Gathering Ashes Chapter 3

  Ambrosia had always been familiar with death. As a bounty hunter, she had been raised with the idea that anyone could die: family, friends, and even unlucky clients. In a job as dangerous as her own she knew better than anyone to be prepared for the worst. She had steeled herself for misfortune. At any moment her death was imminent and she knew it. At one point her will was updated regularly, but now she had no one to leave her possessions to; it now sat in a folder in the back of her closet, slowly collecting dust.

    With all the preparation that had gone into dying, she was almost disappointed to open her eyes to a ceiling of dark clouds. If this was the afterlife, she was severely disappointed; her head was pounding with an approaching migraine and her bones felt like they had been melted down and twisted into pretzels.

    A dark gloom hung in the air. The soft pitter-patter of rain had increased to a near torrent. She could see it splattering onto the concrete, louder than it looked, and slowly soaking her to the bone. Her head felt fuzzy. Ambrosia squeezed her eyes shut and tried to fight off the pounding headache.

    Did the spell fail? That wasn’t impossible, as sometimes spells simply didn’t work, but it seemed a bit difficult for even a sloppy shade to realize that a fatal one hadn’t done its job. Still, she couldn’t complain. As long as she got out of this relatively unfazed she would mark this disastrous night as a success.

    The sound of movement made her open her eyes. Through the dim light she could see two reflective eyes leering out from the shadow of a dumpster. They regarded her with disdain, as if she had failed some task.

    “Shoo!” she tried to snap at the cat, but all she heard was a strangled bark.

    She froze. The sound echoed briefly through the alley, only to be swallowed up by rain. The eyes blinked out. Ambrosia tried to scramble to her feet, but her legs weren’t working right and she flopped to the ground. Don't panic, she told herself, heart pounding, it's just a minor motor skill malfunction. Happens all the time after a big spell.

    Ambrosia looked down, expecting to see her hands mutated and mutilated, but was instead met with the sight of short white fur and toes ending in blunt claws. Paws. She had paws. Wiggling her toes, she discovered that she indeed had control over them. They were flesh, blood, and fur, not plastic.

    A loud yowl ripped through the alleyway. The panicking wizard attempted to scramble to her feet, falling flat onto her face a few times before she managed to stand in a vaguely upright position against the wet brick wall, wobbling on all fours. It took all she had not to let loose another yowl as she craned her neck back as far as she could. Yes, that was definitely a tail sticking out from the tip of her spine. Hey, she thought, head light, That’s new.

    A puddle had formed not a few feet away. She stumbled towards it, half dragging herself as her legs refused to work properly, and peered in.

    White fur, splotched with brown over one eye, and a short muzzle greeted her. Two long ears dangled from the sides of her head. The worst part was the part that had changed the least; as she gazed into the reflection, two dark eyes gazed back at her. They were still brown, so dark they were almost black, with a fierce blaze of passion that glimmered even now and flecks of gold barely distinguishable in the dark light. There was no mistaking her own gaze.

    She staggered back, feeling sick to her stomach. There was no way that the face looking back had belonged to her. But what other explanation was there?  The concrete was rough under her paws. Lifting one, she awkwardly tried to twist it around to look at her palm. The black skin was calloused and rough, with smudged, faded orange runes that were so twisted in trying to fit with her hand’s new form that they were surely useless. What really convinced her that she was looking at her own hand was the thick scar that ran through the center like a strike of lightning.

    What kind of spell was that? she wondered. It certainly had done its job, if its job was to make her a fifth of her normal size. The part where it made her a dog was much more distressing. She was still trying to process her lack of hands when the distant sound of metal smashing into concrete snapped her out of her stupor. She heard it as clear as a gunshot. She pressed herself against the wall, fur bristling and tail rigid.

    A shout drifted through the rain. “Watch where you’re going, you idiot! Do you want to wake up the whole city?”

    There was a grunt and a muffled reply. Ambrosia felt her blood go cold. She didn't know why, but her mind immediately screamed at her, Pig demons!

    “Oh, shut up. We have work to do! Are you sure the trail leads this way?” The voice was definitely female.

    “Duh,” grunted the first voice, “My nose is always right!”

    “Shut up! You said that last time, and we wasted an hour slinking around a deli.”

    “What? I was hungry.”

    There was a slapping sound and the female shouted, “Just find the girl! If she thinks that she can escape our noses and get away with capturing our brothers she's got another thing coming. I don't care how shaky the trail is, just find her again.”

    It was time to go; panicking could come later, and she was too rattled to fight. A quick scan of the alleyway alerted her to a spot of orange under the dumpster, where her chalk had been carelessly tossed. Her short arms were just barely long enough to scoop it out. Had she tried, she probably could have squirmed all the way under.

    Ambrosia was thankful that she had at least one weapon, even though she wasn't sure if she could use it in her rattled state. She gripped the chalk in her teeth and darted out into the street. The moon was still low, peering out through the clouds. Not much time could have passed since she had last been awake. Looking around, she realized that she wasn't sure where she was. When in doubt, head north. She turned to trot in the opposite direction of the voices.

    As she traveled, lights began to appear in windows. Vehicles moved sluggishly through the darkness. Every once in a while someone would walk down the sidewalk, making her duck into the shadows and wait them out, but for the most part people were inside or asleep, away from the sleepy rain even as she made her way into the more populated side of town. Her senses were sharp and alert; she could hear cars rumbling from many blocks away; she could smell exhaust and oil in their wake, coating the concrete and intermixing with the stale scents of food and mold and thousands of other smells she couldn't place. Had it been the middle of the day she would have been overwhelmed.

    The demons were still following. They weren’t exactly the stealthiest of creatures, but years of practice had given them a good sense for the layout of back alleys and shortcuts away from the street. Brief gusts of wind gave her routine whiffs of pig demon scent—grease and stale beer—that she would have recognized even as a human. She knew that her keen smell didn't give her an advantage though--if her nose was sharp, their noses were sharper.

    She ducked into a doorway to catch her breath. Her lungs burned, even after such a short run, and her legs ached with the unfamiliar movements of running on all fours. She tried to focus on the discomfort and to avoid thinking too hard about her situation. Act first, think later; that had always been her motto and it had kept her alive this long.

    Admittedly, this wasn’t the worse situation she had been in. Now that she was confident that she wouldn’t blast off her own feet while trying to fight back, a few quick fire balls would be all she needed to get them off her tail and give her time to call up Ralf—once she found a phone, that is. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too hard to reverse the spell. Overall, she wasn’t faring too badly. This night wasn’t worse than the time she had been stuck in a lamp with a talkative genie who had rather strong opinions on the nation’s political system. That had been a painful weekend.

    She closed her eyes. It was time to stop running.  

    Finding her core had always been an easy task, even as a child. It was the center of her magic, a reflection of her strength, the smoldering flame was always just beneath the surface. All she had to do was tap into it. But at the moment, when it should have been leaping with the adrenaline pumping through her veins, she felt nothing.

    Deeper. It had to be somewhere.

    Finally, her senses brushed against something. But it wasn’t a roaring flame; it was cool and unresponsive, a burnt out coal left over from a blaze. She poked at it, trying to nudge it to life, but it responding with nothing. Her blood chilled, eyes popping open. She tried to shove her core to life, hoping to force it into lending her magic, but all it let out was a cough of smoke. She was powerless.

    The smell of grease was suddenly overpowering as a pinkish figure blocked her view. There was a flash of triumph on its face, but that quickly evaporated when it realized what it was looking at. She snarled, catching it off guard, and darted between its legs, across the street, and into an alleyway. Her brief victory was soon crushed, however, when she turned the corner and had to skid to a halt before the high chain link fence barring her way.  

    There was a scramble of feet behind her. When the demons burst into sight all they saw was the tip of her tail disappearing from beneath the fence and into the bushes beyond. Ambrosia grimaced as she snaked among the shrubberies, feeling twigs prick at her face. A loud clash and subsequent cursing told her that her captors were having a bit more trouble getting past the obstacle. At least her new size had one advantage. But she would rather have her magic.

    A pink paper was trapped among the tangles of a strong-smelling plant. She peered at it, curious where she had ended up. Annual School Carnival, the flyer proclaimed, lasting all night. Don’t miss it! Creeping along a small path, she soon verified this claim. Half a dozen booths were set up along a large school building, covered in tarps and umbrellas to fend off the rain, and two more were being taken down and transported to the safety of the gym. Yellow light spilled from the high windows, and through the open door she could see people milling around. Excited shouts floated through the air. Even from across the field she could smell fried foods and buttery popcorn. Over all, it was exactly the sort of scene you would expect from a school carnival.

    Perfect, she thought smugly and slipped towards the light.
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    Yeah, perfect. If this is perfect then I’m the queen of England.

    Ambrosia shifted her weight, trying to avoid the steady dripping of water that was trying to nail a hit directly in her eye. Not ten feet away a young man shoved ineffectually against the tangled stacks of folding chairs, grumbling and cursing when the pile shifted precariously.

    “Come on, you stupid dog!” he said, crouching down and glaring at her beneath the chair legs. She glared right back.

    The logic behind sneaking into the hubbub of the carnival was fairly sound, she thought; the demons wouldn’t dare showing themselves in a highly populated event of humans just for a bit of revenge. That would earn them a bit more than a single low-rank bounty hunter after their tails. Maybe they would even get a hunter sent directly from the Council. No, the logic wasn’t the problem. The problem was the execution.

    She wasn’t quite used to her new body. Running was quite easy, provided she didn’t think too hard about it, but the moment she tried to do something complicated like, say, sneaking through a carnival in a brightly lit gymnasium, that things started to go wrong. Moving in this body seemed to be like riding a bike—she never forgot, but she couldn’t remember the actual learning. It seemed that instincts were engraved in her brain, but they didn’t appreciate requests on how to act.

    So here she was; sitting beneath the sports bleachers, amidst a maze of folding chairs that seemed to have been arranged by an orangutan. Fence stretched to one side and behind her the escape was blocked by a storage shack and a tangle of band equipment. Peering through the stands, she could barely see the light of the gymnasium across the football field.

    She wasn’t exactly sure how this had happened in the first place. One moment she was clumsily creeping behind a stall and the next moment a toddler had grabbed her tail and startled her out into the open. Before long she had zigzagged her way through the crowd, knocking over a popcorn stall and causing general chaos until she managed to duck away and escape with only one grumpy pursuer. He seemed determined to catch her.

    “Buzz off,” she growled, which only made his eyes narrow.

    A new voice entered the fray. “Uh...Kevin? What are you doing?”

    “Eva!” The head disappeared from her view. “I wasn’t doing anything—wait, what are you doing out here?”

    “Uh, I was reading—“

    “In the rain?”

    “I have an umbrella. Is...is something wrong?”

    He heaved a sigh. “This stupid dog somehow got into the gym and messed up the carnival. Even spilled Mr. Beet’s stall. I’m trying to get the thing out of here. Speaking of the carnival, shouldn’t you be at your stall?”

    “I finished my shift. Anyway, it’s too crowded in there.” She shifted her weight, “A dog, you say?”

    “Yeah.” There was a pause, and then an excited tone entered the man’s voice. “That’s right! Eva, didn’t I hear once that you're good with animals?”

    “Um—“

    “Can you take it from here? I need to get back to the carnival.”

    Another pause. Finally the girl sighed, obviously unable to come up with a way out. She must have nodded because the man said “Great! Thanks!” and his footsteps retreated.

    A head peered under the chairs. She was young, obviously a student of the high school, with short black hair and a splash of freckles across her nose. A pair of bright blue eyes sat behind rain-splotched glasses. Ambrosia growled. Those eyes reminded her too much of her last encounter with another wizard.

    “Hey there,” the girl said softly, “Come on out, OK? I’m not going to hurt you.”

    I don’t think I should be the one afraid of being hurt, Ambrosia thought, baring her teeth.
 
    The girl shrank back slightly, but still spoke in a quiet voice, her eyes trying to lock with Ambrosia’s own. “There’s no need to hide. I promise I won't do anything bad. We'll get you out and somewhere warm... you look too smart to be a stray, so you must have an owner."

    She frowned. After a moment Ambrosia’s path was blocked even more as the girl squatted down on the wet grass and held out a hand, reaching as far as she could. “Come on, now. Your eyes are... kind of weird... but I’m not going to hurt you. I just want—“

    Ambrosia darted forward, sinking her teeth into the offered hand. With a yelp the girl jerked back, hand going to her chest, as the wizard darted past. Hm, tastes like grape, Ambrosia couldn’t help but think as she sprinted out into the drizzling rain. Where to now?

    The answer came in the form of a loud shuffling of underbrush from behind the fence, something she wouldn’t have noticed without her new ears. She froze, forgetting Eva. A pair of pink ears peeked out from the bushes, and even closer, directly behind the crisscrossed metal, a large creature paced back and forth on four legs. It grinned when it saw her.

    “Pigs?” a voice whispered behind her, “W-what on earth are pigs doing here? Those things are huge!”

    “Go back!” Ambrosia snapped, turning to face the girl, “Get to the gym!”

    Of course Eva didn’t understand her words and only shrunk back from the furious barking. A loud series of crashes brought their attention back to the demons, both of whom were smashing their heads against the fences, tusks slashing away at the thin metal. The female looked up, eyes glinting with malice.

    “Yes, come out little pup,” she sneered, “Your little disguise can’t fool our noses.”

    At this point Eva looked like she was about to faint. Ambrosia sincerely hoped that she didn’t, because then she would have to deal with the guilt of causing her death at the hands of pig demons. Her night was already going badly enough without that on her conscience. Of course, considering their current lack of any form of communication or defense, just getting one of them out of this alive was going to a hassle.

    Ambrosia darted towards the shocked girl. She wasn’t sure exactly how to attract attention, so she slammed her head into Eva’s leg and let out a sharp yell that ended as a bark. Eva gasped, but when she looked down the dog was already running across the field. Come on! Ambrosia thought, looking back at her with a mixture between hope and frustration, Don’t just stand there, run!

    Thankfully the girl took the hint--or, more likely, didn't want to face the ferocious pigs and deduced that they were between her and the school--and darted across the wet grass. Behind them the demons burst through the metal fence and thundered after them.