The General was slightly put out that her daughter was pointing and laughing at a man with a gun, no matter how ridiculous. “Magnificent, I have spoken to you about your lack of control…”
“Did you workshop that line?” Maggie cried. “Is that what you were doing all night?”
“Maggie, the man is armed,” said the General.
Maggie sniffled and dabbed her eyes with her sleeve, shaking her head. “Oh my gods, Mom. It’s a Derringer.”
“Ah.” The General gave a small chuckle of her own. She pushed up her glasses. “A Derringer.” She regarded the man with a smile, “Go ahead and shoot.”
“What the fuck?” said Hyacinth, in tandem with a male voice from the other room.
Maggie hadn’t closed the door tightly. She reached back and remedied this.
“Stop that!” shrieked the night clerk. “Stand over there together! Keep your hands where I can see them! Who is that man in the other room? Open the door!”
“Is that all?” Hyacinth said, hands raised to the height of her shoulders. “Can we make you a sandwich while we’re at it?”
“OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”
“My dude,” Maggie said gravely, “if you shoot me, there’s about a fifty-fifty chance that bullet is gonna go where you want it to go, maybe less at this distance. It’s cute how you put on your fashy little outfit to come kill us, but there are no agents on the roof — that’s something out of a fucking serial — and if you have any backup at all, they sent you in here with the most comical gun on the planet to see if we’d kill you. Are you feeling expendable?” She beamed at him. “You should be! No matter what you hit with that peashooter, someone here is going to tackle you, and I’m gonna be annoyed. How ‘bout you put that thing away and we pretend this never happened?”
The man pulled back the hammer, surely hoping for a more intimidating noise than the tiny click that resulted. “Move, or I will end you and move your body.”
She grinned. “Try it, twerp.”
“Maggie!” snapped Hyacinth. “The twerp is insane and we need to get out of the crazy country that spawned him. If that bullet goes into a person, I promise you, no matter who or where it is, it’s going to complicate our escape plans — and maybe we won’t get out at all. Stop needling him!”
Maggie turned towards her, “Well, I’m sure as hell not opening the door, so what do you want me to do?”
“I am in charge here!” the twerp insisted. “I have a gun!”
“Do you?” said the General, gently. “Really?”
“Your government friends didn’t give you that thing,” Maggie said. She cocked her head. “Is that even a real uniform? Did you buy it off a costume shop? Can I get a look at the tag in the back?”
[M]BIRD STOP, Milo signed. I/ME NO DIE NO NO N…
“Stop that! Keep your hands up!”
Milo sighed and shrugged. Well, he thought, that’s what I get for trying to help your dumb ass out. Kill one of us and get fucked, I guess.
Milo, we can’t just…
Ann, there’s no magic in here, I can’t get to a pen, and I’m shit at countermagic anyway. Unless you wanna take a bullet so Maggie can drop him, AND I DEFINITELY DO NOT, I got nothing.
…Just stay very still and maybe he’ll forget we’re here.
“You all think you are so very clever,” Andrej said, prompting bug-eyed incredulity from everyone else in the room, which he ignored. “You have been outplayed, Marsellia! I — We!”
Maggie smirked.
“…have been monitoring your suspicious behaviour for months! The phone is tapped and this room is bugged! I record EVERYTHING!”
Milo and the General both narrowed their eyes, and glanced at each other with implicit blame, and incredulity.
Maggie had slightly less impulse-control, and the power of speech, so she responded with, “Bullshit.”
“Oh?” He beamed at her. “You look and don’t find? Because they are UNDETECTABLE!” He backed up to the wall, moved a painting without looking, and pulled off a clear strip of tape. Actually, it looked like several strips of tape, plastered haphazardly on top of each other so that the edges didn’t line up and the middle bit was hardly transparent at all. “Entirely magic-based! No battery! Works on ambient alone!”
Maggie brayed laughter, Milo smirked, and this time the General spoke up, “So, when we say ‘record everything,’ do we mean random blips of audio, including, most recently, a live rendition of ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’…”
Andrej goggled at her, so she knew she had it right, but she knew that anyway.
“….But mainly my daughter’s voice saying things like, ‘Give me two seconds and I’ll zap this’?”
“‘Daughter’?” cried the spy. “Oh, please! Maybe I don’t hear everything, but I hear enough! I’m no idiot!”
There was a general sound of stifled laughter, which he ignored.
“‘Oh, we are here for simple temp job and sightseeing,’” he said airily. “What temp job?” he snarled. “What temp job suits this so-called ‘family’ where none of you even resemble each other? ‘Mom,’” he sneered at Maggie. “Give me the fucking break!”
“Drop the gun and I’ll break anything you want,” Maggie said.
“You slip up and call your superior officer ‘sir,’ all the time!” Andrej went on, triumphantly. “I know your decadent, egalitarian military!”
“Not the first adjectives I would have chosen,” said the General.
“You need a dictionary real bad,” Maggie said. She scowled. “Not to mention a history book.”
The General demurred with a smile. “I have noticed that small children fail to recognize Calliope when she is out of uniform. Perhaps it is similar.”
“You people are not even the same colour!” Andrej cried.
“It seems some remedial education in genetics and demographics is also required.”
“Yeah, well, their schools seem to be focused on killing and maiming the children, so maybe it’s just as well he’s an idiot.”
“You know,” he said. The gun wavered but he did not drop it.
Maggie narrowed her eyes at him. “And you know too. You could’ve just told us what happened in Kirov, you little shit…”
“Maggie!” said Hyacinth.
“What do you want me to do? Make friends with him?” She gave a polite nod. “Well-well, it seems like your wholesale human slaughter is coming right along! And how are you?”
“We did nothing in Kirov,” Andrej replied. “They were gone before we…” He gave a little gasp, followed by a cold smile. “It doesn’t matter. Your fearless leader tried to get the information out of me, but I resisted your interrogation brilliantly!” He nodded to Hyacinth, who responded with a cockeyed stare. “I turn the tables and get information out of you! Now that we know about cistern, they will send more men to see, and we will figure out…”
Maggie goggled at him. “You told them, like, a month ago and they still haven’t sent anyone to look at it?” His furious expression was all the confirmation she needed. “Holy shit. Either they already know what happened and they just didn’t tell you, or they don’t care.”
“No one is coming to save you!” he shrieked. “Stall all you want! ‘Needle’ all you want! I have your traitor informant locked in the basement and you will all tell us everything you… you… Stop that!”
Maggie had failed to halt Milo’s flurry of signs with eye-contact and disapproval, so she hissed aloud, “Stop overcomplicating this! Shut up!”
“What?” Andrej looked back and forth between them. “What are you saying? Speak, damn you! I know you can!” He levelled the gun at Milo’s head.
Arguably, he would have a better chance of hitting it if he threw a bullet, but Milo was not nearly as secure in his knowledge of ballistics as Maggie and the General. He went even paler and finally stopped signing.
Maggie groaned. “He’s just offering to help you kill our friend. We already told him no, but he’s stubborn.”
Andrej glanced back and forth between Maggie and Milo, open-mouthed with shock. He blinked and corrected his aim so that he would, more or less, kill or wound Milo, or something near him, if he fired. “Stop that! Your… your social engineering specialist will not save you either — or whatever the fuck that is you do,” the spy snarled, also in Milo’s general direction. “You… You… Fraud!” He looked Milo up and down, distracted. “Disguise artist! Actor!” He didn’t seem to have a word for whatever it was he thought Milo did, and “be crazy and build things” did not seem to be included in his best guesses.
Milo cast his eyes from side to side, now wondering if the night clerk was flat out hallucinating another person. Yes, he and Ann had been in a few local plays, but they weren’t all that popular. Not internationally.
“After all this time, I still have no idea which you are!” Andrej howled in frustration. “The chatty one who gets information by being everyone’s best friend or the sneak-thief so quiet he is practically invisible? I don’t know why or how you do this, but I am wise to it and it will do you no good! So give up… STOP THAT!”
Maggie had been going after the pen in her side pocket.
“HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM!”
She rolled her eyes and showed him her hands. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You like serials, huh? Swell.”
“OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!”
She did not.
“Maggie,” said Hyacinth.
“No,” said Maggie.
“Maggie,” said Hyacinth, firmly. “We are going to do whatever it takes to keep him from shooting at us and deal with the consequences as they happen, because there is no point in any of us stalling. Nobody in this room has any backup or help on the way, I think we are very clear on that!” She glanced at the General, and received a subtle nod in confirmation. “Okay?”
Andrej grinned, but it was getting less and less confident and more and more unhinged. “Oh, no, please. Stall all you want. You have eaten my special goulash and it is only a matter of time!”
Maggie opened her mouth, the General gave a low, brief hiss, and Maggie closed her mouth. They exchanged a glance.
“Oh, yes, there it is,” the General said, perhaps a bit conversationally. She keeled over backwards.
“Wooo. Spinny,” Maggie added. She fell over too.
Milo stared at them. He had no comment.
“We didn’t eat the goulash,” Hyacinth said.
Maggie sat upright with a shriek, “For fuck’s sake, Cin! Read the room!”
The General remained fainted, for the time being.
Maggie was still laying into Hyacinth, loudly, with gestures. “If the man thinks he drugged us five hours ago and it didn’t kick in until now, LET HIM THINK THAT! I know it’s not going to make any difference now, but write it down somewhere — and save it for the future when it’s relevant! Could you do that for us, please? Could you… Could you cultivate a… a sense of when dishonesty is required so you can do that for us when people are trying to shoot us? As a medic? For the preservation of human life? Please? I’m begging you!”
Despite his demonstrable incompetence, all the yelling and large gestures in the world were not going to prevent the spy from noticing the General, not indefinitely: “What are you DOING? Sit up! Show me your hands!”
She sat up, smiling at him, but she did not yet show him her hands. “Pardon me. You’re just so very convincing. I decided to have a bit of a nap.”
“Oh, yeah, me too,” Maggie said. She fell backwards again. “We’ve been up all night, Mr. Clerk, the floor is comfy!”
“STOP THAT!” He fired the gun, the gods alone knew whether he meant to, and killed a table lamp. Despite the emotion-based loss of the other table lamp, the desk lamp and the ceiling lamp remained, so this did not plunge the room into convenient darkness.
It did, however, get both Maggie and the General to sit up and show their hands. Both women were clutching ballpoint pens with the clicky bits depressed.
“Sorry, it fell out of my pocket and I grabbed it,” Maggie said. “You want it?”
“Likewise,” said the General.
“Drop them!”
Maggie dropped her pen with a sigh. The General placed hers on the floor. Andrej approached and kicked both of them away.
“You need a minute?” Maggie asked her mother.
“No, but there is another issue. My injury has not been bleeding for quite some time.”
Maggie gave a tiny nod. She got it. Milo blinked, startled. He got it too. Hyacinth had no idea and didn’t care. Mordecai was in the other room and couldn’t hear anything they were doing.
Andrej, meanwhile, knew something was going on, but he was too rattled and confused by their behaviour in general to put anything together.
But that wasn’t his fault. Even if some weirdo with too much time on his hands — and no idea of what he ought not to be able to do — had designed a system that allowed someone to cast magic spells by proxy, why would he further modify it to allow a hypothetical virtuoso to dismantle an anti-magic field from the outside? Who would have the foggiest idea of how to do such a thing? And then, why would they purchase and enchant a gross of souvenir pens to distribute to every tourist, shop, and restaurant within a block’s radius — creating a web of potential proxies that had surely spread across the continent by now?
Why, unless they had already used up all the magic in a given area — for some unknown reason! — and they knew it was going to stay that way, and sometimes one of the virtuosos wanted to warm up a kolach without breaking a battery?
And maybe they were a bit paranoid and trying to cover their bases in case the night clerk was a spy. That too.
Anyway, since it was slightly more likely that Sasquatch was in the other room with a gun, Andrej kicked the pens away and made no further inquiries about them. He knew something was up, but he did not know that the General was trying to tell everyone that she’d killed the source of the anti-magic, and they still couldn’t do anything magical unless they smashed a battery, started bleeding, or killed something.
“OPEN THE DOOR!” shrieked the night clerk, stamping his shiny black shoes. “OPEN IT! OPEN IT! OPEN IT!”
“Cin,” Maggie said, “if I let him shoot me…”
“No,” said Hyacinth.
“I mean, if he actually lands one, what are the odds it kills…?”
“Maggie, I outsourced math when Milo moved in, just open the damn door!”
The General offered a nod.
Maggie sighed, stamped to the door, opened it, and went through with a hand raised over her head. “It’s me.”
Mordecai gave a faint shriek, lost hold of the desk lamp he’d been clutching with murderous intent, and fell off the desk, but Maggie turned and caught him. “Thank you for trying,” she said. “Really. But the man has no trigger discipline and the gun has no aim, so…” She glanced towards the bed, noted that Erik was not in it, deduced that Erik was either under it or in the closet, and remained stone-faced the entire time.
Come on, fool, she thought. Wherever you are, stay unconscious or stay smart and nothing in between. Work with me.
“Get in there! All of you! Move! Get…” When Andrej saw Mordecai, he flat out screamed.
But he didn’t shoot anybody, or any lamps, or give Maggie much of an opening, so it was just annoying.
Hyacinth goggled at the bed. Maggie hissed, “It’s the future, it’s relevant,” at her, and Mordecai struck what he must have thought was an intimidating pose and said, “Drop the gun or I’ll call a god!”
Hyacinth said, “No you won’t and he knows it,” flatly.
Mordecai sputtered. “What? Why would you tell him that?”
“He has an anti-magic generator in the basement,” the General said.
Andrej goggled at her.
Hyacinth blinked. Now she got it, and Mordecai at least picked up the idea that said generator must be broken — but for some reason they still weren’t doing any magic. The pair exchanged a gape-mouthed glance and fell silent.
The General fixed Andrej with what she must’ve thought was a personable smile, but it had far too many teeth. “Isn’t that what you said?”
“No! I said your informant… Nevermind!” He shooed them with the gun. “Up against the wall! Keep your hands up! What are you doing with that thing?”
“Does he mean me?” Mordecai asked Hyacinth. “Am I the thing or is there another thing?”
“Mainly, I’ve been dealing with its mental and physical health issues,” Hyacinth said, to Andrej.
“Ah, yes, that’s me,” said Mordecai, nodding.
“It’s all of you,” said Hyacinth.
“Shut up!” screamed the spy. “I’m going to… I…” He glanced frantically around the room, but he evidently had no idea what he was going to do. “You can’t have that man here!”
“Would you like him to leave?” Maggie said sweetly.
“NO! You will all… You…” He edged towards the hall door. “I must make phone call…”
“Oh, by all means,” said the General.
“Yeah, we’ll wait here,” Maggie said.
“You will!” Andrej cried, with audible relief. “I have hostage! I-I have your informant! You will do as I say or I will kill her!”
“Her?” said Mordecai.
“Oh, that’s just rude,” Maggie said, scowling.
“Yeah,” said Hyacinth. “He doesn’t even do drag…”
“What?” Andrej glanced over her shoulder, but lifted the gun and refocused before Maggie could tackle him. “Stop trying to confuse me!”
“I think we’re succeeding at confusing you, but that’s a wash,” Hyacinth said. “Do you have a small, brown, gay man with a guilt complex in your basement?”
“What?” Andrej said, faint with horror.
Maggie cackled. “That’s a ‘no’!”
Milo looked briefly annoyed, then ashamed, then annoyed again. Damn. He didn’t want to hurt some poor, random lady. Couldn’t this dumb jerk do anything right?
Maggie adopted a sing-song voice, giggling, “You’re gonna get in trou-ble!”
Hyacinth darted a finger at Andrej, “You got mixed up and kidnapped the doughnut lady, didn’t you?”
“Definitely not,” said the General. And now, not only did the entire household know she had disabled an anti-magic generator in the basement, she’d also told them which pen she’d accessed to do it.
“A doughnut lady?” Andrej said, mystified. He straightened and snapped, “I mean, yes! I-I have… What?” He just couldn’t sell it, due to the fact that he had no idea what he ought to be selling.
Maggie was screaming with laughter. “Oh, my gods! What lottery in heaven did we win? It’s the worst spy on the continent!”
“He can still kill us, Maggie,” Hyacinth said tightly.
The General sighed. “You do realize we might’ve gotten him to leave if we didn’t make it so damn obvious that we don’t care about whoever he’s got in the basement….”
Maggie groaned and thumped her head against the wall, no longer amused.
“ …I only mention it to remind you that most of us are also incompetent, Magnificent.”
“And because you’re annoyed about it,” Maggie said.
“Yes.”
Maggie addressed the spy, with as much patience as she could muster under the circumstances, “You wanna tie us up so you can go make your phone call?”
“No!” His back was against the hall door, and he clearly did want to leave, he just had no idea how. Due to the distance, he might hit just about anything in the room if he fired again, including himself.
“Look, I am trying to help you out. You don’t wanna keep standing there, we don’t wanna keep standing here. Tie us up, I can show you how to do that if you really need…”
“No… No!”
“Alright, then make your best goddamn effort and let’s see who gets the upper hand. Because nobody is winning this situation as-is, and it’s boring. What have you got? Rope? Handcuffs? Zip ties? Tape?” Maggie shook her head with a pained smile. “Oh, my dude. You need us to rip up some bedsheets for you? Is that where we’re at? Have you got a scissors on you? Nail clippers, even? Mr. Clerk? Andrej? Oh, boy…”
He’d either frozen or decided to pretend he’d frozen, but Maggie would’ve put her money on the former.
“This… This is not an improvement in terms of safety,” the General managed, with a tight voice that Maggie recognized was also desperately holding in a laugh. “I… I think we may have baffled this person into a dis… a dissociative state… Excuse me.” She cleared her throat. “We really must not make any sudden…”
“My friend has a real bad cough,” Hyacinth broke in.
Everyone slowly swivelled to stare at her in disbelief, barring the spy, who only moved his eyes.
“Total shit at magic, I swear. Not a threat. If he coughs, are you gonna shoot him?”
“Ideally,” said the General, “he would cough so hard he falls down. That would be the most survivable.”
Mordecai mouthed words, What is wrong with you? He didn’t get it.
“He should probably cough so hard all of us fall down in sympathy,” Maggie said conversationally. “Just for instance.” She glared at him. “If he’s sure he can.”
He shook his head at her.
Milo began to form letters with a shaking hand: B… L… C…
Mordecai’s mouth went, What?
…O… O… D.
“I can’t cough up blood on command!” cried Mordecai. “What kind of a plan is…”
Andrej gasped and aimed the gun at him —
And a voice under the bed said, “Oh, wait. I can.”
There was a certain amount of swearing and screaming, all of it cut short by a gunshot that buried itself in the floor.
A white cat scrambled out from under the bed with a yowl.
Erik rolled out from the other side and said, “Abracadabra.”
The Derringer melted — bullets, powder and all. The resultant black liquid slipped through the spy’s fingers and puddled on the floor, as he frantically tried to grasp it and press it back into its original condition.
Erik sat up and smiled at his uncle. “Pancakes and sauces.” He frowned. “Aw, man. I don’t do ‘abracadabra’ anymore. Sorry, Maggie. Dang.”
She beamed at him, clasping eager hands. “Fool, I have never wanted to learn how to melt butter for sauces this badly in my life! I don’t care!”
“How?” said Mordecai, weakly. He thumped to the floor beside Erik. “Dear one, are you hurt?”
“Nah.” Erik held up a hand and flexed the fingers. The palm was bloody and sparkling with glass. “I don’t have to feel anything I don’t want to…”
“Oh, hell,” said Hyacinth. She dropped down on the floor too.
“It’s just a battery,” Erik said with a smile. “They’re all over the floor down there. Potato woke me up playing with one…” He blinked at the white cat. “Or, no. Who are you?”
Misha was grooming his own tail in a fastidious frenzy and gave no reply.
“That’s Misha,” Maggie said. She paused and drew back from him, crouched but not yet kneeling. “And that’s my ass, Erik.”
“And it’s spectacular,” he said, with a wistful sigh.
And Andrej screamed, tore open the door, and ran into the hall.
“Did he just…?” the General said.
“Fuck, we can’t let him go!” said Maggie. She abandoned her stupid, injured boyfriend and ran after the stupid, traumatized spy.
But before she could breach the doorway, a female voice in the hall barked a few words in Prokovian. Maggie’s eyes widened and she staggered backwards into the room.
There was a sound of a shotgun blast, at full, ear-shattering volume — indicating to all with a passing knowledge of guns and armoury that someone had sawed off the end with the automatic suppression spell and not put another spell on the remains.
Maggie shrieked and slammed the door, shooting the bolt and then pressing it closed with her back. “Cin! I need a fucking translation! What did she say?”
Hyacinth stood, shaking her head. “Um, I think… ‘You locked me in the basement’? And I think she called him a twerp, or a twink…”
Maggie opened the door a crack and peeked out. More words were audible. Hyacinth ran over, “She just said, ‘stay down, the other one’s buckshot’!”
“Please tell her to stop!” Maggie cried.
Hyacinth shouted through the open door. The voice replied. Hyacinth lowered her volume conversationally, and then cackled at the response. “We’re all right!” She called into the hallway, “Eto potomu, chto ty dal nam sumku!”
The female voice responded with more laughter, and Hyacinth pushed open the door.
Andrej was crouched on the floor, clutching his chest, weeping, and dripping blood on the carpet. Miss Mila Fiala stood over him, pointing the sawed-off shotgun at his head, with her finger responsibly on the trigger guard.
A wide-eyed face peeped out of one of the shared rooms. Maggie detected dark hair and a dark olive complexion. “Uh… ¿Hablas ilio?”
“Romana,” a female voice said faintly.
“Friiig,” Maggie muttered. “Uh… Le tocó el… el pecho?” She pointed at Andrej and briefly groped her own chest.
The Roman tourist scowled at the bleeding man, spat on the floor, pulled back into the room and slammed the door. More voices were babbling, muffled and indiscernible.
“What did you…” Hyacinth began.
“I simplified,” Maggie said. “And he’s about to be the victim of an international game of sexual harassment telephone. Could you tell her they’re probably not going to run off and get the cops but the ones downstairs might?”
Hyacinth was nodding, already making her best effort to translate.
Misha pranced into the hall, expressed his opinion with a trill, and dropped a dead mouse at the day clerk’s feet.
Maggie’s face twisted into a murderous scowl. “When did you kill that, you little asshole? Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Don’t yell at the kitty!” Erik’s voice objected from behind her. “He has a frigged up eye like me and I love him!”
Maggie winced. “Oh, boy. We gotta drive him out of here, but I think he’s still stuck in first…”
“It is an improvement over ‘reverse,’” the General put in.
“It works! I can drive it!” Mordecai cried, with a strain in his voice that suggested he was crying, or trying hard not to.
The day clerk pointed at the grovelling man and asked a quiet question.
Hyacinth kept nodding. “Oh, da. He’s a real one, but he is nuts… Nastoyashchiy shpion.”
Miss Mila blinked at the shotgun and slumped with a sigh, defeated. She spoke in thickly-accented Anglais, “Fuck. I have quit my job.”
