The line madder, p.1
The Line Madder, page 1
THE LINE MADDER
THE LINE MADDER
Jenna Blackmore
The Line Madder Copyright © 2017 by Jenna Blackmore.
All Rights Reserved.
Rubia tinctorum Press.
ISBN: 9781082201868
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
Cover designed by Jenna Blackmore.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Jenna Blackmore
Find online as jennalblackmore and jennablackmorebooks.
DEDICATION
For someone special who may never see this book, but this book would not exist without.
Contents
DEDICATION
PART I
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
PART II
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
AUTHOR BIO
PART I
Chapter 01
The lighting in the coffee shop goes dark as I notice the danger right in front of me.
Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move.
The small creature comes closer to me, moving past the lettuce on my sandwich and approaching my hand with some malicious intent. Don’t move. It might not hurt you. I never really was sure about how to deal with scorpions.
It passes my coffee mug to climb over my hand. Don’t move, and don’t breathe if you don’t have to. I shouldn’t be scared. They’re not deadly enough to kill people, are they? I don’t know a thing about them. It moves to my wrist.
Don’t move, don’t think. Don’t move, and don’t let it know you’re scared. I’m not just scared, I’m terrified. I’m the perfect pincushion.
“Are you okay?” An employee of the coffee shop asks me. She’s somewhat tall with medium-dark skin and long black hair. That’s not all, though. I’m almost certain that I can see a faint red glow around her. But that’s not normal. It must be the lighting.
“Not really, no,” I exhale with caution. “On a scale of one to dead, how bad of a condition would I be in if this scorpion got me?”
“You don’t know a whole lot about scorpions, do you? Don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine.” She picks up the scorpion and drops it in a half-filled coffee cup on her plastic tray. “I’m not going to make you fill out one of those pest reports today. You don’t mind, right? It’s just a scorpion, no big deal, and we’ve been getting a few pests in here lately. It’s nothing unusual.” She turns to the scorpion in the cup and gives it a look that I can’t quite understand.
“Fine enough,” I say. “I don’t like filling out forms anyway.” I stand up and hand my cold coffee to the girl. I don’t really have any intentions of finishing it anymore. She walks over to dispose of the garbage, and before she can return from the task, another member of the staff notices the scorpion in the cup.
“You should get a report on that,” the man states.
“If I have to.” The waitress takes a small piece of paper from the back and returns to me with it.
“Change of plan, unfortunately. Fill in the blanks, be as honest as possible, and put it in the red box in the back when you’re done. Is that okay?”
“Mhm.” As soon as she leaves, I crumple up the report and put it in my pocket. They get enough of those already to have to read one more scorpion report, and I wasn’t exactly provided with anything to write with. I throw on my jacket and start my walk home, more than ready to ignore everything that I just experienced.
After many cold minutes, I finally make it to my apartment building. It’s not a nice place, that’s for sure, but I can’t manage much better. The walls are dark grey like the sky outside, and since a light has died in the hallway leading to my room, it’s darker than usual. It’s menacing in its own sense of the word. Maybe I’m just feeling a little off because of the whole scorpion incident. Scorpions really aren’t common in these parts from what I’m aware of. I open the door to my room and throw my coat off. I need another coffee after the event with the last one, so I pour some hot water from the tap into a chipped mug and spoon some instant coffee into it. I pull some sugar packets from the coffee shop out of my pocket and place them on the counter. There are red letters on them, drawn on in a permanent marker. E, H, S, and T.
Hold on. If I change the order of the letters… Seth. My name. Why does the café sugar have my name on it?
I open the first package. Nothing seems to be odd about the contents, though the packages didn’t look to be tampered with in the first place. I decide to pour the sugar into my coffee. It’s most likely safe, just a little unnerving. Suddenly I hear a scream. I drop my mug of instant coffee and rush to the hall. The girl that lives in the apartment across from me is spread across the floor covered in blood. Or rather, it’s the girl that lived across from me, because she isn’t living anymore. Her hand is curled around a piece of paper, one that’s oddly familiar. What is it?
It’s a pest report from the café, with scorpion written on the front with large looping letters.
Was it the scorpion that killed her? Did someone do this on purpose? What’s happening? I take my phone out of my grey hoodie’s pocket and call the police. Now I can only hope that they don’t peg me for the crime. On second thought, it will be much better if I leave. I don’t need to stick around here to be a witness.
I go back inside my own living area and sit down. What to do, what to do? I see something moving along the edge of the wall. No, the ceiling. Now the wall again. There are a bunch of things, a bunch of scorpions. They’re coming from everywhere, covering everything. They spot me as their target. Don’t move. But they’re everywhere. I freeze. They’re all over me. I’m being pierced by hundreds if not thousands of stingers. The pain is too much. I can’t bear it. “Damn it, damn it, damn it,” I curse. I’ll just have to put up with it, since I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do. I wait. It’s harder to feel what they’re doing to me; it seems almost as if they’re gone. The scorpions are still there, though, and still stinging. I can’t feel anything at all. I collapse. I can’t even move. I won’t be lucky enough to get out of this safely.
“Looks like you’ve got some pretty bad luck.” The waitress from the coffee shop walks in on me. “They’ve got you pretty hurt, haven’t they?”
“Mhm,” I choke.
“Well then.” She strides over and stands above my head. Not aware of her true intentions, I tie her shoelaces from her uniform shoes together so I can ask her questions before she goes. “Cut that out and I’ll try to help you.”
“Damn you.” She knows what I’m doing. She’s got me. I close my eyes and drop the laces. “It’s your fault for standing like that. I didn’t really have a many other options, and I’d like to be able to ask what you’re going to do to me.”
“I get it. Now this might be painful, but you’ll just need to take it for a few seconds, got it?”
“Yeah, all right.”
Something hard hits my head a few times. I open my eyes to see her beating my head in with a staff of some sort.
“Stop it!” I snarl. “Don’t you know what the hell you’re doing?”
“There’s something inside of you that’s making this difficult.”
“Making what difficult? What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to push back the thing inside of you so the scorpions will go away. They’re not attacking you, they’re attacking it. They don’t usually do this when they’re sent after someone.” The girl throws the staff on the ground. “I think it should be done now, though.” The scorpions recede into the corners of the house. “It’s a good thing too.” She gazes around my small home. “From what I can tell, you’re never going to get ahead like this, but I think I might know how to fix that.” She extends a hand to me, which I am unable to take in my own. Understanding this, she lifts me up. “Now there’s one more thing that I’d like to do, okay?”
I can’t stop her, and it’s getting harder to speak. The scorpions aren’t normal, that’s for sure, and I don’t know what effect their venom will have on me now that they’re gone.
“I’d like to show you this.” The woman’s eyes change slightly in a way that my own can barely detect, and before I know it, I’m being stabbed in the throat by a giant stinger. My body falls to the floor, but somehow, I still stand, completely fine and able to move. The girl helps me to the wooden chair that I keep near the door, and I think maybe, just maybe, I am able to go to sleep without anything gettin g worse.
I wake up. What happened exactly? What am I? Am I alive? Am I dead? Maybe I’m alive, but I’m also dead. I don’t know how else to explain it. Because my body, my swelled, destroyed body, is lying on the very floor that I’m looking down upon. Am I actually done for? Could it be some kind of out of body experience? I always thought those were crap that people made up, but now I’m starting to reconsider. Is that what this is? No, it can’t be, because how could I have a physical form if that were the case? I stand up and walk over to my body, which is looking more than ever like a corpse. The lady from the coffee shop holds her arm out to stop me, but I push it away. “Let me do this,” I evenly say. I bend down and turn the body over. It’s mine, that’s for sure, and it shows no signs of life. “So.” I face the girl. “Who are you and what am I?”
“I promise that I can explain all of this. It might take some time, but I’ll let you know what you need to when you need to know it.” She tilts her dark head to the side. “My name is Ser H. Circuit. It was...”
I cut her off. “What an odd name. What world do you think this is?”
“Funny. My father actually decided on it. He changed his name when he moved from far away and I guess he thought Circuit was what he was looking for. It’s none of my fault, believe me.” She paces around for a moment. “It was my fault that the scorpions appeared, and because of them, you’re dead. Undead, actually. Adds a bit of fun, minus the f.” I sigh at her bad idea of a joke, if it could be called that.
“You’re disgusting,” I mutter.
“You are now filled with something called Blood. I know it sounds obvious, but it’s not blood like you know it, it’s Blood, with a capital B. It’s a type of energy within you, seen as the colour red, which it’s why it’s called Blood. When one has this type of energy, something grows inside of them that allows them to take on features of whatever the energy morphs into. My Blood, for example, is a scorpion. That stinger you saw, it allows me to use that. If you have enough of it, you’ll be able to transform completely into whichever form it chooses, though that’s highly unlikely since I generally can’t give enough Blood to allow others to do that,” she explains. “You could also spend years training it, but who really has the time for that?”
“You look enough like a scorpion already for me to stick around to see you transform completely.” She doesn’t react to my comment. “So when will I know what it will do to me?” I ask.
“It could be any time. We’ll just have to see. Things will start happening soon, though, if you’re the way that I’m pretty sure you are.”
“How long did it take you?” I don’t care to find out what way she thinks I am. Not if her initial impression of me is as bad as mine is of her.
“The changes came within an hour. More stuff happens on the inside than on the outside, really. But after about three hours I was able to do this,” she explains. I wait for something to happen, but nothing does.
Then the tail returns. I step back. The tail goes away, and a claw appears where her left hand was. It fades too. “I take on scorpion traits when I need or want to.”
“I’d rather not do that.” I back away from Ser a little more.
“I’m sure you’ll like it after not too long.” Ser looks at the watch on her wrist. “Listen, I need to tell you some things.”
“Go ahead. I’ll believe anything at this point,” I quietly laugh. Why did I say that? Why did I even laugh? I must be losing my mind. Maybe it was left in the other version of my body.
“Good. So the first thing is that I can’t just do to anyone what I did to you. So don’t count on any of your friends being like this. Actually, I was supposed to wait before doing this to you, but it’s too late to do anything about that. Second, there are many different worlds in our universe, and this is only one of them.”
“I know that already. The other worlds are no secret. What year do you think this is?”
“I can only give one person per world enough Blood to be useful, so you had better not die on me.”
Something starts to change in my opinion of this Ser lady. If she did this and she needs me to be useful, then she must both have a really important reason for doing this and also think there’s some kind of hope for me, which is something that not even I have done in a very long time. “I understand. I won’t die on you if I can help it.” I am the only person she can get help from in this entire world. At first that fact is shocking and impressive, but then I remember that there are many other places she could easily pluck an assistant from for whatever she needs one for. I try to recall any of the other worlds I might have heard of before. I have never been outside of Rubia, so I don’t really know much about any of the other places, despite knowing that they exist. The only other one I know any amount on at all is Ruri, since a former friend of mine had grown up there and was always telling me stories about it. “I’ll be your help from Rubia if that’s what you want. I’m guessing there’s something you want me to do now that I’m like this.”
“There is. And... Thank you. I’ve already lost a couple of the others. A shame, really.”
“So what have you been doing to lose them?”
“Travelling. Recruiting. There’s something important that must be done, and I need as much help as I can get with it.”
“You must have done some pretty dangerous travelling. Doesn’t sound like this is something I should get into. But if you can provide me with something to do and maybe some food and shelter, I’ll do whatever needs to be done.”
“Seriously? I was pretty certain that this would be a lot harder than it is right now. You’re not kidding, are you?”
“No I’m not. Look around. I have nothing. I don’t have a job, I can barely keep a room in an apartment building, I don’t really have a family to worry about troubling when I’m gone, so what do I even have to lose? I don’t even technically have my own life anymore.”
“You have a point.” Ser casts her gaze down to the ground with a grateful smile. “Thank you.”
“Don’t worry about it. I should be thanking you, in a way.” I don’t even know why I’m saying this, but it seems that it needs to be said. “You gave me another chance anyway, one that doesn’t involve me struggling to get by.”
“Perfect. I’d suggest that you pack a few things that are important to you, because we have to leave in two hours to go to Zerrin. Meet me at the edge of the statue in the park on the far side of the city five minutes before we have to go.” Ser leaves the room.
I start to examine my body once more, and I try to decide if I should clean the blood off of the dull floor and walls. In the end I decide not to. In two short hours the room won’t be my problem, and when someone comes to collect the money for the place they’ll just find me dead there anyway. I abandon the corpse and start packing a small bag of my most important things, aware that there’s a chance that I might lose even them by the time all of this is over. Then again, what does it even matter if I lose them when there’s a risk that I could end up like Ser Circuit’s other helpers and lose my life?
“You’re a couple of minutes late,” Ser scolds. I don’t care; I had to walk across half of a city.
“I think I did quite well,” I mention. “I packed everything I needed and made it here without the help of a map.” It’s my first time in the area, and I did have to ask a few people for directions. “You should be impressed with me.”
“I actually am, don’t worry,” Ser tells me. She looks much less menacing in the natural light, and she seems to give off kinder energy. “I actually had to take the bus to get here, and I only got here about four minutes ago since the traffic was so thick.”
“So when do we leave for Zerrin?”
“There’s a change of plan, Seth.”
“Oh?” I frown. “What is it?”
“There’s something here in Rubia that I need.” She takes a map out of her bag. “I know I should have done this while I was living here, but it would have been a little complicated on my own. Already I had to kill a girl to even get to you, so getting the crystal might be a bit difficult without committing any crimes. Also, it was too far away from my job at the coffee shop.”
