In 2009, Ruth Arnell created the Collaborative Cliché project, where we reached for every cliché we have seen or read, and used them to create an awful group story. We skewered epic fantasy in that column, but we can find clichés anywhere. Let’s try it again, this time with a sub-genre dear to my heart, urban fantasy.
I’ll start us off. Then you continue the story by adding your cliché-ridden passage in the Comments Section. You can come back and add as many passages as you like.
My soul-beacon tattoo woke me at two in the morning. I got up and slipped into my skintight, gleaming black leather pants, the matching boots with the four-inch stiletto heels, my bustier and a black hoodie. All set for a night of fighting, climbing and running.
Someone in the city was in trouble. I hoped it wasn’t a family member again. I was loyal to my family. Even though I hadn’t spoken to my father, the organized crime lord and city Alpha of the werewolves, in three years, and even though my mother, the mad half-Nephilim, had tried to drag the earth into the sun before getting yanked away and imprisoned in an alternate dimension, and even though the gorgeous man who had grown up with me, who Dad insisted was my half-brother even though that just didn’t feel right, had disappeared a year ago, I was all about family. Loyalty. That’s me…
Now it’s your turn! Add to the story in the Comments. You can come back and add as many passages as you like. One commenter with a USA mailing address will get to choose a book from our Stacks.
Since it was 2am, I had to stop by my favorite coffee joint and grab a cup of joe. Rattling along in my beat-up jalopy (praying all the while that all parts would stay intact for the drive), I drove toward’s the beacon’s pulse.
My idle thoughts drift toward the men in my life; Jack, the full-blood vampire who’s sexiness is only outweighed by his massive wallet, Dirk, the mysterious police detective with the sexy eyes and Wallace, my best friend who helps me out with all sorts of background research and looks hot in those tight jeans he likes to wear…
April — Oh, I’m so glad there was coffee!
When a blonde in a skintight red dress with six-inch stilettos staggered out into the road. I stomped on the brakes, narrowly avoiding running her over. Down the side street she had come out of I saw a wizard stalking down the street. He had a long white beard, tall pointy hat, and long grey cloak. He brandished his staff in the blonde’s direction and said…
Her stilettos are higher than yours? CHALLENGE!
“That was the last time you betray me, ungrateful daughter! Your insistence on cavorting with my nemesis will ruin me!”
I just can’t say no when I see someone who needs my help. I’m all about help. Help and loyalty. So, I yelled at her to jump into my car while I sent a mental request to Gregor, asking him to delay the wizard. Gregor is a gargoyle who I once helped escape from a museum and ever since he’s felt bound to me. But that’s a story for another day.
The blonde in the skintight red dress managed to squeeze herself into my car just as Gregor jumped off a roof and landed on top her father…
Oooh! Gargoyle and a familiar/oddly gifted friend!! Nicely played Kat!
Thank goodness Gregor didn’t land on top of her car!
Suddenly my three boyfriends — Cal the weredragon, Danny the vampire, and Jack, who was just plain gorgeous — came charging down the street. I knew I was in for One Of Those Nights, because each was more jealous than the other. For no good reason, as my husband kept telling them.
Not going to write it out, but you need an awful teenage younger sister who gets in trouble all the time at school. And says things like, “You’re not my mom!” to the main character (because Mom is an alcoholic who barely functions and has a small mute child at home who witnessed some terrible event and won’t speak. Except to the main character.)
The teenager will also say things like, “I’m old enough to do what I want” and “I don’t care if the world is ending, my boyfriend is waiting for me outside.” (Just think of Dana from Homeland and you have the perfect, awful teenager)
My phone rang in my purse, and I groaned as I answered the call from Guy, a half vampire half boogie man who runs a local combination coffee/comic book shop and who knows every supernatural person in the city.
“Can I have good news please, just once?”
“Sorry, maybe next time. Your quirky sidekick is here with a mysterious guy. I think you need to get over here.”
I swore to myself. Pix, the ghost of a half pixy half goblin who’s unlife I saved a few years back, had decided he owed me in a major way and now was constantly trying to bring “work” my way.
“On my way,” I said before hanging up to I could take my missing brother’s motor cycle across town from my run down apartment in the basement of an old haunted church.
As I expertly navigated the late night city traffic, my thoughts wandered to the letter sitting on my nightstand from my ex, a sexy vampire with a thing for rock and roll. He poured out his heart to me while somehow being condescending and also implying that his flings with the beautiful human teenager girls he constantly dates meant nothing to him.
As I swung the motorcycle helmet on to protect my fragile mortal skull, I wondered if I should call Kralo, my dad’s friend who’d been teaching me weapons since I was old enough to walk. He used to be in an army of some kind, but every time I ask him about it, he clams up. But he’s been teaching lil ol’ ordinary me all about fighting and running and assassination, even though there’s nothing at all special about me. But lately I’ve been getting these headaches…
“Must need some coffee” I mutter to myself.
Because I’m all about coffee. And helping, of course. And loyalty.
It could be from the insomnia, it could be from “the Rivers”. That’s what we called them growing up. The buildings, the subway cars, even the alleys in between – I hear them, calling out to me. My friends think I’m crazy. Maybe, but perhaps that’s why I ride. I fire up the engine, point the bike north, I’ve gotta get to…
The narm! The narm! It burns!
I needed to make it to Shav’s quickly. I knew he would be open all night, the best Grimoire hawker among the Night Peoples. If there was something ookie and supernatural going down he would be the one to know what it was. Also he wasn’t bad on the eyes as Trolls go. Most mundanes couldn’t see through the glamour that kept the shop looking like a grocery store, and him the cantankerous Italian shop keeper, but I hadn’t been part of that, the mundane world for nearly 2 decades…when i was five, right after my mom died.
(OMG, I totally forgot about cantankerous foreign troll/gremlins under a glamour!)
Dammit, really need sleep…but when daddy Warlox summons, there’s really no choice. I step through the tarp that still exists over the gaping hole that the demons of Brooklyn blasted in my apartment (I think this means I lost my deposit) and straddle the crotch rocket. My leathers make that embarrassing skreeching noise only possible when leather meets vinyl and start the engine to cover the sound. Idling the engine for a moment I ponder the idea of maybe, just maybe I should go in the opposite direction, but when out of nowhere there is a crackle, a flash of light and before me was a Big Bird…no, wait it was…holy shit…it’s angel.
… And you would have thought it was an angel, too, but you would have been wrong. With his dastardly good locks, expensive suit, and more expensive watch, he was an angel of death, come to stalk the streets of My Town (of which I am very protective). His name was Johnny Garabino, and he was the Crime Lord who had tamed the wildest criminal elements in the streets of My Town, and ruled with an iron fist. I would have been more inclined to like him (because we have an un-resolved sexual tension which seems to crop up any time we’re around each other), but he got rich off the woes of drug addicts, girls forced into prostitution, and racketeering. I’m all about protecting my city, and protecting innocents… along with loyalty, of course. I’m all about loyalty.
“Well,” I said tartly, “look what the cat dragged in.”
“I see your manners towards me have not improved,” he replied.
“Drop the act, Garabino! What are you doing on this side of town?” I demanded, crouching into a fighter’s pose.
He looked non-plussed, and replied… “
“Loyalty Chase,” (did I mention that’s my name?) “I’ve been looking for you.”
“I can tell. Is that a dagger in your pocket, or ….”
“Cut the crap, Loyalty,” he said in that smooth gravelly voice that sounds like a velvet sack full of rocks, “I came to warn you. I think you ought to know that the Nephilim are after you. They want you to rescue your mom from the alternate dimension and, as you know, they have ways of making you do what they want.”…
Also, Loyalty Chase? I’m dying over here. My co-workers must think I’m insane from trying to subdue my laughter.
A velvety sack full of rocks! I’ve scared all the dogs by cackling out loud.
“Wake up!! You’re unconscious! You were zapped by a Gandalf wannabe when you got between him and his slutty dhampir daughter. Your nutso mom called me for help when you wouldn’t wake up after 10 of your less than charming boyfriends kissed you.”
“Not me. The Nephilim tried to break me once, and their leader still has the scars,” I replied, my voice full of bluster, even as I quavered inside about the Nephilim releasing my mom from the inter-dimensional time prison she’d been in since my birth.
My soul-tattoo itched, as it was prone to do when danger was near. In my line of work (a combination ex-cop/ supernatural investigator/ mercenary/ demon hunter), it had saved my skin more than once. My supernaturally enhanced senses warned me that something was near, but every time I looked, nothing was there…
“Seriously, woman! YOU ARE DREAMING!! I have better things to do than help you get over a wizard’s spell!”
“God, where the hell is Pix when you need him?” I muttered, wishing my sidekick were here to have my back.
On cue, my phone buzzed with a text message from Kralo.
“Loyalty- there’s a street kid who looks pretty beat up sitting on my stoop. The kid smells like a half demon. And like your mother.”
“You got your period, babe? How about I get you a hot water bottle and give you a back rub?”
“Out, Garabino” I snarled. “I’m not falling for your bullshit.”
“Honey, you know you fell for me a long time ago. Remember that time …”
“Cut to the chase.”
His smooth,even features broke into a frown. Something was going down and he was delaying. It had to be bad, real bad.
“It’s you dad.” He put out a hand and touched my face, those long fingers so gentle it struck fear down my spine. “He’s in trouble. I know how loyal you are, so I want you to be prepared. This time you can’t save him. The Night People’s High Council has pulled him in. His old adversary, Montreith the half dragon half sorcerer has been murdered. Everyone knows your father …”
A shiver ran through me, a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold.
“Okay, I said. I’ll go talk to the Nephilim.”
“I’m going with you,” he said, with a smile that didn’t touch his eyes.
“No. I work alone. You know that. You know why, Garabino. Remember what happened last time?”
“You’re not responsible for your sister’s death, Loyalty. You did everything you could. It’s not your fault.”
“I failed to protect her. It IS my fault!”
“I should have known they would kill her to open that portal to Hell!”
The secret I couldn’t tell Garabino, the secret that no one knew, was that the spirit of my dead sister, Laveau, was imprisoned in an engraved human skull which I kept in my under-underground arcane laboratory/kickboxing practice ring.
HA!
Everyone, my Alpha dad, my bat-shit crazy mom, my multiple sometimes boyfriends, everyone thought she was lost when that hellmouth opened. I had been carrying that skull around in my pocket for years, in case I needed it. I never thought I would have to put Lulabell in it… and she is so pissed.
Dragon sorcerers, angry wizards, nephilim, vampire assassins, night people, talking skulls, buxom babes, and more men than rain drops…. I wasn’t sure that I could handle it all. But I knew I had to try, because… I’m all about helping people and I’m loyal to my city, because where else can you find so many portals to hell? Demons are bad in all the right ways, and the prince of hell still owes me a favor, but that’s a story for another day.
I knew it was dangerous, but I had to use “the artifact”. It allows me to multiply myself so that I can be in multiple places at once, the catch however is that it’s powered by life force and even a short use would burn up years of my life. For an immortal-ish human hybrid, years of life are a major concern, because, well… wrinkles… Lulabell doesn’t know how easy she’s got it made being a soul anchored to an etched magical skull. She never has to worry about wrinkles! Wait… Do I even need skin? I better write that one down for later, so that I can remember to ask my imprisoned skinwalking paranormal adviser.
I could not let Garabino know how the news about my father affected me. Turning quick and catlike, I stalk over to him and begin to stab is broad chest with my finger saying “my sister is…dead…my mother is trapped and now someone has my FATHER?! What are you people trying to do to me? Don’t you know I already have enough baggage to deal with?
And then he does something…surprising…
“LULABELL?? SERIOUSLY?? WAKE UP, YOU STUPID WOMAN! YOUR SISTER’S NAME IS VANITY, SHE NEVER DIED TO OPEN A HELLMOUTH, AND YOU ARE STILL DREAMING!!”
Garabino’s lips curl into a cruel yet sensual smile, like a snake eating honey, and then his mouth crashes down on mine. For a moment I am stunned, embarrassing ripples of arousal flowing through my loins. But that’s what I get for being one-fourth succubus.
I push Garabino away, but it’s too late! He’s done something with that kiss…
That’s me, strong, sensual feminine but tough gal. I was doing my morning yoga/ un named martial arts/ belly dancing workout. There was a knock at my generic but feminine styled door. I walked past my large kitchen, because women cook. I opened the door and there he was, that sexy generic neighbor guy I randomly fantasize about when there is a lull in the story. But I would never act on it, even though everyone but me sees all the tellatale signs of lust. I let him in and see some typical, generic badguy holding him at gunpoint. I do my typical feign scared and use it to disarm him. We fight in my place. I use typical items a woman would know how to use as weapons, frying pan, hair brush, loufa. He gets the upper hand for the sake of interest. But I win anyway. My neighbor stands up from being totally worthless and absent during our fight and our lips nearly brushed. I have to yet again for the 10th time pretend it was no big deal and I was still a realtor, not an assassin. He leaves and as I take a shower my fantasies shift to him as I am alone………….
“My life has been like this ever since I got caught up between the two warring factions of supernatural creatures that ordinary people don’t know about, except for the crazy guy who wears a tinfoil hat who nobody takes seriously even though he’s right about everything. The prophecy says the chosen one, but nobody knows which side I’m supposed to be on, but it turned out the prophecy was made up, except it came true anyway. So instead I hang out with some cool loner types, including this guy named Bloodshadow Darkheart, who seems like a jerk at first but that’s only because the Knights Templar (a sinister group that is also behind the fall of Atlantis, the Black Death, and the Republican Party) killed his parents, which he discovered last week when we were mortal enemies and also secretly lovers.”
Garabino’s kiss turned my blood liquid hot. As beads of sweat trickled off my jaw a huge thunderous crash sounded from behind me. Garabino swivelled and flung me to the floor. I landed with a bone crunching smack into the cement. He crushed me beneath his heavy frame as bits of ceiling fell around us like a Rocky-Road blown out of an exhaust pipe.
“Don’t move,” he muttered in my ear. “Demons.”
And with that he leapt to his feet, brandishing two huge Japanese inspired knives.
“Bugger that!” I said. “I’m no lily livered female to be taken care of. I’ll do my own fighting, thank you very much.”
“Get back,” he snarled. “These are fourth sub dimension demons. Way of out your league.”
“Let me tell you something baby. Nothing is out of my league…”
And with that, I executed a perfect summersault over his head, landing in front of Garabino with a ballerina inspired martial arts roundhouse. I pulled my specially designed bowie knives from my tousled curls and brandished them at the crouching creatures before us. One was a massive hybrid beast reminiscent of biblical creatures, truly horrific, with a shark’s head and jaguar body. It growled in demonica, some wrangled awful sound that made my neck hairs rise to attention. The other circled to the right, a monstrous mismatch of body parts, a Frankensteinian monstrosity. I left that one to Garabino and confronted my nemesis.
My mother.
Returned from hell and ready to play.
Whoo-hoo! An action sequence!
As much as I would love to kill my mother…it just isn’t done. But then she doesn’t appear to want to kill me either. Instead we stand there staring at each while she continues to mutter demonica…only so much of it sounds strangely familiar. Then it hits me…this isn’t hell spawn speak — though pretty close — this is mother speak: whycan’tyoubemorelikeyoursister… youwouldlooksoprettywithyourhairoutofyoureyes… whenareyougoingtomeetaniceboy…. the words pure soul suck and doing a good job sapping my will to live.
The slap caught me by surprise and I nearly took off Garbino’s arm for his troubles. “So THAT’s all it takes to best you is your mother demon?” Shaking my head I turn to face her again and said “Well you know what they say…if it’s not one thing, then it’s your mother…”
Garbino was covered in the mishmash monster’s ichor, and it took all my self-restraint not to dismember him alongside it when I saw the mess he’d made in dispatching it.
Limbs were strewn across the floor like throw pillows, and he’d opened up its torso like a butcher’s piñata; there was no way I’d ever get the stains out of the wood.
But refinishing the floors was the least of my worries right then.
“Mom! Quit badgering me and drop that stupid form already! I’m not a child and you can’t frighten me with your two-bit skinwalker tricks anymore, so knock it off.”
Ichor! Yes!
“Dr. Garabino, why can’t you help my daughter? I paid a fortune to get the best Fae mage to reverse this stupid spell!”
“Alpha Chase, I have consulted with the original wizard and my most talented colleagues. We feel Loyalty’s unique DNA, shifter mixed with Nephilim and tainted by those artifacts she uses, messed up the original spell. She is dreaming she is in some god-awful book with a sister named Lulabell trapped in a skull. Apparently, she has cast me as her evil love interest after I attempted to break the spell.”
“So my daughter thinks she is trapped in a skull with some woman named Lulabell??”
“No, Alpha, it’s more complicated than that, and I am afraid we may need your wife’s heart to break the spell.”
But she was saved from answering by the wail of sirens. The explosions had finally attracted the attention of the mundanes. Never one to take any responsibility, mother took off with only a wewillcontinuethislater. Garabino folded his ichor stained wings, tucked away his knives and with a bow, was gone in the same light explosion that had brought him — the bastard leaving me to deal with My Cities’ finest. But I caught my first break of the evening when the only human on the force that knew about us supes showed up.
love it!
I already had a third of the monster’s pieces shoved through the portal that served as my trash-bin when Detective Ryan Callahan let himself in through the front door.
“Don’t you need a warrant, Detective?” Not that it mattered, but I liked to remind him that the key if given him was for booty-calls, not official police business. I kept shovelling ichor-stained limbs and viscera as I talked.
He eyed the rapidly dwindling pile blandly.
“Don’t you need an environmental assessment before disposing of toxic waste within city limits?”
“Ha! Trust me when I say these won’t be anywhere within city limits once I get done.”
The portal gave a *snap* as I shoved what looked like a gorilla’s pelvis through it.
“Where does that go to, anyways?”
I paused and wiped my brow, as though that could do anything but smear the layer of goo I could. Feel streaking down from my hair, and realized neither of us was going to be happy with my answer. So..time to put on a dour face, make with the mysterious double-talk and hope it flew.
“Somewhere beyond your understanding, jurisdiction or concern Callahan.”
He stared at me, and I could feel something slide down into my cleavage as I met his eyes.
“You have no idea do you?”
I dropped my dour look and swapped it for exhausted embarrassment.
“I pushed two grenades and a still-squirming land-kraken through it the first day I installed it, and I’ve been afraid to find out ever since. Somewhere in the Otherside, someone -”
“Or someTHING, more likely.”
“- or something, yah, is almost certainly and justifiably pissed off.”
Ryan looked around my half-trashed home, and then at my trash-portal.
“You’re a terrific hero Loyalty, and a great FWB, but you are a LOUSY neighbor.”
At that moment, what looked like the entire fire department showed up and Callahan said…
“It’s okay everyone, it’s my buddy, Loyalty Chase” The cop surveyed the wrecked apartment. A slab of plaster dangled from the ceiling, then fell to his feet with a resounding smack, the kind of sound that reminded me of an exclamation mark.
“One day it won’t be me that turns up,” he warned. He reached down and picked up a cloth covered object that jiggled in an awful alive kinda way.
I felt my eyes widen in horror, so wide the dusty air prickled my eyeballs. “Give that to me.”
He turned the object in his hands for a moment, tossed in the air and handed it over. His lips quirked in a small smile.
“I must’ve dropped it when the ceiling fell in,” I evened out my voice. “And damn that slumlord for his penny pinching ways. There were rats in the walls, damp, wood rot … you name it. I should’ve moved out of this hellhole months ago.”
Trying to keep my hands from shaking, I took the relic that housed my sister’s soul from him and slipped it into my jacket pocket. Sensing that I needed a moment, Callahan turned away to deal with the FD, while I surveyed the damage. And even though there was a gaping hole into the hallway, I realized there was some persistent knocking at the front door. Opening it up, there was old Dottie Dunphy — half blind, arthritic and more than a little crazy — she thrust a package into my hands. “This came for you today and I kept it safe from all the hooligans. The neighborhood, you know…”
She continued to natter on, but I tuned it out because I could feel the waves of magic coming off the package like body blows. OMG, I had just been handed an RMO — Random Magical Object…
The werewolf Alpha, despair obvious in his eyes, looked at the Fae Mage. “Is Loyalty suffering?”
Garabino shook his head, “As far as we can tell, she is in no danger, and she is enjoying the stories she creates. But I know your wife is a despicable creature, so sacrificing her to save your daughter should not be a hardship….”
Alpha Chase shook his slightly shaggy head. “I would gladly kill the woman, rip out her heart, and feed it to my daughter, but that evil hag I married has been banished from this plane. I have no idea how to find her. Poor Loyalty will have the best of care from the family Brownies and Dwarves. I will not rest until I discover a way to wake her from this spell.”
Vanity rolled her eyes and began checking her weapons. She once used the enchanted katana with the hilt made of tanuki bones to kill a minor lord of chaos. The new spells she had placed on the blade seemed to be working perfectly. She estimated that she had at least a 50/50 chance of killing a nephilim if she got in the first strike. Her Glock 9mm pistols were loaded with enchanted silver bullets, mostly to annoy her father. The throwing knives hidden under her black leather overcoat were souped up with so many different spells that she couldn’t remember what they all did. She also had some wooden stakes in case she had to fight a vampire and a magic ring that allowed her to project a telekinetic force blast once a day.
Of course, she rarely needed any of that stuff against male opponents since her nephilim DNA gave her exotic pheromones that made her irresistible to the opposite sex and low-level telepathy she could use to wrap weak-minded men around her finger. Still, it never hurt to be prepared. She didn’t want to die like a chump like her little sister Integrity. That massacre at band camp was the reason why she walked around with enough weapons to take over a small country.
“I’ll kill Mom,” Vanity said. “My spin class got canceled and my afternoon is free.”
Alpha Chase gave her a look that managed to convey both disappointment in her and intense pride at the same time. “You know how to find her? Please forgive me for being skeptical.”
“Of course I do. Mom contacts me about once a month. She usually wants to talk about you. Last time, she gave me a magic flute that takes me directly to her. It’s no big deal.”
“A magic flute?”
“Sure, she got it from some creepy guy called the Pied Piper. She tried to explain how it works but I wasn’t listening.”
“You can’t lie to me, child. I grow weary of these feeble jests.”
Vanity sighed. “Okay, Dad. Here’s the deal. I have a crystal ball that I can use to talk to her. Your expert over there might be able to do something with that. Or not. Whatever. I don’t really care any more.”
“My spin class got cancelled.” Hahahahaha!
I just really want a cup of coffee that hasn’t been poisoned with demon’s blood.
Everything always has to happen at once, doesn’t it? Good thing I already have a plan. Now that the last disaster has finally happened and I haven’t slept in three days, it’s time for one last cup of coffee before I impress all of my allies and fix everything all at once with my awesome master plan. Too bad this master plan requires major damage happen to my house and car and also probably at least two pints of my blood, but what can you do? I am Loyalty, and I am here to help everyone.
Vanity looked at her father. “Has Loyalty been projecting her dreams telepathically to everyone?”
Garabino answered, “You are getting visions of her dreams? Only the wizards, mages, witches, and voudon priestesses who have tried to break the spell have seen the dreams while they touch Loyalty.”
Alpha Chase sighed. “Loyalty and Vanity thought it would be fun to be bloodbound when they were tweens. We haven’t been able to break that spell either.”
Garabino looked amazed.
‘They are bloodbound? That is shocking. Even the Fae cannot bloodbound fully. You are special, Loyalty. And Vanity, of course.’
‘Hmmph, now he notices me.’ Vanita tossed her curls carelessly over one shoulder and rolled her eyes.
I sighed.
‘Look dad, as much as I love our family meetings, I really need to *get stuff done.* Anyone want any coffee?’
When no one replied, I shrugged, and closed my eyes to reach Namir, the outworldly secret plane where I store my favorite Costa Rican coffee for special occasions. Such as sparring with my booty call boyfriend, my weirdly formal father and my once dead sister who lives in a skull. I concentrated, and felt a warm purple glow within me as Namir became a real place I could reach out.
Vanity glared at Garabino. “What kind of a Fae mage are you that you can’t control my idiot sister’s dreams?? Now she has me enrolled as one of her messed up characters. Throw her in a glass coffin! I’m going to kill that evil hag dad insists is our mother.” With that, Vanity stomped off in her purple Doc Martens.
Vanity did not want to tell her father, the I-Am-An-Alpha-Wolf-Know-It-All, that his evil hag Nephilim wife was not in an alternate plane or even another country. She was holed up downtown in one of the city’s best hotels. His pack and the entire Supe community would never let her father live that down. A wolf who couldn’t find his own wife when she was five miles away would never be able to hold onto the respect he needed to command the Supes in the coming apocalypse.
“Thanks for the, uh ….” I managed to spit out, just as the RMO turned a really bright sunset red. The kind of red that toned in well with dark hair. People thought my hair was black, but there were some really nice shades of red in there, too. When I walked into the sun people were continually surprised by how, well, reddish black it was.
Seeing the relief wash over Dottie as I took the package, I was a little suspicious. I studied her for a moment while the RMO kicked up a storm—literally—electrical zaps made little lightening bolts buzz against my fingertips. My ISR (or internal-suspicion-radar) didn’t pick up anything remotely threatening from Dottie, and I shrugged off my quizzical mind. Surely Dottie wasn’t interested in a one night stand, or white slavery. It seemed like everyone was a suspect since I’d had that awful experience a year ago. It’s always inside me, that awful suspicion. Unless I was busy killing someone. Or being loyal.
Callahan chose the wrong moment to walk up behind me. Typical Callahan, always sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted.
“Look,” I said, turning to face him …
But Callahan interrupted whadjaget? Something from Amazon? I stared at him quizzically, “you don’t see it?” “Noooo” getting it he rolled his eyes “magic stuff?” “Yeah, magic stuff” “figures…I guess that means you won’t be crashing at my place tonight” I gave him an enigmatic smile and just shook my head. “Nope…things to see, people to do…or something like that…anyway, look, I need to head out — this place isn’t safe for me or anyone right now.” He took a breath like he was going to argue, then shrugged “ok, I’ll take care of things here.” “Thanks, and…Callahan, be careful, I have a feeling that things in My City are going to get really ugly really fast.”
Stepping back through the now tattered tarp, I strapped the package to the back of my bike and headed out to my underground laboratory/kickboxing studio. There would be lots of weapons there…and it was time to bring the scooby gang back together. My loyal, loyal friends. Black red hair whipping in the wind I headed out into the rain soaked night.
“OH HOLY BAT GODS!! HOW FAR AWAY FROM HER DO I HAVE TO GET TO STOP HEARING HER IN MY HEAD??!!” Vanity was ready to rip out her own heart and feed it to Loyalty just so she didn’t have to listen to those ridiculous dreams. Loyalty was the favorite, the oldest, the golden child. Vanity was second, poor Laveau (nicknamed Lulabell) was third (their father lost a bet and had to name her for an old witchy friend), Integrity was the fourth girl, and poor Bravery was the only boy. Vanity thought he ran away to avoid the consequences of having a name like Bravery in a pack of wolves.
“Wait a minute… Lulabell isn’t real. She only exists in Loyalty’s head. Keep it together, Chase. It wouldn’t do to go crazy before talking to Stalwart.”
Vanity only talked to herself in moments of extreme stress. For some reason it seemed to be helping her focus as she raced across town in her lovingly restored Aston Martin DB5. A very sophisticated glamour cast on the engine would keep police from noticing her as she did her best impression of Steve McQueen in Bullitt. The car had an impressive force field that would protect her during a crash, but she still needed to pay more attention than she usually did to make certain she didn’t hit pedestrians or other vehicles as she ran red lights at speeds averaging around 180 miles per hour. She played a mix tape Loyalty had made for her because it might help her concentrate. For some reason, at least half the songs were Eighties glam metal hits. Loyalty knew she hated that crap. Suddenly, “Danger Zone” came on. A little on the nose, perhaps, but it worked.
Even though Vanity was twice as beautiful as her sister, she didn’t have as large of a horde of male admirers with useful supernatural talents. So, at times like these she usually had to rely on Stalwart Champion, a half-elf barbarian swordsman from another dimension who got trapped on earth when he failed to jump through the dimensional rift back to his home world in time. Stalwart was a can-do kind of person. After he mastered English and got some forged identification (Vanity helped a little with that because she knew a guy), he went to college and earned a degree in computer science. He now had a nice little operation going with a team of white hat hackers who did things he couldn’t talk about for the NSA.
If it had anything to do with mythical monsters, magic, or white collar crime Stalwart was the right guy for the job. Hopefully, he had some new ideas about what to do about her mother that didn’t involve loaning her his sentient magic broadsword. Knowing her luck, Thunderstrike would decide that her soul was more appealing than dear old Mom’s and betray her just for giggles. Stalwart couldn’t do much to help Vanity because of a geas that kept him from fighting women. All he could do was look pretty with his shirt off as he double checked thousands of lines of code and offer suggestions.
Fortunately, most of those suggestions had panned out. So she was willing to forgive Stalwart for the occasional bad idea. Like anything involving that darn sword. It was bad enough the thing could fly around under its own power and make weird noises. It had killed Stalwart’s last girlfriend, his accountant and a guy who delivered pizza to his apartment one time when he was helping Vanity plan a complicated art heist.
Stalwart’s sword wasn’t important now. Saving Loyalty was the top priority. Vanity was a fairly good burglar, but Stalwart was better at things such as creating fake key cards and getting past motion sensors. She might need his skills to get into her mother’s hotel room. Knowing what Mom was like, she probably added her own security measures and maybe even placed curses on the windows. Breaking in would be tougher than actually taking her heart.
“This is just like that job in Chicago,” she muttered as she narrowly avoided hitting a bike messenger.
“Thunderstrike… That was a Marvel comic book character, dang it! Loyalty is still messing with me! Stalwart’s sword is called Durandal. Keep it together, Chase!”
He named his sword after a Marvel character? I guess he really has assimilated.
(I was trying to come up with something that sounded like Stormbringer and I forgot Thunderstrike was taken).
(Thank you, Brian!! I was really tired last night and blew my own continuity by sticking Lulabell/Laveau in. By the time I realized what I had done, I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. YOU ROCK!!)
(Thanks. I’ve been really enjoying your parts of the story. You rock too.)
Vanity hammered on Stalwart’s door, knowing he was probably in his uber-secret Lair of Larceny, an impregnable safe room built under his basement. Stalwart swore he would survive a nuclear attack, an EMP strike, a magical apocalypse, and a One Direction concert as long as he could make it to his Lair. He had stockpiled elf bread, water from a magical underground spring, and air freshened by some air elementals who lusted after his pectorals. The idiot still had not installed a door bell that rang in the Lair, and the jealous elementals would not tell Stalwart that Vanity was at the door. She groaned as she took her cell phone out of her pocket. “I hope I remember all the stupid safe phrases. That boy needs to get a life.”
“You got that one wrong,” Stalwart said. “But from the exasperation in your voice, I can tell it’s you Vanity. Hang on for a second.”
Vanity tried not to fume as Stalwart went through the complicated process of opening his door. Not only did he have six standard locks, but there were eight wards that had to be temporarily deactivated and other procedures that seemed to change every two weeks or so. After all that, he had to quote a line from a Shelley poem that would send his tame demon security guard back where he came from for a few hours. Stalwart’s thoroughness and attention to detail were both two of his best traits and two of the things that drove her crazy. She had tried to explain obsessive compulsive disorder to him once, but he pretended not to understand, muttering something about how they don’t have that in his home world.
“You shouldn’t keep a lady waiting, Stalwart.”
“When I see a lady, I will keep that in mind.” Stalwart flashed his maddening crooked grin. “Enter freely, weary traveler. My hearth and my wine are yours.”
“Cut it out with e`
(something weird happened there, please pretend I didn’t hit “submit comment too soon)
“Cut it out with the elf crap, Stalwart.”
“Hey, one of us has to have some manners. Coffee?”
“You always know the way to a girl’s heart.”
As usual, Stalwart was barefoot and wearing nothing except for a faded pair of jeans. Stalwart’s perfectly shaped muscles made him look like a Renaissance statue come to life. Vanity didn’t normally care for men with long hair that looked as nice as hers, but it worked for Stalwart. His flowing blond hair fell down to the middle of his powerful back. He claimed he needed to keep it long because it would cover his pointy ears, but Vanity suspected he was well aware of the effect it had on women. Vanity liked his complete lack of disgusting body hair. Stalwart claimed that was due to his elven DNA, but she suspected he spent a fair amount of time manscaping.
“My eyes are up here, Chase.” Stalwart passed her a cup of coffee prepared exactly the way she liked it with another one of those grins.
“I need a favor, Stalwart.”
He nodded soberly. “I figured you weren’t here just to stare at my abs. Are the Russians after you again?”
“No, it’s my stupid sister. She’s trapped in a dream.”
“So, you need your mother’s heart to break the spell?”
“How did you know?”
“Your father called and told me all about it.”
“You’re insufferable, Stal.”
“Yes, but I make great coffee.”
Vanity punched him in the shoulder. “I swear Stal… Sometimes I want to kick your butt.”
“That can wait for a more convenient time. I have some ideas about how to finally kill your mother. I have one of my air elementals working on a spell that can help you. There are some other things you’ll need, but they will take a while to explain.
“So, you’re enchanting a bullet or a knife for me?”
“You think too small, Chase. We’re working on some holy hand grenades.”
It wasn’t that you hit Submit Comment too soon. Reality is collapsing!
I walked into the nearest bar. Thank Odin, I had never been there before. I didn’t want to see anyone I knew; I just wanted a drink, a drink and time to process what had happened. I was such an idiot. If I had stopped to think before tearing off on my bike, I would have known that RMO was a trap. But no, I’m Loyalty Chase, and I know everything. I sat down at the bar and put Lulabell on the bartop. The half blood Troll bartender came over. “A scotch for me and a bourbon for my sister.”
OH BY ALL THAT’S HOLY!! GET THE HELL OUT OF MY HEAD, LOYALTY!!”
Stalwart cleared his throat to cover a laugh. “Uh, Vanity…are you okay?”
Vanity groaned. “I said that out loud, didn’t I? Stupid, stupid, stupid! I should have known not to listen to Loyalty by the time I was five, and I let her bloodbind me when I was eleven! After we off Elvira, you are going to help me get rid of this bond. Now, what’s the dispersal and collateral damage on these grenades?? Mommy dearest is holed up in the Eight Seasons.”
Sally M. J, if you live in the USA, you win a book of your choice from our stacks.
Please contact me (Marion) with your choice and a US address. Happy reading!
And I want to thank all of you for whole-heartedly, deeply and authentically embracing the cliche and making our collaborative effort so much fun.