21 – Back to back

21 – Back to back

Mia heard the knock and turned her bleary gaze away from her reflection in the mirror. She looked terrible. Well, compared to how she usually looked these days she did at least. The deepening dark circles under her eyes and the lethargic look in the eyes themselves entirely didn’t fit the barbie-like look the rest of her face had going for it.

Not that the rest of her face made her all that happy now that she was looking at it. She pinched her cheeks, pulling at them this way and that. They were irritatingly smooth. She couldn’t even see the pores of her skin. It looked fake as hell, like she had more makeup on than the walls had plaster.

Well, maybe she shouldn’t have stayed up late. Maybe she should have stopped after the first rune settled down in her runic-model, or the second, or the third. Mia calculated the number of hours she would get to sleep and reasoned four hours would be enough for her just this once, but damn, did she not account for someone starting a shootout with some monsters in the next city block at the ass crack of dawn.

You’d think moving away from the US would have made firearms rarer, but Austrians were damned wild. Thirty out of a hundred people owned a gun. Well, Mia hoped the goblins liked the taste of lead as much as they liked her Arcane Blasts.

Mia wet her hands in the lukewarm water and slapped her cheeks. It stung, but at least the pain woke her up a bit. Oh, how she missed coffee. She felt like a corpse for the first third of the day without her morning cup.

Another knock reached her ears, and Mia let out a sigh, tearing her gaze away from her reflection. Her hair was a tangled mess she pulled into a loose ponytail and she didn’t bother to put on any makeup. She looked like death warmed over, and a little makeup wouldn’t hide that enough to be worth the effort.

“I’m coming,” she said as she reached for the door, paused and stood on her tiptoes to glance through the peephole. The knocks didn’t sound like Jeff’s. The man always beat on the wood like it owed him money, as did most of the men Mia knew. These knocks sounded gentle, almost feminine. Sure enough, she saw her blonde bird-murdering partner from the day before standing on the other side.

“Hi there,” Mia said, trying not to sound like she was about to fall asleep. “Come in? I’m going to get dressed then we can go.”

“Ah, sure. Good morning?” Lina said, stepping in and looking around the room awkwardly. Her gaze stopped on the many signs of the bird’s rampage, though it lingered on the abomination of duct tape and wood that was their table after Mark ‘fixed it up’.

“It’s neither morning, nor is it good,” Mia mumbled under her breath as she nevertheless gave a lazy nod of acknowledgement at Lina’s words. The sun was barely above the horizon, only psychos woke up this early, especially in the summer. “Get comfortable, I’ll be back in a minute.”

For the third day of the apocalypse, just to change things up a bit, Mia decided to wear jeans shorts. Though she was already regretting foregoing the comfy cotton shorts by the time she got back to the living room.

“Let’s go?” She said, startling Lina, who was peeking out through a tiny gap left in the barricade covering the windows.

“Oh, right!” the girl spun around and nodded, quickly striding up to Mia. “Sooo, goblin hunting, right? You said you’d show me today?”

I don’t think I explicitly promised anything. Mia mused, then shrugged. “Sure.”

“So,” Lina spoke up once they were outside the flat. “Ehm. How are you? You look pretty ... tired.”

“I feel worse than I look,” Mia grumbled, throwing a weak glare at the blonde. “How could you sleep with that?”

She could still hear it. Distant cracks of air, the thundering echoes of gunshots and not the cute low calibre ones either, but the sort that goes through concrete. Someone pulled out some heavy-duty stuff from God knows where and was probably going wild on the monsters.

“With what?” Lina sounded confused.

“The gunshots?” Mia frowned, looking up at Lina to check whether she was messing with her. She seemed genuinely befuddled. “You don’t hear it?”

“No?” Lina blinked, then squinted as she tilted her head this way and that, prying her ears. “No. I don’t hear anything.”

Mia groaned. Stupid pointy ears were making her life harder again, it seemed. “Well. Damn.”

“What?” Lina asked. “What’s up?”

“These ears,” Mia said, barely stopping herself from flicking the triangular organs in irritation. It was one thing to embarrass herself before Mark and another entirely to do so before someone who was practically a stranger. And cute. “Aren’t just for show I suppose. I thought I could sort of turn down the volume, but it seems I was only partially right.”

“How so?” Lina asked. “What’s it like? All I got from that awakening were these freaky eyes. Honestly, I’m pretty jealous.”

“Don’t be,” Mia said, still feeling grouchy without her morning coffee. “I got off lightly with these silly things. I could have ended up with bark for skin or whatnot.”

“It’s fine.” Mia lied. She spent nights staying up with her little brother when they were little, listening to their mother cry locked in the bathroom. She’d never be ‘fine’ with having lived through that. Still, that was hardly something she wanted to talk about with a girl she barely knew. “As for why Graz? The house was here and I decided to move back here after uni to stay close to mom.”

“Must have been so different,” Lina mused. “You moved half the world away from one day to the next.”

“It was not,” Mia snorted. “Small towns, rolling hills and the forests look just the same over here as they do over there. Honestly, if you dropped me down on a hiking trail in either place, I wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference.”

“Hmmm,” Lina nodded slowly. “I guess ... You like hiking?”

“Yeah,” Mia said with a shrug. “It’s nice and calming. And I love forests and hiking up to the top of hills.”

“Think we could still go?” Lina asked. “Hiking I mean? With all these monsters in the city ... and who knows what else out in the woods. I don’t know whether we’ll ever again be safe hiking like we would have been before.”

“You just have to be more dangerous than a monster,” Mia said, a smile tugging at her lips. ‘You just have to be more dangerous than a bear.’ Gabe used to tell her that when she worried about getting mauled or eaten by one, the idiot. “With magic, we don’t even need guns to be dangerous. Lead bullets have nothing on the sort of stuff we can now throw around.”

*****

Lina watched what used to be a goblin. It took some effort, especially because of the considerable distance between herself and the monster, but she’d managed and the results spoke for themselves. It was very, very dead and spread out over the pavement.

Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed myself so much. She thought, grimacing at the gory sight. Her magic literally ripped the thing to shreds.

“See?” Mia asked next to her, glancing at her with a half-smirk that disappeared like a mirage a moment later. “Your magic works perfectly. The birds were just a bad matchup.”

Lina grinned. The little elfin girl was adorably awkward, especially when she tried to be consoling. She was like the little sister Lina never got to have.

“Seems so,” she said, then glanced to the side where the pink-haired girl effortlessly butchered a group of twelve goblins. Someone is going to be very damned sorry when they try to mess with this girl. “How long do we have here?”

“A few hours,” Mia said, shrugging as she pushed her face up to the bars to look for more prey. “Not sure. Jeff just dumped me in that room with you yesterday. I’m not even sure if they are going to ask us for anything today.”

Lina grimaced at that. If only she didn’t pass out after only two damned birds. What if someone died because she took an impromptu nap? Worse yet, what if they never let her fight again afterwards?

Lina knew how this worked. Laws only worked when there was someone to enforce them and she sure as hell didn’t see any policemen around. It’d take one lucky bastard who got too powerful with his magical bullshit and they’d all be helpless.

Power made people show their true selves, and Lina knew from experience that usually wasn’t pretty. How much worse it’d be when that power was permanent and supernatural, she could only guess, but it’d be only a matter of time before everyone learned the lesson that’d been beaten into her.

‘The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.’

Lina bit her lips. People were already ahead of her in the power-curve in this new magical reality. Not only was she lagging behind, but all she had was this flimsy air magic that she thought was barely able to do more than slow a powerful enemy down.

Was she jealous? Of course. Every time she saw one of those ‘hunters’ the landlord had basically on retainer, she burned with envy. They tore out rocks from the dirt, healed from grievous wounds, and conjured up infernos while she was a human-shaped fan. Everyone would have been jealous in her position.

If she was being honest, she almost felt the same way about the petite elf girl next to her at the start. Elves were super magical and whatnot in pop-culture, right? So the girl could probably run circles around her in the magic department, even with Lina’s supposedly ‘noble’ and awesome Bloodline.

That’s what she thought, at least and Mia’s abrasive way of, well, existing, didn’t help Lina’s opinion of her. But then she stayed behind while Lina slept like a log, invited her into her home and attempted to console her.

She’s even more lost than me. The blonde thought, watching as the elven girl perked up.

“We have a new group coming in,” Mia said, giving a quick glance over her shoulder to Lina. “Want to try taking the whole group down? I’m sure you could use some levels and practice.”

Lina took a quick breath, gulped, then stepped up to the window. If she didn’t want to be a victim ever again, she had to grab this opportunity by the balls. Magic and levels were a type of power no one would be able to take away from her.