Page 93 of A Subtle Scar

I looked around. I knew exactly where I wanted to go from here, even if I had no idea where the path would lead me.

“Put me down,” I said.

Charon frowned at me, even as Hermes appeared next to him.

“I can carry you. It’s not an issue,” Charon said.

Hermes growled. “Remember the sharing bit? I can carry him. You just carried him. It’s my turn.”

“But I already have him, and he’s just getting used to this.”

“Can you two shut up for a fucking second, put me on my feet, and just do what you’re told for once?”

Charon’s onyx eyes narrowed on me, and his smile held dark promises. “Mouthy, darling. There are gags for that.”

Stupidly blushing was another thing that wasn’t me. “There aren’t right now,” I mumbled when Charon did finally put me back onto solid ground.

“I like the ones that’ll still let me have your mouth,” Hermes said. “Not talking shouldn’t be an excuse for not swallowing, right?”

He’d come up behind my back so that I was once more sandwiched between these two, and his pupils were wide.

Charon hissed. “What did I tell you about randomly asking for blowjobs, Hermes?”

“You know what, you two stay here and discuss that. I need to…”

I pointed, vaguely, and started walking.

In Psychic Studies 101, our prof, Mme Ribault, had mentioned—along with the statistic about less than two percent of magic users ever being able to achieve a genuine trance state—that those who did go into trances sometimes lacked motor control, self-preservation instincts, lowered inhibitions, and higher function reasoning skills after they came out of one.

My training was good enough that, objectively, I could see that some of those points definitely applied to me in this moment. I simply couldn’t do anything about it and didn’t feel any pressing need to either.

No, the only thing I definitely wanted to do was walk into unknown danger without even having told anyone where I was.

The running water was behind me, and the paths here, while they were in use going by the packed dirt, didn’t seem to see a lot of traffic. There were no stones and gravel, just the kinds of trails marked out by feet regularly pounding along them. I moved as briskly as I could manage, up the little hillock ahead.

When I reached its top, I saw what I’d missed in the aerial view: camouflage tarps on poles hid fields of produce, tiny heads of cabbages, other plants in the early stages of growth.

This was the cult, or whatever it was. Compound. The scary place that drew me close.

“Whoa,” Hermes said. “Humans are really very odd. Ugh. Ronny, look, they’re growing Brussel’s sprouts.”

“I can see that. Chandler, darling, any idea where we are headed?”

I pointed, and said, “There, but I don’t really know. What it is, I mean.”

“Of course you don’t. We’ll, no helping it now.”

“Oh,” Hermes said, and I looked around to see him walk across the neatly planted rows of crops. “Their potatoes are failing. See this? It’s diseased.”

I didn’t see anything because the closest I ever got to my produce was the damn farmers’ market, but I nodded at Hermes.

“Maybe a ritual to cure it, then,” I said.

“The magic they worked had nothing concerning fertility or growth that I recognized,” Charon said.

He’d folded his wings away and was walking next to me.

“Nor I.” Hermes wiped his hands on his jeans and caught up to us.