Chapter Two - "Assuming it is a head"

Little Larry isn't a bad guy, but he's just never been quite up to snuff for the front lines Druid life. Oh, don't get me wrong, LL's a hell of a magical mind, but what he's never been great at is being under pressure. In terms of researchers, LL might be one of the best on the planet. That won't help much during a firefight, though. That's where the Druids are supposed to be. We're generally the warrior caste of modern magicians. We're front-liners, designed to keep everyone else in check, and it's not exactly the home of the scholarly and book-laden. Which isn't to say we can't do those things - it's just not the number one thing that's expected of us.

The Druids have a long, well-documented history of being justice's executioners.

But LL, despite the fact that he was 6'6" from the time he was 12, was a gentle giant. He'd always done poorly in combat classes and exams, and his improvisational skills would make you yearn for a regional theater group in Skokie, IL. He wasn't the kind of person you would ever want to be riding shotgun and keeping bogies off your six with the street sweeper.

That was the reason he'd sort of been softly exiled to the amber mines in Wyoming. Danzour Amber Mine was an archeological site that required a druid on-hand to oversee it, but that druid wasn't expected to be much of a combatant. Nothing combat oriented had happened in the amber mines during my lifetime and that was to be expected, because there wasn't anything alive down there, no matter how wonderfully preserved the past was.

I remember the first time I was down in Danzour, and it scared the absolute crap out of me. I think I was eleven or twelve when Dad said he was going to take me and Charlotte out to see something cool. And, despite how I felt about it at the time, Dad was right - it was definitely something cool.

The Danzour Amber Mine was, perhaps, the greatest hidden vault of magical history on the planet, perfectly on display and as ageless as it was from the day it had been captured over a thousand years ago. You see, sometime between a thousand and eleven hundred years ago, a cabal of mages known as The Enclave had built their underground headquarters near what's now Cheyenne, Wyoming. They were an order of mages who were known for their wild experiments and their total recklessness in terms of research. The druids of the time referred to them as 'vandals and reprobates,' when translated into modern English.

Anyway, The Enclave were assholes, and they'd always been assholes. Like most assholes, they didn't give a whole lot of thought to the repercussions of their actions, and those actions inevitably came back to bite them in the ass when they just decided to go pissing about with magics they didn't understand and couldn't control.

What we've been able to determine is this - they opened some kind of portal that apparently led into another dimension, and as a retaliation mechanism from the other side, the foreign dimension flooded in a kind of tree sap like a molasses invasion, slowly drowning everyone in the base, while invaders from that realm poured in, seemingly able to move through the substance with little difficulty. We call it 'amber' even though it probably really isn't.

A thousand years later, we've been able to track some of the fight through the swirl patterns left in portions of the amber, as well as the bodies in their wake. Mostly, however, all the members of the Enclave who died there are perfectly preserved, frozen for all eternity in the creepiest yellow crystal prison you could ever imagine.

At some point during the invasion, however, the incoming force tripped some sort of stasis spell trap, and that's why half a dozen of the insectoid bipedal soldiers remained frozen and lifeless in the settled substance to this day. Our theory is that it settled quickly, far too quickly for the invaders to respond once they'd been caught by the stasis trap. And what had once been their greatest weapon became the tool of their own demise. There were six invader bodies in areas that we could see, but the Enclave's base extended downwards for several levels, and we haven't dug down that far, because the amber or resin or sap or whatever the hell it is, it isn't easy to remove.

Since we discovered this place a hundred years or so ago, the Druids have been excavating, carving out tunnels, researching and examining what we can out of the carnage left behind, but it's very slow, slow work and has to be done carefully and methodically. Not for fear of damaging the site, but for fear of damaging the tools. We've sent down all sorts of things, from purely mechanical to magicked up the wazoo. Our best day of tunneling, we made maybe half an inch worth of progress. It is slow, slow, slow going.

So, for the most part, there's a crew down there, sanding away, trying to slowly work their way into getting closer to things, trying to extract things, and trying to learn what we can about both the invaders, who we've taken to calling the Zaxxix, and the Enclave themselves.

It's been a long slog to get as much as we have, which isn't much, but honestly, it's where Druids go to die. There's no stress, no excitement, no fear... just cold, lifeless, unmoving stillness.

Dull as fuck.

I'd never really worried about what was going on out in Montana. Shit, I'd never really even thought much about Little Larry and the Amber Mine, other than the yearly postcard his family sent ours and we sent his.

And there I was, reading what might as well have been his Last Will and Testament.

Fuck, that wasn't how I wanted to end my day.

I ended up calling Larry's wife, Rosalyn, and she said he'd been in the mines for the last few days, but that she'd seen him three days ago, even if he looked a little distracted. That said, she couldn't enter the mine to check on him, as she wasn't a Druid, even though she was married to one. (She was also a lycanthrope, and they had an allergy to the 'amber', which was why LL had to make sure he was totally clean before he came home.) I told her that I'd gotten a box with a magical relic in it and told her that I wasn't sure if he was dead, or if maybe he'd just forgotten to reset the autosender. She was concerned, but not completely panicked, and said she hoped she'd be able to call me and tell me not to worry but if we could stop over in Cheyenne as soon as we could, she would appreciate it.

I think I was most chilled by the last thing she said to me, which was, "Always knew that mine was going to be the death of him."

And I haven't even gotten to the relic yet, weird as fuck thing that it was.

Inside of the box was a metallic pyramid made out of some sort of silverish substance that looked different colors under different kinds of light, with all sorts of strange markings on the exterior of it, which we assumed was the Zaxxix language, although nobody was entirely certain of that. And it glowed through a number of small pores on the surfaces of the object, strange, eerie lights, green and purple, alternating but sometimes repeating. It had been doing that since before it was extracted from the mines, and we'd guessed it had been doing that for the thousand or so years it had spent encased in the amber. That alone was pretty fucking creepy.

The 'eyes' were worse.

We called them 'eyes,' but whether or not they were actually that had never been proven one way or the other. Still, there were six light holes with pinpricks of light that tended to focus on whatever was happening around them, and over the years, different people have had different opinions about what they were or what they were doing. Dad always told me he thought they were motion trackers, but not signs of sentience. Uncle Dwight insisted they were actual eyes and that thing was an unliving head that refused to die, and he didn't even like being in the same room as it.

My personal opinions leaned more towards Dwight's than Dad's. I've always thought there was something sentient going on inside of there, and I didn't like leaving the thing outside of the box, for fear it might be spying on me. Charlotte thought much like my father, and accused me often of being needlessly paranoid, although I was always fond of reminding her that my paranoia had saved both her life and my own more than a few times.

Charlotte pulled her Mini-Cooper to a stop in the alleyway in front of my back door and garage, and gave her horn a single beep, to catch my attention. I closed up the box and tucked it under one arm, grabbing my duffle bag with clothes and weapons in it with my other arm as I headed down to meet her in the alleyway. I opened the rear hatch and tossed my things in there, seeing her two bits of luggage, one of which was a standard suitcase for clothes and the other of which, a much more industrial-looking black and silver hardshell, that I assumed was carrying all her weapons. The box containing the totem was big enough that it laid across most of the back seat. "We're going to have to make a stop near Cheyenne along the way," I told her. "I'll explain more in a minute."

I headed back into the building and up the stairs, and headed into my apartment to turn on all the alarms, traps and guardians, so that anyone attempting to break into my place would be taking their life in their own hands, risking their continued existence. Not that any of it would be a detriment to Quincy, though, as the little bugger came and went as he saw fit as if all of my defenses weren't there at all.

The very last thing I did was grab a small box from my safe, pulling out a small leather pouch, one of the sets of maintenance tools for the SoulEnders. I was hoping not to need to use the weapons on this trip, but I learned long ago exactly how much my hopes counted for in such things, and it was always better to be prepared instead of unprepared. We were also going to have long stretches of road where I could give the two weapons a long needed proper tune-up, knowing that while the mountain sights were pretty at first, eventually I would have several hours to meticulously clean and polish each part of the two firearms that I tried to keep on me at all times.

The best tool is one carefully maintained, as Dad always said.

(Uncle Oscar always claimed the best tool was the one nobody knew you had on you. I'd learned to respect that opinion just as much.)

After the house was locked up, I headed back down to the car and crawled into the passenger side. Charlotte had insisted she was going to do all the driving for the entire trip, but I was giving that about five or six hours before she changed her mind and let me behind the wheel of her precious baby.

I'd seen lovers come and go for my sister, but I don't think I'd ever seen her love anything more than she loved her car. She got the car for her eighteenth birthday, and she's taken very good care of it since then. She named it Mifune after Toshiro Mifune, so I couldn't much argue with her about that. That said, the car had encountered more than its far share of damage, outside of my sister's control, obviously.

"Cheyenne, huh?" my sister said to me. "What's Little Larry gotten himself into now?"

"He might be dead," I said in as flat a tone as possible, knowing it would put her on the back foot.

"Wha... what?"

"He might not," I added. "He might have simply forgotten to reset the date on his autosender, but it's also possible something went wrong in the Amber Mines and he's died down there."

"Why doesn't someone go in and check?"

"Because only druids are allowed in there, Char," I said with a sigh. "Not people who have married into the family, but just direct descendants of the original druid line. You know that. And the mines are considered such a low priority, there's generally only ever one druid on station there. Betty, bless her heart, can't go into the mines any more than Rosalyn can. And their son, Benny, isn't old enough to venture into there on his own, seeing as he's only four, otherwise you know Ros might've sent him in to look for his Daddy. But if something did go wrong down there, she doesn't want to lose her son along with her husband."

"So we're not rushing there now because we're assuming he's dead?" she said as she started to pull the Mini Cooper out of the alleyway, heading towards the Bay Bridge, so we could begin the long trek eastward.

"We're not rushing because Larry said not to in his note," I shrugged. "He seemed to think something like this was inevitable, which is strange enough as it is, considering as far as I knew, nothing exciting had happened in the Amber Mines in the better part of a millennia."

"And he sent you a letter?"

"Along with the relic."

"Oh, not that bloody head they found."

"First off, we don't know it's a head."

"I've seen it plenty of times to know that whatever else you might think of that... thing," Charlotte said, disdain in her voice. "It's a head."

"Fine, assuming it is a head--"

"Which it is--"

"It's been encased in amber for thousands of years," I said, amusement dripping from my voice. "Nothing lives that long. Nothing. So you needn't worry about it. We'll manage."

"I still don't like the idea of hauling that thing around with us, especially in close proximity to the totem," she told me. "But if you're sure we need to take it back to Cheyenne, then I'll trust you."

The car pulled up onto I-80 heading east, as we started to leave San Francisco by getting onto the Bay Bridge. I felt a pang of nervousness about leaving my hometown in the hands of the Lord of Daggers. Simon wasn't all that bad, despite all my bitching and moaning about him, but there's just something unsettling about having to put something you value under someone else's watch. I was sure it would be fine. I just needed to not being so easily startled by it.

What I was startled by was my sister's choice in music. We were at the Treasure Island point of the Bay Bridge when I guess Charlotte decided if we weren't going to be talking at first, we should be listening to some music. And when the dulcet tones of N*SYNC shouting "Bye! Bye! Bye!" at me, I turned to glare at her, even though she seemed to be happily singing along with them.

Most days, it's easy to forget that my sister is still a bit of a girlie girl at heart, and she has a love for those silly boy band pop groups she grew up with. Despite the fact that she can field strip a.50 cal rifle in just under two minutes, she still went through all the typical things a teenage girl went through as well, and that included having, what I considered, some truly horrendous musical taste.

But she was driving, it was her car and the last thing I wanted to do was be the bratty younger brother who refused to let his sister have her way.

Around Fairfield, though, she started laughing, though, completely out of nowhere. "You were really going to suck it up and listen to me relive my teenage years on the stereo for a full week without saying anything?" she said, giggling through the hand covering her mouth.

"It's your car, Shar," I said, exasperated. "We've never done a roadtrip together, just the two of us, so I wasn't sure what kind of rules you were going to put down."

"I love you, baby brother, but I could tell around the time Ricky Martin came on twenty minutes ago that you were getting ready to pop," she said. "I know you brought your iPod with you, and you've always got whatever cables you need, so do you want to plug it in and make me listen to some of your speed thrash metal or whatever it is you're listening to these days?"

"I haven't listened to thrash metal since I was, like, fifteen, sis. Here, try this... I think you'll like it... it's... complicated," I said to her, as I plugged in my iPod and put on Tool's most recent album, "10,000 Days," even though it was three or four years old at that point. They had to be due for a new album pretty soon, I figured, but I suspected the complex polyrhythms and wild tempo swings would catch Charlotte's attention, and from the moment Maynard's voice kicked in with 'Vicarious,' I think my sister was hooked.

That kept us busy past Sacramento, as my sister suddenly wanted to learn as much as she could about what seemed to be her new favorite band. Although she didn't connect with the earlier stuff from "Undertow" quite as well, she loved "Lateralus," and we had to listen to "Schism" five times in a row before she would let me move on.

It was around that point that we pulled into a Flying J, stopping to get gas and snacks, and to stretch our legs. We'd been making good time, doing about 95 while a protective spell around her car kept any police from looking our way. Sure, I get it that we're setting a bad example, but we could've been going a lot faster if we'd been willing to be more careless, which we weren't.

Once we got out of the car, I immediately moved to start putting gas into Mifune. "Y'know, we're gonna have to talk to each other during this trip, sis," I said to her.

"Oh, I know," Charlotte tells me. "I'm just trying to figure out how we start to make up for a couple of years of trying not to piss each other off or tell each other how to do the other's job." She sighs, reaching over to put her hand on my shoulder. "I know Dad made the right call, but it still hurts to know that I didn't live up to expectations."

I shook my head and wrapped my arms around my sister's shoulders, giving her a big bear hug. Despite the fact that she was older than me, she'd still been considering our father's decision to give me the title of Gunslinger and her the title of Huntmistress to be something of a slight. "Sis, Dad told you time and time again - it wasn't like one was better or worse than the other. We just... we have different skills, different strengths and weaknesses."

"Mmm... well, it seems like the Gunslinger is the position that requires more strengths than Huntmistress or Huntmaster, if you'd taken it."

I shook my head slightly. "I'm not built to be a leader, sis," I told her as I let her out of the hug. "And while Dad shared command with the other druids, he'd always made it clear to both of us that he was only doing it to help Uncle Oscar, who never really settled into the job all that well, considering how late in life he had to take it on. Dad always expected Oscar would eventually step up, but he was only Huntmaster for about eight years before the accident, and you took over the gig. You've done far better in the leadership aspect than he ever did, and you and I both know that."

"You're better with people than I am, Dale," Charlotte frowned. "I don't know why you keep insisting otherwise."

"No, I'm better with small numbers of people than you are, say, one-on-one or three or four at a time," I laughed. "You ask me to organize a fighting force like the Hunters, and I'm going to fall apart in three steps or less. All of your crew knows better than to let me lead an incursion, and I know better than to try."

"I suppose you're right," she said to me, resigned to her fate. "I should lean into my own strengths and not worry about my own perceived shortcomings." The car clicked as the gas pump turned off. "Looks like we're fueled up. I should go in and get snacks, though. And we should both probably use the bathroom before we get back on the road."

"A'ight, I'll use the can and then I'll meet you inside, so you're not responsible for grabbing me snacks."

"You're afraid I'd grab you something healthy, aren't you?"

"I know you would, sis," I said walking to the side of the building, so I could use their public restroom. No matter where you go, no matter what you do, no public bathroom is ever in that good of condition, and this one was no exception. It was dingy, it was grimy, and I desperately needed to take a shit, so I steeled my resolve, found the cleanest stall I could and did my business, while I heard what sounded like a car backfire in front of the building.

I wasn't sure if washing my hands in that sink would actually make them any cleaner, but I took a gamble and ran cold water over my fingers anyway, shaking them dry because no way in hell was I going to trust whatever excuse they had for paper towels in that place.

So with slightly damp hands, I made my way back out of the bathroom and headed into the gas station, only to know immediately something was wrong, as I felt the barrel of a gun pressed against the small of my back.

"Where do you think you're going, fucko?" the man growled at me.

"Look, man," I said calmly, "I just came in here to get a soda."

"Sit the fuck down there with the others!" he shouted, shoving me towards a small group of people huddled in a mass off to the side of the counter, a second man with a shotgun looming over them. Both of the men were wearing ski masks, but I got a quick read on them. Mid-twenties. Probably tweakers, based on the slight shakes I was seeing, which made them a lot more dangerous. They had terrible trigger discipline, and it was just as likely those guns would go off without them intending to instead of them being pointed and fired intentionally.

It was exactly the kind of situation I didn't want us to be in.

I moved to sit down next to Charlotte, who growled at me, "You didn't hear the gunshot?"

"Thought it sounded like a backfire." I glanced up, keeping my voice as low as possible, seeing there was a brunette goth Latina in one of the shortest skirts I'd ever seen huddling next to her, as my sister held the woman's hand. "Looks like you were distracted yourself. Just the two of them?"

"Yes, now quiet," she said to me. "I'm trying to think of a way out of this."

The guy with the shotgun turned to point it at the clerk behind the counter. "You. Empty the register and the safe into a plastic bag."

"I can't open the safe, man, it's on a timelock," the clerk stutters.

"Fuck!" the guy with the pistol says. It's a.38 and it's seen better days. That model was built with durability in mind, but it wasn't all that accurate at a distance. He turns and waves the Saturday Night Special in our direction. "All of you! Wallets, phones, car keys, on the floor, now!"

Charlotte looks at me and frowns, and I know exactly what she's thinking. If I move too much, they're going to see the SoulEnders in their holsters, and this whole thing's going to fall apart. That's the last thing we need, this turning into a shootout, just because I don't know if I can ensure the safety of everyone around us.

"Hey! Longhair!" the guy with the pistol says, stepping in close to me, putting the gun right in my face, cocking the hammer back. "Don't think. Just do."

He doesn't realize he's just given me a gameplan.

The motions come naturally, and I see Charlotte moving to try and rush the guy with the shotgun. I didn't want her to make that move, but Shar has always been willing to rock'n'roll at the drop of a hat, and when I see her charging, I know we've only got a few seconds before everything gets out of hand. On my right wrist is a small tattoo that looks like a pile of ash. I push two fingertips against it and turn them ninety degrees clockwise as I feel the spell sizzling off my body, taking effect in the area around me. Every bit of gunpowder in a 300-foot-radius just turned to salt, so neither of these two is playing with a loaded gun anymore.

At that range, it's easy to just bring my hands up and jam one of my fingers against the hammer of the gun before he's even had a chance to recognize the movement. By the time he does, there's two reasons that gun won't go off.

Within moments, Charlotte's got the shotgun away from the guy near the counter and I'm using the pistol grip of the.38 to club my guy across the face with it, knocking him out. I see Shar jam the shoulder stock of the shotgun into her guy's face, and I'm pretty I hear the guy's nose break.

The next few minutes go by in a flurry, as law enforcement comes and asks us plenty of questions, telling us what a stupid thing it was to take them on ourselves, although once the county sheriff arrives, he knows of our reputation, and is happy enough to let us wrap it up.

The entire time, the goth girl is clinging to my sister, looking up at her in adoration. I sighed, knowing we were done for the night, so I headed across the street to the Motel 6 and checked in, getting us two rooms, while Charlotte continued flirting with the girl, whose name was Maria.

Day one of the trip and my sister was already getting laid and I wasn't.

Fucking great.