Feature Writer: Bill Underhill /
Feature Title: Kinnick’s Demon /
Story Codes: Demonic
Synopsis: Baby sitting young Ellie turns sexual”Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a really slick piece of technology.” Dangling boy-meat as a human sacrifice in front of a pedophilic high-energy physicist isn’t a career-enhancing practice, whatever universe you’re in /
Characters: Dramatis personae: Kinnick (10yo), Master Zan (with all that necromancy, who knows?), First Apprentice Fenndrick (thirty-ish), various other Apprentices (a mixed bag), Eddie Parker (thirty-ish), Vinith, Rotha, and Miku (each about 9 or 10yo)
Kinnick’s Demon
“Damn!”
Kinnick shuddered in the center of the pentagram, his knees slightly flexed, his heart racing as he glanced from Master Zan’s face to that of First Apprentice Fenndrick. Even shorter and scrawnier than most other ten-year-olds in this third year of the Great Famine, Kinnick knew that he was here to be expended, as a lizard is expended in the working of a love-spell. The only great questions left in his life were “When?” and “How much would it hurt?”
The chamber stank of musk and sulfur, rancid oil and pungent pigments. A number of those smells were sharp in Kinnick’s nostrils because musk and sulfur and twelve kinds of pigments were all that he was wearing.
“Who drew that line?” Master Zan’s wand crackled with power as he pointed to an intricately redoubled tracery that occupied some of the space between Kinnick’s navel and the base of the boy’s little phallus.
First Apprentice Fenndrick looked bored as he peered at Kinnick’s skinny young body. “Kephir, I think.” He nodded. “Yes. Kephir.”
Sharp-beaked Master Zan turned towards the Junior Second Apprentice.
“What were you thinking about?” His wand crackled again as the tip of it passed within a fingers breadth of Kinnick’s abruptly-sucked-in groin. “Twice recurvent in the third order, not just once! If I hadn’t felt the forces shifting at the last moment, we would’ve wasted this slave completely!”
Kinnick very much wanted to cry, but part of the preparation for the summoning had been a simple spell that had left him incapable of fully feeling his fear. The Apprentices had told him that several earlier slaves had gone mad with terror. One had simply died of fright, and so Master Zan had been obliged to whip up an elegant little fear-blunting cantrip.
(“You wouldn’t believe how long it took him to devise this,” said Senior Second Apprentice Bocharek the first time he’d prepared Kinnick. He looked deep into Kinnick’s eyes as he prepared to recite the spell, his fingertips sliding up and down the boy’s ribs. “It has to be perfectly transparent to the major formulae of the summoning.”)
His body was as carefully prepared. Kinnick had never been so clean in all his life, both inside and out; he was purged and scrubbed and toweled in preparation for each session in the pentagram, sometimes twice a day, and the fear-quenching spell slid over him and into him just before the Apprentices gathered round to paint him and anoint him for the test of each phase of the ritual Master Zan was creating.
Each time he was brought from the bath chamber to the preparation area, Kinnick was trembling with fear. The walls were decorated with the suspended and sorcerously preserved bodies of naked men and women and children, most of them contorted in agony, every face frozen in anguish, all of them covered with the elegant patterns which were used to focus the power of Master Zan’s experiments.
After the fear-dampening spell had been cast, they would stand him next to the body of a boy a little younger than himself – a boy of Westlands stock, judging by his fine blonde hair and shell-blue eyes – impaled upon a stake embedded in the floor. From this template, rigid in a final silent scream of horror, the Apprentices calmly copied the markings that would make fresh and attractive demon-bait of the skinny little redhead Master Zan had fingered in the Meldromeh orphans’ market.
“A pedophage,” Master Zan had muttered that first time, pacing around Kinnick as the Apprentices applied the finishing touches to the youngster’s hands and feet. “By my calculations, the kind of demon we desire is drawn by the flesh of boy-children, unblemished and virgin.” He paused, pointing with one finger to Kinnick’s nose. “More charcoal around the nostrils; the skin must be totally black in this area.”
Master Zan had sensed something special in Kinnick, and he had been more than usually cautious in his use of the boy. There were still three other victims waiting in the deep chambers, frozen into timelessness: two more slaves of Westlands blood and the third was a nine-year-old who had been lured away from the household of a powerful noble.
(This one was being carefully hoarded by Master Zan, as his tests had proven that the boy was truly a bastard child of the Emperor himself, and therefore valuable as a hold upon the Imperial gens should it ever become necessary to work compulsion against the temporal powers.)
None of the three, however, had shown the promise within the pentagram that Kinnick had demonstrated. The passage between the world and the demon realms brightened and beckoned when Kinnick’s flesh was offered as the reward for a response to Master Zan’s summonings.
“Four of them hunger,” the wizard said softly. “One each from four different realms. But which one is the most powerful? Which the most tractable? Which will do my bidding with the greatest ability and yet be safely contained within the pentagram?”
First Apprentice Fenndrick was not a brilliant young mage, but he was wise beyond his three decades of life. He was fully capable of seeking wizard’s rank, but he remained with Master Zan because he recognized that it is sometimes possible to find more light within the shadow of a great man than ever can be gotten under the honest radiance of the sun.
“The one from the highest realm is the most dangerous, Master.” Fenndrick spoke calmly, restating the obvious. “Most powerful, most intelligent, least constrainable. Eliminate him – or reserve him for later summoning. He is avid in his hunger, and will come for whatever victim you choose to offer.”
Master Zan grunted assent. “And the one from the lowest realm? Crude in his aspect, raw in his power. Even if he is called and controlled, with what discretion can I utilize him? A battering ram put to cracking groundnuts! So it’s a choice between the two from the middle realms. Which?”
First Apprentice Fenndrick shrugged as he bent to break the pentagram with a scratch of his dagger. The Second Apprentices came forward with a rough gray blanket to throw around Kinnick’s shoulders before they hustled him back to the bath chamber. Oil from the second pressing awaited him, and sponges and strigils, before he could be tubbed for the second time and returned to the preparation area.
“I think the more subtle one would be more dangerous, Master.” Fenndrick held up a hand to halt the Second Apprentices, parting the blanket folds to peer at the misinscribed lines just above the root of Kinnick’s sex. He frowned. “Perhaps it would be best to lure the curious one. He seems more open to inducements.” The First Apprentice looked up at Master Zan and smiled.
“He may be more gullible.”
xxxxx
Eddie Parker wasn’t quite sure what the results meant. The power was intermittent, but it was coming from somewhere in the chamber, and it sure as hell wasn’t parasitic. Was it ‘vacuum state’ energy? If it was, why was he able to tap into it only intermittently? And whyever in hell wasn’t it as large as the theoreticians said it should be?
Eddie had been an experimentalist since the day he first picked up a screwdriver and crawled over to a wall outlet. Having survived that experience, he went through childhood and adolescence in a cloud of ozone and volatile hydrocarbons, testing and tinkering with everything he could get his hands on.
As an undergraduate, he’d studied and beaten three different ‘stacks’ in the course of a single Ditch Day, and as a senior his stack had sent six incautious sophomores and one underachieving junior to the hospital when they breached the first of the four layers he’d set up. A persistent survivor had cracked the second layer only to release what was thought to be an even more noxious chemical repellent, and the security people had responded a HazMat Team. Before someone had the sense to call Eddie back on campus, five highly-trained (and rather overconfident) representatives of the city and county wound up covered in twenty-five quarts of lime Jell-O.
Much to the disappointment of the interested onlookers, Eddie had disarmed the whipped cream canisters in the fourth layer of the stack.
Among his contemporaries as a grad student and then a post-doc, it’d been even money on whether Eddie would wind up at Lawrence Livermore or Leavenworth. He sucked up the challenges of the theoreticians and spit them back with experimental results that sparked more speculation than a monthly meeting of the Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve, and while he couldn’t write a grant proposal to save his life, he could make an automated teller machine sing like Al Jolson.
Literally. There are still ATM’s in New Mexico where they haven’t sifted out the virus, and every time somebody asks for sixty dollars’ worth of quick cash he gets a rendition of ‘Blue Skies’ as a bonus.
With DoD and DoE money drying up, Eddie had begun work at the private-and-highly-capitalistic Shawcross Foundation, set to the task of making some experimental headway into the proposition that the energy associated with an absence of matter in quantum theory – the ‘vacuum state’ – might actually be tapped.
If this was possible, people could forget fusion and let the Tokamaks be used for acrobatic motorcycle stunts. Feynman’s speculations on the question of vacuum energy had yielded an estimate of something like two billion tons per cubic centimeter for the equivalent mass per unit volume, and the energy tied up in two billion tons of matter is more than enough to instantly boil every drop of water in the Earth’s oceans.
Tap into the ‘vacuum state’ energy safely and successfully, and the world’s oil and coal reserves become useful chiefly for the manufacture of hair tonic and bubble wrap. Governments fall, cartels disintegrate, old industries die in agony, and new ones rise up higher and stronger.
Eddie Parker just had to be in on this one.
There’s a saying in experimental high energy physics: “Laugh and the world laughs with you; run a test on a Friday night and you run it alone.” Eddie had found truth in the proverb, but it didn’t deter him from doing a little tinkering all by his lonesome. One final tweak here, a little jiggle there, and maybe – just maybe! – Eddie Parker was going to be sitting down to dinner someday with representatives of the Swedish royal family.
OSHA regulations required thick barriers and ballistic glass vision slits between the test chamber and the operating consoles; Eddie ran his tweaks and jiggles from a patch of floor right in front of the chamber, using a hand-held controller that had started life as the steering gear for a model airplane. It communicated with the control console through a thick, highly-shielded cable instead of radio waves that might interfere with the sensors arrayed around the test chamber, and Eddie played upon it as Liszt might’ve played upon a toy piano: without much range, but with plenty of verve.
He nosed closer to the chamber, which was about the size of a walk-in refrigerator because it had been scavenged from a walk-in refrigerator they’d bought from a bankrupt delicatessen in the neighboring county. Covered by shielding and pierced by conduits, wires, cables and vents, it looked nothing like what it’d been intended for – and yet every time Eddie stuck his head inside he swore he could still smell pastrami.
There was some process going on in there that Eddie just couldn’t make out. His scalp itched and tingled in the areas where, as a studious eleven-year-old amateur chemist, he’d burned off most of his hair and both his eyebrows in the explosion of an alcohol lamp. Alcohol lamps aren’t supposed to be able to explode, but things that weren’t supposed to happen had a distressing habit of happening – suddenly and almost always with catastrophic consequences – in the presence of Eddie Parker.
That itch was a sure signal that he was onto something.
Something big.
xxxxx
“What is happening?” roared Master Zan. The air swirled ’round the pentagram faster and faster, spattering droplets of herb-tinctured water from the scrying-bowl into which First Apprentice Fenndrick peered with white-lipped concentration.
“The demon, Master! The demon is summoning from our realm! The power! The power is, is –”
Master Zan glared at Kinnick in a rage that burnt the air around his brows, but he hadn’t reached his age and sorcerous rank without having firmly ingrained in himself the habits of discretion. He spoke three words of an ancient and all but completely exterminated language and the pentagram collapsed in on itself so swiftly that Kinnick had no time even to scream.
xxxxx
“Mother fuck!”
Three racks of equipment and a locker in which somebody had forgotten his lunchbox sizzled and blew in a syncopated series of spectacular audiovisual events like something out of an Industrial Light & Magic demo. By the time Eddie figured it was safe enough to pull his head out from between his knees (and a lifetime of experimental misadventure had made Eddie something of a world-class expert on making such judgements), he was hoping that at least one of the five sets of paired CCD cameras focused on the chamber had caught some of the special effects.
A couple of boxes pinged and rattled as Eddie stood up, but he knew every piece of hardware in that corner of the room. There was nothing left that could do any more damage. Now, if they hadn’t moved those two carboys of mineral oil to the other side of the lab on Wednesday…
That was when he heard a groan from the chamber.
In the former repository of American cheese and Genoa salami a very small, very skinny, very naked little boy was struggling to rise up on his hands and knees, every square inch of his body looking like Keith Haring had come back from his AIDS-induced afterlife to work the poor kid over with a box full of felt-tip markers.
“Jeez, kid!” Eddie surged to his feet. “Hold still! Something might be broken.”
The boy looked up at him, his eyes wide with surprise. “Are you the demon?” he asked. His voice was accentless, strangely calm and eerily empty of emotion.
“Demon?” Without thinking, Eddie reached down to help the boy stand up. “Me? I’m just a guy.” He guided the youngster over to a chair behind one of the barriers and sat him down.
“Who are you, anyway? Where are your clothes? And who did this doodling all over you?”
“The lines?” The boy looked up at Eddie. “They are lines of guidance and focus, to make the power flow properly around me.” He smiled dreamily. “To summon you so that you would come to feed upon me and be trapped by Master Zan.”
Eddie blinked. “Drugs. The kid’s on drugs. What’s your name?”
“Kinnick.”
“Okay. What’s your first name?”
“First name?” There was mild puzzlement on Kinnick’s face.
“Yeesh.” Eddie peered into the boy’s eyes, fumbling in his shirt pocket for a penlight, but the pupils contracted and dilated and contracted normally again as he flashed the light into the preternaturally placid little visitor’s oculars.
“All right,” he muttered. “Maybe not drugs. Hypnosis? Something in the stuff you’ve been painted with?” He leaned closer and sniffed. “Hunh! You smell like salad dressing mixed with eau de chemistry set. Olive oil? Yeah; and what else?”
Eddie carefully scraped samples of each of the dozen or so kinds of pigment that’d been used to decorate the body of his sudden visitor, and he swabbed five places that had been anointed with discernibly different pungencies.
“Phew! Butyl mercaptan or I’m a liberal arts major! Why would someone dab skunk juice on your heels, kid?”
“To lift me partway into the demon realms,” Kinnick said. He smiled at Eddie. “To make it easier for you to scent me, too.”
“Sure.” Eddie picked up a CCD stereocam and stood Kinnick up against the more-or-less white backdrop of a barrier shielding one of the consoles. “Hold your arms out a little and turn around slowly; that’s it.” He peered through the viewfinder. “I want a recording of these decorations before they get smudged any more. Are there any on the soles of your feet? Yeah, hold ’em up.”
It was when Kinnick turned his back to the camera and lifted up one foot and then the other that Eddie began to notice an internal response other than the intense curiosity with which the lifelong experimentalist encounters every new and unexplained phenomenon he comes up against.
He was going to have to turn this kid over to somebody – to the police or the Child Protection Services or somebody. Kinnick had just appeared in the chamber, babbling about demons and lines of guidance and focus. The boy had to belong to somebody, somewhere…
And when the social workers got their hands on naked-and-scribbled-upon little Kinnick, they were going to ask questions like: “Did Mr. Parker touch you on your Private Zones?”
Eddie sighed as he put down the camera. He shared with a lot of his other colleagues a reputation for being awkward with women. It was supposed that his preoccupation with science drew his attention away from the concerns of the flesh, and that he simply didn’t think about sex.
That supposition was erroneous, of course. Eddie thought about sex as much as anyone else might. It’s just that he didn’t think very much about sex with women.
As a matter of fact, if one subtracted the musk and the skunk oil and the multicolored lines from Kinnick’s slender young body, the naked little boy would slip perfectly into Eddie Parker’s most treasured erotic fantasies. Even though he hadn’t touched another person with sexual intentions since high school days, every one of the people he had touched – in the course of a very sexually active childhood and adolescence – had been both prepubescent and male.
Eddie Parker was what the psychiatrists call a ‘fixated pedophile’. He loved little boys.
“You hunger for me now, don’t you?”
Eddie looked up. Kinnick was watching him. The boy’s blackened nostrils were flared wide and his uncircumcised little sex poked upward from the base of his belly, stiff with excitement.
“The Apprentices said that I would be able to tell, and that when I felt your hunger I would want to give myself up to you.” He smiled. “I thought they were teasing me, but I was wrong.”
Eddie sat there, numb, as the boy moved closer.
“My flesh yearns for you.” Kinnick’s arms drew away from his sides, his head tilting back. “Your teeth in my throat, demon! Kill me and devour!”
“Hoo, boy.” Eddie gently took Kinnick by the shoulders and shook him. “Wake up, kid. I’m on a low-fat diet.” He grinned. “Not like you’re not a real specimen of lean cuisine.”
Kinnick looked up, disappointment in his eyes. “Not to feed upon me? Not to kill me and drink my blood?”
Eddie shrugged. “So I’m a poor grade of demon. The only meat I eat has to have a USDA stamp on it.”
And then Eddie had his arms full of sobbing, shuddering, naked little boy.
xxxxx
Getting Kinnick out past the Shawcross Foundation security setup had been easy enough. Eddie always brought at least five days’ change-of-clothes at the beginning of each week so that he could run on full sport death mode for as long as he had to. There were crash rooms and showers in the lab building. It had been designed as a hacker-friendly facility. The guards were more than used to Eddie’s odd hours, and the one at the gate made the usual joke about the big black duffel bag Eddie hauled in every Monday and lugged home every Friday or Saturday.
“Got a dead body in there, Dr. Parker?” He partially unzipped the bag and peeked inside, his nose wrinkling. “My God, what’s that smell?”
“Some reagents got away from me this evening, all over my second-best pair of pants. Nothing toxic, but I think I’m going to have to run it a couple of times through the wash.”
“Jeez! You’d better air out your bag, too.” The guard zipped it closed and Eddie picked it up without difficulty.
He was glad that he’d been able to park his beat-up blue Camry close to the gate when he’d come in on Wednesday morning. He made his way out into the late-autumn drizzle and popped the door locks with the remote. Gently he set the duffel bag onto the back seat and got in behind the wheel.
“Are you all right, Kinnick?”
The zipper slid open a little. “Yes, demon!” There was a laundry-muffled giggle. “I’m glad you gave me a chance to make water before you put me in here; I almost wet myself when I thought the guardian was going to open the bag all the way.”
“Yeah, me too.” Eddie glanced over his shoulder. “Stay in there, okay? It’s going to take a while before the car warms up.”
“I don’t mind the cold.” Kinnick stuck his head out of the bag and looked up and around in amazement. “Oh-h-h!”
“What?” Eddie came up to a red light and looked back at his passenger. Kinnick’s face was much the better for the application of hand soap and hot water in the men’s room just outside Eddie’s office. The little stranger turned from side to side as if he couldn’t decide which sight was more overwhelming: the strip mall on the right, or the three-story office building on the left.
Clad only in a much-too-big Notre Dame sweatshirt, Kinnick sat up in the duffel bag. “The realm of demons…!” He barely breathed the words and yet the sound of his voice was enough to raise the hair at the nape of Eddie’s neck.
“Would you please quit that? I’m not a demon, and except for members of the Wake Forest Alumni Association, nobody else around here is a demon, either.”
“Yes, d–” Kinnick blushed. “I mean, yes, Master Eddie.”
“Just Eddie, kid.” The light changed, and Eddie got his attention back on the road. “‘Master Eddie’ makes me sound like a character out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
Eddie had inherited his maternal uncle’s home, a two-storey place on a couple of acres just outside of town. It was really too damned big for a single guy to live in, but his uncle’s will had left it and all its contents to Eddie, with nothing much else given to any of Uncle Harry’s other nieces or nephews. Eddie had been surprised at the behest until he checked out the house and discovered that the ‘all its contents’ clause included a stash of the most eye-poppingly explicit kiddie porn this side of the prize bait-and-switch collection maintained by the U.S. Customs Service. Almost all of it was devoted to the lickerish appreciation of the prepubescent male.
Despite the fact that he and Uncle Harry had never been close (in any sense of the word), it was apparent to Eddie that Uncle Harry had known which of his surviving family members was the most appropriate person to entrust with his legacy.
There were other things socked away in various places, including a number of items indicating that Uncle Harry had been a Second Amendment* purist as well as a staunch exerciser of his First Amendment* rights. You could equip a rifle squad from the stuff Eddie had found in one secret basement closet, and while Eddie was no gun freak he had enough respect for well-designed hardware to preserve Uncle Harry’s arsenal. He just improved the concealment by a notch or two.
Eddie lugged the bagful of Kinnick into the house. There was a double-sized shower stall in the laundry room, and once he’d gotten the boy out of the duffel bag it was toward the shower that he aimed his visitor.
“I’m beginning to believe your story,” he said. He fetched a yellow plastic stepstool from the pantry and set it in the center of the shower stall. Kinnick let the man pull the baggy sweatshirt up and over his head, and he stepped into the tiled square to seat himself, looking up at Eddie as the man turned the garment inside out and began to squirt it liberally with pre-soak detergent.
“You don’t act like somebody who’s ever seen cars or buildings or anything else in this country, and yet you speak perfect English and you understand every word I say. How the hell does that come to be?”
Kinnick shrugged. “I cannot say. Master Zan and his Apprentices never said anything about having to speak with the demon I was being used to summon.” He shuddered. “There was much about what the demon was going to do to me once he came.”
Eddie sniffed at the clothes with which Kinnick had come in contact during his tenancy in the duffel bag. He made a face, and decided to hit everything with the pre-soak stuff before shoveling it into the washing machine. He set the controls to fill for the longest possible soak cycle and dropped the lid.
“You said that there’s been a famine back wherever you come from, right?”
The boy nodded gravely. “My father was taken to work on the canals, and died with a dozen others when the trench they were digging collapsed upon them. My mother…” There were tears in Kinnick’s eyes suddenly, and he hugged his knees tightly. “She died of the fever.”
Eddie paused. “No other family?”
“None alive.” Kinnick gazed straight ahead. “They took me to the orphans’ market and put me up on the block.” He blinked and looked up at Eddie. “I don’t mind being naked when I’m playing, or sleeping, or working in the fields. But when they strip you and put you up for people to look at…” He blushed. “They touch you, and then they laugh when your thing gets stiff.”
He spread his knees apart. “See? It got like this.”
Eddie swallowed hard. “Yeah, I see. It must be embarrassing.”
“On the block it was.” Kinnick smiled. “It’s not embarrassing now. You like it, don’t you? I can tell. Do you want to touch it?” He leaned back, offering himself. “I wouldn’t mind if you did.”
“Er, maybe after we get you cleaned up a little.” The washer chose that moment to finish filling. “Step out of the shower for a second; I want to run the water to get it warm.”
Kinnick complied, his eyes widening as it began to rain inside the little room.
Eddie tested the temperature with his forearm and nodded. “Okay. Jump in.”
The boy shook his head slowly from side to side, and Eddie could tell by the expression on Kinnick’s face that he wasn’t faking. He remembered a time not long after his own tenth birthday when a seven-year-old cousin staying overnight had balked at taking a shower because he’d never had anything but tub baths before. How had he handled that?
“Aw, shit.” Eddie started to take off his clothes.
Kinnick smiled and pointed as Eddie’s pants came down. “Your thing is hard!”
“Yeah, I know.” He stepped into the shower and ducked his head under the spray. “Ah! Nice and warm. Come on in.”
Dubious but obedient, Kinnick gingerly edged into the shower stall.
“Shampoo first. Keep your eyes closed until I get this crud out of your hair. What the hell is this, anyway? Yak dung?”
Kinnick sputtered under the spray. “B-burnt Sienna, in oil of the first p-pressing.” The foamy suds scared him a little, but Eddie’s hands were strong and full of confidence. The hot rain beat down on his head as he was held beneath the full force of the spray,
“Hey, you’re a redhead!”
Kinnick tried to smile up at Eddie. “That pleases you?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Eddie bent down to kiss the top of Kinnick’s head. “I think I’d like you if it was purple and done up in a Mohawk.”
Kinnick caught an impression of what Eddie’s words meant and gave him a look of dismay. “R-really?”
Eddie laughed. “No! Jeez! Can’t you tell when a guy’s making a joke?”
The boy shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He glanced down, reached up and took Eddie gently into his hands. “Is this a joke?”
Eddie smiled a tight little smile. “If it is, it’s not a very big one.”
Kinnick grinned. “It’s bigger than mine.” He looked down again. “I like the hair. It’s almost as thick as my father’s hair was.” His eyes met Eddie’s, filled with sadness. “I used to touch it sometimes, when he was asleep. It never got hard like this, though.”
Eddie carefully disengaged Kinnick’s hands. “Well, that wasn’t your fault, kid.” He seated himself on the plastic stepstool and stood the boy between his knees. “Let’s see if we can get these decorations off your carcass.”
With soap and shower gel and loofah, Eddie scrubbed away the lines and the smells of Master Zan’s workshop, the process proving to be an intensely erotic exercise as Kinnick’s slender body twisted and turned against him. The boy’s hands went again and again to Eddie’s sex, squeezing and caressing, his own little penis rutting against Eddie’s knee or thigh or belly every chance he got.
Finally Kinnick lay limp in Eddie’s arms, pink-skinned and freckled, his cream-colored young maleness sticking up harder than ever. The silence was shocking as Eddie turned off the shower.
“So what did this Master Zan expect to get out of me once he had me summoned into his little pentagram? I’m a high-energy physicist, not the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz.”
“You would have powers in our world.” Kinnick smiled as Eddie stood up, still holding him. “Once you had answered his summons and accepted my Master’s sacrifice, you would have been at his command.”
“Yeah, right.” Eddie eased the boy down onto his feet and wrapped a towel around Kinnick’s shoulders before grabbing a second towel to swab himself off. “Like I’m going to kill you and eat you in the middle of the laboratory.”
“You could have done so.” Kinnick smiled dreamily and leaned against Eddie’s side. “The lines and the spells made you want my flesh; I could feel your hunger.”
“Kin-kee,” Eddie murmured. He kissed the boy on the forehead. “I guess it’s a good thing for both of us that I’m watching my cholesterol.”
xxxxx
Eddie had a hacker’s notion of nutrition; food was fuel, and you made sure of the correct mixture without much concern for esthetics. Protein was protein. He browsed the kitchen and the pantry with Kinnick at his side.
“Frozen yogurt. You ever had frozen yogurt?”
Wearing another sweatshirt – this one bearing the seal and motto of Miskatonic University – Kinnick shook his head.
“Well, I guess it won’t upset your stomach.” He dished up a couple of bowls of peach-raspberry and took them to the table. Kinnick knelt on his chair, the sleeves shoved up above his elbows and the waist of the baggy garment hanging down almost to his knees. There was nothing underneath.
“Cold!” The little redhead literally shivered with delight. “And sweet!”
Eddie’s brows wrinkled in puzzlement. “This stuff is no-added-sugar, kid. What’s it going to be like when you taste your first candy bar?”
Kinnick confirmed a half-gestated surmise of Eddie’s when he looked up in surprise. “Sweeter than this? And flavored how?”
Eddie paused. He looked the boy in the eye. “Cadbury’s milk chocolate,” he said deliberately, watching the expression on Kinnick’s face. Then: “Nestle’s Crunch.” The youngster wriggled with pleasure and Eddie frowned. “I don’t believe this; you’re reading my thoughts! Hershey’s special dark chocolate.”
Kinnick’s lips puckered the way Eddie’s always did whenever he took the first bite out of one of those hard, semisweet diabetic’s disasters.
“Y-you have to speak the words,” Kinnick said. “They make the pictures and the memories in my mind.”
Eddie frowned. Then he said something in Spanish.
“Rice and beans?” Kinnick responded.
Something in French.
“Leave us alone,” the boy said, smiling. “Let us pass.”
Something in German.
“God damn!”
Eddie shoveled a spoonful of raspberry yogurt into his mouth and swallowed. “Okay. Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a really slick piece of technology. Just how the hell did this Master Zan make you into a walking Universal Translator?” He frowned. “Can you read?”
Kinnick shook his head.
“No school?”
“Not for countryfolk.” The boy blushed a little. “The priests teach a few in the village, but my father needed me on the farm.”
Books were never far from any chair in Eddie’s house. He reached over to the other end of the kitchen table and grabbed a paperback, flipping it open at random.
“Read this,” he said, handing it to Kinnick. “Out loud.”
“‘…a-and I caress Jamie’s damask buns, lick up a b-bit of milk chocolate frosting within, and the boy gasps…'” He looked up, his face gone completely scarlet as only a redhead’s can.
“Whoa!” Eddie grabbed the book out of Kinnick’s hands, saw the title on the stark black-and-white cover, and winced. “Sorry! I guess Uncle Casimir isn’t the kind of writer to read under these circumstances.”
“But I understood!” Kinnick stared at the paperback. “The buns are not made of cloth or bread, but flesh! And the chocolate is not chocolate but, but –”
“Yeah, I know. The Duke was a kinky old bastard. Eat your yogurt. I’ve got to think.”
xxxxx
After Kinnick had finished his dessert, Eddie nuked up a couple of Styrofoam containers of instant ramen noodles and poured them each a stadium cup full of Dr. Pepper. Kinnick’s nose wrinkled at the scent of the fizzy stuff, and so he wound up drinking tap water.
“So those lines and things were aimed at me specifically?”
Kinnick shook his head. “Master Zan was studying four demons. The preparations were designed so that they could be used to draw any one of you with only a minor variation in the Master’s incantations.”
“Hm.” Eddie led the way up to the second floor. Two adjoining bedrooms had been turned into one very large computer center, with vast amounts of hardware attesting to Eddie’s investment in keeping up with the Gates family. He hooked up the memories, one each from the paired surveillance cameras and yet another from his hand-held stereocam.
“This’ll take a couple of minutes,” he said. Then a picture of Kinnick appeared in full color against a paper white background with color bars running up and down both sides of the screen. A movement of the trackball rotated the image, and clicks abducted arms and legs into a Leonardo da Vinci figure that could be viewed from any angle.
Kinnick watched silently as his frozen body was spun around and zoomed in upon. The picture was grainy and there was no life in the eyes, but it was frightening in its reality.
“You are a wizard!”
“Yeah, sure. What did Master Zan and his Apprentices use to get these colors? That blue around your nipples; what the heck is that?”
Kinnick gazed intently at the screen. “Crushed and powdered lapis lazuli. The green is malachite, the black from the soot of burnt oil.” He named the rest – realgar yellow, lead white, vermilion and madder, umber and Sienna, both burnt and raw.
Eddie grumbled something about working from an alchemist’s formulary. “None of this stuff should be too hard to get. But powdered semiprecious gemstone? Ouch!”
“What are you planning to do?”
Eddie shrugged. “Rewrite you as a roadmap, roll on back to Master Zan’s little shop of horrors, blow the gentleman a couple of new assholes, and get back here in time to clean up the mess in the lab on Monday.”
Kinnick began to tremble as the meaning of Eddie’s words surged over him. “G-go back? But why? Master Zan cannot harm you, and without the lines and anointments he cannot trace me or steal me back. We are safe here!”
“Three reasons,” Eddie said. “First, from what you tell me, he’s killed a lot of people trying this demon-summoning crap, and it looks like he’s ready to kill a bunch more if it’ll get him what he wants. Second, he knows where I am, and he’s not going to leave either of us alive if he can Once he gets that demon he’s faunching after, he’s going to be coming for me. Third…” Eddie’s face took on a grim look. “If I read the situation right, his experiments have been fucking up my experiments, and that’s something up with which I will not put!”
xxxxx
Kinnick slept as if sedated; an avalanche of nervous exhaustion will do that, and Eddie supposed that it was just as well. The boy had conked out in the computer room, and Eddie simply carried him to bed and climbed in with him.
Eddie responded to a full-bladder morning alarm and left his guest to sleep on, pinning a note to the sleeve of Kinnick’s sweatshirt. He called in a message on the lab supervisor’s voicemail to describe the damage sustained on Friday night, and then spent the rest of Saturday morning hitting chemical and art supply stores for all the stuff he needed.
When he returned, Kinnick was still sleeping. He roused the boy, guided him to the bathroom and supervised the torpid little guy’s third civilized use of running water. Steered back into the bedroom, Kinnick tumbled into the sack again and was totally unconscious within seconds.
It wasn’t until Eddie was through with the last of the improvised minigrenades that he heard noise in the kitchen just overhead. He’d been working uninterrupted in his Uncle Harry’s old basement gun shop for at least four hours.
When he came upstairs, he found Kinnick, still dressed in nothing more than his Miskatonic sweatshirt, stirring a saucepan full of soup.
“There were cans of things in the pantry,” Kinnick explained. “And I can read the writing on them! I found other things in the cabinets, and there was a little book in the box of the can opener that explains how to use it.” He lifted up a spoonful of soup. “Taste!”
Eddie sniffed, sipped, blinked. “Sauerkraut?” There were recognizable chunks of Spam swimming in the pot also, along with white beans and tiny canned potatoes.
“The meat is pork, but cured and spiced,” Kinnick went on, grinning. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever tasted before!”
“I’d put money on that, little guy.” Eddie heard his stomach growl and he realized that breakfast had been a couple of Oreos and a half-a-glass of Tang nine hours ago. “Spam-and-sauerkraut soup. Kinnick, there’s a place waiting for you at any fraternity house on the Caltech campus. I’ll get the bowls; you grab a ladle out of that drawer over there.”
xxxxx
“I don’t expect you to become an expert with this thing,” Eddie said. “If you have to pick it up, it’ll mean that I’m either down or dead, in which case the fertilizer will have well and truly hit the ventilation system.” He looked Kinnick in the eye. “Just don’t shoot yourself in the foot with it.”
Kinnick nodded. The big hearing protectors covered half his head on the left side, the ‘earmuff’ shoved up on the right to let him hear Eddie’s instructions. Uncle Harry’s collection included a number of highly illegal weapons, and the one Eddie had chosen for this job was a German Grenzpolizei-standard H&K machine pistol, an MP-5A2. He picked it for reliability, weight, and the fact that he had four box magazines for the thing.
The shoulder stock wasn’t collapsible, and it was much too big for the boy, but Eddie had shown him how to hold it. He pulled the overlarge ear cover into place on the right and took aim down the twenty-foot [6 m] length of the miniature tunnel that Uncle Harry had long ago excavated underneath the floor of the garage.
“R-ready on the left!” Kinnick called. “Ready on the right! Ready on the firing line!”
And he began to bang away on the semiautomatic setting, whacking three targets set at varied distances down the tunnel. Eddie let him blow off a full magazine and then watched him pop out the empty, slap in a new one, and chamber the first round. Kinnick pointed the SMG ceiling-ward and grinned at his teacher.
“Okay, kid.” Eddie gently took the weapon out of Kinnick’s hands, released the clip and ejected the round in the chamber. Then he reeled in the targets.
“Not bad.” Every hole was where he’d told Kinnick to put it: more-or-less within the center of body mass on every silhouette, between the bellybutton and the breastbone.
“I did what you said.” Kinnick smiled and held up a fist. “Each time I squeezed the trigger, I pretended that I was going to punch the target, and it struck like a death-spell, again and again!”
“Yeah.” Eddie nodded approval. “Like a nine-millimeter Parabellum death spell.” He tucked the chambered round back into the magazine, holding up the slender box for the boy to see. “And you’ve got thirty of them in every one of these.” He frowned. “You’re sure that the only one with a wand and all those thunder-and-lightning spells is Master Zan?”
Kinnick’s head bobbed in assent. “Only the Master. All the Apprentices carry dirks, of course, and First Apprentice Fenndrick keeps a quirt at his side to touch up the slaves.”
“Okay. Master Zan is the priority target. If there are any slaves in the place, they’ll be naked, right?”
“Yes.” The look on the youngster’s face spoke an added “of course.” Why would anyone waste even rags on a slave boy?
“All right. Anybody wearing clothes gets a quick trip to the afterlife.” Eddie grinned. “I’ve always wanted to walk down Hogan’s Alley; now I get to do it with live targets.”
Kinnick smiled back. He took off his hearing protectors and moved closer. “To ride the summoning back to Master Zan’s chambers, you must kill me and taste my flesh. Shall we practice that now?” The shapeless black sweatshirt concealed the boy’s body, but his eyes sparkled with desire.
“Well, not the killing part…”
“But the tasting…?” Kinnick began to slide the hem of the sweatshirt upwards, revealing long, wiry legs that met at the point from which originated a pink and perfect set of prepubescent male genitalia, the central component of which was stiffly up-tilted and begging for attention.
Eddie grabbed the rumpled cloth to help Kinnick slip his arms out of the sleeves. He looked down at the faintly-freckled face.
“No compulsions? No spells making you do anything you don’t want to?”
Kinnick grinned, shook his head, and ducked down through the too-big collar, emerging from underneath to wrap his arms around Eddie’s waist.
“Perhaps one compulsion,” he said. He kissed the front of Eddie’s shirt and pressed his cheek against Eddie’s chest. “To love you.”
Eddie’s hands went up to caress Kinnick’s hair, and then one slid downward along the velvety recurvences of the boy’s spine to find the smooth flesh of Kinnick’s bottom. He lifted, and he felt the boy’s chin tuck itself within the hollow of his neck, Kinnick’s legs wrapping themselves almost completely around his waist.
He had to negotiate two flights of stairs before he could reach the bedroom, and there he surrendered his burden to the mattress. Kinnick smiled drowsily up at him, his pelvis moving in small circles of such blatant lasciviousness that Pat Buchanan would’ve changed his luck at the sight of it.
“Taste me, demon!” Kinnick’s voice was low and inviting. “Taste my flesh and give yourself up to my Master!”
“Mmm, fresh chicken!” Eddie slid out of his clothes as if they’d been woven out of Teflon. He climbed onto the bed, straddling Kinnick on his hands and knees. “Plucked and hot and ready to eat!” He ducked his head to bring his mouth against Kinnick’s, and then let his kisses descend along neck and chest and belly until he found the proud proclamation of Kinnick’s gender.
Moments later, for the first time since shortly before the death of Uncle Harry, the windows of the master bedroom rattled in sympathy with the sound of a little boy’s orgasm, and whatever ghosts the old house might’ve harbored must have smiled in approval.
xxxxx
“Okay, kid: time to ‘die’.”
Kinnick lay on a folded blanket in the middle of the cleared-away basement floor. His teeth clenched, his body marked and dabbed in a perfect duplication of the Apprentices’ preparations, he looked down at the tiny pink button that capped the even tinier tube that had been inserted into the vein along the side of his right forearm. It had been the only place Eddie could find free of markings.
Eddie knelt alongside the boy in what he called ‘Full Rambo Drag’: black coveralls and sneakers, webbing and weapons belts, the SMG hanging from an assault sling and a Ruger P-85 holstered at his side. His face was thoroughly smudged with the same mixture of carbon black and olive oil he’d used to paint portions of Kinnick’s lines of guidance and focus. He nodded at the youngster’s outstretched arm.
“It’s as if old Zanballer had made up a label that says: ‘Put I.V. Here’.” Eddie tapped the barrel of the syringe to knock loose a bubble. The syringe was plugged into a short length of flexible tubing that terminated in a ‘butterfly’ needle that Eddie poked into the latex center of the button that tapped into Kinnick’s vein.
Eddie looked down at the boy, trying not to show how worried he was. “All right, we’re ready.”
“T-tell me again,” Kinnick asked. “W-what does the medicine do?”
“It’s called adenosine,” Eddie replied. “It’s used for treating super-fast heartbeat.” He smiled. “You inject it and the heart literally stops beating for a couple of seconds; then the medicine gets metabolized like lightning and your heart starts up at a normal rate. It’s like hitting the ‘reset’ button on a computer.”
“It’ll make me die, and then I’ll come back to life again?”
“Not really.” Eddie looked down into eyes surrounded by a pattern designed to summon agony and death. “From what you tell me about the laws of magic in your world, you’re ‘officially dead’ when your heartbeat stops. You lose consciousness when your heart stops pumping for more than about five or ten seconds, but brain activity continues for five or six more minutes. Master Zan and his buddies actually seem to take advantage of that, using something they draw from the people they kill to work their spells.”
He frowned. “Theoretically of course, it’s possible that your heart may not start up again after the adenosine shuts it off. It’s happened a couple of times.”
“W-what then?”
Eddie held up his fist. “Then I use my trusty forty-watt defibrillator and whatever else I remember from that B.L.S. course I took eight years ago.”
Kinnick’s face went pale with understanding, but he let his head fall back upon the blanket. He trusted Eddie.
He had to.
Kinnick felt Eddie’s fingers on his body, touching his fear-softened little sex and gently caressing it into hardness. He looked up into Eddie’s eyes.
“I love you, demon.”
The man smiled. “I told you. I’m not a demon.”
Kinnick grinned. “You look like one, now. And what else can you be, ready to cross over into another world and kill?”
Eddie grunted. “Just the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the valley, kid.” The syringe in his left hand and the pistol-grip of the MP-5 in his right, he leaned over and took Kinnick’s flesh into his mouth.
xxxxx
“Jeez, but they told me I could get in trouble sucking kids’ cocks!”
Eddie gasped with pain as Kinnick got the dressing tied in place on the outside of his right thigh. He held the SMG at high port, half-expecting something else to come at them.
The place was even more horrible than Kinnick had described it. Dead people – and identifiable chunks of dead people – everywhere, all of them covered with the same kinds of lines that decorated Kinnick. There was a blonde-haired little boy huddled in one corner of the chamber, hollow-eyed and filigree’d exactly as Kinnick was, with a blotchy crimson over wash that had been the result of two rounds impacting upon the skull of Junior Second Apprentice Kephir.
Master Zan was dead beyond the finest trauma team’s wildest dreams of resuscitation. Kinnick had looked on in astonishment, the roar of gunfire and exploding ‘flash-bang’ grenades still ringing in his ears, as Eddie had actually pulled a wooden stake out of his belt and used a handy mallet to pound the thing through the center of the wizard’s chest.
When Kinnick asked why he’d done that, Eddie had only wheezed: “You can never be too certain, kid.”
To be perfectly honest, Eddie hadn’t been sure until the moment he started pulling the trigger that he could pull the trigger. Fortunately, Eddie Parker had grown up in the era of virtual reality, and he’d been MUDding like a maniac since his ninth birthday. He could look Master Zan and his horror-stricken Apprentices in the eye and blow them away without compunction or hesitation because they were targets, not people.
The only reason he hadn’t automatically killed the little blonde kid was because knocking off noncombatants loses you serious points.
And Americans wonder why the rest of the world is scared shitless when they show up…
Much to Eddie’s surprise, First Apprentice Fenndrick had actually lived through the attack. With a sucking chest wound and neither healing spells nor thoracic surgeons in the immediate vicinity, however, there was barely even a long shot possibility that he was going to be alive very much longer. The only reason he hadn’t become an instantaneous occupant of the nether regions was that Eddie had been focused enough in the aftermath of battle to slap Vaseline gauze dressings over both exit and entry wounds and roll a six-inch [15 cm] Ace wrap around the guy’s chest.
“We can use you for a while, I think.” Eddie had snugged the little metal clips into place on the Ace bandage and then noticed something leaking into his right sneaker. When he looked down, he realized that Senior Second Apprentice Bocharek had gotten a little closer with that ceremonial meat cleaver than first impressions had led him to believe.
The field dressing padding out his thigh, Eddie set himself to the job of making the best possible use of the sole surviving member of Master Zan’s research team.
“Fenndrick?” Eddie shook the pasty-faced Apprentice’s shoulder. “Fenndrick? Stay with me, fella! I need you to tell me how to get back to my own world. I don’t want to have to dick with Master Zan’s lab notes and maybe wind up in the wrong place.”
Fenndrick opened his eyes and looked up at Eddie. “H-home? You wish to return to your own realm? You have conquered us!” He coughed a little, but Eddie didn’t catch sight of any blood. “You have slain the most powerful wizard in the world!”
“Yeah, sure.” He hooked a thumb at the cooling carcass of Master Zan. “If he’s the best you’ve got, we could’ve taken this whole planet with a pack of Cub Scouts.” He smiled – not a pretty sight when a man’s face is covered with greasy carbon black and spattered blood. “If you had anything I wanted, I’d stay. I’ve got important stuff waiting for me back home, and unless you want me to stick around and perforate you like a Hollerith card, you’d best be making with some quality enchantment. Understand?”
Brokenly, First Apprentice Fenndrick nodded.
“Eddie?”
He glanced up at Kinnick.
“There are others in the cells down below.” The boy pointed to the blonde kid. “Like him.”
“Oh?” Eddie looked down at Fenndrick. “How many?”
“T-two.” The man grimaced in pain.
“Okay. Kinnick, do you know how to get them out of stasis?”
The boy nodded.
“Then do it. We’ll take them –” Eddie looked over at the practically catatonic little blonde. “– And him, too. Christ knows what kind of song-and-dance we’re going to have to come up with for those assholes from CPS once we get home, but we sure as hell can’t leave them here.”
By the time Kinnick returned with the two dazed victims-in-waiting, Eddie had cleared an area big enough to inscribe a pentagram as per First Apprentice Fenndrick’s instructions.
“Does all this blood on the floors make any difference?” he asked.
Fenndrick chuckled and clutched at his chest. “Wizard’s blood? The blood of a wizard killed in sorcerous combat? If used properly, the power in one drop is enough to suspend a city in the air for a decade!”
Eddie cocked a Spockian eyebrow at the punctuated Apprentice. “Oh? Big fucking deal. If it’s going to make getting out of here a little easier, fine. If not – what do I draw next?”
Under Kinnick’s instructions, the two other boys – naked but undecorated – carried the sorcerously-grafitti’d survivor into the center of the pentagram.
Eddie took a quick look at the kid, who was maybe nine years old. “He’s in shock, I think. You –” he pointed toward the other blonde boy “– grab something to wrap him up in. We’ve got to keep him warm.” The Westlander brought back a cloak that Master Zan had no further use for.
“Okay,” Eddie said at last. He looked around. “Everybody inside the magic pentagon? One, two, three, four…” He turned to First Apprentice Fenndrick and smiled. “I’d like to take the side representing the Coast Guard, but I can never remember the words to ‘Semper Paratus.’ So let’s just have a rousing chorus of ‘Anchors Aweigh’ and get us the fuck out of here.”
Fenndrick began a wheezing version of the proper chant, conscious of Kinnick’s grim-faced attention and the snout of the sub-machine gun the boy was pointing at him.
“That’s nice, Fenny-baby.” Eddie smiled as he felt the power building around him like static electricity. “Just remember: no more demon-summoning. You’ve been screwing up my readings, and if you get between me and that Nobel Prize, I’m going to come back here and really fuck you up. Got it?”
The First Apprentice nodded slowly.
“Good!” Eddie reached into a pocket of his coveralls and pulled out a brown plastic pill bottle. He pitched it into Fenndrick’s lap. “Broad-spectrum antibiotics. A friend at the lab was allergic to the damned things, and he gave ’em to me. I brought them along on the off-chance that they’d come in useful. Take one tablet twice a day until they’re finished, and you might just live.” He grinned. “Bye-bye!”
His eyes wide, Fenndrick spoke the word that collapsed the pentagram.
xxxxx
The other blonde kid was named Vinith. He said that the shocky one was from his village; his name was Rotha. The brunette was Miku.
Eddie breathed a silent prayer of thanks to Murphy when he saw that they’d landed in the basement of his house. If he’d popped into his homeworld in the middle of the laboratory with four naked little boys and enough weaponry to draw down a BATFE response team, there would’ve been difficulties.
As it was… He limped over to Rotha and checked the kid out. The pulse was rapid but strong, and the boy’s hands and feet were warm.
“Rotha?” He looked down into cornflower eyes. “Hey, kid? Wake up.”
The boy blinked, blinked again, and then screamed, soaking Master Zan’s robe through and through as he did so.
“Hey, you’re safe! Calm down! No more wizards! No more spells! You’re outta there!” He looked up at Vinith. “What the hell is wrong?”
Vinith turned red trying not to laugh. “Y-your face, Master!”
Kinnick punched Vinith’s shoulder. “He doesn’t like to be called ‘Master’.” Then he smiled at Eddie. “It is your face, though.”
“My face?” Eddie touched his cheek and looked down at blackened and bloodied fingertips. “Oh, shit!”
By this time, Rotha was looking from Eddie to Kinnick to Vinith, his eyes round with astonishment.
“It was dark!” he blurted. “It was loud, like thunder! There was blood and death everywhere!”
“Yeah,” said Eddie, shifting himself a little and wincing at the pain of his wound. “And now it’s wet everywhere. You’re alive and safe and you need a bath. Kinnick? You know the drill, right?”
The boy nodded, grinning. With Vinith helping, he got Rotha to his feet and used the dry parts of the cloak to swab him off. “Upstairs now, to the shower. I’ll show you how.”
Eddie watched them climb the stairs to the kitchen. He tried to get up and groaned with the pain. Instantly, as if out of nowhere, Miku appeared at his side.
“Thanks, kid.” Eddie seated himself on a stool by the workbench and started to peel back the field dressing Kinnick had applied. “Sheesh! A nice, clean slash, but this is definitely going to take some stitchery to close.”
Miku leaned closer to examine the wound. “Clean, yes,” he said. He looked up. “Stitches? A healing spell would do better.”
Eddie chuckled. “Yeah, sure. I’m supposed to be a wizard, right? Oz, the great and powerful; just ignore that man behind the curtain.”
Miku frowned with a nine-year-old’s sense of gravity. He looked and sounded like Freddie Bartholomew’s long-lost kid brother: the same fine features, the same precision of enunciation. Slender and naked and unconscious of his beauty, he was utterly gorgeous.
“I know some healing spells,” he said hesitantly. “They’re only simple spells, but for such a wound…” He looked up. “May I, Master?”
Magic didn’t work here. Eddie was a physicist, and the laws he knew were the laws that governed in this world. Indulgently, he smiled and made a gracious gesture. “Be my guest, kid.”
Miku smiled his thanks and began to concentrate. His fingers moved in the air above the wound in a complicated sequence of curlicues not unlike the tracings on Kinnick’s and Rotha’s bodies, and suddenly the wound started to close.
Eddie barely breathed as he watched. Devitalized tissue and bits of thread from his slashed coveralls crawled out of the incision and fell to the floor. The skin around it felt hot but didn’t redden, and it came together from both ends without visible scarring.
Miku took a long, shuddering breath when it was done. He smiled up at Eddie. “That was very easy, Master! You must eat a lot of meat. There was plenty of stuff to heal you with.”
Eddie flexed his leg at the hip and the knee. No pain, no stiffness. He looked intently at Miku, who blushed with pride. “Kid, I think we’ve just taken the first step along the journey to end health care as we know it. What else can you do? No – don’t tell me now. Later; I want to get it on a vid.” He paused. “Are you hungry?”
“Uh, yes, Master.” A pinched look came over the boy’s face. “We’re all hungry. Slaves don’t eat very well, you know.”
Eddie smiled put an arm around Miku’s smooth shoulders. “I can remedy both of these conditions. First, there’s a kitchen full of hacker food upstairs. Second – have you ever heard of the Thirteenth Amendment*?”
Together they followed the sounds of running water and squealing boys up the stairs.
THE END