Star Child

Chapter V: Threats

"Well shit," Theo muttered lowly as a group of guards approached them.

"You're under arrest for the murder of one of the royal guards," one of the guards began to get out a pair of handcuffs, while two other guards restrained Nicolas and Theo. Nicolas' frail body was jerked forward and his hands were bound behind his back with handcuffs.

"Sorry, I'm not into bondage," Nicolas spat, his head looking at his captor, his mussed hair and earmuffs hit by a club of one of the other guards.

"Shut up, you worm," responded one of the guards, and the other guards chuckled venomously, comparable to jocks on the culprit's position of a hazing. They shifted and Theo leered at Nicolas, egging him on. Nicolas could tell Theo's plan; Nicolas would distract them with wit, and Theo would magic them out of the situation. Hopefully.

"Ooh, what a great comeback, I'm just quivering at the sight of these Law and Order: French Revolution rejects." The guards growled like beasts, and their eyes shined antagonistically at the boy as he was struck with a club in the back of the head once more. Feeling dizzy, Nicolas stumbled onto his knees but was jolted back up into the blurring reality by the guard who had him now.

"Who's so funny now?" the guard snarled into Nicolas' ear.

"Still not you," Nicolas retorted, beginning to slur his words. "You're so dim a black hole is jealous." The guards' face became nearly crimson as there was a nervous chuckle among the rest of his posse. Theo carefully slipped his wand out of his pocket and grabbed a small bottle out of his bag.

"Shut up, all of you!" The guard silenced everyone by swinging down his club against Nicolas' head once again, striking it with a loud crack, deafening to even the most bloodthirsty of sentient beings. The guard panted after doing so, and everyone just stared at the motionless body of Nicolas; his body was inert and gray, like a statue illustrating brutality and desperation.

Theo took this moment to drop the small potion on the ground, allowing for a plume of purple smoke to enshroud the crowd. Lifting Nicolas, Theo unlocked the handcuffs on both of them by using an the key and they sped out of the situation, further into the forest.

***

From the shadows, Matilda watched the violet plume explode, and she lost sight of her son and the human. When the fog cleared, the guards stood, entranced and in a stupor of confusion. In this second, she came into the light between the trees, and the guards raised their weapons. She flicked them away effortlessly, and they began to run away, however they weren't able to get far before she lifted them into the air and brought them back to her.

Taking out some petals of nightshade between her fingers, Matilda Thompson blew them and the spread, hitting and taking out almost all of the guards, except for the one that had been brutalizing the human. Each guard fell to their knees, and then to their chest, gray and dead from the spell of nightshade. Matilda pushed up her glasses and brought the remaining guard to herself.

"Tell your Queen; deliver my son home to me. Do what you will with the human, but return my son Theodore Thompson," Matilda caressed the guards' neck with her long, dark fingernails. Her long, dark hand, ringed with iron jewelry, was then brought back to her side, sitting next her big hip. Stringing her wiry black hair out with her other hand, she pointed at the guard, letting the words of her threat sink in. "Trust me; she doesn't want me opposing her in this war."

And she sent the abusive guard packing.

***

"Hey, Mrs. Tsukino," Selena Shade spoke with a delicate yet firm deliberation over the phone. Her dark hand and dark-rimmed glasses leaned against her face, her phone caressing her cheek like the pavement to a corpse.

"Oh, hello Selena, how are you?"

"I'm fine thanks, I was just wondering if Nicolas was home. We had planned to hang out with some other friends this afternoon, but he hasn't been replying to my messages."

"Oh, that's weird... well he must be outside, maybe in the woods."

"Yeah that's what I figured. I'll try calling him again and see where that gets me," Selena replied, and the two parted with polite good-byes and she hung up. Sighing, she clicked her cell back on and tapped the screen with long, dark fingers. Wiping her dark, messy hair out of her face, she texted Nicolas once again, her third text in two hours.

'Hey loser, you okay?'

Waiting for a response for a few minutes, none came.

Groaning, she realized that she would have to venture into the woods, and see if she could find him. The woods by his house weren't that big. You couldn't really get lost in them; the diameter of the wood was a mile apart at most. Pulling a long, black jacket over a dark lavender-cosmic dress she juxtaposed herself strongly against the snow and began her journey.

And she stepped into the snow.

***

"Are you okay?" A soft voice melodically swept over Nicolas as he blinked his eyes calmly. The blurriness of his sight left Nicolas unable to move for a few moments, and until his self imposed paralysis subsided, he stared up at the seemingly endless expanse of trees and whispered to himself unintelligibly.

From a foot away, Theo stared intently forward, unblinking. Nicolas yawned and rubbed his eyes, his demeanor no different than that of someone who just awoke from a nap. Feeling the back of his head, Nicolas caressed a lump of dried blood from some sort of injury he suffered previously. The lump was sore, and Nicolas winced when he put pressure on it, which when Theo walked over with a small bag of herbs and creams, he did just that.

"God damn," Nicolas winced lightly. "Didn't you just hear the narrator finish explaining that it hurts when you put pressure on it?" His teasing fell on deaf ears though, as Theo looked at him incredulously.

"What the hell are you talking about? Are you okay?"

"Never mind... maybe we should..." Nicolas, with much assistance from Theo, got himself up and standing. "It's fine..." He panted. "I don't need help... its fine don't bother yourself." Theo shook his head and Nicolas sighed. "What happened anyway?"

"You don't remember?"

"No... I just remember something hitting me... I guess..." Nicolas' words stumbled out clumsily; a conglomeration of completely confused consonants. Theo creased his eyebrows and reached into his bag, pulling out the bottle of whiskey and taking a sip, he handed it to Nicolas along with a few pieces of ice for the back of his head.

As Nicolas slipped in and out of consciousness, Theo observed him protectively; being that this was the first person other than his mother and sister that he had really talked to (though he had talked to Ra, she was a familiar, and couldn't talk back). Of course, he wouldn't admit that to Nicolas, or anyone for that matter. His sheltered life, though productive in his learning of magic, was largely obtuse in its production of emotional bonding, causing him to be friendly to everyone.

What had happened with the guards had shocked him, and he now felt some sort of dark, paternal guardianship over the petite boy; though he was frail, he was a resilient type of frail; an illusionary type of frailty. He was frail, but is frailness was limited to his physicality and partially his mentality.

Theo on the other hand felt that his mentality was frail. What human interaction had he had, without his mother to be there to guide him through the clumsy conversations and undirected dialogues? He was friendly, but had no one to be friendly to, and his friendliness, he thought, was because of his ignorance to the world outside the mausoleum-like building he called a house. He had really never experienced the terrible things that had happened to the people in the Ashlands, or in the slums of the Fairy Circle Major under the city of the Great Pine, or any of the other provinces of the Wood.

Finally, Nicolas slipped into a coma-like sleep, and Theo realized that the deepness of his slumber would likely prevent him from waking for several hours. Through Theo's medical knowledge, he theorized that it would be better to let the boy sleep and put a charm circle around the area to protect him.

It was at this point that Matilda stepped out.