A Chorus Of Concern

For this week's story, dear reader, we return to Martha Hazard, Dwight Thompkins, and the mystery of just how a gang of soul-bound street toughs ambushed and gravely wounded Dwight.

How, and why? Who would want to come for the Professor, leaving him housebound and too sick to track his attackers himself?

A Chorus Of Concern - An In Council story by M. K. Dreysen

The kid rode his board at the edges of the night's crew. Up the sidewalk, along the curb. The occasional trick; killing time, mostly, in that easy lean and pull way. Keep moving, no stops.

Almost like magic, the way he never had to really push for it. Like gravity and friction took a day off or something when he and his deck needed the freedom. And even unto crowd control did his magic extend.

Folks stepped just enough off to the side, gave the spaces here and there he needed to ease through. Nothing fast when he needed access, just another easy ride, when he got close he slid through at barely more than a walk.

"Don't scare the straights?" she asked through his earbuds.

"You got it," he responded. But like his pace, if you'd been standing next to him you'd not even have noticed his voice. Kid's talking to himself, that's all. "What's on the menu?"

Martha looked down from the goggles; they connected her to the kid's eye view. Look to the edges and she could see the gear. And the snacks. "Bugles."

"No Funyuns?"

"That was yesterday. Hot Cheetos tomorrow."

"Gross."

Martha cracked a can of Mountain Dew. "Hear that?"

The kid didn't even pause. He slipped his backpack off, and a can of his own soda loose, pack back on and a green and yellow can in hand and no loss of momentum at all.

Magic. He let the sugar and caffeine do its own magic for a bit before he asked the question, first time that night and Russ Russell smiled that he'd made it this far into the evening without asking. "Anything yet?"

Martha thumbed her laptop keys so that the notifications scrolled across her heads-up. "They're here."

Russ put his foot down, pure habit. But he caught himself before he came to a complete halt, and made the motion look like he'd just needed a kick. "Where?"

"You sure about this?"

"Well yeah, I mean..."

"You're aunt's gonna kill me if I get you hurt."

Russ shrugged. "Isn't it a little late for that?"

Martha looked at the five glowing dots that had popped up on her display. Green pixels. Indications of a trap. The lights formed a horseshoe.

At the back of an alley. All Russ had to do was... "If you're sure?"

"Yeah, I'm sure." Not a boarder's cocky. Well, only a little.

Nerves there, and surety. Martha had to trust that the kid could maintain that balance. She checked his helmet's gauges, the board's, the other gear. The little modifications that she'd made so that she and Russ could make this all work. "Hang a right."

****

"Want this?" the leader of the little gang said. He shook Russ's board, let the reflective decals shine a little light across Russ's face.

Russ shrugged. They'd jumped him, just like Martha had said they would. Bag over his head and tied hands and here they were in... a warehouse, looked like.

"Nice deck," the other said. "Balance, good wheels. And that little stream of connection to your soul." The leader smiled at that. "We like that kind of thing. Makes it easier to take what we need." The guy reached a long skinny finger down to the deck, and plucked.

Agony shot through the connection, past all of Russ's defenses and straight to the base of his neck. Russ ignored it. Not enough pain to matter, and definitely not yet enough fear, nothing like standing at the top of a too-tall ramp and waiting to dive off.

Russ eased his head back and forth, letting the tensions roll away. And giving himself and the helmet they'd left him a nice slow pan of the surroundings.

Nine others. The five, probably, three others that looked like backup.

And this guy. Russ wondered if the others could see the connection between Russ and his board. Probably. Probably that's how they knew who and what.

Russ took the moment a little farther. Knees good, elbows good, back, butt. The usual places where there would have been road rash from the sudden stop. His gear had taken that up, Russ hadn't been moving fast enough for the rope and the crash to do any personal damage. Well, maybe a scratch or two.

"So what is it you want?" Russ asked the guy.

"The energy you've built up these past few nights. You've rolled our streets, taking, focusing all that the crowd could give you. And now we're going to take it from you."

Russ remembered what his aunt Regina had told him. "They've given up the direct connection to the physical world's energies. But their spirits are still hungry. And they can only feed from one type of source. You, if you're dumb enough to get in range."

Russ looked at the ten figures gathered around him, looming over him. Stepping closer.

Blocking what little light entered the warehouse. Russ gulped against the fear, the real thing now eating at his gut.

****

Martha eased her way into the unlit warehouse. What light there was came from the street lamps outside, drifting through. She and Russ could see because of her goggles, and his glasses.

Anyone else, well. She started to wonder about the physiological changes the gang's members had undergone in their spiritual journey, but didn't let herself get too far down that path.

She drifted down the aisles of pallets until she could see what was going on. The circle of trouble, Russ in the middle of it. The gang's leader with Russ's board, the light of the mana that Russ had gathered, a natural by-product of the nightly activity of the Quarter, the residual energies wound onto a mage like static electricity. Russ, anyone with their own magic, gathered it without a thought.

The spirit-bound gang couldn't access that energy, not directly. They needed a living conduit. Thus, Dwight and his run-in with them, and now Russ. Only, Russ carried something else that the gang, or more likely whoever controlled them, desired.

Youth. All ten of the spirit-bound gang, and their target in the middle, shared the same rough age bracket. Eighteen, more or less.

Martha slid her phone from the pocket of her cargo pants, then found the button. And then she waited to push that button until the spirit-bound started trying to draw from Russ's gathered mana.

****

Russ felt the agony return; the gang's leader bit down on the faint glowing string where it connected with Russ's deck. It burned, now, the ten of them drawing in unison.

It burned until it didn't.

A hint of shadow coiled down and around Russ's extremities; hints of shadow, boiling away from the helmet, the elbow and knee pads. Along and out and through the lit mana. And into the ten soul-bound where they sipped at their feast.

Russ watched the shadows play. The pain had eased as soon as the nodes Martha had buried in his gear opened.

The fear went, too, once Russ got his mind to quit gibbering and pay attention. "Oh, wow," he muttered.

Martha stepped out of the shadows. "Agreed." She thumbed her phone to light, now that the immediate danger had passed, and used it to scan each of the ten in turn. "They're locked away for the moment, Russ, you can come on out of there."

Russ stood up, stretched, and then yanked his board loose from the gang leader's now strengthless grasp. Then Russ tucked his board away and performed his own inspection.

Ignoring how his heart hammered at his chest each time he stepped up to look into another shadowed pair of soul-bound eyes. "How long do you want to keep them like this?" Russ asked.

"You're the expert."

Russ pulled a notebook from his backpack and scratched out a few calculations. "Aunt Regina's ritual should lock them away for a couple days without modifying anything."

"Could we extend it if we had to?"

Russ shook his head. "No. We have to lock it in at start, one way or another."

"Two days for sure?"

"Yep. That's solid. It'll fade, another twelve hours or so after that and they'll start freeing themselves one by one."

Martha opened her own satchel, rummaged around until she found a pair of scissors, then walked up and cut a little of the leader's hair. She capped the little glass sample bottle, then repeated her work with each of the other soul-bound. "Right, got it. Go ahead, Russ."

"Two days it is." Russ Russell knelt and let the enormity of the night and the moment drift away.

This was the first time he'd done something like this, by himself at least. The ritual, sure, but more the fact that he really was out and about and trying to save someone from the dangers of the other worlds. Just like Aunt Regina had promised.

Russ closed his eyes and let the ritual's energy spin its way out and down onto the ten soul-bound gang members.

****

Martha and Russ tracked down their target with just a few hours to spare. By the time the ten soul-bound gang members woke, one by one, to an all mighty hangover and no real memory of the fun they'd had to get there, Martha and her tagalong had found their way across the river to Len and Dwight's mother's house.

"You're certain?" Len asked.

To Martha, the house they'd tracked down was just another piece of Garden District eye candy. Not painted, not renovated, still hanging onto its century plus worth of accumulated entropy. But very much a Victorian era mansion with iron gates and brick fence walls and crepe myrtle full of bumble bees and the heavy creeping wall of honeysuckle to cover it all.

The low tone of Len's voice told her the old mansion might mean something to the Laughing Man and his brother. "There's a story there?"

Len chuckled, weakly. "Yeah."

Dwight, from the rocker, echoed his brother with a wan grin. "Mom and Grandma used to clean Doc's place, twice a month. Len and I had to pitch in spring and fall, when they tore the place down. Lot of furniture to move."

"Grandma diapered Doc's butt. Only place she had anything to do with after she retired, she and Momma did it to keep up with Doc's kids as much as anything." Len shrugged. "And then there's Dwight and Jason."

Martha waited for someone to add something to that. Eventually, Dwight obliged. "First boyfriend."

Martha felt something behind those words. The weight of tears. She dropped it. "But that's a long time ago, Doc isn't with us I'm guessing?"

Dwight turned to Len. "Is she still..."

Len frowned. "She still owns it, DT. And, I'm guessing Martha's results mean she's in town. Doing what though, who knows?"

"Do you want to find out?" Martha asked.

The two older men looked away from each other. Dwight gazed out toward the city, Len looked down at the porch rail. They stretched the moment as long as inner demons could wrestle.

Then Dwight looked up, finally. "Yeah, Martha, I think we need to find out what Jason's sister is up to."

Russ, to this point quiet beneath the generational gap, clapped his hands and rose from his seat at the top of the porch step. "Great. First, we'll need to stop at a gas station."

"Corn nuts?" Martha asked as she followed Russ to the car at the curb.

"Corn nuts, bullshit. You owe me beef jerky. The good kind, peppered and wrapped in butcher paper, none of that plastic shit that's been sitting on the rack since Pharaoh took a swim." The two of them headed to the car, tossing a trail of snack ideas and ignoring the moment that loomed ahead. Len followed them, shaking his head at the well-meant bickering.

Dwight rocked in his chair, bound to the worn leather seat by still-recovering wounds, the lady dying in the living room.

And a lacing of emotional scar tissue, taut and fresh now as it ever had been.