Star Harbor Nights

My name is Orchid Song. I'm an archeologist by trade and an adventuress by habit. Most of my work consists of legitimate scientific endeavors. It's funded by an outfit called the Pandora Foundation... Pandora as in, 's Box, as in that-which-should-not-be-opened. Ninety-five percent of my time is spent unearthing buried secrets. The other five percent is spent re-burying them. I could tell you stories... well, no I couldn't. That's kind of the point.

I wasn't in Mexico on foundation business, though. I was there in the rattrap of a cantina on my own time, waiting for an old friend to make contact. I sure as hell wasn't there for the atmosphere... which was thick enough with haze and cigar smoke that you could have driven a nail into it and hung up your hat. For all that, I smelled the trouble coming before I saw it.

"Me and my friends wonder how much you charge for four of us?" he asked in heavily accented English, not improved by the slur. He was a fat, sweaty man whose hair seemed to have migrated south towards warmer climes. He would have been unattractive in any language.

It was almost inevitable that I would have attracted this kind of attention. I'm no shrinking violet, but even if I was, a five foot five Japanese woman is just going to stand out in some places. It's a reality I faced. That doesn't mean I'm willing to put up with disrespect, though. This kind of attention is expected, not excused.

"I look like a prostitute to you?" I asked, tipping my chair back as I looked up at him. He was big, and not just around the equator. I fell short of five and a half feet standing.

"So you do it for free?" Pauncho asked, leaning in and leering. There was a chorus of chuckles from nearby men. I barely noticed... his breath reeked and he was in my space.

I gave him a sexy little smile as I put out my cigarette. Then I put my feet up and shifted forward. The chair's momentum added force to my fist as it crashed into the drunk's face. His nose exploded with a sickening crunch, blood blossoming from it. He staggered back, did a neat little half turn, and fell over. You gotta love drunks... they're better than clowns. I didn't have time to watch, though, because his friends were coming to his aid.

They came face to face with my personal sidearm. It looks like a Desert Eagle, but it isn't.

"Gentlemen, I'll give you two choices. Your amigo already needs medical assistance. You can either get him to a doctor, or I can send you there with him," I said in perfect Spanish, accented with only a touch of venom. The men scurried to pick up their friend and get out of the bar.

When they were gone, I let out a breath that I hadn't realized I was holding. My hands were shaking a bit, but from wasted adrenaline, not fear. I could have handled them without the gun. With it... well, I wouldn't have killed them. Like I said, it looks like a Desert Eagle but it isn't.

I don't like to hurt people... I really don't. I just don't mind it much, either. If my continued well-being depends on inflicting a little pain, I'm going to do what it takes to continue being well every time. Part of it is that there's people in my life who depend on me. Part of it is that what I do is important in the grand scheme of things. Mostly it's just plain stubborn self-interest.

I sat back in the chair and called for another bottle of tequila. It was a way to pass the time. Cheap booze was one of the redeeming features of a joint like this, right up there with... cheap booze was the redeeming feature of a joint like this. I noticed the owner was giving me a sour look. I'd have to remember to leave a little something extra for having driven out some of his customers.

I put the bottle down almost as fast as I had the drunk, and began admiring the dress of one of the serving girls. It was bright red one of the few spots of color in the dingy bar, and it clung very flatteringly in the places it didn't flow loose. I'm not exactly a clotheshorse, but I like frilly things sometimes. When I'm not in the field. She was doing a little swaying dance as she walked. My first thought that there was no music, but then I realized you could faintly hear it wafting in the door from somewhere up the street. At a slightly nicer place, probably. It made me wonder about her... who she was and what she was doing in a dump like this. She should do better for herself, I thought. I started inventing tragedies to explain her circumstances. I'm not normally that sentimental, but the night was wearing on and my mind was wandering.

"Well, I'll be damned if it ain't Indiana Croft herself."

The voice was distant and tired, but I knew it right away. Adrian Barbossa. Once we'd be partners. Twice we'd been lovers. Like a bottle of tequila, he helped me pass the time. His face was lean and hollow, harrowed. He had a look of exhausted anguish. I'd seen that look before. I'd been responsible for that look, both the exhausted part and the anguished part in turns.

"The man comes around," I said, passing him the almost empty bottle. "Have a slug."

"I think it's a worm, actually," he said, looking dubiously at the bottle. He'd never been a fan of tequila. He took a seat. He sat down facing the back and clung to it, in fact, like it was a life preserver. "I wasn't sure you'd come."

"You should know better than that by now," I said. The double entendre was unintentional. Honest. "Last I heard, you were on a dig. A legitimate one. What happened?"

"We found something," Adrian said. He grabbed the bottle and downed the dregs. "I took it."

"Oh, Adrian," I said. I was disappointed, and I let it show on my face. "The last time, we barely kept you out of jail."

I didn't even mention the time with the chalice. I wondered if he still had nightmares about that.

"This is different," he said. "Something was breaking into the site."

"Something?" I repeated. "Or someone?"

I wasn't exactly skeptical, just pinning down specifics.

"Something," he said. "We started posting guards... and then it killed two workers. I didn't... didn't get a good look at it."

Translation: he'd ran.

"So what was it after?" I asked. "What's worth something killing two people over, and you risking your career?"

He pulled a towel-wrapped bundle out of his pack and placed it on the table. He looked like he expected it to bite him. I reached over and unfolded the cloth.

"You ever seen anything like that  come out of an Aztec settlement?" he asked as I stared at the object that it had revealed.

I had to admit I hadn't. Crystal skulls, yeah. Crystal feathers were a new one to me. It looked like it had been carved from one large, exceptionally clear piece of quartz. There were pale rose and teal highlights along the edges. They were inside the stone, not painted on it. Despite the dim lighting, it shone slightly, as though it sat on an illuminated base.

"I think it's a Quetzalcoatl feather," Adrian said.

"It's pretty," I said. "Why's it worth blood?"

"It can heal wounds," Adrian said. His voice rose and grew hoarse as he spoke. "I tripped when I fl... when I was leaving the site, and went sprawling in a ravine full of rocks, but I kept a tight grip on the feather. I watched my cuts heal and my bones knit back together."

"Show me," I said. Healthy skepticism didn't go out the window when you dealt with the supernatural. In fact, it became all the more important.

Adrian pulled a penknife from his pocket and cut a small line in the palm of his left hand. It wasn't very long or deep, but he squeezed his hand into a fist until scarlet welled up for me to see. He placed the wound on the feather for a few seconds, then held up his hand. It was not just healed, it was clean.

"Where's the blood?" I asked. "Did it clean you up when you fell in the ravine?"

"No. The feather seems to absorb blood when it comes in contact with it," he said.

"That's very Aztec," I said. "Do you have any idea what its limits are? Could it raise the dead?"

"You want to try?"

I didn't answer. I picked the feather up gingerly and held it up. More colors became apparent as I turned it. There was a whole rainbow hidden in its depths. Purple fringe, red near the base, transitioning through blue, yellow, and green at the tip.

I realized we were drawing stares.

"It's amazing what they can do with plastic these days," I said in badly accented Spanish. "But you paid too much for a cheap tourist trinket."

"What?" Adrian asked.

"I think we should finish this conversation back at my hotel," I told him, wrapping the feather up in the towel and stowing it. I didn't wait to see if he'd ask for it back. I wouldn't let it fall into the hands of whatever was chasing it, but I couldn't let him keep it, either. I knew we might fight about that later, but at the moment he had other concerns.

"Orchid, I don't want to give you the wrong idea," he said. "I called you because you're the only one I know who can handle things like this. I'm not looking to... I mean, we've had some fun... I just don't think it would be a good idea to..."

"Hey," I said. "You're exhausted and sex would be the last thing on my mind. I just want to get us out of sight and into a more defensible position."

Honestly, sex with Adrian may have been a few notches above bottom on my list, but he collapsed in the tiny bed almost as soon as he saw it. My comment about a defensible position had been mostly bluster. The hotel had no security. The room had a lock, but the door barely fit the frame.

The only other furniture was a wooden chair and a low dresser that I was using as a desk. I had been staring at the feather for over an hour and was getting one mother of a headache. I wanted to know more about it, but I didn't have a lab or any proper equipment, or even my magic kit. Yeah, magic kit... I dabble a bit in that sort of thing. I don't like the words "mage" or "sorceress." I deal with the supernatural, and I like to know what I'm dealing with. I knew enough to know that a lot of fancy gear isn't always necessary, but when you're dealing with something this heavy-duty it's important to dot the pentacles and cross the runes.

Magic always had rules, but the bitch of it was that the rules could be anything. Sometimes you can impose your own, but when you deal with big magic, that can get pretty dicey. If something inside the feather was hungry for blood, that didn't necessarily mean it was evil... but I sure as hell didn't want to let it out with a careless probing spell.

I did learn one thing about the feather's limits: it did all of jack shit for a tension headache. I found my eyes slipping towards the bed, and the sleeping form of Adrian, more and more. He'd always been handsome. Boyish. Rugged. Just stupid enough to be dangerous, and just dangerous enough to be attractive. He always looked a little world-weary. When he slept, it just sort of fell away.

Handsome? He was beautiful.

I pulled myself away from the sight. I told myself it's easy to fall for a guy when he's unconscious. I went to the window to get some fresh air.

The city was quiet. The street below me was empty... or almost so. I felt a prickling at the base of my neck and knew that something was approaching. Something as in Adrian's something. From nowhere a wind rushed down the avenue, stirring up dust and litter so that I could actually watch it loop its way snake-like up to the second story of the hotel and right to my window. It pushed past me and I got a whiff of something hot and stale. The wind rustled the edges of the cloth that the crystal sat on. I darted to the dresser and snatched it up. Just like that, the wind died.

I whipped back to face the window, and there she was, standing in the moonlight. A frail-looking old woman, resplendent in tattered Aztec finery. Ladies and gentlemen, we had our something.

"What do you want, grandmother?" I called down in Nahuatl. I think that's what I asked, anyway. I might have been asking if she had any chickens to service.

She stretched a hand up towards the window, claw-like hand opening and closing. "Feather!" she rasped... in English. Grandma was a fast learner. "Give me the feather!"

"That's not going to happen," I called down. "Wy don't you just..."

I saw her eyes come alive with dark red fire. She drew back her hand and then shot it forward with a grasping motion. I watched as that foul tendril of air sped towards me and barely had time to swear before I was picked up and yanked out of the room. I shot up like a cork, then slammed down hard.

The street wasn't exactly paved, but it wasn't exactly soft, either. Luckily, I had the feather. It didn't do anything for the pain, but I was alive and conscious.

A brilliant whirl of light appeared floating in front of me, inches from my eyes I blinked, but it didn't disappear. I hadn't really expected it to.

"Fuck off," I hissed at it.

The light bobbed up and down. It was like a spinning color wheel, a three-dimensional kaleidoscope. I knew what it meant: the bloody elementals were offering their help. Remember when I said I dabbled? That might have been a slight understatement. Some time back, in the course of discovering one of the many things I wasn't meant to have discovered, I'd kind of been recruited as an agent of the elemental spirits. They used the term "servitor." The gig came with some impressive powers, but everything has a price tag. It was like letting the Foundation finance my digs: every time they helped me do something I wanted, I somehow ended up doing ten times as much for them in return.

I swatted the colored light away. I wasn't there on the Foundation or the elementals' behalf, and I would do this by myself. I got to my feet and faced my attacker... and shuddered in revulsion.

I had known she wasn't exactly human, but that left a lot of territory to cover. She could have been some kind of construct, or a spirit guardian, or even a goddess incarnate. She could have been any of those things, except that she was a corpse. A mummified human being.

It doesn't matter how often you stare down the walking dead. The primitive part of your brain, the part that seizes up every time you hear a wolf howl, will never get used to it.

I held the barrel of my gun up to my lips as if I was going to kiss it. "Deadshot," I whispered. It was a command word. The spell it triggered was better than any suppressor on the market. Audible gunshots always attracted attention, even if they didn't summon police. I normally used a two-handed firing stance, but I wasn't about to let go of the feather. I'm a competent shot with one hand, and I hit the Grandma three times in center mass as she shambled towards me.

The woman-thing walked through the gunfire like raindrops, not seeming to notice the ragged holes they punched in her leathery flesh. She snarled and whipped her hand through the air. Her pet wind nearly clotheslined me, but I rolled backwards and avoided most of the impact.

"Foolish child, I would have let you walk away but now I shall end you," she said as she stalked closer.

The little will o' wisp buzzed around my head again. I gritted my teeth and holstered my gun. It felt like disrobing. I held out my hand and the light hovered over my palm and began reciting the rhyme.

Let me preface this by saying I didn't write this shit. Elementals represent the simplest parts of the world's mystical make-up. They're impressed by simple things.

"Earth, air, fire, water, lend your strength to Eden's daughter," I said. "Let power flow from every quarter, help me now restore the Order."

First of all, I wasn't too fond of that "Eden's daughter" crap. Way too C.S. Lewis for my tastes. Secondly, those weren't even all the elements. Just the popular ones. Like I said, though: when you deal with big magic, you have to play by its rules.

So I said the stupid rhyme. Exit Dr. Orchid Song, eminent archeologist. Enter Arcana, elemental guardian. My own gear was gone, replaced with a pure, clean white garment kind of like a body stocking. It came with accessories, too: gold bracelets, one with a sapphire and one with a ruby. The belt held an emerald in its clasp. The matching choker had a diamond. Elemental stones.

The name and costume hadn't been my idea, either. They came with the nursery rhyme. I appreciated them, all the same. It helped me separate what I did with the elemental power from my normal existence. That was important to me. I didn't plan on playing errand girl for a bunch of cosmic constants all my life.

But in the meantime... mummy.

"So, the mortal creature has some power," she said. She sounded oddly pleased. "It will be... fun... to devour you."

"That's not going to happen," I said. My voice rang out clear and strong. Arcana was larger than life. Larger than me, anyway. I lost myself in the moment. "You have offended Arcana, benevolent guardian of elemental magic... and bitch, you pissed off the wrong benevolent guardian."

"I thought the last of your kind would be long gone by now," Grandma croaked.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said. "I'm an original."

"May that sorry delusion die with you," she said. She charged towards me with surprising speed, the foul wind at her back. Her nails were long and sharp, but my mystic gear was better than armor. I cocked a fist and sent her sprawling. Enhanced strength... what a rush.

"Winds, obey me!" I called. The hot miasma that clung to the mummy shuddered visibly as it tried to resist my command. I felt it giving way, and it spun around her like a miniature tornado. She spoke a few words in her native tongue and the aerial familiar simply dispersed.

"You're better than I thought," I said grudgingly.

"And you're nowhere near as good as I expected," she countered. She charged again, her hands sporting a sickly greenish flame. I tried to counter with brute strength again, but the impure flame burned through my defenses, leaving me with ugly burns on my stomach. The feather was doing its job, but I could feel the fire's taint fighting against the magic of the feather. The feather was winning, but slowly.

I grabbed the bitch's forearm... burning my own hand... and threw her away. She landed like a cat and immediately sprang back towards me.

This wasn't going well.

"I grow tired of this," I said. False bravado is still bravado. Then it hit me... her magic seemed to be the reverse of mine. If I was weakened by her twisted fire, would she be able to withstand pure and holy elemental flame?

I decided to find out.

"In holy fire you now burn... what came from earth will now return!" I shouted. A little extra rhyme wouldn't hurt. I spread my hands and a blazing white hot flame shot forth.

The dead thing screamed when it hit her, fire wreathing her emaciated form. It rushed down her open mouth and into her throat, burning her from the inside out. It seemed longer to watch it, but in a matter of seconds it was over. What ash remained quickly scattered on the wind.

I released the mystical energies that made Arcana and tucked the crystal feather into my belt then trudged back inside and up to my room. Adrian had slept through the fun, but he awoke at my entry. I was on the bed before I knew what I was doing. I'd taken care of his monster. I didn't care how tired he was, he was damned well going to take care of mine.