On the Verge (A Charmed Life Book 1) (13 page)

“That's what happened to you, isn't it?  Why didn't he do that to me?”

He nodded confirmation.  “There's a way out,” Jacob said.  “If you sign up, you bypass it.  But most newbs don't know about the registration, so they just get caught and hauled in.  Take the exit there.”

Tracy considered a few moments longer as she took the exit Jacob was pointing to.  “What about the guy the other night? He didn't do either.”

Jacob nodded.  “Right, two ways out.  Take a right here, then the next left.  That was newb-hunting … it's … a common way to try to get easy new tokens, especially for those of us who don't have many to start with.  We head out and wander the streets, trying to feel for others.  If they haven't actually manifested yet, they have a different … feel to them.  Hard to explain, but you'll feel what I mean when you're more used to everything.  If you defeat them before they manifest, then you get their token, but they never got linked to it, so they don't suffer from not having it.  It's … actually kind of merciful, I think.  It's the only way out of this whole mess.”

Tracy nodded, understanding better, now.  “I dunno,” she said, “I guess … I guess part of me does sorta wish that you had gotten it from me.  I'm sorry I yelled at you, before.”

Jacob shook his head.  “No, it's all right.  You were right, it's not fair.  But there's nothing 'fair' about this whole business.”

Tracy persisted.  “I know, and that may be something to be angry about … but it's not your fault.  I shouldn't have been angry at you.”

Jacob grunted his acceptance of the apology.  “there, on the right,” he said.  “Pull into that parking lot.”

It was a large white flattened dome of a building, perhaps four or five stories tall, and two or three times as wide as it was tall.  It didn't have any corporate logo, it didn't have a sign, it was just a generic-looking building.  She'd always assumed it was some government storage building for road maintenance supplies - salt, plows, that sort of thing.  She'd seen it often enough from the highway, but had never thought much of it.  It had a large parking lot, capable of holding a hundred cars, and to one side was an entrance to some underground parking, but at the moment there were only three cars in the upper lot.  Tracy pulled easily into one of the parking spots a couple spaces down from the nearest car, and shut down.

The air was brisk as she exited the heated truck, and Jacob shivered and hugged his coat tighter around himself, but Tracy wasn't feeling all that cold.  The wind tugged at her skirts, blew into the open front of her jacket and billowed it around her, and it just felt exhilarating.  The sun was hanging low in the sky as the afternoon wore on a bit, but there was still that faint, warm scent of moisture in the air that suggested Spring was on its way.  There was something else on the air, though - a dry ozone smell coming, she imagined, from the building ahead, sort of like the smell coming from cooked pavement when the temperature topped over a hundred in the summer.  It reminded her of the smell when Craig was throwing fire at them.  She would have commented on how it was unusually pleasant weather for this time of year, but Jacob looked so cold that she decided not to rub it in.

“One more thing,” he said, as they walked down the sidewalk towards the front door.  “As a newbie, you're entitled to a month's worth of special protections.  You don't have to accept all challenges - you can opt for at least a week between challenges.  So for this first month, you can't get deluged with challenges or taken advantage of.  This gives you time to study the rules of engagement and practice with your new abilities.  Also, you get to pick a mentor.  Anyone challenging you is also challenging your mentor, and he can either stand in for you or fight alongside you.  There's rules involved with all of that.”

Tracy nodded, walking slowly.  Jacob wasn't hurrying, either, despite hugging his coat close around himself.  “Can you be my mentor?” she asked.

He shrugged.  “I'll do it if you want me to,” he said.  “I should warn you, though.  People don't like me here - you could inherit some grudges.  You might want to pick someone else.”

Without hesitating, Tracy shook her head.  “You're it, then,” she said, with finality.  “I'll trust you to help me with all of this.  You've been doing well so far.”

Jacob gave her a smile, a sudden, open smile such that she hadn't seen from him before.  She had a flash of insight at the cloud of self-doubt and stress that must be surrounding him all the time, felt a crushing feeling of loneliness and paranoia that she understood all too well.

“Don't do that!” he snapped, eyes narrowing.  “Get out,” he stated coldly

Tracy felt a rush of anger.  How dare he be angry with her?  She hadn't done anything!  “What's your problem?” she snapped back at him.  “I didn't do anything!”

Jacob glared at her, and Tracy's irritation just increased.  Then she felt a tight frustration and confusion.  Why had it shifted to frustration?  What was going on?  “You're empathizing,” Jacob said softly.  “All the elements have different types of empathy.  Most people wouldn't notice, but shadow is pretty sensitive.  You're in my head.  Get out.”

Tracy wasn't certain how she was reading his emotions, but at least now she knew where the wild emotion swings were coming from.  She wasn't going to be like one of those characters in a book that needed everything spelled out for them to the tiniest little detail.  Figuring that a mental construct might be useful - it's what they always used in books and movies, at any rate - she pictured a bubble around herself, a wide bubble that encompassed Jacob, and pictured her mind as filling that bubble…  then she pulled it in, pictured the bubble getting smaller, until it centered on her head and drew inside.  She felt a pressure compressing her mind - an imagined mental pressure more than a physical pressure, but a pressure all the same.  Then it eased away and something in her temples relaxed that she hadn't even realized was tensed.

Jacob looked a bit taken aback.  “Hey…  good job!” he commented, surprise evident in his voice.  “How'd you know how to do that?”

Tracy gave an excited grin.  For the first time, she started to see the other side of what she was dropped into – a young girl's dream, long forgotten, come to life.  “A lonely childhood and an addiction to fantasy novels,” she responded.  Jacob smirked lightly, gave a small shrug.

The amused smirk lasted to the door.  As they passed through, Jacob took on a grim expression, and Tracy's own grin faded away from nervousness.  A guard stood just inside the door, looking like a normal rent-a-cop.  A bunch of tiny, beaded braids hanging at the side of his tanned, broad face broke the stereotypical appearance, though, giving him a faintly exotic look if you ignored his uniform.  With a bit of surprise, Tracy realized that the beads each held a tiny rune on them - these beads were his charms, and there had to be twenty or thirty of them!  The bit of nervousness settled down something like fear.  It was as if she had just realized that a mall cop had an assault rifle on his back, in easy reach.

Jacob nodded to the guard.  “Powa,” he said, politely.  She assumed it was the man's name.

For a moment, the guard seemed like he was just going to stare out the front door, ignoring the two of them, then he said, just as politely back, “Jacob.”

Jacob nodded, and stepped through the inner doors.

Tracy wasn't sure what she had expected inside the building.  She supposed she had expected something bizarre, anachronistic.  Stone columns, perhaps, with archways leading into a massive sand-covered Coliseum floor.  What she saw, instead, was just a simple office building.  The lighting was from normal light bulbs set into frosted half-circle wall settings or recessed into the ceiling, and not the harsher fluorescent tubes that office buildings usually had, but other than that it could have been the building she worked at.  A cheap all-weather carpet covered the floor, and a bunch of semi-comfortable looking couches were scattered between small tables and plants.

Yet, something felt different about this room, despite the similar appearance, and she couldn't quite place it until she started processing the smells.  Tracy realized that unlike a normal office, these plants weren't fake.  The room didn't have the stale odor of a closed-up office; it had the rich smell of greenery and wet soil, the air smelled fresh as the air outside, crisp and clean.  There were other scents, too, scents she had a hard time identifying.  More of that sort-of-burnt smell, the ozone scent of hot summer days, and a confusing dry smell that shouldn't have mixed well with the rich moist scent of the plants, as well as a myriad of other odors that she couldn't start to identify right off.

At the back of the room was a door with one of the cheap office combination locks set into it, right next to a small glass-fronted window where a bored receptionist waited.  Jacob walked up to her.  “Hey, Ilsa,” he said, politely.

Ilsa looked up at him.  She was wearing a pale blue sweater that was a bit too snug across her large chest, her hair was drawn back away from her face except for a few strands across her forehead, kept back with a nice solid hair clasp engraved with Celtic knots.  Her skin was smoother than anyone who lived in a place with their sort of winters had a right to have.  “Hello, Jacob,” she said, cool and professional, and her eyes glanced over Tracy and then dismissed her.  “Another one for Lord Brin?”

Jacob's voice grew a bit sharp.  “Ilsa, you know I don't work for him anymore.  You processed the paperwork yourself.” Ilsa shrugged and said nothing.  Jacob sighed.  “No, she's here to sign up so that she doesn't have to work for him.”

Ilsa gave him a small smile that held no warmth.  “Well, how nice for her.” She opened a drawer and flipped through some paperwork for a bit, then slid them out through a slot in the glass, attached to a clipboard with a cheap Bic pen tucked into the clip.  “Fill these out.”

Tracy felt a little bizarre.  She had been expecting something less … normal … about the affair, but as she sat down and looked at the paperwork, she saw that the majority of it was just a bunch of standard forms.  She could have been applying for a job.

As her pen scratched over the paper, filling in tiny boxes with pertinent information, she sat down in one of the couches with Jacob settling into a chair to her left, resting his forearms on the table near the pages she was working on.  “You brought them in, didn't you?” she asked, quietly, so that they wouldn't hear her.  “Powa and Ilsa?”  Jacob sighed and nodded.

They were quiet for a while as Tracy filled in information as best she could remember.  She couldn't remember contact information for the employment section, and asked Jacob, “Why do they need to know where I've worked?”

“In case they need services.  They like to hire people inside our private little … 'community', if they can, so they like to know what everyone can do.  It's a choice to take any work offered, not a requirement, but it contributes to the tax you owe and usually pays pretty well.” Tracy nodded and kept filling it out.

When she reached the last couple pages, the feeling of something just not-quite-the same started returning.  More than usual paperwork - questions about hobbies, arts and crafts, and other, more personal questions.  Her dreams?  Her ten-year goals?  She knew some recruiters and HR drones asked about those sorts of things, but she'd never had those on a sheet.  “Psst … Jacob,” she murmured.  “Do they mean literal dreams?  Like, what I dream when I sleep?  Or do they mean what I want to do?”

“What you want to do.  Why would they want to know about your actual dreams?”

Tracy gave him a flat look at the question, and he just looked a bit more confused.  She sighed and rolled her eyes, then went back to filling out the sheet as best she could.  Not that the answer helped entirely – it just threw into stark relief that she was still doing a minimum wage job because … she had to admit it to herself … she didn't know what else to do.  How to get from where she was to where she wanted to be.  The last page held the question she was expecting: what was her core rune? What other runes did she possess, and who did she get them from?

“You said it was weather, right?” she asked, glancing at her charm.

Jacob nodded. “But they want you to put down dual colon air slash water,” he explained.

“I don't know the guy's name I got the rock charm from,” she murmured, tapping the pen on the page.

“Write 'Jacob Nightfox'.  Technically, you got it from me after I got it from him.  If you had gotten it from him, you'd be putting down 'NA'.  Oh, hold on, that means I have paperwork to do, too.”  He sighed and got up to get a clipboard and a much smaller half-page form, scribbling the info quickly in as he stood there and handing it over to Ilsa.

Tracy glanced over the paperwork nervously, hoping there wasn't anything she had missed.  On his way back, Jacob caught the look on her face and the unsettled flipping through the pages.  She looked up as he laid a hand on her shoulder.  “Hey,” he said, “Don't worry, the important thing is just that you registered, and that you filled out the appropriate tokens.  The rest is pretty minor stuff.”

“OK,” she quietly said, took a deep breath, and let it out as she stood up.  “Um … I think I'm done, Ilsa.”

Ilsa took the clipboard and flipped through it to see what Tracy had put down.  “Oh, a combo trinket.  Very nice.  And earth, huh?  From Jacob?”  Her face lit up as she peered over at Jacob with a surreptitious, self-satisfied little grin.  “Do you have time to wait for a little bit and talk to someone?”

Tracy glanced at Jacob uncertainly, who gave a shrug.  She looked back at Ilsa and nodded.  “Sure, I guess so … how long?”