Sefa lingered outside the Hebe cabin for maybe two hours, passing a ball back and forth between his hands, until he that familiar face passing by in a completely different direction. “Oy!” Sefa called out, running up beside Major. “You been throwing sickies or something? You missed the last three footie matches.” Sefa knocks his fist against Major’s shoulder. “I’ve been stuck in one on ones with JTT and you know the man’s a total egg—can’t tie the laces on a pair of jandals. Beating him’s been a piece of piss. Score’s twenty-nothing every time.”
Sefa set his phone down on a little tripod and stepped back a few feet, adopting a casual pose. He waited for the shutter to go off, checking his image on the screen to make sure everything looked good. With one second left on the time, Sefa suddenly noticed somebody standing behind him. “Hey mate,” he called out, turning back to the stranger. The shutter started firing rapidly behind him. “Could you step away for a minute? You’re in my shot.”
“Alright, watch this,” Sefa introduced as he passed his vape pen off the Major. With his feet hanging off the edge of the dock, he focused into the center of the lake and held his hands out. The vein in his forehead strained as Sefa held his breath. Out in the middle of the lake, the water started to rise, taking two big spherical forms. In between, a big pillar of lake water rose tall and proud. “Look at that!” Sefa announced excitedly, his voice strained of breath. “Lake dick!”
DATE: Saturday, December 26, 2020
CHARACTERS: Sefa and Linnaea
ABOUT: Desperate times call for desperate measures.
“Nah, yeah... Nah, yeah, I understand… Thanks for the update.”
I abso-fuckin’-lutely do not understand.
Major’s in the fucking hospital? Major? Gabriele was pretty clear about the distinction, so what the fuck is that supposed to mean? Is Major... Back? Did he find a way to get rid of... That other guy? Is what I’m doing right now a complete mistake?
There’s a muffled cry from behind me.
“Oy, shut the fuck up!” I yell at the girl tied up in the backseat of the car.
Okay, I reckon this might look problematic as, but this girl probably did the same thing, if not worse, to my best friend just a few months ago. I wouldn’t have tied her up and boxed her nose if she didn’t bloody deserve it.
“People will be looking for me,” Linnaea whimpers.
“What people? Nobody even knew who you were when I went asking around. Do you even have friends?”
“Fuck you,” she retorts. She’s probably choking on her blood because I can hear the mucus and bubbles warping her voice and it’s fucking gnarly. Linnaea gurgles and I hear her hock the biggest, wettest loogie known to man.
“Oy, cut it out!” I hiss. “This car’s a rental!”
“Fuck you,” she mutters back.
I check the GPS and we’re still thirty minutes away. Not really sure where I’m going, but the guy messaged me to meet him at this address. I think it’s a motel but there was no website, so your guess is as good as mine.
I peek back at Linnaea in the rearview mirror. Her eyes flicker open and closed. She looks like she’s about to pass out.
“Hey,” I call back. “Hey, you better not pass out. You might choke on your blood and I don’t want a corpse in my rental.”
“I’ll die if I want to, fuck you.”
“No, you will not!”
“Killer.” I hear Linnaea hock another loogie onto the floor.
“Oy! You wanna hiding? I told you not to spit in the car!” Fuck! How do I even get blood out of upholstery? JTT probably knows. I’ll have to come up with an explanation for how it got there. Or maybe not, JTT is kind of an airhead.
“Where are you taking me?” Linnaea mumbles from the back seat.
“Uh,” I hesitate. “I don’t know, a motel?”
“What do you mean you don’t know? What’s on the GPS?”
“I don’t know, I just put in the address the guy sent me.”
“What guy?” Linnaea pauses. “Are you… Working with someone?”
“Oy, I told you to shut up!” Fuck, this girl’s sharp. Shouldn’t have said anything.
“You’re collabing on kidnapping me?”
I sigh. It doesn’t matter if she knows, right? “All I’m gonna say is I’m not the only bloke you pissed off lately.”
I hear Linnaea’s breath quiver and it makes me feel gross for a second, like I’m committing some sort of crime.
“You’ll be fine,” I assure her, even if I don’t know if that’s the case. “He really specifically told me to bring you alive, I reckon he’s not trying to hurt you.”
“Then why did you punch me in the face?”
“Because you bloody deserved it,” I mutter back.
I don’t know if it’s because she’s panicking or because it’s getting too hard to talk with her bloody, mucousy throat, but Linnaea finally shuts up.
The rest of the drive is filled with silence and it’s kind of annoying because I start to wonder again if I’m really doing the right thing. I mean, I have a killer in my backseat. And a fucking necromancer. That’s witch shit. That’s not natural.
And yet I still feel guilty for bringing this girl—who murdered my best friend—to a total stranger that I met out on the beach one time. I mean, how do I know that he’s not actually gonna kill her? Sure, he told me that he was a demigod and seemed to know an awful lot about stuff, but that didn’t mean I could trust him, did it?
Then I remember his offer.
“I can bring your friend back.”
How did he know? I hadn’t told anybody what Major—no, Lucien—said to me on the street that day. How could he have known? And was he telling the truth?
There’s only one way to find out.
“You have arrived at your destination,” my phone chirps. I roll up into the parking lot of a dingy motel. The kind a middle-class accountant might rent a room at to fuck their also-married-and-unhappy accountant coworker. The kind where you’d find an old needle sticking out of the bathroom garbage bin. The kind where someone might go to murder someone else.
I see the dude standing outside one of the rooms at the end of the long building and park right in front of him. He stares right into my headlights and I notice for the first time that his eyes are a deep, unnatural purple.
“If I do this for you, you’ll get Major back, right?” I had asked him on the phone last night.
He didn’t answer me then, but the way he’s smiling at me now, like a lion baring its fangs at its prey, makes me fear that the answer is going to be no.
Sefa checked his phone as he strolled into the terminal. “Thirty minutes to kill,” he called out to Major, who was walking along behind him. Sefa stopped and turned to face his friend, his hands resting on the handle of his suitcase. “Last chance to get a gelato before we’re back in the states. Or we can get that, uh,” Sefa snapped, searching for the word. “Little lobster tail with two consonants in the front of it?”
Sefa had just pushed the last of his clothes into his suitcase when the cabin door opened up. “There’s the legend,” he greeted with a smile as Elias came back inside. “Thought I’d have to leave without a goodbye.”
