Chapter 141: The Wizard’s Night

I stood on that porch for a long time, watching the dark spot at the end of the drive where the truck was idling.

I wasn’t scared of it. Let me be clear about that. A truck full of men with hunting rifles is not a threat to me anymore, and it hadn’t even been in my previous life.

I was angry.

The cold, quiet kind of angry that sits in your stomach and does math. Because those men had spent a week parking at the end of this road, every single night, staring at a house full of women who had already survived the worst thing men can do to them.

[Not tonight, though. Tonight I’ve got thirty-one people who just watched me pull a trailer out of thin air, and they deserve a wizard who isn’t distracted.]

"Kid," I said to Nora. "Keep the drone on them. If they move up that drive, you yell."

"Obviously."

"Vera. Nobody goes near that fence tonight."

"Nobody has all week," Vera said.

And I went back inside.

Which was a mistake, honestly, because the kitchen had turned into something I was not prepared for.

Thirty-one women and every single one of them had just watched a man drop a forty-foot refrigerated trailer onto a lawn out of nothing, and now that man was standing in their kitchen holding a cup of coffee, and they had absolutely no idea what to do with him.

So they did what people do. They sorted themselves.

About a third of them were scared of me. Flat out scared. They stayed on the far side of the room near the back door with their arms crossed, and every time I moved, their eyes moved with me. I understood that completely. The last time they’d seen me, I’d been covered in blood, and now I could apparently do magic, and neither of those things is comforting.

Another third could not stop asking questions.

"Can you do it again?"

"Can you make anything? Like, anything at all?"

"Where does it come from? Is it somewhere? Is it a room?"

"Can you make a car?"

"Can you make a hot bath?"

"Are you a government thing? Like an experiment?"

"Is it God?"

"It’s not God, Marcy... gods don’t need coffee."

I answered as best I could, which was badly, because the honest answer was "I have a magic inventory and a magic shop in my head, and I don’t know why either," and that sounds worse than "wizard."

So I stuck with wizard.

But the last third was the real problem.

Because the last third was just... looking at me.

And I need to explain something here, because it matters for everything that happened next.

Nobody has ever looked at me like that.

I’m not fishing. It’s just a fact. Before the world ended, I was a broke university student who had spent every dollar he’d saved since he was nine years old on a Ducati Diavel instead of literally anything sensible. I lived on instant noodles. I had one good jacket. I spent two entire years being a hopeless, pathetic simp for the prettiest girl in my department, and she never once looked at me twice, and I was fine with that, because at least the bike was fast.

And then the shit-show started, and there were other things to think about.

So having a room full of women look at me like that, on purpose, at the same time, was genuinely a first in my entire life, and my face kept doing things I had not authorized.

[Stop it... Stop smiling. You look like an idiot. Stop!]

I could not stop.

The first one made her move about ten minutes in.

She was young, maybe Nora’s age, with dark hair in a braid, and she came over with a fresh cup of coffee even though I already had one, and she stood a little too close to hand it to me, and she said, "You looked like you needed a warm-up."

And just as I opened my mouth to say thank you, Nora materialized between us.

I don’t know how. She’d been on the porch. She was now standing directly between the coffee girl and me with her arms crossed and her cap tilted back, looking up at the girl from about a foot below her.

"He is spoken for," Nora announced.

The girl blinked. "...By who?"

"By..." Nora said, with total confidence. "He’s spoken for by someone else."

That made no sense. Everybody in earshot knew it made no sense. The girl looked at me like I might explain it, and just as I was about to, Nora shot me a fierce glare. So the girl just... nodded, set the coffee down on the table, and went back to the stove.

[What was that? What did that mean? Nora. Nora, what did that mean?]

Nora did not explain. She went back outside.

The second one was bolder.

Late twenties, tall, with a scar through one eyebrow, and she didn’t bother with coffee. She just walked up, looked me dead in the eye, and asked, "So. Are you single?"

Direct. I respected it. I also completely froze, because I had never in my life been asked that question by a woman who wanted the answer to be yes.

And before I could get a single word out, Nia answered for me.

She was sitting across the room at the far end of the table, cleaning the SR-25 with a rag, and she didn’t even look up.

"He’s with me," Nia said, pleasant as anything. "And if you touch him..."

The whole kitchen went quiet.

The woman with the scar looked at Nia. While Nia kept cleaning her rifle and kept smiling.

"...Noted," the woman said.

"Good~"

And that was the end of that.

[Jesus Christ. I’m going to die in this kitchen. I’m going to die happy and terrified in this kitchen.]

The third one didn’t even get to me. Before anyone could even ask if I used something like mana, Kara’s voice rang out from the doorway.

"He’s tired," She said, still drying the pot.

Here’s the truth: I was not tired. I was extremely awake. I was the most awake I had been in my entire life.

Then Nora came back in from the porch, took one look at the room, at the women still watching me from across it, at the ones who had clearly heard the last exchanges and were now reconsidering their approach, and decided the situation needed escalating.

"My bro can also do telekinesis," she announced to the room.

Every head turned.

"It’s currently inactive," Nora added, with immense smugness. "He’s resting it."

Thirty women instantly went ohhh at once, and one of them said, "... like moving things with his mind?"

And Nora said, "Exactly like that."

While I stood there holding my coffee, doing my best to keep my face poker.

Because here’s the thing.

Nora doesn’t know what telekinesis costs me now. Nobody in that room knew. She thinks it’s resting. She thinks it’s a battery that’s low.

It isn’t. Right now, if I so much as reach for it, there’s a coal behind my eyes that flares white, and the pain is enough to put me on the floor.

As far as I understand it, TK is gone. Maybe it’s coming back, maybe it isn’t, and hearing her say it out loud, proud as anything, like it was a sure thing, like it was just a matter of time, hurt more than I was ready for.

And in the same second I decided she could say it as often as she wanted.

Because she was proud of me. Openly. In front of thirty strangers. And that was worth more than the truth.

"Resting it," I agreed. "Yep."

[Glaze me, kid. Go on. I’ll take it.]

Meanwhile, Tikki had long abandoned me completely.

I want that on the record too. Years of loyal service, riding my shoulder through fire and blood and a nuclear meltdown, and the second thirty women showed up with warm laps, that degenerate forgot I existed.

He’d been passed hand to hand around the room like a holy relic. Every woman who got him rubbed his ears and told him he was beautiful, and he went completely boneless in every single lap and purred like a diesel engine, and at one point three of them were scratching him at once while he laid his eyes closed and his belly up.

"Traitor."

"Mea," Tikki said, from a stranger’s lap, with his eyes still closed.

And he meant it. He absolutely meant it.

I looked around for backup and found none.

Leo was sitting in the corner with his hand on his ribs, first aid done and an accelerated Healing Stim already in, and a strange look on his face.

He was watching me get fussed over by strangers, and I could see him thinking, and I could guess what about. Two hours ago he’d learned I walked into a mafia building on day one for his big sis. Now he was watching that same man get flustered over a cup of coffee. He was rearranging his idea of me. I let him.

Mr. Norton was asleep. Upright. In a chair by the stove, with his glasses in his hand and his chin on his chest, out cold, and nobody had the heart to move him.

And Kara was at the stove with Ruth, the two of them shoulder to shoulder over a pot talking about something, and she was not looking at me.

And then she was.

And then she wasn’t again.

[Okay. That’s... fine. That’s a thing that’s happening...]

Around eleven, the house started winding down. The frightened third went to bed first. Then the curious third, with a lot of last questions. The interested third went last, and slowest, and Nia watched every one of them out the door with her rifle across her knees.

And I found Ruth on the porch with a lantern and her shotgun, exactly where I’d started the night.

The truck was still at the edge of the property, tucked behind trees. Same spot. Engine still running.

"They’ll sit there till midnight," Ruth said. "Then they’ll go."

"Every night?"

"Every night..." She didn’t look away from it. "It’s not to watch us. They know what we do at night. It’s so we know they’re there."

I stood beside her and looked at the dark.

"How many guns do you have?" I asked. "Really."

"Eleven. Two of them don’t feed right." She said it flat, like a shopping list. "It’s thirty-one of us, and most of us had never fired one before the fall."

"Someone mentioned the two who got bit..."

Ruth was quiet for a moment before-

"I did it," she said. "Both times... Nobody else should have to."

I didn’t say anything to that. There wasn’t anything to say.

[Thirty-one women. Eleven guns. Nine kilometers from forty men who think they’re owed... And she’s been holding it together with two rifles that don’t feed right and a shotgun she probably shot her own friends with.... Yeah, I am not leaving these people like this... besides, Kara will kill me if I did...]

Down at the end of the drive, the sound of a door opening and shutting rang out especially loud in the quiet night as though they wanted us to know they were here. Then the truck’s lights came on, and it backed up onto the state road, and turned south, and the taillights got smaller and smaller until the snow ate them.

[Midnight... On the dot...]

Ruth picked up the lantern.

"Get some sleep, handsome," she said, and then, over her shoulder, at the door: "They’ll be back tomorrow."