Jericho Lott - Chapter 19 (Patreon)

I’d assumed that Jessie would head home after meeting the Corrupted Oracle, but she announced that she was finding this a grand adventure and offered to go with me to Denver. In the end, I shrugged and said okay. I didn’t have the foggiest idea what Pierce Carter was capable of, and it wouldn’t hurt to have some backup along. After the wreckage she’d left in her wake saving me from the Raven’s Council, it wasn’t like I could say she didn’t know how to handle herself. In a moment of brutal honesty, though, I realized the picture Corban drew of Carter frightened me. It expressed too much. It was as if the fallen seer had captured a sliver of the man in a cage of ink. What the image expressed was unspeakably dark and suffused with a primal intensity I’d never encountered before. As much as I hated to admit it, I didn’t want to face Pierce Carter alone. I would have if no other option presented itself, but I was glad it hadn’t come to that.

We caught a flight out of Philadelphia because it was the fastest way to get to Denver. I’d never been to the Denver Airport before and wanted a chance to scout the place out. On the flight, I tried to reconcile Gran’s statements about the Corrupted Oracle with my own impressions. He hadn’t been out of control and certainly not rabid. He’d seemed urbane and a bit lonely. Of course, for all I knew, we’d caught him on a particularly agreeable day. Based on Jessie’s warnings, he must have done some pretty god-awful things in the past. It was also possible he was so agreeable because he’d foreseen a moment in the future when a favor from me would prove critical to his survival or fulfilling some scheme. That kind of reasoning left me with a vague pain behind my eyes. First, it was confusing, and I hated feeling confused. Second, if the future was mutable and he’d secured a favor from me in response to imperfect foreknowledge, he may well have altered the conditions that would lead to needing a favor from me. If the future wasn’t mutable, it meant my life was running on a fixed track and that was a deeply frightening thought. I decided those weren’t matters that I could decide on a four-hour flight.

I turned and gave Jessie a thoughtful look. She was staring out the window and listening to something on an MP3 player. Her head bobbed along to music I couldn’t quite make out, other than to recognize it had a serious drum component. After Corban’s bomb about his age, I’d been wondering about Jessie. She looked like she was in her late twenties, but Corban looked like he was in his early thirties. I didn’t really know her or her history. Could she be something of extraordinary age, as well? It would help to explain her power and the ease with which she seemed to control it. On the other hand, I could lay down some serious power when I wasn’t strapped to a magic-inhibiting frame. She must have felt me looking at her or seen my reflection in the window.

“What?” She asked without turning her head.

“I was wondering, just how old are you?”

She gave me a looked that could have cracked walnuts at fifty paces. “You’re old enough to know better than to ask any woman that question. How old do I look to you?”

Even I saw that trap coming. “Twenty-one.”

She sniffed. “Uh-huh.”

“If you’re going to make something up, you might as well go for broke,” I said.

“To answer your real question, no, I’m not some ancient thing masquerading as a mortal. I’m just that damn good.”

“Who taught you?”

She rolled her eyes and pulled out the earbuds. “People like you need to learn. People like me just do it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Man, there are some pretty huge gaps in your knowledge.”

I grimaced. “Yeah, I’ve been noticing that lately.”

Jessie thought for a little while before she spoke again. “For lack of a better way to put it, there are two kinds of people who do what we do. People like you are rule-bounds. At least, that’s what I call them.”

“Rule-bounds?”

“Your mind needs a system to make sense of the magic. Systems impose rules. Take away the system, take away the rules, and you have a really hard time manipulating those forces. It’s not so much that you can’t, as it’s just a lot harder for you. It’s not your mental default. It seems like you’ve been at this long enough that you don’t have to think your way through it every time, but that’s just because you’ve practiced so much.”

I considered that possibility. It fit with my experience of things. Uncle Bill had drilled me for years on the categories of magic, what they could be used for, and how to harness them. I’d studied grimoires to learn spells and then distilled them down into single-word castings. She was right, though, that my entire use of magic depended on a system. That system was so deeply ingrained in me, such an automatic second nature, that I doubted anything short of catastrophic brain damage could take it away. Still, it was a system. It had rules, and I depended on them.

“Okay, that’s probably accurate. So, what are you?”

“I’m a natural or maybe an intuitive. I feel my way through the magic. I know what I want to do, and the magic tells me whether I can.”

I shook my head a little. “It tells you? Like, it talks to you?”

“Nothing so boring as that. It’s not like the voice of God or anything, I just know.”

I found that whole idea a little terrifying. The idea of just willing the magic to do this, that, or the other ran counter to my entire worldview.

“So,” I said, trying to formulate a vague curiosity into a coherent question, “what’s the difference? Between intuitives and rule-bounds, I mean.”

“Who knows? It might just be a byproduct of how people think. Something about minds being flexible or inflexible in certain ways. Maybe intuitives are just closer to the magic somehow.”

“Which do you think it is?”

She smirked. “In general, no idea. With the two of us, I think the magic just likes me better than it likes you. I’m more fun.”

“What?” I sputtered. “I’m fun!”

“Oh, you poor boy,” she said, patting my cheek in mock sympathy, “you’re really not. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person as morbidly serious as you before.”

“I am fun,” I protested, sounding whinier than I meant to.

She laughed. “Look at the bright side. There are thousands and thousands of angst-ridden emo girls out there just waiting to drop their panties for someone like you.”

I felt my jaw opening and closing with no sounds coming out. There was a swell of embarrassment rising in me and my cheeks felt hot. I wanted to say something, anything, that would let me get in the last word. My mind fumbled around, and I said the first thing my off-balance brain gave me.

“You shouldn’t stereotype. It’s wrong.”

I’m pretty sure they could hear Jessie’s hysterical laughter at the other end of the plane. I spent the rest of the flight with my nose buried in a random paperback I’d bought at the Philly airport. I studiously ignored Jessie, which she seemed to find quite amusing. She spent the rest of the flight poking my arm at random intervals and saying, in the most melodramatic tones, “It’s wrong.” Then she’d laugh again. I cannot begin to express how relieved I was when we finally touched down in Denver. I mused, as we disembarked, that maybe facing off against Pierce Carter by myself wouldn’t be so bad. I mean, when you got right down to it, all he could do was kill me.