The Loretreaders  •  Act 1

Just as the djinni’s arm swung down to deliver the fatal blow, his whole body convulsed like a ripple in the very fabric of reality. Nausea swarmed through him, and he stumbled, dropping the knife. It landed with a muffled thud on the carpet, and he stared in shock at his hand, which was warping erratically into ink and paper before his eyes.

The moment passed, and his hand settled back into flesh and bone. He flexed it experimentally. He had no sooner regained his composure when Mr. Cliffords’ digital clock flashed 6:00 AM and the room filled with a blaring alarm. The djinni jumped and swung around to stare at the little device.

Mr. Cliffords groaned and ran his hand over his face. The djinni hesitated, still clutching his racing heart at the surprise. Indecision gripped him as Krissy’s father began to paw tiredly at his bedside table.

The djinni released his breath slowly in a growl and stooped to collect his knife from the floor.

There was so much to learn about this new world, still. And while just as capable of killing a waking human as a sleeping one, the djinni decided in that moment to lie low a little longer—at least until he understood the transformation that had just afflicted him. Perhaps there was some manner of arcane ward protecting this room. Whatever the reason, the man would be spared…for now.

By the time Mr. Cliffords opened his sleep-blurred eyes, the djinni was gone.

Mid-morning sunlight was streaming into Krissy’s bedroom by the time the bedraggled teen stirred. She blinked, disoriented. Two weeks, and she still wasn’t quite used to waking up to the sight of her new room in Rosetta. She wiped her face with a grimace. She’d slept so hard she’d actually drooled. With a disgusted grunt, she propped herself up on her pillow. Her bleary eyes happened across a note on her nightstand.

“Krissy, we decided to let you sleep in today. We’re off to the marathon. We’ll be home around noon. Call if you need anything! Love, Mom.”

Krissy grunted and flopped back onto her pillow, too dizzy and sore to be disappointed at being left behind. She was usually 100% up for any athletic event, but this morning, she felt like she’d been hit by a car.

Her brow furrowed at that thought. Something was flitting just at the peripheral of her memory—

“I don’t suppose you plan on letting me out any time soon,” said a disgruntled voice.

Krissy lurched up from her bed, and her startled eyes fell upon the djinni draped on her desk chair.

“Oh my gosh,” Krissy wheezed, scrambling to her feet. “OHMYGOSHIFORGOT! You! You made me a superhero!” She scampered to her mirror, triggering that strange sense of heat that she remembered from the night before, and transformed on the spot. The skinny, freckly, bed-head teenager in the mirror became a skinny, freckly superhero. Glossy chestnut hair piled around her.

“Eeeeee! Ahahahaha! Oh man!”

“You FORGOT?” the djinni said, indignant as Spark pranced giddily on the spot. Her happy bubble punctured at his disgust. She powered down to her normal self, tutting plaintively.

“Oh, give me a break! It’s a lot to take in! I promise, I won’t forget again—oh, what the—?” she tried to pat his shoulder in consolation, but her hand slipped right through his hazy arm without resistance. “Were you ghostly like this yesterday?”

He scowled. “I require the touch of a sentient being to maintain my contact with the physical realm.”

“What’s a ‘sen chent bean’?’” Krissy asked, waving both of her hands through him. The djinni flinched instinctively, even though he could feel nothing. “Wow, this is so weird and cool!”

“Just. Touch. The lamp,” he snarled.

“Hm? Oh!” Krissy said, understanding clicking on like a light switch. “Haha, got it!” She snapped with both hands, pointing finger guns at him before turning to trot back over to the backpack she’d dumped unceremoniously beside her bed. “Is this what all the stories mean about rubbing the lamp?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Er,” the djinni tilted his head. “No rubbing required. A touch is sufficient to free me from the aetherealm.”

“The aetherealm, huh…” Krissy repeated, rifling around in her backpack. Her fingers brushed cold silvery metal, like the kind the djinni wore around his neck, and his hazy silhouette solidified. He sighed softly in relief.

“It is the between-place,” he said quietly. He followed Krissy as she led him down the stairs and into the kitchen in her search for breakfast. “If I go too long without my lamp receiving contact, I become trapped within that place. My connection to the world begins to fade. After a time, I cannot touch or be touched. Longer still, I cannot be seen by any but my master. Then, I cannot be heard. Then…the darkness comes.”

Krissy scanned his brooding face.

“Are you afraid of the darkness?” she asked softly.

The djinni seemed to come to himself, aware that he had given the impression that he had a vulnerability. His troubled expression changed at once to a sneer.

“Ha! When you have lived as long as I have, and seen what I have seen, nothing will scare you anymore.”

Just then, Krissy’s strudel popped from the toaster with a mechanical click, and the djinni visibly jumped. Krissy giggled.

“Nothing but the toaster, you mean,” she said, brandishing her pastry at him. The djinni looked ruffled.

“What sorcery is this?” he grumbled, inspecting the toaster with great dislike. Krissy puffed through her lips and rolled her eyes, though she smiled.

“Pfbt, it’s not sorcery. It’s modern technology!” Her face lit up with an idea. “Oh! Look at this! This’ll blow your mind!” she said, dragging the djinni to the living room. He frowned at her touch, and he rubbed his wrist as if she had dirtied him when she let go to dig between the couch cushions for the TV remote.

The flat-screen TV glowed to life with a touch of a button. “This is called a television! High definition,” Krissy sang with a sassy bob of her head.

The djinni stared speechlessly at the screen, his expression stranded between alarm and awe as flickering images reflected in his eyes and jewelry. The voice of the morning news reporter filled the room:

“—are still investigating reports that monsters are responsible for the severe damage sustained by the Rosetta Public Library last night. The incident reportedly occurred between 6:30 PM and 7:30 PM. Three deaths have been confirmed—”

Krissy hastily jabbed at the volume button, her eyes round. “Oh my gosh! They’re talking about last night! That monster…three people died…”

The djinni laughed humorlessly and lounged into an arm chair. “The Guardian has claimed far more lives than that.”

Krissy looked at him searchingly. “Where did it come from?”

“Don’t you know? The Guardian and I were imprisoned in Ali Sahin’s inescapable pit.”

Krissy frowned. “Well, geez. This town IS a bit of a bummer, but I wouldn’t call it an ‘inescapable pit.’”

The djinni ran his clawed fingertips through his hair, regarding the television with a look of discomfort. “The world is…very different than I remember it. How long was I in that hellish hole?”

“I don’t remember seeing a…‘hole,’ hellish or otherwise. All I know is that Ugly McSmokestack was rampaging through the library, and then your lamp fell on me.”

The djinni’s confused scowl deepened further. “That…doesn’t make any sense.”

Krissy tapped her cheek. “Hm. Maybe we’ll figure something out if we go back to the library?” she suggested, then grimaced. “Whatever’s left of it, anyway. Stay right here! I’m gonna go get dressed!”

She tossed the lamp onto the couch and thundered back up the stairs while the reporter on the television relayed breaking news.

“—receiving report of an incident on Saffron Avenue and Rosetta Boulevard. Details are still forthcoming, but civilians are urgently advised to avoid the area—”

Krissy cavorted along the sidewalk of Saffron Avenue, the djinni in grudging tow. They were only one block west of Rosetta’s downtown, but at this hour on a weekend, it was quiet. Small, white-collar businesses lined one side of the street. The other side was occupied by a large, empty parking garage.

“Wow, it’s really dead out here,” Krissy said, looking around. “Then again, compared to Austin, it always feels dead around here. I guess everyone’s at that marathon…”

She supposed it was convenient; there were fewer people to stare and wonder at the odd man with the pointed ears and slit-pupiled eyes in the Arabian Nights getup. On that thought, she clapped her hands together and beamed at the djinni. “I still need to pick a name for you! And you know, I was thinking…since I am a superhero now, YOU can be my sidekick!”

“Oh, goody.”

“And that means you get a super-cool SIDEKICK NAME!” she sang.

­The djinni didn’t look thrilled at the prospect, but Krissy wouldn’t let that dampen her excitement. She dug around in the fanny pack her mom had filled with high-protein Chuckle bars for the marathon, but had evidently forgotten on the counter. It looked a little silly, but it was just the right size for the lamp.

“Let’s see, you’re a djinni…” she began, twirling the handle of the lamp around her finger as she thought. The djinni watched her with reproach. “Ooh! What about Gene? Too on-the-nose? No, something more mysterious. Wait, “mister’…Mr. E. Yes! Ha!” She slapped her thigh with delight. “That can be your civilian name! It’s just the right level of dorky. The ‘E’ should stand for something, though. Edward? Eric? Ezekiel…? We’ll come back to that. More importantly, you still need a cool superhero alias. Hm. Maybe something with ‘wish’?”

“‘Death Wish,’ perhaps?” the djinni suggested snidely.

His contempt sailed right over Krissy’s head. “Oh! That’s a good one! But it sounds a little too sinister, more like a villain name. You’re a good guy,” she told him, “so you need to have a name that sounds HEROIC.”

The djinni let out a peal of scornful chuckles. “Heroic. Right,” he drawled. “Listen, I think I’d best leave the heroics to you. Leave me to what I’m really good at: granting wishes.” He looked Krissy up and down with calculating eyes. “A spritely young girl like yourself—let me guess. You want a new gown, a white stallion, and a solid gold carriage.”

“That’s genius! I totally could use that until I get my driver’s license! No more walking home from school for me! But, scratch the ball gown. And put spikes on the carriage wheels. Can the horse be black? What about a steel carriage instead of gold? Ooh, with superhero decals!”

The djinni was rather taken aback, but, being the expressive fellow that he was, he merely arched an eyebrow. “You may have whatever you desire, Mistress.”

Krissy rubbed her chin, pondering over the possibilities with glittering eyes. “Hm, maybe—” she began excitedly, but the djinni cut her off by holding a hand to her mouth, stopping her in her tracks.

“Ah, ah! Think very carefully, pet. Never just fire off a wish. You got lucky with your bizarre request yesterday, but, ah, heaven forbid you were to word a wish wrong; I’d be forced to grant you something you don’t want, or—worse—something dangerous. A few of my past masters have met very gruesome ends that way…”

A shiver trickled down Krissy’s spine. “What’s the worst wish you’ve ever granted?” she asked in a whisper.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” the djinni said. He touched his fingertips together and tapped them against his lips, looking over Krissy with shrewd eyes. “Let’s focus on you…”

He circled around Krissy, examining her.

“You have a terrible complexion,” he observed. He cupped her face in both of his hands. “Such a sallow color. Freckles. Blemishes. Don’t these hurt?” he asked, brushing his fingertips across the red bumps that traced Krissy’s cheekbones. Krissy squirmed and turned away from him.

“Ugh. Mostly my pride.”

“But it could be much better.”

She gave the djinni a sidelong glance. “A wish to clear up my skin, though? That seems kinda lame. I mean, Proactiv is a thing. Besides, I suppose someone as cute as I am has to have one flaw,” she jested.

The djinni opened his mouth to say something quite rude, but smothered the comment with some effort. Instead, he just smiled. “Of course. Still…something to consider,” he said lightly.

Krissy knew her burgeoning teen hormones had not been kind to her. Her fingers coiled a little tighter around the lamp. Just a wish…

“No, no. I’m not making a dumb wish like that. I need to save my wishes for something more important. Something that can help other people, not just me. That’s the heroic thing to do,” Krissy decided, summoning a grin. She quirked an eyebrow at the djinni. “Thanks for telling me I have gross skin, though. ’Preciate it.”

“Any time,” said the djinni graciously.

As he bowed and turned away from her with a curled lip, the djinni noticed something hurtling toward them. He started and dodged to the side, allowing the thing to collide full-throttle with Krissy and knock her right off her feet. She let out a strangled yelp, finding herself abruptly pinned under a squirming mass of ink and paper shaped into an enormous rat. The lamp skidded away across the concrete.

“Ah! Get off me!” Krissy shrieked as the gliar scrabbled at her. It hissed, and her head swam as if someone had just blasted an air horn in her ear. With an electric crackle, a shot of fierce green light collided with the beast. The gliar shuddered and melted before Krissy’s eyes, its weird ebony sludge pooling around her on the sidewalk.

Krissy rolled over, following the trajectory of the shot over to the sight of an armored woman wielding two blasters—one, still smoking, pointed at the space directly above Krissy. The other pointed toward Rosetta Boulevard.

“If you cherish your world as you know it, you’ll STAY OUT OF MY WAY!” the woman barked over her shoulder. Krissy gaped at her.

“Oh, let her stay for the show, Vesper,” taunted a sing-song voice. Another woman, almost as bizarre-looking as the first, stepped delicately through the air on levitating panels of shadows. They inexplicably materialized beneath her footfalls like a flight of stairs. The lady carried herself with the grace of a ballerina and held an object that vaguely resembled a violin, but it seemed to slither and shimmer beneath Krissy’s gaze. As Krissy watched, the woman docked the violin beneath her chin and drew a bow with a flourish and a smirk. “I’m just getting warmed up.”

She riffed the bow across the instrument, and the street blared with a heart-piercing melody. The surroundings writhed, churning into rodent shapes. They surged into attack in a disgusting, pulsing mass of inky black flesh. Vesper snarled and began firing rounds of vaporizing plasma into the fray, trying to take down the violinist. But the musician seemed to avoid her fire effortlessly, spinning and ducking and sweeping in a mesmerizing dance as she continued to play. Her teasing, tinkling laugh somehow carried over her music as her warped minions laid waste to all that lay in their path toward Vesper.

Krissy knew a villainess when she saw one. Her expression of confusion and fright shifted into a bold grin.

“Ha, a warm-up, huh?” she said, leaping to her feet. “Well, let me bring on the heat.” Still smiling like an idiot over her wordplay, she socked her fist into her palm. “Let’s LIGHT IT UP!”

There was that rush of heat, the sense of weightlessness, and the brush of an outrageously voluminous ponytail against her back that Krissy had learned to welcome. She twirled on the spot just to feel her hair swish around as raw power coursed through her body.

Vesper and the violinist stared as the teen transformed before them—as if a sci-fi battle chick and a musician that could turn walls into rats were somehow more normal a sight on Saffron Avenue than a girl in red Spandex. Spark giggled at their astonished faces before launching forward to join the battle.

The violinist recovered first. “Cheeky brat!” she growled. She ducked and ran, faster than Spark expected, toward her. Spark pulled to a stop in confusion before they could run headlong into each other, and the woman stopped, too, with a deft jump backward. Her violin and bow morphed fluidly—the former into something that slung around the woman’s body, and the latter into a long, sinister-looking object. Spark realized nearly too late that they had become a quiver and an archer’s bow. She yelped and dived to the side as the violinist let fly a black arrow. Its vicious tip sank into a telephone pole.

There was an unearthly hiss and the telephone pole rippled like a reflection in an agitated pool, blackened, and began to melt. Spark felt a weird wave of pressure in the side of her head closest to the melting pole that forced her to land and stumble slightly.

“Is the distortion a little much for you?” asked the woman sweetly as she docked another arrow.

Frankly, the answer was probably yes, but Spark wasn’t about to show weakness. “Ha! You wish!” She kicked off hard against the sidewalk to launch herself into the air, where the violinist levitated with haughty poise. “Who do you think you are, anyway?!” Spark asked, even as she volleyed another shot at the woman.

This much closer, however, Spark could see that she wasn’t a woman, quite—rather, a girl, not much older than Spark herself, though her makeup and dress made her look more grown-up. She was garbed like a harlequin in a fitted bodice and a skirt that was bustled in the back, revealing sleek legs clad in dance tights. Dark curls flowed beneath an odd curved hat and framed her partially masked face.

She whirled out of the way of Spark’s shot, again with that maddening, chiming giggle. She skipped across more tiles of shadow in the air as if this were no more than a dance recital, then turned and curtsied.

“Serenadē,” she responded as she rose from her bow. “Not that it’s any of your business. And you? Some kind of circus performer, I wager?” she said, launching another arrow at Spark.

Spark dodged the shot, sweeping her eyes over Serenadē incredulously. “Tch, you’re one to talk! You look like a Vegas side-show threw up on you!”

Serenadē made a noise somewhere between a scoff and a laugh, placing her hand over her breast in a dainty display of shock. “Ha! You’ve got lip, little girl.”

“Yeah, w-well—you’ve got a dumb hat!” Spark spat.

OK, she wasn’t going to win any clever comeback awards with that one.

It was getting harder to focus on witty banter as Serenadē’s intensity increased. Serenadē’s bow changed from instrument to weapon and back again so quickly that it was hard to keep up. Something about the brief bars of music that she drew from her violin made Spark’s head swim. Seemingly to the music, the gliars below swarmed and lunged. Vesper was fully engaged with both blasters trying to repel the horde, while also obliged to erratically parry the shots volleyed by Spark and Serenadē.

“What are you doing?!” Vesper demanded when Spark found herself swiping past her to get out of the path of an oncoming arrow.

“Uh, I’d believe I’d call this ‘saving the day’?” Spark said.

At once, a sharp pain tore through Spark, and she landed heavily on the pavement and might have collapsed if she hadn’t braced her hands just above her knees. Her whole shape jerked and flashed. For a split second, she was Spark, then Krissy, then a vapor of ink and paper and calligraphy, then Spark again. All she could do was stare wide-eyed at the ground, breathless and dizzy. She vaguely heard Vesper yell and the electric crackle of a plasma blast colliding with one of Serenadē’s arrows.

It was over as quickly as it started. Spark staggered shakily upright, just in time to find herself a few inches short of a full-body gliar tackle. She gasped and chucked a firebomb as hard as she could at it, reducing the monstrous rat to smithereens. Another followed right behind, and Spark was forced to hop back in the air to gain a better vantage.

Serenadē skipped and twirled along the outer perimeters of the battle. Vesper swung around and fired, but to no avail—her shot collided with a shadowy barrier that leaped up from the street around the violinist. Spark wasn’t so easily deterred. She arced back and swan dived down, unleashing blast after blast until the dark wall shattered into black flecks.

With the opening, Vesper took another shot, and this one connected with Serenadē’s violin. Serenadē hissed as the glossy black instrument jolted from her hands and shattered against the asphalt. The moment the violin splintered, so did the swarm of gliars. Their oily forms shimmered and cracked, and then they were gone, leaving their mistress standing alone on the battered street.

She snarled.

“Looks like curtains for you, maestro,” Spark said, tossing a firebomb up and down in her hand.

“Don’t you want the encore?” Serenadē jeered, raising her hands like a flamenco dancer. Spark’s smile wavered as she saw shadows beginning to form around the villainess, but Vesper didn’t wait around for Serenadē to muster another distortion attack. She took aim and fired both blasters. Serenadē crouched and sprung straight upward into an impossibly high backflip, corkscrewed in midair, and vanished from sight before she hit the ground.

Spark released the breath she’d been holding and allowed herself to drop back to the street. It was over, then. Her second battle as a superhero, and she’d even gotten to banter this time!

She grinned at her new comrade, who was holstering her weapons and looking around at the damage. “All right!” Spark crowed, holding her hand up to Vesper eagerly to invite a high-five.

But instead of accepting the gesture, Vesper rounded on the teen with a bolas. It snapped around Spark, lugging her to the ground. She was so startled she couldn’t even squawk in protest.

The next thing she knew, Vesper was standing over her, her blaster pointed directly at her face.