – if she’s gotten any on her own since then, that’s news to me.) Her nose is a little wonky, having been broken twice over her lifetime. Her fashion sense ranges from top of the line to ‘what dumpster did you dig that out from?’ Her music tastes are questionable at best, as we’ve already established. She’d rather see a bad opera than a great movie, and her dining habits border on the outrageously expensive. On top of that, she’s 5’5” on a good day. I’ve heard her exes describe her as “too feminine,” “too masculine,” “too butch,” “too soft,” and, in the one I can certainly agree with, “too confusing.”

Part of it, I think, is that Charlotte’s partially a reflection of whoever she’s currently with - whatever aspects that person likes about their own personality, Char will amplify back at them. So, the things that people mostly like about my sister are things they mostly like about themselves.

 I’ve never been able to do that myself. I am who I am, for better or worse, all of the time. That does okay, I guess. But your local mom’n’pop burger joint’s never gonna compete with McDonalds, because they win in volume. I’m never gonna have her numbers.

I opened the box to check on the relic, just to stop thinking about my sister’s endlessly successful love life, and to this day, I’m still not sure which would’ve been the worst fate. Once I opened the box, I was more than a little disturbed by the amount of light the relic was producing. The six little pinpricks of light that we’d jokingly referred to as ‘eyes’ were bleeding out large rays of light, which was already somewhat concerning. The fact that the lights were shifting and twisting and casting disturbing shadows on the walls, shapes and patterns that held no meaning to me, but I’m sure meant something to someone somewhere, that made things even worse. That’s the shit I really hate – cryptic things that don’t explain themselves to me. I get compelled to figure out what they are.

My memory is solid, but I started committing some of the shapes and patterns to my notebook, just in case I needed to show them to someone later. There was no rhyme or reason to any of them, no consistency that I could connect the dots with, but all of a sudden, they just stopped, and the lights went dead, leaving me alone in my lonesome Motel 6 room.

“Well, fuck me sideways,” I muttered to myself before I closed up the box again. As far as I knew, the relic had never done anything like that before, and I can’t say I’d been especially thrilled to see it do it then either. I picked it up, examined all the surfaces of its pyramid shape, gave it a good shake and then dropped it back down into the box.

Just like my love life – it’s never active when I want it to be.

I scooped up the box, grabbed the rest of my things and walked out of the room, seeing my sister standing next to her car, leaning against it, her arms crossed over her chest, wearing yesterday’s clothes. “C’mon, little brother, we need to get going,” she said.

“Fleeing the scene of the crime, are we?” I asked her.

“Oh, you make it sound like it’s a murder instead of a simple dine and dash,” she said with a laugh. “I wasn’t promising a life with kids and a plush house in the countryside. I just wanted a bit of fun, something to spend all that adrenaline on, and get it out of my system.” Charlotte stretched her arms over her head, crooking her head at me. “She had a great time. She didn’t need anything more than that.”

“That why you’re outside waiting at the car?”

“I didn’t want her to have the option to get clingy.”

“Does that typically happen for you, sis?”

“A bit more often than I’d like,” she said, moving to get in the driver’s side once more. “You have any trouble sleeping?”

I debated telling her about the relic and its little lightshow, but I decided I didn’t want to make my sister any more distracted than she probably already was. “Nah, put my head down and was out like a light until a few minutes ago. We didn’t really agree on a start time, but I figured you’d be out here early enough for us to get on the road and still be able to stop an hour or so in and grab breakfast.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I’ve known a bunch of your exes, Char, and all of them said you don’t like to cuddle for more than an hour or two.”

Charlotte grumbled and turned up the radio. “Gossipy bitches.”

And with that, we were back on the road again.

I don’t know how much you know about California, but once you get out past Sacramento, there’s not a whole lot to see out there, and that left Charlotte and I alone with our thoughts and our music, but sooner or later, we knew we were going to need to talk to one another.

“How’ve things been going with the Hunting Party, sis?” I finally asked her, in an attempt to break the awkward silence.

“They still don’t fully respect me, but they’re coming around, day by day.”

“Still? Char, it’s been nearly a decade. I’d have thought any of the old guard would’ve either come around or died off by now.”

“Huntsfolk tend to be stuck in their old ways by nature, little brother. Even me, to some extent.”

“No way! Just because you asked me about 8-tracks doesn’t mean you’re stuck in the past.”

“Very funny, Dale, but I mean it. Over a third of the hunters refuse to use firearms? They say it’s too much like cheating.”

“You could always fire them.”

“Hunters are hard enough to come by without idiosyncrasies, Dale. I can’t just swap them in and out like pieces of a lawnmower. They’re real people and real people get set in their ways, on how they do things and who they trust. And they’re not used to a woman being in charge of the hunt.”

“Oh, tell them to swallow their fucking pride and get over it,” I laughed. “If they want to get stuck in their ways, that’s their problem, but you don’t owe them anything. Let’em use their muskets and their daggers while you’re picking off nasties with sniper rifles and high-yield explosives, and when they complain to you about how hard their jobs are, you can scold them for making it harder on themselves by not growing up and learning to use new things.”

“You make it sound so easy, Dale,” Charlotte sighed, “but you’re not in charge of anyone. There isn’t a gunslinger support team or work force you have to worry about. It must be nice, nobody to complain about what you’re doing or how you’re doing it.”

I gave her a little shrug. “Also nobody to reliably ask for help, nobody to watch my back, nobody double-checking my work, nobody checking in on me, nobody watching the corners I’m missing.”

“But the final call is your call, Dale,” she said, exasperation in her tone of voice. “If people disagree with you, the hell with them! You’re THE Gunslinger! End of discussion!”

“And you’re the Huntmistress, Charlotte! If people disagree with you, they can fuck off!” I laughed, rolling my eyes. “You’ve got to stop caring what people think of you! Or, at the very least, stop letting it define how you act. If they want to complain, let them, but you can’t let that make decisions for you. You’ve got to be forceful in your decisions. Not, y’know, intractable, but hold your ground unless there’s a compelling reason to back off and reconsider.”

“They constantly doubt me! I don’t know why!”

“Because you haven’t completely put your foot up their asses, sis. Don’t let them push you around, don’t let them talk back to you and put them in their place. You’re their boss. Don’t ever let them forget it.”

“And you’re still convinced you wouldn’t have made a great Huntmaster?” she asked me with a smirk, rolling her eyes.

“I am, because I would’ve beaten the shit out of the first person who dared question my call,” I grumbled. “I know I’m advising you to be more aggressive, but I’d have been too aggressive, too antagonistic. And you’d have gone nuts trying to unravel mysteries like I get stuck doing.”

“I could’ve figured some of those things out without too much effort, Dale.”

“And other things would’ve driven you insane,” I told her with a smile. “You’ve never truly had your willpower tested until you’ve had to deal with dragon politics and machinations. There’s planning, and there’s planning upon planning upon planning upon planning, and about two dozen levels beyond that, there’s dragon politics.”

“I prefer Uncle’s solution – ‘The best way to negotiate with a dragon is with your blade on its throat.’ But I know, I know… the Gunslinger has to keep everyone happy as best they can, and that includes being political and diplomatic.”

“That’s what I’m saving you from, sis.”

The next couple of hours, we didn’t talk all that much, we just drove.

Somewhere along the way, I drifted off to what I would’ve loved to have been sleep, but instead was what we call ‘a vision trance.’ I’d love to say we had control on them, over where and why, but they’re just sort of part and parcel of being a druid. When this sort of trance comes on, you just have to roll with the punches,

That’s how I found myself glancing in the back seat, seeing a druid dressed in robes that must’ve been thousands of years old, maybe much older than that even. He had long, flowing white hair that connected with a long, flowing white beard that folded at his waist, it was so long. His face bore a thousand tiny scars, and I wasn’t even sure what to make of it. He looked at me then he turned and pointed at the box. I looked down at the box and noticed that the cardboard lining was covered in glowing green runes, nothing in any language I recognized, nor even had an inkling where they’d come from.

And they were moving, slithering and shifting like streaks of oil, refusing to mix with water.

 Looking at the box for too long started to hurt my eyes, so I turned to look back up at the druid, only to see his eyes had been replaced by empty pools of blackness into which I was terrified I was going to get lost within. I was ensorcelled by it for what felt like an eternity before I shook my head, and the vision dispelled, the druid’s form shattering to dust before wisping away on the breeze from the open car window, blowing out into the open road.

I snorted myself back awake suddenly, actually opening my eyes and gasping in a sudden inhalation of air that made my sister almost stop the car in shock. “You okay, Dale?”

I shook my head, unclenching my fist that I’d apparently been holding shut while I’d been having a vision trance. “Random vision trance,” I told her. “Something to do with the relic, but I’m not sure quite what. From one of our waaaaay back ancestors, so not exactly the chatty kind, and I doubt I’d have understood him, even if he was.”

“And you’ve no idea what the message was?”

“The box was covered in weird symbols, but nothing I recognized,” I grumbled.  “I’m guessing that was his way he was trying to communicate with me, but I don’t fucking recognize them, and I doubt anyone still alive would. So no, no fucking idea.”

She nodded empathetically. “I’ve had them from time to time, too. Most of the time I can’t make heads or tails of them, although I think one of them was warning me about Jacob Thunderwillow.”

“What, like I did?” I chuckled. “Never date fae folk, sis. You should know that lesson all too well by now.”

“As should you,” she chided. “You’ve had worse luck with them than I have, although you’ve barely got a tenth of my body count over there.”

“That’s why I haven’t screwed around with as many of them as you have, Char.”

“I just think you’ve been turned down more often than I have, little brother.”

“You wish, sis,” I snorted in annoyance. “I don’t ask a lot of people out, because I don’t trust a lot of people. And I’m not into a lot of people. Sometimes I’m attracted to women. Sometimes it’s even enough for me to feel comfortable asking them out. Some of those times, I get lucky, and they say yes. And then, a few months down the line, we figure out why it won’t work, and then it gets called off, because I’m an asshole, or because she won’t listen to me, or because we want different things. And then I go back to being me alone for a few years, so the process can start all over again.”

“That sounds rather lonely, Dale.”

“That’s my life, Char. Better or worse, it’s what I’ve got.” I offered her one of my most cryptic smiles, as I cocked my head to one side. “Up to you if that’s better or worse than what you got.”

“What do you think?” she asked me.

“I think waking up in a cold bed seems a fair trade for not having to break another heart every month or two,” I laughed. “If I really need a pair of arms to hold me, a lot of the blood brothels owe me plenty of favors, so that’s easy enough to collect upon.”

“Seems like you’ve got it all figured out, Dale.”

“Nah, I’ve just got something that works for me and doesn’t keep me too busy. I’ll survive and we’ll see how it goes.”

We were quiet again for a while, but when my sister started up the conversation again, it was no less awkward. “Can I ask you something serious, Dale, and get you to promise you won’t mock me when you answer?”

I tilted my head to one side. “I suppose, Char. What’s your question?”

“Is it… difficult destroying souls with the SoulEnders?”

I inhaled a deep breath and then slowly, deliberately, let it back out again. “It’s as simple as breathing. You just do it without trying to think about it.”

“You don’t… feel anything?”

I sighed deeply. “Sometimes I do. I try not to dwell on it.”

“There’s got to be more to it than that,” she said.

 “There is,” I told her, “but I don’t know that you really want to hear it.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Are you hoping it’ll make you feel better? Worse? That you’ll stop wishing you were the one to be carrying the SoulEnders? Or maybe you think I can’t handle it and you could do a better job than I could.”

“Dale, that’s not—”

“I don’t really care which it is, Charlotte, because I took on this responsibility, not you, and I’m the one who has to live with it, not you. It’s not a thing you’re ever going to have to worry about, so it’s annoying that you’re asking, but fine. You really wanna know? Yes, there’s times where the weight of what I do gets to me. There’s days where I’m aware of just how many souls these two weapons have destroyed over the years, not just at my hands, but at the hands of those who have come before me. It’s not a gentle thing they do, Charlotte, because it’s not supposed to be. It’s a commitment. To the cause. To violence. To justice. To peace. To making the truly hard decisions so that nobody else has to. These weapons are my burden and Dad trained me well in how to use them and how to manage the weight of carrying them. Does it get to me sometimes? Sure. Am I close to breaking? Absolutely not. In fact, Dad told me a story once that the SoulEnders get slightly heavier every time you take a life that wasn’t worth dispensing justice to. You know how many times I’ve felt them gain weight?”

“Two?”

“Not even once,” I said to her truthfully. “So either Dad was lying, or so far I haven’t had an unrighteous kill.”

“And how many—”

“Thirty-eight,” I told her, rubbing my eyes. “Yeah, I know. I keep count. You think I shouldn’t.”

“I’m glad that you do.”

“Really?”

“It shows that you don’t take it lightly. That you understand the weight every time you pull that trigger, and you have considered everything you need to. That you aren’t doing it out of anger. That you aren’t doing it without measuring all your options. I wish I had that luxury.”

“How many—”

“I’ve lost count.”

“How long ago?”

It was her turn to sigh at me. “Sometime near the beginning. Huntmistress has a lot more blood on her hands, and in higher volume. There hasn’t been a single week since I started on this job where I haven’t killed somebody. Lots of somebodies, actually. Most weeks, it’s five to ten.”

“How do you deal with that?”

“By trying real hard not to think about it. By sleeping around a lot. By using recreational alcohol and pharmaceuticals a bit more liberally than I ought to. But mostly, I just do. I put one foot in front of the other. I get up every morning and try and remind myself I’m doing it for the right reasons and not the wrong ones. And I try and make sure I didn’t have any other option whenever I can. But that’s the difference between you and me, little brother. You’re a scalpel; I’m the shotgun. You deal in precision; I deal in volume. And I can take comfort in the fact that I just kill them, not destroy their souls. And that if we need that done, you’re the one who handles that, not me. That’s why I was asking you if it bothers you, having to decide what to do with someone’s soul.”

I offered her a little shrug, as the car continued through the mountainous roads. “I try not to think of it as ‘me deciding,’ but more of ‘these people’s actions have consequences and they should have known they couldn’t get away with it.’ You know? The only reason I’m at people’s doorsteps, gun in hand, is because they’ve done something to merit it. They made all the decisions that led up to me arriving on their doorstep. At that point, my appearance is just sort of a given.”

“You make yourself sound like a force of nature, little brother.”

“Not that,” I corrected. “Never that. I’m just a man. I won’t say that in front of our peers, because I have an image to uphold, and a reputation to maintain. I need the position of the Gunslinger to have a certain mythos and mystery associated with it, just like you do with the Huntmistress position. But at the end of the day, sis, we’re just people, struggling to do the best we can with what we can, and hoping that’s good enough. Most days it is, I think.”

“Nobody thinks I have any level of mystique, Dale,” Charlotte grumbled at me.

“Oh no? The local blood banks think you’re some kind of boogeyman,” I teased. “They still don’t understand how you were able to pick off all your targets in the unregulated feeder den up in Petaluma. Nobody saw you until you walked into to help the survivors out, and the survivors claim that people just started dying all around them.”

“A combination of sniper work, stealth kills and offensive spells, sure, but the work of a boogeyman? They just don’t recognize us at work. Besides, I didn’t do that all by myself. I had Janice and Nathan with me, so it was a team effort. It usually is. I know far better than to attempt most of my jobs on my own, which is more than I can say for you, little brother.”

“I don’t have a team of people working for me, Charlotte.”

“Maybe you should is my point, Dale.”

“And have them doing what most of the time, Char? Fetching me coffee? Doing research into Bhatt Boxes? Putting together dossiers on the factions around town and what they’re up to? There’s not enough work for that, Char. People would be sitting around too much of any given day doing nothing, and that’s not a good way for us to spend the family fortune.”

“I’m sure there’s something we could get them working on in their spare time, brother of mine.”

“Yeah, well, when you figure out what that is, you let me know,” I told her. “Because I certainly wouldn’t mind my end of the bargain being a little less lonely when I can.”

The drive itself turned quiet again, and neither of us had much to say until we were nearing Battle Mountain. We’d crossed over into Nevada hours ago, and hadn’t really seen anywhere we wanted to stop and eat, but saw a sign for a roadside diner called “Bad Barry Bear’s Brutal Battle Brunches.”

And if you can’t stop for Bad Barry Bear’s, what can you stop for?

As we pulled into the parking lot, I definitely got a strong whiff of magic about the place, and that wasn’t helped any by the two motorcycles I saw in the parking lot. To someone without The Sight, they would’ve just looked like any other road weary Harley Davidsons, I’d guess. To me, they had wheels made of blue flame.

Road wraiths.

Wraiths are the least understood of the tribes of magic, mostly because they tend to avoid long interactions, don’t engage in organized society and prefer not to have to answer much in the way of questions. They only engage and interact with others for small periods of time.

Generally, wraiths are solitary creatures and don’t spend time with others, but there are some wraiths that have bucked that trend, worked as representatives of their kind to strike balance with the others. Lady Graveflower and I have shared a meal a couple of times over the course of my tenure as Gunslinger, and while it definitely takes some getting used to, sharing a meal with a companion who doesn’t really have much in the way of a face, I’ve found her company delightful, in a rather chilling way.

Wraiths are the only one of the tribes of magic who are not naturally occurring. Vampires, dragons, werewolves, mages, elves, fae, dwarves, orcs, gargoyles, yeti, merfolk, ghouls… the list goes on and on and on, but all of these? They’ve been part of our world for as long as anyone can remember. So have wraiths, but wraiths don’t reproduce – they’re created.

You see, wraiths happen when magic goes fatally wrong. Not all the time. Not even most of the time. Just some of the time. Generally, if a mage is playing with powers beyond their ability to control, when they die, they become a wraith, immortal but not really living, undying but closer to dead than alive. They’re often powerful wizards and witches who got something horrifically wrong as their final spell, and whatever monstrous mistake they made, it ended up scarring their soul so much that death refused to take them and left them to wander the planet.

There are ways to kill a wraith. It’s not easy, but it can be done. Dad helped one commit suicide during his last few cases, and I’d killed one myself very early in my career. Both times we’d used the SoulEnders, which is why I guess I was less afraid of them than most people were. My sister had killed a couple a few years back, using some very carefully prepared rounds that I’d helped her craft.

Road wraiths represent a very specific subsection of the wraith community – they’re messengers, couriers and travelers. They are always on the go, moving from one place to another, never giving any location more than twenty-four hours of their time. They always travel in pairs, usually on motorcycles, but sometimes they’ll travel by car or in a hauler semi or even in a boat. The most reliable way to get any package from point A to point B is through road wraith messenger services. I’d wanted to ship the totem to New York by road wraith, but my sister wanted us to handle this gig by ourselves, so I’d been outvoted.

But seeing road wraith bikes parked outside? It meant that Bad Barry Bear’s was a Sanctuary, a place where we wouldn’t have to worry about being attacked, because all were welcome, all were granted safe passage. It would be a place where the presence of the wraiths wasn’t just accepted, it was expected.

As we headed into the diner, we knew at the very least, we were going to have an exciting lunch.