Unnaturalism

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

By now you're probably thinking, “What the fuck is this girl doing, jumping into a portal to who-knows-where just like that?” I know. Not smart.

But my thinking was, if this guy had the power to open up portals out of thin-air and quarantine birds made out of fire, I would probably already be dead by now if he really wanted me dead ipso facto he wasn't a threat—at least not right now.

Note to self: don't do anything stupid.

I've never been particularly good at creating attainable goals.

The portal spat me out in a large dome-shaped room with metal walls. I could hear the hum of electricity, it sounded like a theremin. All around the room were huge glass tubes filled with what looked like blue lightning. Odd tools cluttered the tables, including some more of those weird black dildos, which I suspected weren't actually dildos.

“Don't touch anything,” said Jew Fro, and I bit back a snarky remark.

Like I was seriously aching to touch any of this shit? Uh huh, yeah, no. I folded my arms over my chest and tried to look unimpressed and not how I actually felt: like a four-year-old kid going to Disneyland for the first time. “What is this place?”

“DRACO.”

I made a forwarding motion. “Which is…?”

“The last bastion of defense against those who would hunt us.”

What an enigmatic, cliché thing to say. I felt like I was in a B-movie.

At least he didn't say something like “we're humanity's last hope.”

“We're humanity's last hope against the supernatural.”

Fuck it.

He still had the firebird under his arm. It had gone limp, and the feathers had dulled in color; it looked…resigned.

I watched Jew Fro walk up to one of the tubes. He tapped a few keys on a panel in front of it, and the lightning flashed out, whipping around the bird, and it was sucked into the tube with a pop. I stared.

“Where did it go?” Bird of fire or not, it was still a living creature. “Did you kill it?”

“No.” He gave me an annoyed look, like he was reconsidering his choice to let me come along. “It's in stasis. This way, this way, and for God's sake, be careful.”

I looked at the tube, but the lightning was undulating so fast I couldn't see whether the bird was in there or not, and the bright light was hurting my eyes. Hopefully it was fine.

I carefully picked my way around the cluttered tables, trying not to stare too long at any of the objects on the table. A few caught my eye, though. There was a huge set of bull horns that were longer than the span of my arms. What looked like a cone shell, except it was sparkling, throwing off actual rays of light. And then, suspended in some kind of anti-gravity field, there was a—“oh my God, is that a fairy?”