“Is that fox talking?” The younger of the two cops asked.
I waved a dismissive hand at Saoirse. “That's a spirit. Like that thing we just killed, but less dangerous and infinitely more sassy.”
“Right,” he replied, eyeing my little fox friend dubiously.
The fox narrowed her eyes right back at him, then gave me a look like, ‘are you seriously talking to these guys?’
Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either, Saoirse, but they were actually helpful, so I guess the least I could do is be polite.
“Is there a problem officer?,” Saoirse told the cop with a haughty flick of an ear. Apparently Saoirse didn’t share my views on being polite. “Whatever you think I did, I didn’t do it, and even if I did, you can’t prove it.”
“Right…” he said again, turning to his older partner for some sort of guidance.
The older man was considering me like I'd just tracked dog shit onto his favourite rug. “Thanks for the help… Gauntlette? We have an arrest warrant for you, though. So… you're under arrest. Take off the gloves and put your hands on your head.”
“Gloves?” I asked incredulously. “It's in my name, man. Come on.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Don't care. Gloves off, hands on head.”
The younger cop glanced at me, then back to his partner… then readied his weapon. Alright, choices had been made, I guess.
I groaned, testing my leg. God, my thigh hurt like hell. I wasn't going to be able to run.
“Hey, uh… Tia…?” Saoirse whispered tentatively. “Close your eyes for a sec?”
My eyes flicked down to where she stood beside me. “That’s not my name.”
Her eyes flicked up to me, and I watched her compute my statement in real time. She nodded imperceptibly. “Sorry, Tailor. Blink, please.”
Was that a scarf joke?
Ah, what the heck. I closed my eyes. My options were limited. I could take my chances with flying out of here while they shot at me, or I could trust whatever idea Saoirse had cooked up.
There was a loud pop, and my vision flared white-orange for a second as an extremely bright light flared between me and the cops.
“Shit, fu— my eyes!” The young cop cried, while the older one grunted in wordless pain.
My eyes snapped open to see the cops stumbling and disoriented while they blinked sightlessly. Oh shit, okay.
“Time to leave!” Saoirse said urgently, already rushing back down the street the way she'd come.
Wow, this fox had more tricks up her sleeve than I realised.
Raising a hand, I pulled myself into the air. The strain caused my back to flare up, but I gritted my teeth and sucked it up. I tumbled through the air for a few seconds, pulling and twisting at the weave of reality, until I landed into a stumbling, flailing heap down near the end of Carding Street. I think I aimed for the back lot of a shop?
Saoirse arrived thirty seconds later, her wheezing, squeaking breaths preceding her. “Hell yeah, gave the cops the slip! I've been wanting to do that since I binge-watched that one horror TV series.”
“What…” I grimaced. “What series?”
“Law and Order,” she stated, flopping onto her stomach. “I wish they'd have let the good guys win at least once, but… I guess that's the genre for you.”
I stared at her. Wasn't that a cop show? “The good guys… win? You mean the murderers?”
“Yeah, I think they made the protagonists be murderers and other bad things so that the viewer doesn't feel so bad when they get arrested,” the little fox said with a sigh. “Otherwise the show would be too bleak, you know?”
I stared at her, utterly baffled. Then, a thought occurred to me. “Wait… if you could do that flashbang thing, why didn't you use it to stop me catching you?”
Saoirse blinked once, then twice. “Oh. Oops. Uh… you weren't meant to realise that.”
“Realise what?” I asked, tension flooding back into my limbs as I readied myself for a quick aerial escape. I knew the little shit was untrustworthy, but was this about to get really sketchy?
“Okay. Okay… I wasn't just randomly stealing your trash…” she said softly, not meeting my eyes.
My gauntlets hissed as I instinctively vented some of the waste mana that'd built up in them.
Saoirse's eyes widened and she struggled until she had her paws back under her — ready to bolt. “I knew who you were! I knew you were the one who… set us free. I knew you were my cousin — kinda. We're a lot of steps removed, ‘cos like, our ancestors made babies together like a few thousand years ago. I guess that doesn't really make us cousins… but you're the same age as me and I'm lost and lonely and scared! This world is scary!”
I held her gaze, trying to figure out if she was telling the truth. Abruptly, she whined and flopped onto her side, showing her belly and looking up at me imploringly.
I groaned and stomped a foot, but I began buttoning up my leather jacket, then ushered her closer with a gesture. “We're going to talk about this later, y’know? For now, we gotta GTFO. The cops are just down the road.”
Saoirse blinked, then rolled back to her feet and padded cautiously closer. “Okay… thank you for not killing me. I really appre—”
I snagged her and stuffed her down the front of my jacket, getting a startled yelp out of her. She tried to scrabble out of the little pouch I’d made, but the fit was really tight, and she stilled quickly.
“Oh… this is kinda nice,” she murmured, letting her head rest under my chin.
“Let me know if you still think that in, say… five seconds,” I giggled, and pulled us both into a tumbling upwards plummet.
Saoirse squealed and writhed as we spun haphazardly through the air, but when we flipped completely upside down at one point and she started slipping free, she stopped and decided to let out one long string of panicked curse words instead. I just laughed and pulled us through the air towards the downtown area of Concord. I liked this little fox, quite a lot. She matched my sass blow-for-blow, but with her own over-the-top flavour.
During one long arc where the wind was mercifully calm enough that our big ears might be able to hear one another, I said, “Priority is helping people. Then I'll bring you home, and we can chat, okay? I think you're cute, and I'm going to keep you.”
“I am cute,” I heard her mutter happily to herself — then, louder, “And you owe me shampoo!”
I hummed, twisting another burst of momentum from the sky. “What if I lied about our deal?”
She gasped, and suddenly sounded very small and horrified. “You wouldn’t…”
“I’m the same type of spirit that you are. Would you trust a non-magical deal with another one of us?” I teased her lightly.
“Shit.”
Oh man. So fucking cute.
“Don’t worry, I’ll keep my end of the bargain,” I giggled, right before the wind began howling again, destroying any hope we had of hearing each other.
Downtown was chaos. The horse-spider was still running amok, and there were small origami bat things swooping at anyone who was brave enough to venture outdoors. A burst of rubber balls was enough to outright destroy the bat things, so I dealt with the ones I could find very quickly. The horse-spider, on the other hand, was a problem.
I stood on top of a low residential brownstone building, Saoirse at my feet, watching it assault an office building four blocks away. Its low roars of challenge were periodically met with bursts of gunfire, and it would leap dozens of feet to attack whoever was engaging it. Sometimes, a scream would make it through the wind.
“Those origami things were… what, again,” I asked, holding a dead one and turning it over. It was basically just a crude bat, but made entirely of black and grey paper.
Saoirse glanced at it. “It has a proper name in Japanese, but everyone just calls them Orariki. They’re pests, and not capable of higher communication in any shape or form. That thing down there currently terrorising the cops is a burdenbug. They like to eat and puppet domesticated animals, then create large underground hives. We managed to quarantine them in an area surrounded by the Fog, so they haven’t been a problem for civilised spirit society in a while. Now, I guess they’re Earth’s problem.”
“Where did it get the horses, then?” I asked, confused. Who the fuck had horses near downtown Concord?
My foxy friend gave me the side-eye. “That’s your question?”
Yeah… that was fair. People were getting hurt while I fucked around again. Although, this time, I was actually getting intel so I didn’t blunder face-first into a nightmare situation.
“Okay… does it have any weaknesses?” Raising my larger right gauntlet, I stared at my palm, opening and closing it as I thought.
“I mean… nothing worth mentioning? If you smash it to bits or shoot it, it’ll die,” she said, flicking her ears in a gesture that my brain interpreted as a shrug.
I sighed. “Will it burn?”
“Anything will burn if you try hard enough, Ti— sorry, Lette,” she said with a toothy grin. I’d explained the concept of an alter-ego, which she thought was amazing because it involved tricking literally everyone. It was kinda odd where the gaps in her knowledge of Earth were popping up. It seemed like all the context she had was entirely based around scavenged media that got so thoroughly lost that it fell into the spirit realm.
“Hey, you should know that the place with the big yellow sign down there hasn’t been evacuated,” she said after I was quiet for a second or two.
Yellow sign? I squinted, staring down the street… oh! The McDonalds. Shit… the burdenbug was getting closer to it as every moment passed. Now that I was focusing on it, I could actually hear a few faint screams of fear that drifted on the wind like snow.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” I said, squaring my shoulders. “There’s no way I can take that thing in a fight — not with bullets already flying. But… protecting people by distracting it — I think I can do that.”
“Sure,” Saoirse said, standing on her hind legs so I could lift her easily. I put my arm around her little body, then hopped off the building. I slowed us by allowing my fingers to just barely slide through reality until I hit the ground with bent knees.
Dropping my fox guide to the ground, I began to rush down the road in the direction of the evil, angry spirit. It had noticed the people in the McDonalds now, and it was in the process of shoving cars out of the way so it could throw its nasty corpse-body against the heavy glass. Thankfully, your average McDonalds was built with drunk people in mind, so the glass was probably kinda thick.
The cops were busy shooting at it, but their bullets were either pinging uselessly off the hard carapace of the monster, or slamming into already-dead horse.
I sprinted past a pair of cops who were taking potshots from behind a van, and called out to them. “Friendly!”
Hopefully that would keep these trigger happy SWAT guys from immediately gunning me down. I was operating on extraction shooter rules right now, though… so the effectiveness of my call was probably not very high.
When I got within range of the monster, I aimed my palm at it and went through the activation motions for a shockwave. I really needed a way to juice up my spells — put more hit behind them.
The spell exploded from my hand with a snap-boom, and the monster stumbled. It let out an alien, warbling call of surprise, then rounded on me, chittering angrily.
“God damn, you are really really nasty-looking, huh?” I shouted, trying to keep its attention on me.
It lunged at me, faster than I was prepared for, and if I hadn't been ready to flick myself up into the air, I'd be a stain on the pavement.
“Over here, meat-socks!” I called as I landed in the middle of the road — away from the fast food restaurant. My leg threatened to buckle, but I clenched my jaw and forced myself to stay upright.
Its chittering screech was a physical assault as it rushed me again. A wet thump echoed down the street when it bowled a small car over like it was nothing, but again, I dodged it and leapt further from the McDonald's. This time, I fired a spray of magic rubber bullets at it. Blood sprayed out in multiple directions as my shotgun blast of less-lethal projectiles tore at already damaged flesh.
It howled with rage and charged immediately, sending me diving for cover behind a dark SUV that was sitting abandoned in the middle of the road.
The burdenbug was so angry at me that it literally tripped and crashed out into a couple of parked cars. One horse-leg-pair got stuck in the back seats of a sedan, and it writhed, temporarily trapped in place.
A low, thoughtful voice from behind interrupted my next move. “Gone through some changes, have we, Threat?”