Princess of Wands Read online

  “Oh, hell,” Janea said, stopping and looking at her wide-eyed. Then she began to laugh so hard she ended up gasping like the kid who’d been run to ground. Finally she stopped and wiped her eyes, smearing her mascara. “Oh! Oh! God that’s funny.”

  “It’s not funny,” Barb said, trying not to grin. “I was all set to call Greg and put the cuffs on him! And if one of them had made a move, they’d have been looking down the barrel of a .45!”

  “Okay, so it’s not so funny,” Janea said, still chuckling. “Yeah, we were playing a game. Come on, let’s get over to the Hunter room and I’ll introduce you around.”

  * * *

  The Hunter room was a double just about filled with kids dressed in black.

  “I had him dead to rights,” one of them was bemoaning. “I had the cross and the stake and everything. And he won the damned toss! So there I was, dead as a doornail.”

  “Tough luck,” the girl he was talking to said. She was about fifteen if she was a day, pretty, overweight, and wearing at least another ten pounds of mascara and fifteen in silver jewelry. She looked like she probably had naturally light brown hair but it was dyed black and her eyes looked like a raccoon’s from all the black makeup. “But you can resurrect tomorrow.”

  “I know,” the boy grumped. “But what am I going to do the rest of the night… ?”

  “Barb, this is Timson,” Janea said, drawing Barbara over to a young man who was lounging on a chair at the back of the room. “He’s the Hunter leader. Timson, this is my friend Barb.”

  “Nice to meet you, Barb,” Timson said, waving. He was tall and very fair, with light blue eyes and hair and a nice smile. If Allison brought him home as a date Barbara would be happy to let him go out with her. When she was a little older. He was dressed in what was apparently the required black, but it was limited to a black button-down shirt that looked vaguely clerical and black jeans. He had a black leather jacket slung over his shoulder. “Are you going to play? We’ve got two more Hunter slots open.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m being asked,” she admitted.

  There were three other teenagers hanging out with Timson and all three, and Janea, started to explain. It didn’t make heads or tails to Barb.

  Apparently the game involved a three-way war between werewolves, vampires and Hunters who were humans with special powers. Everyone in the game had special tags so people knew they were playing around the con, but nobody was supposed to know which you were until you “encountered.” Then they would “battle” by flipping coins or playing, as Janea had, rock-paper-scissors and, based on some points that went right over Barbara’s head, you might be killed, or win, or be able to escape.

  “It sounds interesting,” Barb said after the five minute explanation had wound to a close. “But I’m not sure it’s my sort of thing.”

  “Well, why don’t you hang around and listen,” Timson said, grinning. “It’s really the most fun to be had.”

  Someone had handed Barbara a Coke and one of the girls slid over so Barb could sit down. The kids were friendly at least.

  “What do you do, Barb?” Timson asked.

  “I’m a homemaker,” Barbara said, automatically. She just realized that what she really was was a Hunter. But in real life.

  “I bet you’ve got kids our age,” one of the boys said, shyly.

  “A bit younger,” Barb said, trying not to flinch.

  “I wish my mom was cool enough to come to cons,” the girl next to her said with a sigh. She was skinnier than the girl who’d been commiserating with the “killed” Hunter but was dressed about the same. “But she’s so uncool it’s, like, crazy making! I had to beg to get the car tonight and she wanted me home by ten. I mean, nothing even starts until midnight. And she wouldn’t let me use the Beamer, I had to bring the Volvo! But with it snowing like it is, she told me I could stay over night.”

  “We all have our problems in life,” Timson said, grinning.

  “Are you all… teenagers?” Barbara asked.

  “You mean living at home?” Timson asked, raising an eyebrow. “Most of the kids at the con are. I’m out of the house, though. I do survey work for a cable company.”

  “I go to Virginia Tech,” one of the other boys said. “I’m taking computer engineering.”

  “I’m going to college next year,” the girl next to her said. “I can’t wait to get out of the house.”

  “Wait until you have to work for a living,” Timson said, grinning. “School sucks so you’re prepared for real life.”

  “You don’t like your job?” Barb asked.

  “I like it enough,” Timson said, shrugging. “It pays the bills. But if I had my druthers I’d con all the time.”

  “This is real life,” one of the boys said, sighing. “We can be ourselves, here.”

  “We don’t have to deal with stuck up sorority bitches,” the college boy said. “Or professors.”

  “Try dealing with cheerleaders,” the girl said. “I’m sorry, black really does go with anything, thank you.”

  * * *

  “That was a… weird group,” Barbara said after they’d left the room and the group behind. “You really enjoy playing… that game?”

  “I think of it as training,” Janea said. “And I was one of those kids when I was in school. I was the geek in the library with the glasses; I didn’t really start to bloom until much later. But I’d never heard of cons or LARPing or the rest of it.” She frowned and shrugged and Barb realized that she knew a lot about the people she’d met at the con, their lives and backgrounds. But she really didn’t know much about Janea.

  “I suppose you could think of it as training,” Barbara replied. “But should your hobby be this close to your job?”

  “I enjoy it,” Janea said. “And some of the kids are really bright. I’ve had good discussions about the occult with them. You should probably hang out with them more. Of course, some of them are better than others. Timson’s brilliant. I don’t know what he’s doing stuck in that job of his. He never finished college, though. He was working on a degree in anthropology but he said it just got too boring so he quit. He’s one of the ones that can talk about the occult all day and night. I mean, he knows the sixty-seven names of the known daevas and each of their special powers. He can even read ancient Persian as well as Aramaic, Greek and Latin. And he’s conversational in ancient Egyptian. I saw him translate Emily Dickinson’s ‘I’ve Known A Heaven’ on the fly into Egyptian and sing it to ‘Yellow Rose of Texas.’ Now that was bizarre.”

  Barbara blinked at the image and then started at the very real sight before her. A man was walking down the hallway carrying, over his shoulder, a very large brown timber. Behind him was another man carrying an identical timber then a woman carrying a smaller… frame perhaps. Then more men and women dragging, rolling and carrying a variety of large boxes and bags.

  “God, the snow’s bad!” the man in the lead said, maneuvering past the two women. “ ‘Scuse me.”

  “Where are you setting up?” Janea asked, eyeing the second man in the line who was rather handsome and well muscled.

  “Rooms three seventeen through twenty-eight,” the man said. “But you’re not my type, sorry.”

  “Pity,” Janea said, arching an eyebrow.

  Barb waited until the whole group was past and then looked at her “mentor.”

  “What in that heck was that all about? And what were those big timbers for? They looked like parts of a cross!”

  “They were,” Janea said, clearing her throat and for the first time in Barbara’s experience actually blushing. “They were for St. Andrews crosses.”

  “And those are?” Barb asked, suspiciously.

  “They’re… big crosses,” Janea said. “And that’s all I’m gonna say. But it’s pretty apparent the Black Rose has turned up in force. I know where I’m going to be hanging out.”

  “I think I’ve had about all the bizarre I can take for one night,” Barbara admitted, shakin
g her head and trying to resist throttling her “mentor.” “I’m going to go see if there are any normal people around.”

  “Wait ’til I drag you to DragonCon,” Janea said. “You’ll look great in a corset…”

  * * *

  “So what did you think of the Wharf Rats?” a woman asked as Barb walked down a second floor corridor.

  “They were… interesting,” Barbara replied, stopping and looking the woman over. She was about normal height and only slightly plump with a pleasant face and blonde hair. The fuzzy reindeer horns were the only sign she was on the outside edge of normality. Compared to most of the people Barb had been dealing with all night she seemed positively normal.

  “Try annoying,” the woman said, grinning. “Might makes right and all that.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that they think might makes right…” Barbara argued as a tall man walked up to the woman. He had long, mid-back length, slightly curly brown hair and was wearing a leather jacket heavy on the studs and buckles.

  “You must be talking about the Wharf Rats,” the man said, grimacing. “If it wasn’t for Pier Books, none of those writers would get published at all. They’re fifth rate if that.”

  “I’m sorry,” Barb said, smiling at him quizzically. “We haven’t been introduced.”

  “I’m Larry Winston,” the man said, sticking out his hand. “I publish Zero Option, Dark Desires and A Bit of Mind.”

  “Oh,” Barbara said, smiling and nodding. “I like your jacket.”

  “Thanks,” the man said, frowning.

  “I’m Angie,” the woman said, shaking Barb’s hand as well. “I’m sort of a gopher for the magazines.”

  “Ah,” Barbara said, nodding. “I’m sorry I haven’t actually read any of them.”

  “That’s okay,” the man said. “What are you at the con for?”

  “I’m a reader of K. Goldberg,” Barb said.

  “Oh, we’ve published Kay,” Angie said, happily. “She does wonderful dark fantasy.”

  “That I can believe,” Barbara said with unintended humor.

  “Why don’t you come down to the room?” Larry said, gesturing down the corridor. “We’re having a slush party.”

  “What’s a slush party?” Barb said, uneasily.

  “First con?” Angie asked, waving the way.

  “Yes?” Barbara replied. It was unlikely that she was being lured away to be axed, but she also wasn’t used to being invited to a hotel room except by drunken businessmen who ignored her ring.

  “Slush is the stories that are submitted to the magazine,” Larry said. “It just… piles up. There’s no way to stay ahead of it. So from time to time we bring it all to a con and invite people in to read it. That gets ninety percent, at least, thrown out. Then we can concentrate on the rest.”

  “That seems a bit… brutal,” Barb said as she got to a half open door and followed Angie in. “I mean, people work hard on those stories. You just let anyone… toss them out?”

  “Wait until you read some of them,” Angie said, laughing. “Larry has a favorite he reads every con, just to give an idea how bad they can get.”

  There were about nine people in the room, sprawled on the beds, the floor and most of the chairs. Where there weren’t people there was paper or boxes of paper. There were at least ten file boxes stacked up against the wall, every single one of them overflowing with envelopes.

  “Every submission’s supposed to have a self-addressed stamped envelope in it,” Angie said, picking one of the envelopes out of a box at random. She slit it open with a curved opener and pulled out the folded pages within. Sure enough, there was an envelope included with the sheets of paper.

  “Incredible,” Angie said, grinning. “We only get about one in three that has an SASE. If there’s no SASE, be pretty sure it’s going to get thrown. We can’t keep track otherwise.”

  She sat down on a partially clear area and opened up the tri-folded pages, then grimaced.

  “Look,” she said, handing over the pages.

  Barbara slid to the floor by Angie’s spot and started reading.

  “ ‘When Gunor reached the feiry wastes of Thogrun he thought that his journey was at an end. But it had hardly beginning. Acrros the feiry wastes he strode, his acks Gomail on his brawny shoulder…’ ”

  Barb struggled through the tedious prose, wondering when Gunor was going to do anything of note or, dare she hope, the writer would learn to run a basic spell-checker. After two pages, Angie looked over at her.

  “You’re still reading that?” Angie asked.

  “It seemed the thing to do,” Barbara said, trying very hard not to laugh at the prose. And she was still trying to find a plot in all the killing orcs and crossing feiry, sic, wastes.

  “Good God, you’ve got a stronger stomach than I do,” Angie said, pulling the papers out of her hand. “Did it get any better?”

  “Worse,” Barb admitted.

  Angie picked up a form, filled in a line and then tossed the sheets of paper into a box filled with similar sheets.

  “This is the rejection form,” Angie said, showing it to her. It had a standard “We’re very sorry your story, insert name here, does not meet our needs at this time,” message. Angie had already scrawled, somewhat illegibly, “The Journeys of Gunor the Great” in the space provided, which was too small so “the Great” was cramped into the space.

  “Stuff it in the envelope,” Angie said, fitting action to words. “Lick and toss into the out box,” she said, sending the envelope skimming across the room into a box with “Kill Them All! Kill! Kill!” scrawled on it in Magic Marker. “Another tiny literary ego crushed by the evil publishing industry.”

  “It does seem a bit heartless,” Barbara said, shaking her head.

  “Do you see all that?” Angie asked, gesturing at the boxes. “That’s the inflow of just the last three months. And that’s just what we haven’t already read. Wait until you get to a really bad one.”

  “That wasn’t really bad?” Barb asked, her eyes wide.

  “Anybody got a really bad one?” Angie asked, raising her voice.

  “I’ve got the pig story,” Larry called from the other side of the room, without looking up from the story he was reading.

  “Not the pig story,” Angie said. “That’s in a category all its own.”

  “Try this one,” a dark-haired man said, flipping some papers at her through the air. Half of them drifted off to fall on the floor as he flipped another envelope expertly through the air to hit the Kill box on the side.

  Angie managed to snag the top page and grimaced.

  “Look,” she said, handing the page to Barbara.

  The page was lined paper filled with crabbed, nearly illegible, writing. There were numerous line-outs and scratch outs with words crammed in and over the sentences in no apparent order. And despite this careful editing, more than half the words were misspelled. The word “word” was misspelled, twice. From what she could glean of the actual story… there wasn’t one.

  “Okay, that’s bad,” Barb said. “People actually think this stuff will get published?”

  “Yep,” Angie said, tossing the paper on the floor to join the drifts. “And sometimes you’ll run into them at cons and they’ll ask you why they didn’t get published. Of course, as you can see, there’s no way to keep up with who they were. But they always have a bad photocopy of their original story. And you have to explain that it first has to be legible, then it has to be literate and last but most certainly most important it has to actually be a good story. Excellent prose, interesting characters, a theme that causes people to think.”

  “Wouldn’t a plot be nice?” Barbara asked, smiling.

  “Plot is sort of optional,” Angie said, frowning. “Some of the finest pieces of writing in the world don’t have what would conventionally be called a plot. Theater of the absurd for an example.”

  “And a hook,” Larry said from across the room. He tossed the papers he was reading on
the floor and picked up another from a pile. “It needs a good hook.”

  “What’s a hook?” Barb asked.

  “Think of it as a topic sentence,” Angie said. “A beginning sentence, or even phrase, that makes the reader want to know what it means.”

  “ ‘Before the lobster blew up we were having such a good time,’ “ Larry said, still not looking up.

  “ ‘I didn’t like being a leaf, but it was better than the alternatives,’ “ the dark-haired man belly-down on the bed added.

  “ ‘It seemed that defenestration was the only solution to Ermintrude,’ “ one of the girls on the floor said. She was a college-aged Asian-American twisted up in a complex position that at first looked like yoga. Then Barbara remembered her own college years and recognized it as College-Study-Position Fourteen. “That’s a classic, of course.”

  “I realized after fifteen minutes in the room that I had stepped through a looking glass without realizing it,” Barb said.

  “That’s good,” Larry replied, looking up. “I don’t usually like first person, but that might work. What’s it from?”

  “I just made it up,” Barbara said, dryly.

  “Tits and a sense of humor,” Larry said, looking down again. “Unusual combination.”

  “Hey!” Angie snapped.

  “Well, there’s a reason I let you hang around,” Larry replied, equably.

  “Sure, you get slave labor from my husband,” Angie said. “And you like my cookies.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever called them cookies,” Larry said, distantly.

  “It’s just doing the time,” the brown-haired man on the bed said. “You stick with me. Someday they’ll say, ‘You remember when Angie and Eric were just lowly schlubs going to slush parties? Now look at where they’ve gotten…’ ”

  “Bedlam,” a man propped at the head of the bed said. He was big and very heavyset with a thick beard and red-brown hair. But while being overweight, he gave the impression of having a good bit of muscle. “Bellevue. Momma Patrona’s House of the Seriously Mentally Infirm. God, that one was bad!” He crumpled up the manuscript, tossed it onto the floor, stuffed and skimmed, making it to the “KILL, KILL!” box despite it being across the room. “It was one of those that was so bad it was like a parody of bad. I kept thinking it was a joke and I’d get to the punchline. I couldn’t believe when I got to the end and realized he was dead serious.”