Saviors 101

Chapter 2-six years until Armageddon--lap 14-

Chapter 2

-six years until Armageddon-

-lap 14-

The neighborhood had changed a lot in the decade since Dana had first beaten Theresa at Super Mario Brothers and set out on her quest to become the neighborhood’s premier video-game champ. Now fourteen, she’d taken down so many contenders that the boys avoided her in the halls at school, just in case she might challenge them. Nothing worse for a teenage boy than having his a*s whipped by a breastless girl. You couldn’t even pretend that you’d lost on purpose to get her alone.

Ravenna Boulevard now had a lot of twenty- and thirty-year olds who had moved in as the generations ahead of them died off leaving small, run-down, brown-and-gray houses vacant and for sale at incredible prices.

The yuppies, ousted from their social milieu by the hipsters, had descended en masse upon the old neighborhood to stake their new claim. They’d added new stories and vaulted decks. They’d bankrupted themselves for the latest kitchen appliance and entertainment system. That they also had to tear open walls to replace the knob-and-tube wiring to run their computers and espresso machines was almost incidental.

It wasn’t just the museum-old wiring in the homes that was causing the problems. The garages were too small for modern cars, unimagined in bygone days when smaller, narrower cars carried whole families across the country rather than individuals zipping to the nearest shopping mall.

So their fancy cars lined every street, clogging up perfectly good energy pathways. Hence the inevitable result of nature’s winged creatures constant target practice upon available windshields.

Dana turned left across the far lane against the light and headed up 15th. The traffic could be dangerous, even at two a.m., but it was more dangerous to stop once the spell’s energy started to move. Sluggishly at best, but the current was finally moving. The warm spring night felt fresh across her brow under the edge of her bike helmet.

This should clear off her mother’s post-partum depression. Talin was almost a year old now, and still her mother was in a deep funk.

Even though Dana was tired, she made herself keep pumping the Schwinn’s pedals. A right into the alley before 65th, a block short of her uncle’s deli, toward the direction where the sun would climb over the snow-capped Cascade mountains, but not for a few more hours.

A shout. A couple kids dodged aside barely in time to avoid a collision. Pounding feet took off in three different directions, scattering DVDs down the alley. Had they stolen some yuppie’s collection for resale or for themselves? Their high-pitched voices hadn’t broken yet, so she suspected the latter. She’d be careful when she came round the corner on her next circuit. Though the Schwinn’s fat tires were okay on most surfaces, a pile of DVDs might be a bit slippery.

Two lefts, three rights and she was once again coming onto Ravenna. Fourteen laps down, six more to go if the ancient formula was to be trusted. She took a deep breath and kept going. Mama depended on her.

The problem was, Dana’s research had revealed that while her Mama wasn’t a deity, she’d certainly rubbed shoulders with one at some point and it had screwed up aspects of her life ever since.

Dana had researched the enhanced powers on her own. Her mother had been a good start, able to see the aura of energy lines that danced around a person, but that’s as far as her vision went. That was the limitation of Mama’s powers, and they weren’t even particularly godly, just unusually clear-sighted. So, where her mother’s knowledge had run out, by the time Dana was seven, she’d had to look elsewhere for her education.

She ground her way back up along 15th. The old leather seat squeaked against her shorts.

Joining the Seattle Society of Wicca and Other Heresies, had been of no help at all. As Uncle Joshua had warned her when she was just seven, most of them were women who were merely looking for a way to control their husband’s fidelity or their best friend’s husband’s infidelity.

Instead it was Joshua who had become her mentor, slipping her the odd manuscript now and then filled with stories of the gods. But they weren’t just the stories that were told in children’s fairy tales. They were like Dummies’ Guide to Manipulating Godly Powers.

She considered asking him where he got them, but thought better of it.

That she’d had to learn Sanskrit and Hebrew in order to read them had been an inconvenience, but not a bad one. She had a knack for it, having learned Yiddish curses at her uncle’s knee.

Her legs burned with the effort of bicycling, but this was the first night in over ten months that she’d had a chance to try the energy spell.

The power of the blue moon, the second full moon of the month, was essential for a young energy worker. She insisted on thinking of herself that way, it was more comfortable than wondering why it was quite so easy for her to manipulate the powers she read in Uncle Joshua’s books that kept referring to gods.

All she wanted to do was snap her mother out of depression. If she were a true goddess, she’d just take her mother for a stroll along the River Styx, or feed her one of Freia’s golden apples. Not having such tools available, she’d had to improvise.

Post-partum depression was bad enough in the ungifted, but in a woman of her mother’s latent power, it was literally killing the roses in the garden. Dana had to gather a fair bit of intent to punch through her mother’s inertia just to get through the front door when coming home from school.

Mama was just an energy worker who had snarled the house into a dark shroud lit only by the violet bubbles of her half-brother’s incessant babbling.

She sighed and turned onto 65th, lap ten.

What Dana really wanted was to just fit in. Just spend time worrying over who would win American Idol, and giggle with her girlfriends. Instead, she had only Theresa for a girlfriend and at fourteen didn’t even have a steady boyfriend for crying out loud. How was that fair?

She took a deep breath as a stitch formed in her side. Just the body’s natural weakness. She turned onto 15th again and kept pedaling.

She’d had a knack for applying the skills she’d studied in the manuals, but translating them into the modern world, her real world, had proved more difficult. She once caused her sneaker to turn magenta and only later understood it could as easily have been her dark red hair, that matched her mama’s so perfectly, turning permanently a bright pink if she’d happened to be wearing a hat made of artificial fibers. Gods were so strange.

At least she hoped her mom’s problem was post-partum, otherwise all this effort wasn’t going to help anything. Her second step-dad had called Mama “cracked” right before he climbed into his secretary’s Lexus and roared off into the night. If Dana’d been a bit more quick thinking, she might have created a crevasse across Ravenna Boulevard between 14th and 15th that opened a steaming vent to the very core of the planet.

The best she’d been able to come up with, on the spur of the moment before they roared out of sight, was twisting up her father’s libido into a tight knot of impotency within a five hundred mile radius of the woman. For the rest of existence, even if his new flame were passing by in an airplane, he’d be out of service until she was a couple of states away.

Of course, he’d never suspect that “little Dana” would play such a trick on him, because “Daddy’s little girl,” as he’d called her since the first day he’d slept with Mama, didn’t know such things. Even though she was fourteen and had tried necking with both Tommy and Jeff from school. But Tommy grabbed her too hard with overeager hands and Jeff was a really lousy kisser. He was so bad that it hadn’t taken any further experience to be certain of the fact. So she’d wait until the men her age were older and more mature. She hoped it wasn’t too long a wait.

She almost crashed her bike as she turned once again up the alley. She’d forgotten the scattered DVDs. The handlebars twisted sharply one way on season three of Married with Children as her rear wheel slid the other way on Look Who’s Talking.

If those had taken her down, it would have been terribly ironic considering her baby brother never ever shut up. Of course, he didn’t make any sense yet, but that didn’t slow Talin down for a second.

That’s why Mama had to snap out of it. If she paid more attention to her brother, he might shut up long enough for the energy to settle down, then Dana could complete a thought within the confines of their home.

The current wasn’t fighting her any more, but it should be moving along more sharply than this by now. What lap was she on? She closed her eyes for a moment and let the fresh air of Seattle pre-dawn autumn run across her forehead while coasting down the Ravenna hill back toward 15th. Fourteen laps. She was sure of it. So maybe it was okay.

She leaned against the handlebars and stood up on the pedals. Her calves were burning, but Shiva’s ancient formula for curing Parvati of her depression after she gave birth to Ganesh, the elephant-headed Indian god, was clear. You couldn’t be seated for the first half of lap fifteen or nineteen. Having to bike “no hands” on the eighteenth lap didn’t worry her much, except the alley. She whipped a little Thor-style hammering energy onto the pavement the next time she approached the scattered DVDs and flattened them into the alley’s concrete surface.

It would be worth hanging around later in the morning to watch as the owner tried to figure out how his movies had become a permanent part of the asphalt in his back alley. Not only was his wife’s bad taste there for all to see, but his hidden collection of p**n wasn’t so well hidden anymore. He also probably shouldn’t have transferred his own romantic efforts onto so many discs. Or labeled his amateur videos shot with former girlfriends with pictures of the more graphic moments, all now smiling, grunting, or faking it for the camera each with an underlying expression of immense boredom that men never seemed to notice. Be an interesting time in their household over the next few days as he tried to explain away what he’d have to tear up the pavement to remove.

The current slid along beside her nicely as she took the turns that led back to the start of lap fifteen. She stood up to pedal as she passed the bright blue and yellow house in which her mother and brother were now fast asleep. She could hear him over the baby monitor she’d kept in her pocket.

Unbelievable. Talin sang even in his sleep.