“What happened to Lance?”
42561 snorted “You didn’t hear him peeling out in his douchemobile as soon as the door opened?”
Grace shook her head “It occurs to me now that he probably has that whole thing on video.”
42561 nodded slightly “Yeaaaah . . . I don’t think that’s going to be good.”
“Did that mantis guy with the beard have the other gun? How did you avoid getting shot?”
42561 said sourly “I didn’t.” She gestured at her bloody shirt “He got me in the fucking stomach. But I already had my pain editing spell going so it didn’t matter. I just healed myself afterwards.”
“Jesus Christ! You can do that?! I have to admit I’m feeling a little magically inadequate here.” At a loss for words, 42561 shrugged “I guess I did jam the shotgun, otherwise you would have gotten your tits blown off at the jump off.”
42561 raised an eyebrow “You did? Thanks.”
Grace and 42561 were sitting on the hood of a police cruiser drinking bottled water and watching the small army of people crawling over the place. It seemed like every cop and EMT in the county was there, along with a fire truck for some reason. It reminded Grace of the scene in Havana when she got beat half to death by backwoods back magic assholes. For that matter, for as much as the house was modest looking from the outside, the inside had reminded Grace of Gary’s place in Grapevine. Two pretty bad memories.
They had found the body bag in the garage. Inside was a chubby, seriously freaked out black dude. He had no idea what was going on and as far as they could tell, he wasn’t magic. Grace and 42561 had discussed and decided that despite their earlier misgivings, there was really nothing they could do besides call the police – the only other option seemed to be murdering four people.
42561 helped Grace cast her cleansing spell on the doctor and her three cronies but she didn’t really think it would do anything – it wasn’t really meant for fixing whatever turns people into bug monsters. They made sure to stress to the police how weird the people had been acting and said dozens of times they thought that they might be sick for whatever good it might do. Magic buginess probably doesn’t show up on bloodwork even from the CDC.
42561 sighed and laid back on the hood of the car “So much for keeping a low profile.”
Grace smiled sardonically “You don’t think they bought our hiking story? I can teach you a spell that will protect your identity.”
It was a while before 42561 responded “I don’t know if I want to do magic the way you do. It seems wrong to me.”
“That’s fair, I’d really like to learn from you though if you’re willing to teach me.”
42561 nodded “I’d say I owe you. I was a bitch to you and you still came out here to get involved in . . . whatever this was. You really saved me, I did not want to deal with this alone.” After a beat she continued. “Did we accomplish anything here? Or in a few months is there going to be a prison full of bug monsters?”
Grace rolled her shoulders “Well if nothing else, we saved Walter.”
42561 smiled “That is such a dorky white name for a big black dude.”
Grace snickered “Racist. So, what do you want to do? Stick around here and see if there’s more bug people? I’m off TV right now so I got nothing else going on.”
“You’re on TV?”
Grace sighed “I was for a couple weeks, didn’t really work out. Apparently I’m not ready for the big time. And by the big time I mean the very very low end of the medium time. I don’t want to feed into your paranoia but we don’t really know what’s going on here, there could be more bug people. Seems likely that there are.”
“I don’t know. I feel like we could stay here the rest of our lives and never figure out what the hell this is. I kind of just want to go to my next show and if there’s bug people, there’s bug people. Does that make me terrible?”
“Yes, a little, but I’m thinking the same thing. Without more information, what can we do? I suppose good people would stay here as long as it took to figure this out, but I guess we’re just okay people. I mean we did something right? Can you talk to your mom? Does she know anything about this kind of stuff?”
42561 shook her head “I doubt it, she very much kept to herself, which is what she told me to do. I don’t think she even knew there was stuff like this out here, I think she was just afraid of the world.”
“Can’t blame her there.”
42561 looked at her phone for a moment and then chuckled “Lance just sent me a text. He says he wants a million dollars or he’s going to put the video on the internet. And we have to fuck him. Which he says he’s also going to film.”
Grace laughed loudly “What a fucking idiot.”
Rocket Cat 