Queen of Wands-eARC (16 page)

“I’m sure we’ll end up with it eventually,” Artie said with a sigh. “Although where we’ll find the room…”

“See you next time,” Karol said.

“Drinks?”

“Murphy’s?”

“Friday?”

“Rome. There’s going to be sooo many reports about this one.”

“Have your people call my people. We really need to get together more often.”

“Ciao.”

“But what
are
nonstatic items…?”

“What warehouse…?”

“Ask Germaine,” Karol said, looking around at the mess. “He’s a Regent. And we really should check on your cohort.”

“Janea!” Barb said. “Just let me…take a dive in the river, I guess.”

The Maiden’s Tale

CHAPTER ONE

Doris shook her head and looked around the room. For a moment it was like she’d just woken up from a nightmare. There had been pain, so much pain. Then she was here. Wherever “here” was.

It was a large room with medium-height ceilings, brightly lit. It clearly was in a big structure, maybe a hotel. There were various exits and signs, none of which were really penetrating right away. People were entering from a door behind her and going past her in twos and threes, most of them talking excitedly. From somewhere in the room a song was booming an electronic beat.

Today is your birthday
But it might be the last day of your life
What will you do if tomorrow it’s all gone?
You won’t be young forever
It’s only a fraction to the sum
You won’t be young forever
Nor will anyone

She had to think. It was like her brain was filled with cotton wool. She was…

She had a plastic bag in one hand and a backpack over her shoulder. Looking at the bag, it said “Dragon*Con” on the front, with some sort of a symbol. It had…some books and papers in it. There was a sign across the room Hyatt Hotels Welcomes Dragon*Con!”

So…Sure, she was at Dragon*Con. Of course. Bob had told her she could find “people like her” there. People who didn’t think she was weird or ugly or strange.

Come to think of it, some of the people
did
look sort of strange. The music—she could finally find its source—was coming from over by some tables halfway down the room. The people gathered around them, setting up some sort of booth, certainly fit the bill of “strange.” Uber-Goths with bright-colored hair and black clothes. The girls’ hair was mostly an almost-fluorescent red that bordered on purple, while most of the guys had black. One of the guys had a skater cut with dreadlocks, black eyeliner and a weird, slumped look. Strange. Stranger than her. Not…her sort. Not that there
was
her sort anywhere.

“Miss, people are trying to walk here,” a heavy-set man said as he dodged around her. He wasn’t impolite about it, just sort of informative.

“Sorry, sorry…” she answered and moved to the side. He’d almost bumped her.

She hugged the wall and looked around. There was a sign that said “Women” down the same wall about halfway across the room. She stayed by the wall and carefully crept into the ladies’, trying not to be noticed.

She finally found the refuge of a stall, slid the bolt and sat on the toilet, trying not to panic. There were just too many people, too much chaos even though the large room had had barely thirty people in it. It was just like school. People meant bullies, boys
and
girls. The cheerleaders and the football players. The Names and the In-Crowd. The people that made sure she Knew Her Place every single day. And her place was right square at the bottom.

Doris…She knew that much. And Bob had said to go to Dragon*Con. That there were people “like her” there. But most of the rest of it was a blur.

Okay, take stock. She was apparently at Dragon*Con. That was in Atlanta. She had a badge pinned to her shirt. It said “Doris Grisham.”

That was better. Okay, sure. Doris Grisham. She’d grown up in Mt. Union, Alabama. Her dad was a lumber cutter, worked for Weyerhaeuser ’til he got hurt, then mostly just sat in the trailer and drank. Which was what momma did
all
the time.

She’d gone to Hill Crest High. She knew that much. She’d learned her place fer sure in Hill Crest. The only place she was safe was the library. She’d
lived
in the library as much as she could.

Nearsighted, too ugly to get a date, too dumb to pass a class. That was Dumb-ass Doris. She was a total loser. A nobody. She Knew Her Place. It was to marry some redneck as dumb-ass as her and push out another passel of useless kids that’d cut wood ’til
they
got hurt and lived the rest of their life on assistance.

But that was then. Whenever
then
was. Who was she
now
? And why couldn’t she remember, when Hill Crest was clear as day?

She opened up the backpack and rummaged through it. Some cheap T-shirts, mostly thin as paper from much washing. Granny underwear that wasn’t much better. The baggy jeans she was wearing had holes, and they weren’t stylish holes at all. Worn running shoes in “guy” colors. A T-shirt three times too large for her. Most of the ones in the bag were XXXL, for that matter.

There was a toothbrush in the bag, and a tube of lipstick. Rolling it out, Doris knew instinctively it would make her look like she had some sort of lip disease. It was completely the wrong color. So was the dusty, dry, and unused-looking pack of cheap eyeliner. Contacts. Contact solution.

All the way at the bottom of the bag was the one thing that wasn’t totally generic. It was a brooch or a barrette, it could probably be used for either. Made of steel, it had a figure carved out in relief of a woman in armor driving a chariot drawn by cats. It was remarkably intricate work. Doris suspected if she had a magnifying glass, she could pick out the details of the woman’s face. But it really didn’t tell her much about who she was or why she was sitting in the stall, so she carefully put it away.

She checked the pockets of the jeans. A crumpled twenty and a couple of ones in her front pocket. In the back pocket, though, was a driver’s license! Hallelujah!

Doris Grisham. Female. Check.

Birthday: 9/3/1984. Okay. So it really was just about her birthday.

5'9" tall. ’Bout right.

110 lbs. Huh. Liar.

Eyes: Green. Have to check a mirror.

Hair: Red. Yep.

Address: 200 River Road, Chattanooga, TN 37405.

Okay.
That
was something. She now knew she lived in Chattanooga, TN, although it really didn’t ring a bell at all.

“Okay,” she said, definitely. “I’m Doris Grisham. I’m from Chattanooga. I’m at Dragon*Con. I’m here to find people like me or something. How the hell, though, do I get home?”

“Honey, if you’re practicing a secret identity, you might want to keep it down,” said a voice in the stall next to her. “And if you’re talking to your voices, take it from me, it’s a bad idea. That way they’ll never shut up.”

“Sorry,” Doris said meekly, as there was a flushing sound from the next stall.

“So which one was it?” asked the voice as the door to the next stall opened. “And if you’re not gonna use the john you might as well come out. I don’t bite. Mostly.”

Doris cracked the stall door and looked out.

A short, darkly tanned woman was leaning up against the sinks. She was wearing a bolero jacket, a black button-down shirt, jeans, black cowboy boots and a fedora. She probably would have been pretty, if not beautiful, if a teenage case of acne hadn’t left scars to shame a smallpox survivor. But button-black eyes glittering with humor somehow drew the eye away from the skin.

“I’m Mandy,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “You’re Doris. Or at least that’s your secret identity.”

“No, I really am,” Doris said, desperately holding out her license. “I’ve got ID. I’m from…I live in Chattanooga.”

“So you were just grounding,” Mandy said, handing the license back unlooked at and taking Doris’s unresisting hand to shake it. “I get it. Been there, done that, burnt the shirt. Sometimes you just got to make sure it’s you talking and not the chorus. Let me tell you, Aripiprazole helps. You wouldn’t want to know me if I hadn’t gotten on the prescription drug wagon.”

“Okay,” Doris said, eyes wide.

“Not that I’m on aripiprazole,” Mandy continued, turning around to wash her hands. “I finally convinced the county shrink that I was ADHD with PTSD, and not bipolar, which is what it
looks
like. Been a wonderful world lately being almost normal. I can enjoy a con and not drive everybody around me nuts. Con virgin?”

“Huh?” Doris asked, confused by the rapid changes in subject.

“Is this your first convention?” Mandy said slowly. It was clear that she wasn’t doing it to make Doris sound stupid, just slowing her own patter down for the benefit of the listener.

“Uh…yes,” Doris said, almost certainly.

“So who’s your con-buddy?”

“Uh…?”

Doris sighed.

“Con virgin
and
no con-buddy?
And
twenty-something hot female? Honey, you could get away with that at some place like Liberty or ConStellation, but Dragon’s a bit much. Let me guess. You heard about it from somebody and just drove down.”

“Something like that,” Doris said.
Did she have a car?

“I’ve got a fair share of human charity, but,” Mandy said. “The
but
being that I’m here to enjoy myself, I’m already riding herd on Traxa, and there are places you’re not going to want to go that I’m headed. Not from the look of you. But if you got some decent clothes and makeup, I’d say you’d not only fit in, nobody would look at
me
, so you’re
definitely
not
going.”

“Okay,” Doris said, ducking her head.

“But that’s later, and Traxa is trying to find the dealers, so I’ll take you under my wing for a bit. Come on.”

Doris obediently followed the woman out of the bathroom and back into the large room.

“Registration, which you just went through,” Mandy said, waving to the left. “They moved all the band stalls down here since it was getting crowded upstairs. That’s the Cruxshadows booth.”

“Crue-shadows?” Doris said. “The Shadow of the Cross?”

“Got it in one, not bad,” Mandy said. “Not a Christian myself, but doesn’t mean I don’t like the music.”

“I like what’s playing,” Doris said, timidly.

“Their single, “Birthday.” Kind of repetitive, but it’s got some interesting lyrics.”

“
Then tell me what really matters. Is it the money and the fame? Or how many people might eventually know your name? But maybe you touch one life, and the world becomes a better place to be. Maybe you give their dreams another day, another chance to be free
,” Doris whispered along with the song.

“Rogue kind of strikes at the heart of things,” Mandy said as they passed the booth with the Goths still setting up. “Like, you are what you do. Now, me? I’ve got enough on my plate just trying to keep my shit together. Most I can do is maybe help a con virgin get her feet on the ground.”

“Thank you,” Doris said quietly as she sidled to the side to avoid being bumped again. There were a bunch of people around the escalator, and she parked in a corner by the booth, waiting for a hole to open.

“Hey, Doris,” Mandy said, waving. “I’ve been there, like I said. But you’re not going to get beat up for getting on the escalator. And if you think you can wait until it’s clear, well, it will be for about twenty minutes at five AM. And you’re gonna be pretty hungry and thirsty by then.”

Doris still waited until there was a little gap, then darted onto the escalator. She was nearly touching a very heavyset guy wearing an Avenged Sevenfold T-shirt. His look automatically made her think of bikers, and that triggered something unhappy. But she managed to avoid being noticed and got off the escalator at the next floor.

It was much the same as the lower level but there was natural light coming in from somewhere behind the escalator, and a restaurant, currently closed, on the left wall. She realized she was in traffic and looked for a corner to get into.

“Come on, one more level,” Mandy said, taking her arm. “That’s the back patio where most of the smokers, and the smokers’ friends, and about half the con, it seems, on Saturday night, hangs out. But since there’s still not many people, we’re going up to the cigar terrace.”

“Not many people?” Doris squeaked. It was too crowded for her already.

“Honey, on Friday, Saturday and Sunday night it’s going to be more crowded than a club,” Mandy said, maneuvering her onto the next escalator by the simple expedient of hip-checking a skinny guy with a T-shirt that said All I Ever Needed To Learn I Learned From D&D out of the way. “Sorry.”

“No problem,” the kid said. “Hey, can I take your picture?”

“Maybe when we get to the top, if security doesn’t stop us,” Mandy said. “And no taking pictures of my butt on the escalator.”

The escalator debouched into an enormous lobby. The building from there up was entirely open-plan with a bank of glass elevators on the south side and multi-story windows on the east. In the middle was a modern-art sculpture that stretched all the way to the roof, and thinking about it, Doris realized it went down into the basement area where she’d met Mandy. People in a variety of dress, from normal streetwear to costumes, were wandering around the lobby, many of them greeting each other.

At the top of the escalator, Mandy got out of the way of the traffic and struck a pose.

“Go for it.”

The guy fumbled with a digital camera for a second, then snapped a photo.

“Would it be okay if I…took one of your friend?”

“Uh…” Doris said nervously.

“You can do it,” Mandy said, firmly. “Stand here, do the same thing I did.”

Doris stood up straight, got a frozen rictus of a grin on her face and tried not to panic as the kid took her picture.

“Thanks,” the gamer said, grinning happily. “Thanks.”

“Why did he just take our picture?” Doris whispered as they walked towards a bar.

“That’s what guys do at Dragon*Con,” Mandy said. “Well, and game and party and drink and go to panels hungover and talk and…Well, that’s what guys do at Dragon*Con, take pictures of costumes and pretty girls and especially pretty girls in costumes. The one with the most pictures of hot babes wins.”

“So why did he take
my
picture?” Doris asked.

“The one with the most pictures of hot babes wins,” Mandy repeated. “I’m just wondering why he took
mine
. Probably so I’d talk you into getting yours taken, come to think of it.”

“Oh,” Doris said, still puzzled. “What do girls do at Dragon*Con?”

“Oh, all the other stuff,” Mandy said as they got near the bar. “And see how many guys take their pictures. The one that gets the most pictures taken of her wins.”

The bar was separated from the lobby only by a two-story wall and was already starting to fill up. Doris stopped in shock as a Wookiee came around a table and, with the help of a friend in street clothes, slowly negotiated his way onto the main lobby floor.