Carnivale Mechaniste

Chapter 3: Portents

The days passed in a blur of endless highway miles between cities, hours in the back of an RV with Thyra, sharing iPod earbuds and playing Xbox. It seemed like a surprisingly mundane thing to do in a carnival of magicians, or as they preferred to be called, mages. People like him, with unusual abilities or natures, they called 'other-natured'. Jax was beginning to understand himself, slowly, with Aric's impatient but effective instruction. It started with a housecat, a calico named Helix. Aric sat him down in his office—a booth in an expensive, tricked-out RV that Aric called 'the command center'—and put the cat in front him.

“All you have to do,” Aric told him, “is look at the cat, and focus on it. Feel, in your chest, in your gut, in your core, the change. Feel the pool of energy inside, reach for it, grab it, connect it to that image of the cat in front of you.” Jax put his head down, rested his chin on his fist, stared at the cat, which watched him right back with that inscrutable, aloof gaze that is so unique to felines. Jax felt the now-familiar sensation, the tightening in his chest, the slight buzz in his head, the curling inward of his being.

“Good,” Aric's voice was in his ear, but Jax had no attention for anything but Helix. “Now, envision yourself morphing, slowly and intentionally, into Helix. Not into a cat, but into Helix, into that very cat in front of you. It is absolutely vital that you envision yourself as you are, clothed, with all of items upon your person, when you shift, otherwise you will end up naked, as you discovered.”

It happened suddenly. One moment he was himself, and then the next, Jax was crouching on the table, his tail curled around his body, ears pricked to catch every least sound around him, his whiskers twitching, nose smelling. The real Helix was tensed, coiled, growling low in his chest, and Jax heard it as a warning, a message that Helix wasn't happy with what was happening, and wouldn't stand for any funny business. Jax leaped down from the table, felt light and powerful, balanced and precise. He landed, stretched, flexed his claws and held his tail rigid. He felt eyes on him, turned to see Thyra watching him from the back of the RV. He moved towards her, each step slow and deliberate, reached her feet, crouched on his haunches and jumped up into her lap. She giggled, set her paperback aside and scratched behind Jax's ears, a sensation that made him wriggle and purr in ecstasy. He was aware, in the human remnant of his mind, that he was lying in her lap, on her lithe, pale legs, and it made that human portion of himself realize how much he wished he could do this as himself, that he could be this close to her, this intimate with her.  He looked with his feline eyes at Aric, still sitting at the table, and the look in the carnival master's eyes made Jax, cat and human, take pause. It was a look of anger and disapproval, and it scared Jax with its intensity. He looked up at Thyra, then leaped down and returned to the table.

“Now,” Aric's voice was cold, commanding. “Hold an image of yourself, as a human, in your mind. Reach for that pool of power and see yourself, will yourself, to return to that shape. See yourself stand up, clothed and calm. It's important that you have an image of how you want to appear when you phase back into human form.” Jax conjured an image of himself in his borrowed Romani outfit, reached into himself for that tightening, curling, humming bolt of energy, and then he was standing up, boots firmly on the floor, head spinning slightly. Aric grabbed his elbow, pulled him down to the bench forcefully. He leaned forward, his eyes narrowed and glittering like ice chips, fingers digging painfully into Jax's arm. Stay away from my daughter, boy. Jax heard the words in his head, tolling like a bell, echoing and reverberating on the walls of his mind. Stay away, or no force on this earth or any other can save you. She's not meant for the likes of you. Aric released his painful, vise-like grip on Jax's elbow, Aric's face showing a side Jax hadn't seen yet, an arrogance, an assurance of superiority, cold derision and condescension. Thyra was watching like she could either hear what her father was saying to Jax, or could guess. Her features showed resignation and sadness. She lifted a hand, waved it limply, a gesture of farewell. Jax looked back at Aric, met his gaze, feeling anger welling up within him.

Not meant for the likes of him? What was that supposed to mean? What was he, that she was too good for him? He didn't need Aric. Jax looked out the window, saw a hawk wheeling in the distance. Somehow, his vision telescoped and he could see the hawk in perfect detail. Jax focused his energies, and this time the shift came even faster, more naturally. In an instant, he was the hawk, standing on the table, spreading his wings out and bursting out through the open RV window into the clear sunlit air. He beat his wings furiously, rose up and up and up, thought briefly about just winging away into the distance and making his own way yet again...but instead he spotted Harman's distinctive RV and turned on a wing towards it, half a mile back down the caravan. He wasn't ready for the world at large yet. Aric was possessive of Thyra. So what. Thyra was beautiful, a talented mage, from all accounts. Maybe she was too good for a nobody shapeshifter with no real family. He was finally able to admit it to himself, in his own mind, as he sped through the air with the wings of a red-tailed hawk: the man and woman with whom he'd grown up, whom he had called 'mom' and 'dad' weren't his parents. There had always been a niggling little shred of doubt in his gut, his whole life. He'd never listened to it, of course. They never said anything, so why would he? But the words his dad had said, that day, they stuck in his head. When they placed you with me, he'd said. He never had fit in. He didn't look at all like either of them. Even his mom had been distant in the way she loved him. It all made sense, to an extent. He wasn't sure who had 'placed' him, or why, but he could at least admit that Jim and Debbie weren't his real parents. They'd raised him, so he still thought of them as Mom and Dad. Well, maybe at some point he'd find out the rest. For now, just figuring out how to survive and make good in this bizarre new world was hard enough.

He floated in through the open passenger-side window of Harman's RV, thinking of Thyra. He didn't want to cross Aric, but he couldn't get Thyra out of his head. She should be able to make her own decisions about who was right for her. He sat on the cracked leather of the passenger seat, fuming internally and preening his feathers.

“Troubles, Jax? Perhaps you would care to speak of them?” Harman didn't take his eyes off the wheel, didn't seem at all perturbed by the intrusion. Jax phased back into his body, propped his feet up on the dashboard.

“I don't know, Harman. It's...”

“Girl troubles?”

“Well, yes, and no. The girl isn't the trouble, I mean. It's her dad. He's just...not what I thought.” Harman glanced sidelong at Jax, weighing what he would say.

“Aric is like that,” he finally said. “Thyra is all he is having for family, I should say in his defense, but that is not changing his basic nature, and the difficulty of getting along with him. He is not a nice man, for all that he is charming. He is a powerful mage, it must be admitted, and for that he is very proud. He has run this Carnival for many, many years, and he is much accustomed to getting his way, in all things. Thyra, she is the apple of his eye, as they say. You have chosen the most unobtainable of prizes, set for yourself the loftiest of goals in putting your eyes upon Thyra. He would not allow such a match, especially at such a young age. Were I to be you, young Jackson, I would perhaps put it aside. I know you will not do so, but I must say this, at least. And I must warn you. If Aric were to catch you with her...in any fashion...I fear what vicious things he might do to you. He is not a gentle man...as you will find out, eventually.” The talk turned to other things, then, but in the back of Jax's mind, he still saw Thyra's face, felt her fingers in his fur.

When they stopped, finally, it was in a small, one-stoplight town in Nebraska. They set up at the edge of town, the RV's and pickup trucks hauling trailers, all skidding to a stop in the gravel on the side of the road, men and women swarming out of vehicles, unloading, unpacking, hammering stakes and slipping awning poles together. It was a frenzy of organized chaos that swirled around Jax like water eddying around a rock in a stream.

“You, boy,” said a stocky, swarthy man covered in swirling, color-changing tattoos, grabbing Jax by the shoulder, “what are you doing, standing there? There's work to be done!”

“I...I'm new...” Jax stammered. “I'm not sure what to do.”

“Well then come with me, I've got plenty for you to have at.” So many of the people Jax encountered in the carnival had such odd patterns of speech, Jax had noticed. The tattooed man, Uric, as he introduced himself, put Jax to work setting up folding tables and arranging the man's merchandise, hand-crafted figurines wrought from metal, glass, tin, paperclips, clay; any and every material one could think of, Uric had used to make delicate, exquisite figurines of animals and people and other things Jax couldn't name.

“Did you make all these?” He asked Uric, finding it odd to think that such a hardened, tattooed, muscled man like Uric could make anything so delicate as these. He held in his hand a swan made from porcelain, small enough to fit in the palm of Jax's hand. The swan was utterly real, to look at it, as if a living swan had been frozen and shrunk.

“Of course,” Uric said, looking at Jax, baffled at the question. “I make them while my woman, she drives. I make them from whatever I can find.” He cast a glance around him, saw a rusted soda can lying some distance away. Uric retrieved it, set it on the table, stared at it for few moments, thinking, then proceeded to rip the can open with his fingers, as if it were a napkin. Within seconds, the aluminum can was flattened, lying inner side up. Uric placed his hand over it, palm flat, and whispered a few sibilant sentences, passing his hand back and forth over the aluminum. Next, Uric took the erstwhile soda can in his hands and began folding it and bending it, exactly as if Uric was using the metal for origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. Suddenly, Uric swore, dropping the half-made figure. Apparently, whatever magic he did to make the metal more pliable didn't make the edges any less sharp, as Uric's thumb was bleeding profusely. Uric gripped his thumb with his opposite hand, gritting out words that seemed like curses, but in some foreign language that Jax didn't recognize...only when Uric said them, his hand glowed red, like Jax's hand used to do when, as a kid, he would press a flashlight to his palm in a dark room. When Uric took his hand away, his thumb was healed.

Jax stared in amazement. “Can you teach me to do that?” He asked.

Uric looked at him for a long moment before responding. “I suppose I might try. I cannot guarantee that you will succeed in the learning of it. You are a shifter?” Jax nodded, watching intently as Uric finished the figure, turning the aluminum into a deer, complete with a spread of antlers. “Many shifters have difficulty in performing magic other than the shifting, so do not be angering yourself at me if you can't learn. But first, finish this set up.”

A few hours later, after the awning and tables had been set up and the merchandise arranged to Uric's satisfaction, the two sat down on folding chairs Uric tried to teach Jax the healing spell. As Uric had warned, however, Jax found it incomprehensible and nearly impossible.

“It comes from inside of you,” Uric told him. “It comes from your gut, your brain, your balls. It's inside you all the time, you just have to pull it out. Don't think. Don't understand. Just do. Use your imagination, as well.  See it. Feel it.”

They had been working for over an hour when Uric trailed off mid-sentence, and slapped his palm against his forehead and laughed uproariously. “I am an idiot, Jax! An idiot!”

“Why?”

“Because you cannot perform a healing spell if you do not require healing! The magic must have an object upon which to operate.” Uric reached out and dragged the nail of his index finger along Jax's forearm, emitting a strange guttural hiss as he did so. Jax felt a hot deep cutting pain slicing into the flesh of his arm. Where Uric's fingernail touched the flesh, it opened up a pink gash an inch deep. It didn't bleed, strangely. 

“Now, boy, heal yourself.”

Jax focused all of his attention on the gash in his forearm, pulled deeply from the well of energy that sat in his gut. He pronounced the words, touching his palm to the wound, and visualized as clearly as he could the skin knitting back together. This time, Jax felt a cool sizzling buzz in his arm and hum of power running through his body. When he pulled his hand away, Jax's arm was healed, as if it had never been injured.

“Good! Very good, Jax-boy. Now, I think there are other people in this place that could use your assistance. Try Helfdane, the smith.”

“Where is Helfdane? How do I find him?” Jax had't been able to discern any pattern to the booths, as yet.

Uric looked at Jax, puzzled. “Boy, the booths are always the same, always. Have you not noticed?”

“No, this is the first time I've been around for a setup.”

“Oh, well then I guess you can be forgiven for not understanding. It is like this,” Uric knelt and drew three concentric circles in the dirt with his finger, “the outside edge of the circle is always food and beverage vendors, trinket sellers like me, tourist items like Carnivale t-shirts and keychains, things like this. Always, the exact appearance of such things is altered to suit the desires of the local non-magicals.”

Jax was puzzled. “Altered?”

Uric rubbed his forehead. “Boy, you know nothing at all about this place you are in, do you?”

“No, I guess I don't.”

“Well, I can't stop and explain it all to you, but I'll give you the basics. The Carnivale is an ancient, complex thing, it's half-alive, I sometimes think, almost sentient. It's always changing, altering, expanding, shifting, absorbing. That's the magic of it. The most basic thing you have to understand, Jackson Magnus, is that the Carnivale Mechaniste is a magical thing, in its very essence. It operates on magic, the attractions are magic, and all this magic comes from the people who run it. The carnival is the people. It is too many things to name in this tongue.  But, people who possess magic are few, and those without, many. So, part of Aric's job, and his real talent, is creating a spell that surrounds us and travels with us that, persuading gently and subtly and insistently those who cannot see magic that our Carnivale is nothing but a quaint, cheap, traveling carnival.” Uric paused, thought, and asked: “Do you even know about the realm-shift?”

“The what?”

“I didn't think so.” Uric went into his RV and re-emerged with two cold bottles of beer. “Sit and drink, Jax, while I give you a brief explanation of the Carnivale Mechaniste.” Jax was getting used to the blasé way the carnies treated underage drinking. There was no one to say he couldn't, so why not? Jax took the bottle and tried to twist off the red cap, but only managed to cut his hand open. He used the spell he'd just learned to heal his hand and held the bottle to Uric with a look of embarrassment.  Uric took the bottle and opened it with an opener on a key chain, chuckling. 

“Everybody does that at least once, boy. Now, attend me. The basic shape of the Carnivale, to continue," Uric pointed at the circles he'd drawn in the dirt.  "It is concentric rings, like nesting dolls. As I have said, the outside ring is people like me, who use a specialized form of a spell to create some sort of art object, the food and drink sellers, the like, as well as some normal, unmagical carnival rides and games. Next ring to the inside are the attractions, or, in old circus parlance, the midway: mindreaders, telekinetics, fire-breathers, animal tamers, tight-rope walkers...most of 'em would be right at home in a normal carnival or circus, except they use magic, though you probably couldn't tell, honestly. They just use their magic to do the tricks more safely. Inside that is the really special stuff, Gretto's House of Many Mirrors—which I hear you discovered the hard way—the Carousel of Moments, Madame Hassan's Tent of Fortunes, The Sway Sisters, and Herath and Borath's Illusionary Dreamshow. At the very center, where you can only go if you have magic, is the Altar of Angels, Aric's show, and the Bawdy Tent. In that same interior is the drain chamber and the generator room. You'll have to see each of them to believe what they are, so I won't explain them.” There a sudden, startling blast of sound just as Uric finished speaking. It was a primitive, tribal sound, and it sent shivers down Jax's spine.

“What the hell was that?” He asked.

“That was the shufra, an instrument made out of an animal's horn. Morgrath the sword-swallower sounds it when the ticket-takers begin letting in customers. It marks the official beginning of the Carnivale Mechaniste.  He will blow it again at the end, in three day's time.”

                                

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Helfdane the smith was a storybook image of a blacksmith, huge, burly, massive arms like tree-trunks, iron-hard skin, fists like granite boulders, a thick blond beard braided and tucked into a leather apron. He spoke rarely, Jax would find out. He communicated in grunts, gestures, and glares, and this seemed to be all he needed to make himself understood. When Jax showed up at Helfdane's stall looking for work, the smith stared at him for a long awkward moment, sizing him up, then pointed at an apron hanging from a peg. Jax donned it, found it big enough to wrap twice around him and trail on the ground. Helfdane seemed to have difficulty suppressing a hint of amusement from tipping up the corners of his lips. The smith then directed Jax, by way of demonstration, to hold a white-hot rod of metal with a pair of tongs, turning it slowly as Helfdane worked it with a hammer, tapping it here and there, turn, tap-tap-tap, turn, tap-tap-tap, turn...all the while the forge was blasting heat and the sun was beating down and the leather apron was heavy and the tongs were heavy. Soon Jax became light-headed and asked if he could stop for a moment.

“No stop, sissy-boy. Strong grows from pain like tree from soil. Shut mouth and hold tongs.” And that was Jax's experience of the Carnivale for that stop, three days of heat and exhaustion and burning muscles. But, he found, it was satisfying work, and he was learning something, so he kept at it. He realized he was free to go whenever he wanted, but Jax was finding comfort in the absence of worry and thought, he just worked, pumping bellows, carrying loads of metal rods and ingots, anything and everything Helfdane asked him to do. The brutally-hard work of the smithy helped keep Jax's thoughts in safe territory, away from wondering about himself, his parents, away from Aric's threat, and especially away from Thyra. He found himself working like a madman, some days, sweating and muscles burning, just to keep from thinking about her. She was always there though, in his thoughts and around the Carnivale. He'd see her in the distance, their gazes would meet briefly, then she would swirl away in a flourish of skirts. She almost always wore skirts, brightly-colored and of all kinds. He wondered, while pounding an ingot of metal into a sheet, how many skirts she had, and if any of them were just plain black, or gray. He tried desperately not to wonder what she looked like without the skirt, and failed. Just like that, he was daydreaming, the hammer slack in his hands and the metal cooling.

“Work, Jax!” Helfdane's booming voice made him jump nearly out of his skin. “The metal will not be flattening itself, and the girl will not be any closer for all the awake dreaming.” So Jax tried to clear away images of pale skin and blond hair and threw himself into his work with all the more frenzy.

Weeks, months passed this way, for Jax, and he barely noticed. He turned sixteen, celebrated it with Helfdane and Harman and a twelve-pack. The Carnivale Mechaniste was making its way slowly across the country, town by town, three days at a time. Jax divided his time between Helfdane's smithy stall—the transportation of which gave Jax some trouble, as the trailer that held it all was far too small for the amount of actual equipment that was set up at every stop—and Harman Luca's RV. When he was with Harman, he also found himself put to work. The Romani was in his own words, “a mage-smith” but it wasn't immediately clear to Jax what exactly that meant. He crafted objects using heat and hammers and tongs, but he also spent a lot of time humming and chanting and carving runes. One day, while helping Harman make a hammer out of some silvery metal, Jax finally asked outright what it was that Harman actually did.

“It is hard to explain this, young one. You are not from a magical upbringing, so you will have difficulties with comprehending the details, but I will attempt. I make normal things, like hammers, cups, swords, mirrors, figurines, a little of everything, as you have noticed, but I compress into them...no, not compress, is not the right word...imbue, that is it. I imbue them with magical properties.” Harman took a cup from a shelf, showed it to Jax. “This cup, you see, after I have finished with it, will never empty, once filled. A sword can be made to never lose its edge, a figurine of a lion can be a sentinel, alive and aware and watchful for intruders, or a raven could be a messenger...it is all based upon what one could imagine. I can also take normal things, such as radios or iPods, and make them never again need to be plugged in or charged. That is my gift, to put magic into normal things. Here, I show you.” Harman took Jax's iPod, which was lying on a table, its earbuds wrapped around it. Harman held it between his flattened palms and chanted a spell. A glow surrounded his hands, and he pulled his hands apart as the glow intensified, the iPod hovering in place. A few moments of this, and Harman plucked the iPod from the air and handed it to Jax. “Now,” he said, “it will never lose its charge again. For a customer, this would be a service costing a hundred dollars, but for you, I do it free, because you help me. Now, however, I have delicate workings to do, so you must leave me. Stay with Helfdane this evening, if you please.” Jax, not having a place of his own, had been bunking wherever there was room, usually with Harman or Helfdane. Tonight, it seemed, it would be with Helfdane, on the little fold-out army cot behind the forge.

He set out around the outer ring until he came to a cross-channel that led from the outer ring to the interior. On the way, he passed through the midway, and as usual, found himself distracted and drawn by shifting, wild chaotic jumble of people, the music that seemed to pulse from everywhere and nowhere at once, the lights of stalls and a myriad chattering laughing yelling voices. Here, in the midway, time and reality seemed to come unglued, slightly. Fantasy crept in at the edges, truth wavered and distorted. It could be a bazaar from 1001 Arabian Nights, scenes from ancient Rome or the Far East.  Jax stopped to watch as Morgrath held aloft in one hand a shimmering, glittering, razor-edged sword, a length of gauzy silk in the other, the silk so light and fine that it floated and wafted in the slightest breeze. He never spoke, Morgrath, but his mannerisms were so extravagant and showy that he didn't need to. Small, lithe, swarthy, shaven-headed, ears studded with gold rings and hoops, wearing loose colorful clothes much like Harman's and his own, Morgrath was a caricature of a man, larger than life. He gave the silk to a woman to feel, admire its softness, lightness, and beauty. Then, he tossed it in the air, to float and hover and sink slowly downwards. As it descended, Morgrath made a show of examining the blade of his sword, touched his thumb to the edge, yanked it away and sucked at the line of blood, showed the cut to the audience; when the length of silk reached waist-height, Morgrath flicked the sword out, caught the silk on the edge, and at the moment of contact the silk parted to fall in two pieces. The audience ooh-ed and aaah-ed at the display. Then, when Morgrath lifted the sword and reversed his grip, so the point faced downwards, they collectively gasped, and one woman even whimpered slightly. Jax watched Morgrath carefully, noticed that the performer, wily and experienced, waited for several beats until the tension had reached critical mass. At last, Morgrath slowly, gingerly, delicately slid the sword into his mouth, inch by inch, completely focused now, the audience blocked out. When the cross-bars of the hilt were at his nose, Morgrath released the handle, turned in a slow circle so the audience could see that there was no optical illusion involved, then withdrew the sword, just as slowly and carefully as he had inserted. When it was out, he flourished the blade and bowed over it to the applause of the dumbfounded crowd. By the time the knot of watchers had dispersed, Morgrath had a tidy pile of bills heaped upon the scabbard at his feet.

“How do you do that?” Jax asked. Morgrath stared at Jax, then opened his mouth and pointed at the empty space where his tongue should have been.

“He had his tongue cut out, a long time ago in a far away place, he says.” Thyra's voice came from behind him. “He says that just before he swallows the sword, he casts a spell to render his throat impervious to harm. All sword-swallowers from Carth learn the spell before anything else.”

“If he can't talk, how do you know what he's saying?” Jax asked. Morgrath was nodding at Thyra's words, affirming them.

“I'm a telepath, like my father...among other things.” Jax's thoughts instantly flashed back to the trailer.

“Then, did you hear what your father said to me...or thought to me...or whatever? When I turned into a cat?”

Thyra tilted her head down, upset or embarrassed. “No, but I can guess. My father is really good at directing and shielding his thoughts, so I can't hear him. And it doesn't work like that anyway. You have to sort of...point your telepathy at the person you want to hear, otherwise all you get is a jumble of noise and thoughts from all over.”

“You said you can guess?”

“Yeah...I know how my dad is. He thinks no one is good enough for me. He probably told you to stay away from me or something like that. Am I right?”

Jax nodded. “Do you agree?” Even as he asked the question that had been in the back of his mind, he almost didn't want to know the answer. If she did, it'd be easy to just forget about her, write her off as an arrogant snobby bitch. But something told him that that wasn't the case, which was almost worse. In a place as small as this, where everyone knows everyone, it would be pure hell knowing she liked him but was kept away from him. He'd see her, every day...just out of reach.

Thyra looked up at him through a curtain of golden hair, her ocean-colored eyes hesitant. “I...no, I don't, of course I don't. But...he's my father, and I can't...”

“Can't go against him?”

“No.”

“I see.” Jax felt his heart contracting. He tried telling himself he was being ridiculous. He barely knew her. What did he expect?

Thrya must have heard the hurt in his voice. “No, Jax, I'm not sure you do understand. You don't know my father. You've only seen the nice, charming, great-leader side. There's another side of him...”

“I think I saw that, a little. When he spoke into my head...he wasn't nice. He told me that you weren't meant for the likes of me. He sounded...cold...deadly. Like he'd kill me if he caught me with you, even once. He didn't say that exactly, but he made it clear. 'Stay away, boy', he said, 'or no force on this earth or any other can save you.' I believed him.”

“He's dangerous, Jax. You don't understand. You haven't seen the...other aspects of this carnival. It's not all magic and sword-swallowers and stuff...and Daddy? He controls it all. He knows everything that happens.”

“But what if he didn't know...or...”

“I can't afford to play 'what if', Jax. And you can't, even more so.”

“If you can read minds, can't you see how I feel about you?”

“I don't need to be able to read minds to see that, Jax. I watch you at mooning idly at Helfdane's forge, staring in my direction, daydreaming. But yes, I can see it in your mind, too.”

“And do you—”

Thyra interrupted him, “It doesn't matter if I feel the same way. What can we do about it? Nothing at all.”

“What if I don't accept that answer?”

“I'm not sure that's an option. I wish it was, honestly I do. I really wish—” Thyra must have noticed something over Jax's shoulder that alarmed her, for she suddenly looked very frightened, turned and darted off into the crowds. Before she disappeared completely, however, she paused to look back, and Jax heard her voice in his head: meet me tonight, two miles east of Carnivale, an hour past midnight.  Thyra's voice faded and was replaced by a creeping cold in his spine. 

“I thought I told you to stay away from my daughter, shifter?” Aric's voice was low and hard, buzzing against his ear, sour breath against Jax's face. “You don't want to cross me, boy. There are many things worse than death, and I'm skilled at all of them.”

“I can't help talking to her sometimes, Aric. She was translating for Morgrath. That's it.”

Aric eyed him carefully, and Jax felt an odd pressure in his brain. Or...not his brain, Jax's realized, but in his mind, against his consciousness. It was Aric, he knew, using his telepathic powers to probe his thoughts. Jax got angry, suddenly, at the intrusion. He resented Aric for his interference, for his arrogance, and for the intrusion into Jax's private headspace. The sudden burst of anger prompted Jax to push against the intruding pressure, to focus on an image of high walls and guard towers. Stay out of my head, he projected as strongly as he could. He had no idea if Aric could hear him or not, but felt it was worth a try.

Aric looked amused. “Primitive, but effective, I suppose. But if I catch you near my daughter again, you'd better yourself into the smallest animal possible and disappear. This is your last warning.” Aric turned and vanished, but not without a parting shot. A sudden, piercing pain struck Jax's head like a lightning bolt. It was so sudden and so intense that Jax collapsed to the ground, writhing and unable to even emit a groan. Don't screw with me, boy. Pretend walls aren't going to help you any. Not against me. Jax blocked out Aric's voice with all his mental strength, but the agony in his head only increased until Jax was curled into a ball, in too much pain to even whimper. You can't keep me out. You can't fight me. You're no one, boy, and you're all alone in the world. No one will mourn you, if you disappear. Tread carefully Jackson Magnus, for you live in MY world.

The pain in his head vanished as suddenly as it had struck, leaving Jax breathless and immobile on the dirt ground of the midway. No one even noticed, it seemed, for the crowd continued to swirl around him. He struggled to get to his feet, but the pain had left him weak and woozy. He made it to his knees, but couldn't rise any further. He felt a pair of hands under his arms, lifting him gently.

“Slowly, now, son.” It was a small, grandmotherly old woman with wrinkled, leathery skin, iron-gray hair and glittering black eyes. “Let Madame Hassan help you. He is an evil man, Maester Aric is. He's talented and extremely powerful, however, and the Carnivale couldn't run without him, so we must bear up under his occasional tyranny. You will recover soon enough. Come to my tent, young one, come come. Some heartroot tea will help you.”

Madame Hassan's tent was a picturesque fortune teller's tent: tall and peaked, multi-colored patches, gold-tasseled ropes holding open the entrance, smelling of incense and lavender. Within, thick Persian rugs on the floors and hanging from the walls, a giant crystal ball on a wrought iron stand sitting on a small, round, low table of thick, intricately carved wood. Madame Hassan helped Jax down onto thick cushion, clucking and fussing and muttering in a foreign language. She produced a huge hand-crafted clay mug, filled it with water from a basin, filled it with crumbled leaves from a tin. She held her palm over it, whispering. When she handed Jax the mug, it was steaming hot, smelled of mint and jasmine and earth and sunlight. Taking a careful sip, Jax discovered that it tasted exactly the way it smelled, and with each sip he felt stronger and more lucid.

Madame Hassan sat next to him, staring at him intently. “You are destined for trouble and glory, young one. I can see this merely from your aura. Give me your hands...ah...it is as I thought. Come, come...to the ball for a telling of your fortune.” Jax sat down across from Madame Hassan, with the crystal ball between them. She moved her hands over the ball, nearly, but not quite, touching it, chanting and muttering under her breath. Jax wasn't sure what to expect, but he definitely wasn't expecting what did happen: the cloudy interior of the ball began to swirl and glow like wind-disturbed fog, eddying and roiling. Slowly, subtly, the clouds began to assume shapes and images, and Jax found himself unable to look away, pulled in to the churning, hypnotizing haze. He heard Madame Hassan, vaguely: “good, good, fall into it, let it pull you down, see into it, see, see, see, tell me, tell me what you see...” and then his awareness of the world beyond the crystal ball faded away and he was inside the ball, turning and tumbling within the vale of vignette scenes. Was this his life to come? Possibilities? Truth? He couldn't make sense of it, but he found himself mumbling descriptions of what he saw.

First, it was dark, cool, a breeze blowing smelling of grass, then there were stars in glittering millions and the moon high and full swathed chastely in shreds of cloud, then he saw two figures lying side by side on the grass, faces pressed together, arms and legs tangled, skin flashing pale in the dim silver light...it was himself, and it was odd to see himself there, from above like a dream, then he was descending into himself but still aware of his disembodied presence above, a bizarre multi-presence, a disparate awareness. It was Thyra there with him, he smelled her and knew her instinctively and he knew because he had memory of what hadn't yet actually happened, meeting her and coming together unavoidably and inevitably. He reveled in the sensation of her against him, it was like a cool drink of water in the desert, she was fire and passion made flesh, she was as desperate and hungry for him as he was for her; she pulled her head back to look into his eyes, and the welter of emotion writ there took his breath away. “Oh, Jax...” she breathed, barely audible...

Then he was abruptly pulled away from himself, and he tried to stay but couldn't, he couldn't resist and he was bodiless again and floating weightless and invisible and insensate in cloud, in a boiling bank of past, present and future. Then the haze parted and he was descending again, this time into a bright desert, oven-hot, sun-hot, and there he was again, now lying naked and spread eagle, silver stakes hammered through his palms and ankles and he was agony embodied, agony such as he had never experienced in his entire life, mental, physical, emotional, spiritual torment unequaled in all of human history, perhaps. So it seemed. And it lasted for an eternity. He was within himself again, staked there to the cracked ground. His memory was fogged this time, he couldn't remember how he got here, but he had the sense that it was punishment, it was the counterweight to some divine ecstasy previously experienced, some memory that he held in his mind, hoarded away like a precious jewel, buried in the deepest corner of his soul, a memory that he, the disembodied version, couldn't see, couldn't access, whose existence he could only sense as a vague presence. Agony, terror, heat, exhaustion, dehydration, despair...impending death...these were his existence, with no relief or rescue in sight.

Then, a shadow over the sun, moving swiftly just out of his view, bringing a sweet coolth washing over him. The shadow was accompanied by thunder, a huge sound that made the earth shake, made Jax's teeth chatter and his bones buzz against each other. The sound got swiftly closer, and the noises separated into engine sounds, rushing wind, voices, creaking ropes and squealing metal  and snapping cloth...the shadow gave way to a ship floating improbably in the air, a metal behemoth like a horizontal skyscraper, propelled by four whirling screws each as big as houses and he could hear, but not see, sails snapping in the wind. The aerial monster floated gently to a stop over him and ropes were tossed over the side, figures descending them like monkeys down a tree, blurred shapes bending over him, jibbering in a foreign language, untying him and flinging him over a shoulder and scaling the side of the ship...

And then he was rising up like a dandelion seed in a long wind, gone away from the ship and himself and the desert...up...up...up...among the stars and the moon and out past Jupiter past all the familiar planets and galaxies like a wayward spirit wandering free and homeless...and then he was slamming back down through clouds and endless blue sky and the earth beneath did not conform to the map shapes he knew, the continents were strange and not Earth's, not North and South America, not Europe and Russia and Japan and Australia...this was a different world, an earth, but not Earth, not home, and he was streaming down into the rarefied atmosphere above a forested land of mountains and rivers and glacier lakes and green pastures, and then down down into a valley long and narrow, widening out into a vast expanse of grassy plains dotted with things like horses and cows, tents and smoke-plumes and riders wearing armor and carrying long wicked-pointed spears, and then a high-walled castle rose into view from beneath the horizon, perched on the only hill for miles and it was to this that the spirit that was Jax flew invisible and silent and unobserved. Down into the center court of the castle he descended, an open ring with tiered seats surrounding the raked-sand interior. Upon the sand stood two figures, men with weapons in hand, helmets and greaves and gauntlets and metal-plate kilts, circling each other warily in the attitude of men facing off in a duel to the death. The stands were filled with a screaming, wine-guzzling mob, watching and waiting for the first blow to be struck.

He was within himself again, a visored helmet narrowing his vision to a strip of bright sand and the stands behind and the man facing him, leather glove-lining making his hands sweat as they gripped two curved, double-bladed swords, one held point-up, the other point-down. His opponent wielded a straight longsword and a shield, the sword held loosely, inexpertly, the shield drooping too low, and then he struck out with a blade, a feint that tricked his opponent into swinging wildly with his sword, creating an opening for a razor-tip to plunge into soft dark skin, spilling hot blood onto hot sand and sending the crowd into paroxysms of bloodlust. His opponent staggered back and the crowd went even more wild and he knew what they wanted, they wanted the death-blow, so he gave it to them, a spin on his heel with a blade extended, sending the gore-dripping head flying up, spiked on the other blade and held aloft in victory...but it wasn't over, by no means...a grate crunched open and a dozen men poured out and charged him and he was dancing a graceful pattern of death, pirouettes and lunges and parries and ripostes...

And when it was over and he was left standing alone in the center of the arena, blood-caked and sweat-sheened and heaving for breath and heaving disgust at the cost of survival...he was chained and shackled and led down into a cold, torchlit dungeon, left with a ragged blanket and a plate of food. But it wasn't long before a guard returned, with three small, hooded figures in tow. The guard unlocked the door, left it open, and posted himself at the far end of the hall, out of earshot but visible. The three figures stepped into the cell, threw back their hood to reveal lovely faces and intricate coiffures and expensive jewelry of wealthy noblewomen. In his detached spirit-self, he was aware of a sense of resentment, hostility, and resignation at the sight of these women, who were, in all other respects, so desirable....especially when they unclasped their robes and let them fall to the ground, revealing naked bodies that undulated towards him, pushed him down upon the hard stone flags and touched him all over, licked the blood from his chest and thighs and cheeks...he lay there all the while, feeling empty and helpless and violated...

And then, mercy of mercies, his spirit withdrew again, left the dungeon cell with his other self chained to a wall while three beautiful women took ragged portions of his soul into themselves, left the castle and the unfamiliar world and flew back through the stars and down down down with blinding speed into himself, his real self in Madame Hassan's tent.

Madame Hassan was staring at him, fearful and awestruck. “Never, never, have I seen such a vision before. I cannot understand this. You...you will be living many lives, I think so. I cannot word it any more truthfully.” Madame Hassan seemed suddenly unable to remember her English properly. “You, Jackson, must decide your choosings with care and caution. These visions you have seeing just then, they are not firm written, stone-carved. They are maybe-futures. Probably-futures. I see many lines of life that lead to this, and I think you will not avoid it. Gather to yourself, in this time before, strength and knowledge, build up in your heart-chambers a store of courage, a wealth of endurance, for in years to come...you will press through many hells. I cannot say more, cannot see more...cannot alter this or help in any other ways but to say that I will pray to all the gods I know for you.”

Jax was speechless. It was all too much to absorb, to understand. His heartroot tea was still hot, so he drank it, drew deep of its calming effect. Madame Hassan pressed a cool palm to his forehead, whispered a gentle word, and Jax felt his head spin and he fell back in a pile of cushions, asleep and dreamless.

Carnivale Mechaniste

Chapter 2: Opened

He'd ridden three buses, walked several miles, and was waiting for yet another bus, one that would take him out of suburbia to the city center. Jax hadn't ever ridden a Smartbus before. They gave him the creeps, and made him nervous. The drivers were nuts and the people that rode them were weird. The bus finally appeared in a swirl of exhaust and squealing brakes; Jax paid his fare and sat down near the back, turned his iPod up louder. He closed his eyes, scrooched down further in the seat and let himself drift. He was approaching that warm, muzzy, heavy-headed feeling that comes just before you fall asleep from pure exhaustion, when he felt a finger tap his shoulder. He opened one eye, pulled an earbud out.

“Can't sleep yet, sonny-boy,” came a rasping, lilting voice. The speaker was an old woman wearing several layers of moth-eaten sweaters that smelled of patchouli and lavender, a crinkling plastic bag was tied beneath her chin, and she held a huge, old-looking bag on her lap. Carpetbag, he thought it might called. It was like a doctor's bag from the old black-and-white movies, but covered in faded purple flower-print carpet, with tattered, peeling leather around the opening, and on the handles and seams. The woman, who looked like she might be at least 500 years old, peered at him with eyes that were bright, piercing blue, like chips taken from a clear sky at midday. “Ain't safe yet, young'un, no ya ain't. Best keep alert, watch for what ya don't expect, were I you. You shine like the brightest beacon, to those what have the right eyes to see. I'm a harmless old Flash, me, can't do nothin', but if I can sees that what you got in you, then there's those that can see as would hurt you, as would strip you clean of your very soul, could they but get their claws on you.” She was jabbering on in her odd accent as if he knew who she was, or what she was talking about.

“Lady...I don't know what you're talking about,” he said, trying not to sound too rude.

“I can see that, young'un. I can see that right enough. And that's what makes it all the more dangerous for you. I'll tell you what. Take this,” she pushed a greasy, much-folded rectangle of paper into his hands, a flier of some sort. “Find the carnival, boy. It's the best bet for a new one as young and innocent as you.” Jax looked at the flier. It announced something called “Carnivale Machaniste,” which seemed to be a traveling carnival of some sort.

“A carnival? I hate carnivals.”

“Heh. Shows how much you know. This ain't no normal carnival. For one thing, you're saying it wrong. It's a European-soundin' thing. You gotta say it right, even in your own head, or you'll never find it. It's part of the magic. It's like this: Carni-VAHL Mecka-NEEST.”

“Part of the magic?”

“Oh don't act stupid, son. I can tell plain as elephant noses that you've got magic. You've just opened it up, and you're all confused and discombobulated and such-like. An' mebbe you didn't even know you was magic, but you are, all the same. Now you just listen to ole Gramma Lucy. I been around a few blocks in my life, and I know what I'm talking about.” Jax's disbelief and confusion must have shown on his face. “Look, boy. I'll start at the beginning, make it as easy as I can in the short time we got. Magic is real. That's first. It ain't things like sawing no hussies in half or makin' the Statue of Liberty disappear or none o' that nonsense. It's bone and flesh magic, blood and guts and steel and silk magic, rhythm and music and beauty and terror magic. The Carnivale is a carnival, a marketplace, a whole city that travels everywhere, and everywhen. Don't look at me with that sass, boy. Yes, I said everywhen. It goes back and forth in time, and I don't even know what or where else. Like I said, I'm just a Flash, a person what can see magic, but can't do none at all. A between sort. It ain't all roses and unicorns, though, I should tell you. I've heard stories about the Carnivale Mechaniste that would make your short and curlies shrivel, but I can't say as they're true. I hope not, but you never know. Now, here's your stop comin' up, son. Get off, turn right, go down about three blocks, and you'll see the Carnivale, can't miss it. It might be tricky at first, you gotta look at it with magic eyes. You gotta really see it. Now go! Remember old Lucy in your prayers at night, son.” Jax felt himself getting off the bus, his head whirling and and his thoughts running at warp speed. Magic? Well, that was pretty much undeniable, considering what had happened with his dad. Unless this was a dream? It all seemed so real, so...not a dream. If he started question his sanity now, he might never stop, and that just wasn't an option.

No better plan presented itself, so Jax put Otep on his iPod and turned right as the bus rumbled off in a cloud of exhaust. Two blocks later the unmistakable sounds of a carnival began floating to him across the darkness and city sounds. Slowly and subtly, however, another sound crept up on his awareness. A scraping, sliding, slithering, a clicking and hissing. Not sounds that made him feel warm and fuzzy inside, in other words. Sounds that frightened him, that made his short and curlies shrivel, as the old woman had put it. He stopped, turned around in a circle, hunting for the origin of the sounds. He found it, a shadow within a shadow. He stared hard at it, like waking up from a dream and seeing leftover dream shapes in a corner of his room. Except he had no room anymore, and this was not leftover dream-shapes. His vision seemed to waver and his eyes burned momentarily, then he could make out the shape clearly, and wished he couldn't. It was low, long, six-legged, its mouth was a vertical slash in its face filled with jagged teeth, and it had reptilian eyes on either side of its head. The most bizarre and scary part of the creature in the shadows was the tail, or rather tails, plural. There were four of them, for one thing. Or maybe it was one tail split into four parts, it was hard to tell. Either way, there were four long, writhing, spike-tipped scorpion tails, each moving in its own serpentine pattern, each focused on him. It scuttled toward him in a movement like a cockroach vanishing under a refrigerator, tails whipping at him, teeth gnashing. Jax threw himself backward, panic and terror surging up into his throat like a trapped scream. Like with his father, barely two hours ago, something within him burst open; this time, however, he felt his entire being shake and shiver, felt himself curling in on himself, felt a tugging and draining within himself; something shifted, something primal and elemental in his core altered. He felt less afraid, suddenly. Everything was different, his smell, his sight, his tactile sensation, all seemed heightened and...alien. He took a step forward and his vision blurred as he shot forward a dozen feet in an instant. He looked sideways and saw three sets of legs, and he knew, somehow, what had happened. He had become that creature in front of him. He had the tails, and he understood them now, they were odd and powerful appendages, at once antennae and weapons. He wove them in a web pattern, sensing the world around him in a visual kind of smell, a comprehension of the world around him in a four-dimensional way that left Jax's human mind stunned and in awe. The creature facing him froze in confusion. It wasn't a brute beast, Jax understood. It was a cunning, intelligent, nearly-sentient being, and it was suddenly faced with a situation that it didn't understand at all. It had had prey before it, a delicious, ripe, soft thing to devour and suck dry, and now it had...itself. It was all too much for it, and the thing whirled around, stiffened its tail/antennae, flexed some internal muscle that Jax could only sense through his unfamiliar alien mind, and vanished. It had ripped a small hole in the fabric of the air, or of reality, or of time itself—Jax wasn't sure what—and darted through it, letting the seam close and seal behind it.

He couldn't change back. He hadn't turned into this weird, ugly, frightening thing on purpose, and now he couldn't figure out how to get back, and panic was beginning to boil in his head. The carnival, or Carnivale or whatever...that lady, Lucy, had said they could help him. He held an image of the flier in his head, of the circus-red background with the name, Carnivale Mechaniste, written in black dripping ink; he held the name in his head, as Lucy had said it. He oriented himself, heard the music and the ride sounds, calliope pipes skirling and people laughing and barkers calling, and he knew he was close. He followed the sounds, followed his instincts, or the instincts of the body he inhabited currently, holding to shadows and scrabbling up walls and back down like a spider, rushing with blinding speed, leaping in impossible bounds from rooftop to rooftop, silent as a serpent in knee-high grass. Then he was there, in an empty lot between houses, a fairground of some sort, the kind of place that would be deserted, a bare patch of flattened crabgrass and broken bottles and cigarette butts that suddenly overnight became a fair or a carnival or a two-bit circus. There were tents and trailers and ramshackle constructions like third world slums, there were hot dogs roasting and cotton candy machines spinning, there were beer tents and a Ferris wheel and a carousel playing eerie calliope music, rides of all sorts spinning and whirling...then his vision wavered again and his mind seemed to adjust in some minute but vital way and now he was seeing something totally different, yet still the same. It made no sense at all to Jax even as he tried to process it. He was seeing, at once, an average low-budget traveling carnival, the kind of thing that comes in for a few days with rickety rides and sullen, scruffy ticket-takers and food that gave you the runs for days afterward; but yet he was seeing as well a true carnival from some bygone age, a place of fantastic attractions and freakshows and bawdy tents and excited crowds, a traveling celebration of the weird and fantastic. He saw strange machines pumping and hissing like steam-powered contraptions from the Industrial Revolution, but these had no readily-apparent function. Woven all throughout these observations from a rooftop Jax felt...power....magic, if he dared call it that. It was palpable and undeniable, and some part of him hungered for it.

He scritched down the brick wall scuttled to the ten-foot high chainlink fence that forced visitors to the ticket booth, scaled it and leaped from the top into a shadow behind a low tent. There were people passing just on the other side of the tent, so Jax edged around the corner to peer out at them. His antennae-stingers stretched out towards the people, absorbed the air and the myriad sensations coming at him. Some of the people passing by him seemed to glow gently, a greenish-golden luminescence, and it was these that glowed that made that alien, bestial part of him salivate, tense his muscles like a tiger in the brake. He found himself actually doing exactly that, crouching and about to spring forward with all his strength at a particularly bright-glowing young girl. Maybe she sensed him, maybe he made a sound, but she stopped and whirled to face him, shouting: “Thresher!” Her voice seemed unnaturally loud, echoing in a way that was certainly magic, if Jax had any way to judge such things. Thresher? What was a thresher? He turned to look behind him, then realized that she was talking about him. Before he could react, a dozen men were facing him, pointing long, thin, bent silver tubes at him like weapons. He tried to tell them that he wasn't a thresher, but the only sound that emerged was a gurgling growl, and that just made them retreat a step, cursing and brandishing their tubes.

“STOP!” The voice that called out the order was a deep, rich, commanding baritone. Its owner came into view, a massive man with thick, wavy black hair that was oiled and carefully combed, long mustaches that drooped past his chin. He was dressed in quintessential gypsy clothes, loose-fitting bright red pants, a yellow sash wrapped twice around his waist, an orange vest and knee-high black boots polished to a shine. He had a sword thrust through his sash on the left side, hilt tilted for a cross-body draw. His powerfully muscled arms were covered in green ink tattoos, and his broad, hard face had a scar running down one side, pulling his right eye down. The man approached him fearlessly, his sword in its scabbard and his hands swinging loosely at his sides.

“This thing is not a Thresher,” the gypsy said in a deep, thickly-accented voice. “I do not explain it easy, but is not a Thresher, this I am knowing.”

“What are you talking about, Harman?” The man who asked the question was tall and thin with greasy hair and a furtive look about him. “Of course it's a Thresher. You can see that plain enough. It oughta be killed, right now.” He stepped forward and raised his tube, but the gypsy, whose name seemed to be Harman, stopped him.

“Is not a Thresher, I tell you. I am seeing past the skin of appearances to the truth beneath. Do nothing, any of you.” Harman stepped closer, reached out a hand, whispered under his breath. His hand glowed with what Jax knew now to be magic, and it made him growl in hunger. Harman didn't seem to even notice. He continued to whisper, and Jax felt something in his chest being pulled out of him, expanding and burgeoning and overtaking him and running all throughout him. He felt himself unfolding and twisting, felt his brain and senses returning to normal, felt his thoughts slam back into his head with abrupt clarity. He was himself again, all at once, and he was on his knees, vomiting, weeping, coughing and retching, shaking and cursing.

“See? I tell you. Now, you all go. Miss Thyra, you must go fetch your father to my stall, tell him we have a newcomer, newly opened.” Harman unwrapped his sash from his waist and wound it around Jax's, prompting the realization that he was naked. “Can you stand, boy? Try to stand. There you go ,is okay now.” Jax tried to walk, stumbled and fell to his knees and was caught by Harman. The gypsy scooped Jax up under an arm and carried him as easily as a rag doll. The jouncing and jostling prompted another wave of nausea and vomiting, followed quickly by unconsciousness.

He woke up surrounded by the smell of incense and leather and hot metal, with an image of the girl he'd seen inscribed in his mind, her platinum-blond hair and pale skin, nubile body, her fearless blue eyes. His head throbbed and every nerve ending seemed to be on fire. “Don't try to move, boy,” came Harman's voice. “To use magic at the beginning is very difficult. Shifting of shapes is even more sick-making.” Jax nodded, kept his eyes closed.

“Thank you,” he said. His voice was hoarse and sore. “I...I don't know how it happened. One second I was me, the next there was this...thing..in front of me, and suddenly everything was weird and I felt different.” Jax opened his eyes, finally. The walls were brightly-colored fabric in every color imaginable, pieced together in an eye-bending patchwork. At one end, Jax could see the accoutrements of a smithy, bellows, forge, anvil, hammers and tongs and bits of metal and various items in different stages of completion. Between the bed where Jax lay and the smithy was an area that seemed to be part alchemist's chamber and part mechanic's workbench. There were modern tools like wrenches and vises and screwdrivers, there were things Jax had only seen in old history text books, and other things that he simply couldn't make heads or tails of, intricate Rube Goldberg-type contraptions that seemed to run on steam. The room where Jax lay was the living quarters in between smithy and...whatever that other place was. The whole seemed to be contained in a retro-fitted, jury-rigged RV, for Jax saw a modern kitchenette in one corner, and a table and a small flat-screen TV.

“Is very unusual, I must say.” Harman was sitting at the table, a steaming mug in his hand. “Most shapeshifters, they cannot change into magical creatures, only natural animals and people. You never knew of yourself?”

“Never knew of myself?” It took Jax a few moments to understand what Harman was asking. “Did I grow up knowing I was some sort of wizard? No. It just sort of happened.”

Harman laughed, a slow rumble. “Wizard, he says. Heh. You have no ideas of what you are saying. Wizards are from storybooks. Was that Thresher a storybook unicorn? Is the magic of shifting shapes fun and adventuresome? No, is not. You are knowing nothing.” His words were harsh and sarcastic, but seemed to come from a place of kindness. “What is your name, boy?”

“ Jax...Jackson Magnus.”

“I am Harman Luca. I am the weapons master and mage-smith of the Carnivale Mechaniste.”

“I don't know what that means, but okay. Sounds bad-ass, at any rate. Are you a—”

“If you say 'gypsy', Jackson Magnus,” Harman interrupted, “I will throw you back to the Threshers. I am Romani. 'Gypsy' is a term of insult.”

“Romani. Got it. But Romani is the real name for what people call gypsies?”

“Yes, you have the truth of it. And you...you are not a normal American teenager.”

“I'm not?” This would have been news about three hours ago, but now...not so much.

“Normal American teenagers cannot transform into Threshers.”

“I guess not. What are Threshers anyway?” Jax slowly sat up, felt nausea ripple through him and slowly fade. He stood up, a little unsteady on his feet, made his way to the table and sat down. Harman pushed a mug at him. Jax took a sip, tasted thick black coffee and the tang of whiskey.

“Is this spiked?” He asked.

“A little whiskey is in it, yes. It will help, I promise you.”

“I'm only fifteen, you know that, right? Not that I'm complaining.”

“I know the rules of this country, but I give it to you for medicinal purposes. And besides, we are not residents of this place. Their rules do not apply to us. Not really.” Harman pointed to a pile of clothes on a counter. “You should put on those. You do not want to go around wearing only my sash.” Jax looked down, aware suddenly that he was still naked except for the sash. Underneath the pile of clothes was Jax's iPod. “Someone went back to the alley where you first shifted and found your music device underneath a dumpster. Your clothes were gone, but this remained, hidden as it was.”

Jax didn't care about the clothes he had lost, so much, but he was grateful to have his iPod. Music was his comfort, the one familiar and stable thing in his life, even before all this had happened. The clothes Harman had provided were a little big on him, and they were Romani style clothes, but they were comfortable, and all he had. The pants, blue like the ocean seen from afar, were baggy and cut above the ankle. The sash was saffron in color, long enough to wrap three times around his waist and still hang to his knee on one side. A leaf-green vest and a pair of knee-high, supple leather boots completed the outfit.

“Are these your clothes?” Jax asked as he stuffed his bare feet into the boots, which were lined with silk, making socks unnecessary.

“No, they belonged to my brother, who was much younger and much smaller than I. He is dead now.”

“I...I'm sorry...” Jax wasn't sure what to say.

“Is okay. He died a long time ago, in a far away land.” Harman's averted eyes belied his easy dismissal. Jax sensed that questions were unwelcome.

“Well...thanks, again, for saving me and helping me. I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to turn back into myself.”

“You are welcome, Jackson. Ah. Here is Aric. He will help you learn to control what lies within you.” Boots clopped on a metal step and the fabric wall parted, admitting a man of average height and build with attractive Nordic features, fine blond hair swept back into a braid that hung down between his shoulder blades. His eyes were a clear, bright blue, penetrating and piercing, fixing Jax with a cold, hard stare that made some part of him shiver.

“I'm Aric Larsen,” he said in a crisp, unaccented voice, sliding next to Jax in the booth. “I'm the carnival master. That was quite an entrance you made, I must say.”

“Yeah, I suppose so. I'm sorry if I made any trouble for you. Things just kind of happened really fast, you know?”

“Yes, I do believe I understand. You are newly-opened, I am told?”

“Well, I guess so. I mean, I'm not really sure what that means.”

“It means your magical heritage made itself known for the first time. You were raised by normals?”

“Well, I thought so. But when everything happened, they both didn't seem surprised. And my dad—” Jax broke off when the memory of his dad's words slammed through him. When they put you with us, he'd said. You don't fit, he'd said. Put you with us? What did that mean? Jax tried to puzzle out what that meant, failed. He wasn't ready to understand it. There were other more pressing matters at hand. “Magical heritage?” He asked instead, changing the subject.

“People like you, the things you can do, they aren't little accidents of nature. You aren't a freak. You come from a strong lineage, I'm guessing. You have powerful potential. I can help you realize that potential, if you trust me and you listen to me.” Aric stood up to leave. “But that's for another day. For now, just get the feel of the place, figure things out.” With that, Aric left. Jax saw, out of the corner of his eye, Harman giving Aric a dark, angry glare as the carnival master left. There was bad blood there, Jax decided. Something to keep in mind.

* * *

Carnivale Mechaniste was a fascinating place, and Jax found himself fitting in perfectly—much to his surprise and for once in his life. His magical abilities, whatever they were, stayed silent and almost forgotten. Almost. It was impossible to forget them completely, as the Carnivale was a thing steeped in magic, tangible, material, oozing from fabric, shimmering in eyes, gleaming from skin. It was in everything, the food, the weapons, the performances, and especially the technology. Very little, if any, of the machinery and equipment that Jax encountered was normal, familiar, 21^st century technology. It was amalgamations of old and new and foreign, normal and magical. The one thing that he was able to quickly discern about the machinery, in those first few days, was that it all ran on magic in some way, although where the magic came from, how the technology worked with the magic as a power source, he was unable to figure out. He also couldn't figure out what it all did, which was the weirder part. All these machines humming and whirring and clanking and groaning, all day and all night, without any obvious result. They had microwaves and refrigerators and engines, cell phones and TVs and flashlights, but even these things were altered in some way, running unplugged.

There was always, night and day, a feeling of power, of magic in the air around him. Jax felt his own body humming and vibrating, like a generator coming to life. There was a synchronicity, he discovered, in the magic around him. When a generator, as he called the ineffable machines around him, hummed, they all did so in perfect unison from one end of the carnival to together, and the tidal rumbling of magic within him began to subtly match the rhythm.

The people who ran the Carnivale were a rough, interesting, complicated lot, all of them castoffs in some way, all of them with their own hard-luck stories, and they all radiated magic. He spent the first several days just getting to know the people around him. Gretto, a short, stocky, friendly man with blue hair and multiple piercings, seemed normal enough until Jax took a trip into his house of mirrors.

“Watch'er, Jax, m'boy.” Gretto was a fast talker, a smooth, syrup-voiced salesman. “This ain't no normal house of mirrors, this ain't. Ain't nothin' normal about this Carnivale, I oughta warn you, if you ain't figured that out for yourself. Y'ain't gonna get hurt as long as you stay on the path. I'll be watchin' o'course, just t'make sure nothin'...untoward happens.” Gretto slapped Jax on the back hard enough to take his breath away, and shoved him through the tent flaps. The tent, from the outside, seemed to be a normal circus-attraction tent, not overly-large, but once he stumbled through the entrance, everything changed. He found himself on stone footpath that meandered through a wide field of multicolored wildflowers, a sea of blue and red and orange and gold and yellow and pink, and other colors Jax didn't have names for, all nodding and bowing in some unseen wind; at the edges of the meadow, which Jax could just see, the rules of physics were further broken. There seemed to be a galaxy floating beyond the edges of the wildflower field. There were life-sized stars hovering and spinning, planets hanging god-sized and floating serene and mammoth in complex orbits. The path led him over a hill; when he reached the apex, the path flowed down and underneath in an eye-bending M.C. Escher-like curve. Jax kept walking, turned to look over his shoulder and saw only meadow and path and planets and stars and nebula, but no tent, no exit, no sly grinning Gretto with his blue hair that Jax suspected wasn't dyed. He kept walking, kept walking, followed the path through the mid-space meadow that made him feel as if he were in a Mario Galaxy game. He rounded another curve and things shifted again, now he was trudging on the bottom of the ocean, but this ocean-floor was a well-lit place, airy and mystical, full of wild shapes and silken shadows gliding in the hazy distance and bobbing seaweed and rippled sand beneath his feet. Gravity was awkward here, he was a heavy, unwieldy intruder here, clunky and lumbering, shuffling and drifting in slow bounds over hills and around rocks and beneath mountains, he was traversing here for hours, he saw shipwrecks with casks of spilled gold and gems and barnacle-crusted skulls; he wondered how time passed, here, under the sea within a carnival tent somewhere in Detroit. Then his heart began to pound, inexplicably and suddenly. He felt a prickling on the back of his neck, turned, and threw himself backward to the ground, scrabbling backward on his backside away from the nightmare that rushed toward him on too many legs, a thing with too many eyes and too many teeth. It was like a spider, a giant, mutant creature with at least eight legs around a small, oval body, long, many-jointed legs that dug into the sand with curved talons on the end. Its serpent-scaled body was long and thin, and unlike a spider it had a neck and a head, a long, sinuous neck and an avian head that was stretched toward him with an open, toothed mouth.

Jax felt a sensation run through him, a tightening, a falling inward and a subtle shifting of his mental balance. No, he thought, not again. Not this. He fought it. He steeled his core, tensed every muscle, focused every thought and fiber on his mental image of himself, of his teenager's body with sprouts of hair and his sharp-featured face, his straight, white teeth, his aquiline nose and black, spiked hair and green eyes. He felt the feelings fade, felt the creature in front of him watching, knew somehow inside himself that it understood his internal battle.

EAT? He heard a slow, jittery, alien voice in his mind. POKE AND SLURP AND TASTE? MAGICS? The thing in front of him lifted a leg and pointed it at him, took careful, non-threatening steps toward him. It stretched its foreleg to him, a motion that asked permission, somehow, while promising gentility. Jax held himself motionless, his head tipped up to watch the approach of the being in front of him. He couldn't think of it as a monster. Its claw touched his forehead, a whisper-soft brush, feather-light, and the world went black, and he was funneling upward and through microscopic holes in the universe, traveling with a silvery ghost that held his hand softly, a lovely floating wisp that Jax knew was the same as the spider-thing. It was showing him something, he realized. Communicating. He didn't know what it wanted, but he went along with it. It felt like hyperspace looked in Star Wars Episode VI, a twisting, multicolor tunnel of streaming universe-matter, it was cold and endless, and then without warning it was over and Jax was standing back on the ocean floor facing the spider-thing.

NOT EAT, it said. MAGICS UNGROWN. GO FLY AWAY, LARVA. And then it was gone, it turned around, lifted a claw and rent a hole in reality, as the Thresher had done. He saw it give him a last glance with its swan-neck one last time as the hole healed itself.

“That was somethin', boy, that was. Never seen nothin' as that, not never. You got somethin' interestin' in you, boy, you do. Revenants, they don't let their prey go like that, not never. You see one, you're dead. Jax boy...what are you?” Gretto was talking a mile a minute, pulling him from the house of mirrors and propping him up with an arm around his waist, which made him realize that he was limp and weak, suddenly, exhausted. “Drink this, boy, it'll do you good. That weren't no normal trip, I tell ya. That was deep magic.” He thrust a flask into Jax's hands, something that tasted like fire and cleared some of the buzz and haze in Jax's head, caused him to cough and splutter, and take another swig.

“What the hell is that?” He asked, when he could breathe again. “It hurt, and it was amazing.”

“Oh that's a little concoction we make where I come from. Its called necroot. You can't drink too much, it's mighty potent.”

“Where do you—”

“You don't ask that, son,” the smile was gone from Gretto's genial face. “That's a question you just don't ask in the Carnivale. People hereabouts are might sensitive about their time and place of origin. To that is rude, and dangerous. I'll warn you, for free, 'cause you're young, and new. Just don't ask that. There're other things, but that's the biggie, that is.” He tipped the flask up with a finger, pouring more necroot down Jax's throat.

“Now. Tell me, what was it like when that Revenant touched you?” Gretto was back to his bright-voiced self.

“God, I don't know if I can. It was weird, and that is saying something, considering what's happened the last couple days. It was...like being in hyperspace, a little, lots of twisting, flowing colors, and it was cold. The...Revenant, you called it? The Revenant was different, too, it was a like the a pool of mercury, but alive and thinking. It's not an evil thing, I don't think, just different. It talked to me, in my head. I...I almost turned into it, actually. I didn't want to, because the last time I did that—which was the first and only time so far—I couldn't turn back and almost got killed. This time I managed to not change, which I guess means I'm learning how to control this...whatever.”

“ 'This whatever?' ” Gretto laughed uproariously. “Boy, you're gonna have to learn how to talk if you're gonna fit in. First of all...” Gretto took the flask and swigged from it, “You are a shapeshifter. A shapechanger, some call it. You can become whatever you see that is alive and aware, animals and people...and magical beings as well, apparently. That's rare, from what I understand. Shapeshifters are rare, they are, and powerful ones without a bunch of limitations and such like, they're even rarer. You're one of those kinds, would be my guess. Aric's the one to tell you about all that stuff, though, as he's the real powerhouse, hereabouts. Most of us as work the Carnivale, we're specialists, you see. Me? I'm a visualist. My magic works as optical and sensory illusions, so when I send you through the 'house of mirrors' all I'm really doing is sending you into a locus of illusory spells. There ain't no mirrors in there a'tall, just an empty tent, for them as can perceive magic, you understand. You walk into the tent and into my spell and through the other side, that's it. To them as are normal, no magic, they see a house of mirrors right and true, but that's Aric's work, not mine.

“Well, boy,” Gretto gave Jax one last pull on the flask, took it back, made it vanish into a pocket, ushered the now-tipsy Jax away from his tent, “it's been right informative, it has. I got some customers a-comin', so I'm gonna have to catch up to you later on.”

Jax wove unsteadily through the Carnivale, watching the customers enter the attractions, exit pleased and baffled and eager. He followed the crowd, followed the pull of magic wherever it led, followed the music and the heady buzz of the necroot until he found himself standing outside of what seemed to be a teepee of sorts, but on a grand scale, dozens of feet in diameter and at least twenty feet high, constructed from thick smooth poles and blood-red fabric woven at the seams and edges with gold thread. From within came a low pulsing drum beat, a hypnotic rhythm that made Jax's head feel lighter, made his body seem to float and roll and try to escape heavenward. Incense wafted to his nose from the opening at the top, a smell of cedar and lavender and hashish. Jax found himself trying to part the opening of the teepee when a small, delicate white hand descended from behind him, took his and turned him around.

“You don't want to go in there, Jackson Magnus,” it was the girl he'd first seen when he was a Thresher. Thrya, Harman had called her. “Just please trust me, you don't want to.”

“But I think I do,” Jax heard himself say in a thick and slurred voice. “It's pulling me in, Miss Thyra.”

“You're drunk,” she said, a note of derision in her voice. She leaned forward and sniffed at him. “Ah, necroot. You've been with Gretto. Well that explains it. Necroot is dangerous stuff. It creeps up on you. One sip had me loopy for hours. How much did you have?”

Jax tried to remember how many times he'd sipped from the flask. He tried to count on his fingers, but found them multiplying when he tried to focus on them. “Three?”

“Three what? Dear god, Jax. You are positively wasted, aren't you?” She sighed, put her arm through his and led him away gently but insistently. As they got farther away from the red tent, the feeling of hypnotic pulling desire faded.

“What's in that tent?” He asked.

Thyra blushed, ducked her head. “It's...we call it the Bawdy Tent.”

“So it's like a strip joint?”

“Sort of. It's complicated. Don't worry about it.” Even in his current state, he could tell that Thyra was obviously uncomfortable talking about it.

“Where're we going?”

“You need food. We're going to the grub hut.”

“Grub hut?”

“Yeah, that's what they call it. It's where the carnies eat. I hate the name, but it just kind of stuck, I guess.”

“ 'M I a carnie, now?” Jax found that funny, for some reason.

“I guess so. You've got to find a job to do, though. Daddy doesn't let anyone in for free. Pull your weight or go your own way, he says. What can you do?”

“I dunno. Guess I'm a shapeshifter, or something. I'll find something to do. Don't got nowhere else to go.”

“That's the case with most everyone here, so you're in good company.”

The grub hut was a massive awning, a tent without walls, filled from edge to edge with folding picnic tables. Along one wall was an assembly-line buffet, like a high school cafeteria. The food, Jax discovered, was uniformly exotic. There was shawarma and hummus and tabbouleh, pasta puttanesca and alfredo, wood-fired pizza, a dozen different types of Asian food, American burgers and fries, as well as a myriad of foods Jax didn't recognize. The smell of the food made him realize how hungry he was. Thyra pushed him down onto a bench and told him to wait. She returned in moments with a comfortingly-familiar Styrofoam plate piled with a thick cheeseburger and fries and sweating can of Coke.

“I figured you'd want something you know, to start with. Some of that weirder food from the other realms can be tough to get used to.” Other realms? Jax wasn't ready to ask what that meant. He devoured the food, finding his head clearing as he ate. By the time he'd finished his second burger Jax felt relatively sober, although he still had that jangling, buzzing feeling in his head that came with getting drunk midday, a feeling with which he'd become all too acquainted, skipping school with Danny.

He felt a hand pinch his shoulder painfully, craned his neck to see Aric standing above him. “Better watch out for the necroot of Gretto's. He's mighty fond of it, and if you're around him for more than five minutes, he's got you swilling it too, and then all of a sudden you're hammered and it's barely noon.”

“So it's happened to you?” Now that he was sober, Jax felt embarrassment creeping up on him.

“Oh, more than once. It's happened to everyone, so if you were feeling bad about it, don't. No one will think any less of you around here for getting a bit of a drunk on, especially if Gretto's involved. Now that you've sobered up a bit, thanks to my daughter, I'd say you and I have some business to attend to.” Aric put a hand to Jax's head, muttered something, and Jax felt the rest of his residual hangover slither away. “Thyra, I believe Joffrey would like your help with the livestock, if you would be so kind. Jax, follow me.” Aric strode off without looking back, the attitude of a man used to authority, and used be obeyed without question. Jax cast a last glance back at Thyra, then trotted after Aric.

Carnivale Mechaniste

Chapter 1: Adrift

They're at it again, Jax thought. Another fight. Jax touched the screen of iPod, cranking the volume up until the sound of blaring, thrashing metal drowned out his mom and dad fighting. He knew what it would lead to, and he couldn't stand to hear it. Sure enough, even with Amon Amarth as loud as he could stand it, he heard the smack, the shriek, the slammed door. Pulling an earbud out of his ear, Jax listened carefully. His mother sniffled, rummaged in the bathroom, putting makeup over her eye as if Jax was clueless as to what happened in the kitchen every night. As if he'd never seen the drops of blood on the cracked, dirty linoleum, in the corner where his mom had missed it cleaning up afterwards. He swore under his breath, put the earbud back in as his mom started dinner. Back to Nightjohn. He hated that stupid book, but it was better than listening to that.

His mom came in quietly, as she always did, silent as a cat. He never heard her walking, even on the creaky old wooden floors. It was like she floated or something. Her small hand on his shoulder was warm, trembled slightly still.

“Come eat, Jackson.” Her voice was low, musical.

“Not hungry.”

“Please?”

“I have to read this. We have a quiz tomorrow.” He hated that she needed him. She was his mother. But this happened every night, just about. She seemed to need him to eat with her, for some reason he couldn't quite figure out. Something about normality, he figured.

“You can read after. Just come eat with me.”

“Fine.” He couldn't refuse, he knew it. He just wished she would stand up to him more, or something. The one time he'd tried getting in the middle of them, it hadn't gone well. His dad had leveled a look at him that was unmistakable. “Don't, boy,” was all he'd said, in his deep, smoke-scarred growl. Since then, Jax had felt something, deep inside, that was afraid and ashamed. He got mad at his mom for not standing up to him, but Jax knew he was really mad at himself. He'd spent a lot of time thinking about this. He should've stood, taken it, fought back, protected her. But he hadn't. He'd run to his room, put in his earbuds and cranked it up, painfully loud. With a sigh, he turned off the iPod and dropped the book.

Dinner was decent, at least. They got through dinner, which was awkward and difficult. Mom was pretending nothing had happened, and Jax was trying to think of something to say that wouldn't make problems. Trouble started when he came through the door, unsteady and angry. Not again, thought Jax. There was no getting out of this one. He was coming, pointing his finger and slurring, “Havin' dinner withou' me, huh? To good t'wait f'r me? Huh?” He half-fell into a chair and waved vaguely at the table. “Where's mine?”

Jax's mom got up hurriedly, spooned some leftovers from the pan onto a plate and microwaved it. Jax, meanwhile, was sitting paralyzed at the table, staring at his dad, trying to will himself invisible, hoping his dad would just eat and leave Jax alone. When his dad started to talk to him, some slurred nonsense that Jax couldn't make out, he felt his head start to throb, a steady, intense ache at his temples. Whenever he felt especially stressed, he would get these unbearable headaches, migraines almost, that left him dizzy and sick to his stomach. This headache was the worst he'd ever had.

Jax's mom set the plate and a glass of iced tea in front of his dad and sat down.

“Iced tea?” Crap. This is how it starts. “I don' want iced tea. Why would I wan' iced tea? Gimme a beer, if you know what's good for you.” He took a bite, dropped the fork when he burned his lips on the over-heated food. And that was all it took. A swipe of his hand sent the plate flying at Jax's mother, a second sent the glass smashing against the wall. Jax's mother started stammering out an apology, but he wasn't listening. He took a step towards her, stood over her cowering form, fist raised.

Jax shot to his feet, headache gone or forgotten, standing up so fast the chair crashed to floor. His dad cast a glance at Jax.

“No!” Jax shouted. “You won't! No more! Leave her alone!” His dad took a lumbering step away from Jax's mother, towards him. Panic started to boil up in his throat, a hard knot forming in his stomach, a feeling that he'd taken a step over an edge that he couldn't take back. A second stumbled step, creaking heavily on the wooden slats of the floor. Jax couldn't move from the spot, even if he wanted to. He wouldn't run away again. Not again. A third stomped footstep and his dad was there in front of him, sour beer breath and unfocused eyes and hard, raised fist only inches away. Time seemed to slow down for Jax. His mother was watching wide-eyed and fearful, shaking her head, mouthing no no no. Jax's dad was weaving back and forth, his clenched fist was starting its downward arc towards Jax like a falling rock.

Then something seemed to break open inside Jax, like the top of a shaken soda bottle exploding off and upwards and away. Everything stopped. His mother was frozen in place on her chair, her black hair curling in tendrils, sweeping across her face as she turned her face away from the imminent impact. His dad was leaning slightly away from Jax, trying to keep his balance even as he threw his fist at his son. His face was lined, weathered and scarred, Jax noticed for the first time. In the frozen space between seconds Jax realized his parents weren't as old as he'd always assumed. They probably weren't even older than Mr. Schuman, his geometry teacher. His dad, especially, just looked...so rough, so hard. The lines on his face were deeply etched like gouges in a wooden table, and there were dozens of scars, thin white lines all over his face.

The reality, or unreality, rather, of what was happening struck Jax, forcefully. Everything was stopped, just completely frozen. Jax could see specks of dust floating motionless in the air, a bead of sweat clinging to his dad's chin, about to fall, but not. Jax found himself unable to move, found the fear still crouching inside his chest, found himself angry all of a sudden, really truly angry now, not just pissed off and sullen like usual, but burning with rage at the whole stupid situation that was almost frightening in its intensity. His dad, who never seemed to do or say anything kind, or gentle, who didn't love him, or his mom, it seemed. His mom, who stood by and took the hurt, never saying anything, never stopping it. Jax would go with her, if she left his dad. In a heartbeat, he'd leave. He was so angry. He had to do something. Something. Anything.

He lifted his hand, palm outwards, like a martial artist doing a palm-strike, his hand lifting all on its own. Jax felt the anger and resentment building and coiling in his chest and his head and his arms like a snake about to strike, and then all the pressure from everything just burst out and Jax felt it explode through him, through his up-raised hand.

Time returned with a deafening roar, a sound like a hundred jet engine turbines at full blast layered over the guttural growl of lions and a high-pitched whine like feedback from a speaker. Time returned, and Jax's father flew backwards through the dining room like a thrown doll, crashed into the wall of the living room, not just into it, but through it into the yard beyond. He struck the grass hard enough to dig up a furrow of dirt where he hit, rolled into the street in front of an oncoming car. The vehicle screeched to a stop, swerved and fishtailed, honked its horn furiously, but kept on going. They lived in that kind of neighborhood, where no one interfered in anyone else's household...issues. Jax stared, amazed and horrified. He found his feet taking steps, moving towards the gaping hole in the wall, which he stepped through. He knelt over his dad, in the street. He was breathing, but bloodied and unconscious. Or Jax thought he was, until a hand shot out and grasped Jax around the throat, lifted him up into the air slowly as his father rose to his full height, blood streaming down his face in red ribbons.

“So you opened it up, huh, kid? You found it?” His words made no sense to Jax, but they were sober and steady, forceful and lucid. Jax gasped and gurgled, kicked and thrashed. “I knew you would someday. It was only a matter of time. You didn't belong here, I told them that when they put you with us. You just don't fit. Not with us. Not with me, and certainly not with her.” He set Jax down to his feet and loosened his grip enough so that Jax could breathe, but didn't let go, still gripping hard enough to make Jax squirm and scratch at the hand that held him. His dad thrust a hand into the pocket of his stained jeans, pulled out a wad of cash, stuffed it into Jax's pocket. Completely baffled now, Jax just stared at his dad. “You don't know me, you don't know her, and you really don't know yourself. Get out of here. I have no idea where you'll end up, and I don't care. But I can promise you that you'll find what you're looking for, and who you are, even if you don't know you're looking, or what you're looking for. Wipe that stupid confused look off your face. I know this doesn't make any sense. Look at what you just did. Does that make any sense? Has anything ever really made any sense to you? Gah...I'm still drunk...look, kid, this is simple. Confusing, and complicated, but essentially simple. What just happened means you came of age. And that means, in the heritage that you come from, that you're not gonna fit in the normal, above-everything world. You're going down below it, now, into something...else. Because you are something else. Just go, kid. You'll end up where you gotta be, when you gotta be there, and someone will show up to help everything make sense. This is the only thing I got to give you. Now go.” A necklace, a heavy thick silver chain with a strange rune-shape pendant was laid on Jax's neck. And with that Jax's dad released his grip and went back towards the house, stumbling slightly still, but steady. His mother was standing in the hole in the wall, staring sadly at Jax, but making no move to do anything. Typical. She raised her hand in farewell, and Jax could've sworn he saw her hand glow a little, like a trick of the light or something, but he knew, kind of, that it wasn't a trick, that something was happening. He felt a lightening in his stomach, an easing of the fear and uncertainty that laid there like a load of bricks, a brush of comfort, a sense that everything would work out. His mother kissed her fingertips and blew on them, and Jax felt a warmth infuse him. He took one shaky step down the street, a single footstep on the cracked blacktop, and it felt like he'd taken a step that would change him forever, a step over a line that he couldn't take back. He took a second step towards the pool of light shed by a streetlamp, the sickly orange glow that cast long, loping shadows that chased you, passed you and ran ahead of you as you passed. A dozen steps brought him into the center of the pool of light and Jax looked back at his house, but the hole was gone, the lights were off, except the bathroom light, where Jax could envision his mother brushing her teeth in her thigh-length Florida Keys T-shirt, leaning over the square porcelain white sink, rusted faucet running, the pitted mirror of the medicine cabinet reflecting her tired, delicate, features and sad eyes.

The one last glance ended up being a long lingering moment of temptation to turn back and go in, climb into his bed under the thin cold sheets and watch the shadows move until sleep dragged him down. You're something else, kid, Jax heard again in his head. He took another step, and felt a thread snap inside him, a severing of the hold that the house had on him. It was a strange feeling. It was like that first rush of breath after his father let go of his throat, a relief, exhilarating and wonderful. It was also scary, being cut loose from the only home he'd ever known, all of a sudden, no warning, nothing at all. It was Wednesday, an ordinary day, but here he was, walking away from his parents, his life, and he'd just experienced the strangest sequence of events of his entire life. Time had stopped, actually stopped. He'd done...something...to his father. Something violent and terrifying...and exciting too, in a way that felt...almost wrong. Like the feeling of cutting 6^th hour algebra with Danny to get slushies and sneak cigarettes in the cemetery. Fun, but more exciting for the rush of knowing you might get caught. Jax had done something powerful to his big, tough, hardened, alcoholic father...and gotten away with it, sort of.

But now what? Where should he go? No answer presented itself immediately, so he did the only thing he could think of: he turned on his iPod--which he had had in his pocket the entire time-and started walking, trying to put on a tough face, trying to just not think and hope something would happen.

Up until now, Jax had had some vague notion of how life would be: a continuation of the endless process of getting through school, avoiding his parents' fights, and eventually figure out what he wanted to do with himself. Just get through it, one day after another. Get grades good enough to pass through, avoid the bullies and popular kids, and don't get too knocked around by his dad. He spent most days alone, sometimes playing C.O.D. at Danny's, mostly just trying to stay invisible and unnoticed. Now, all that was thrown up in the air. Even his ideas of who he was, and who he would be, was all messed up. The future seemed even more inscrutable than it had before. If he was just sort of vaguely muddling along before, now he was totally adrift and alone.