Fried Chicken

Smoke seethed out of the crack between his eyelids as he sat in the wreckage of what had once been a moderately sized barn.  He was listening to the sound the charcoal made as it settled, smelling the charred flesh and feathers of the dozens of dead chickens that had hours before been crisped into cinders in the night.  Every so often the skeletal beams that still stood would see one of their number weaken, slump, and then fall crashing into the black and grey muddle that sat in the middle of the farm.  Little fires, spitting out small crackling sparks in the mid-morning light mixed with the silence of the place.  He was naked besides the ashy coating that covered him and the dregs of what had once been his zippers and buttons that still glowed a dull orange from contact with his skin.  It was a tan color, the brown of paper just as it starts to burn, covered with wind-applied streaks and washes of white and grey that burned at the edges with a sharp orange glow that tightened in a ring to turn grey into white.  His hair was still there, shoulder length and a deep, dark black that also played host to the ash.  More smoke billowed out of his eyes and mouth as he looked around, sighing as the scene took its toll on him.  Even though the corpses had burned away almost entirely, the piles of ash that stood, each a point in a triangle, hemmed him in, still trapping him there.  He hadn't hated them, just disliked their style of fun, always putting him down as the days wore on.  Burnt to a crisp, and they didn't even deserve it, and he hadn't deserved to live.  Fleeing might have been an option, at one point, when he didn't really feel the weight of responsibility that his living gave his conscience.  Daniel would have to bury the ashes, or scatter them.  He would have to make up for it.  Exhausted as he was by the ordeal, he still remembered seeing the first spark flit out from between his lips, a firefly darting out into the darkness, preceding the inferno, the storm of flame and spark and smoke that followed it, also bursting out through his ears and eyes and nose.  Steams of intensity that warmed and didn't burn, that burst forth to consume but not consuming him.  Emptiness and smoke filled him now, the smoke leaking out to leave the emptiness alone inside him.  Inside where a part of him felt burned away, cleansed, charred, and oh so dry.  He needed a drink, but he still couldn't move himself to leave.  Shock was what it was, a part of him thought, shock for the death, for the little bit of him that felt relief at the fire, for the beauty of it all when it was a room filled with glowing flames, for the pure unreal quality of it all and the speed it had happened.  A car door, truck door, slammed shut off to his right, toward the road. Out of the hazy detachment he was feeling, Daniel registered a man walking over with a lit cigarette, black trench-coat shifting a bit in the wind as he came closer with a glum, stone-like demeanor.

"Don't s'pose you know what you did here, son?"

Blankly, Daniel stared at the man.  He was speaking with a tinge of sadness in his voice, a disappointment that emanated outward without really pointing at anything in particular.

"No, you wouldn't have, not with how clean you got off.  Prolly don't even know that was magic."

He stopped a good 30 feet away from Daniel, looking all around at the whole area, just taking it all in.

"Folks call it a Phoenix, though it's not anything like the mythos most people hear about.  Inspired by the real beast, yea, but even that critter isn't the flaming chicken that kids hear about today."  The man sniffed at the air, then nodded to himself in satisfaction at something he thought to himself.  "The main similarity is how all the magic inside gets burned up.  When the fire runs out of magic, it moves on out of the body, trying to find suitable things to latch on to.  If there was any magic residue on you it'll catch there, eatin' up skin and bone, stone and wood, water and air.  Then it spreads, fast.  Lucky if you get a full body burn out of this type of thing."  He took a drag on the cigarette as Daniel watched him, not really sure what was going on any more than when the barn had burned down.

"Gettin' out untouched, well, that means you didn't have anything on you for it to catch on, and you got lucky that it all went out and away.  Still, might flare up again and you mightn't be quite so lucky again.  Lightning don't strike twice an' all."  He fished around in the pocket of his coat, eventually pulling a small, leather-bound flask from inside.  Popping the lid off to smell it for a second, the man nodded again, thinking to himself before screwing the lid back on.  "Drink this," he said as he tossed it into Daniel's lap.

He Stared down at it, slowly moving his shaky arms toward the place where it sat in his lap, cool against his legs.  It was letting a little steam off from where it made contact, the leather shrinking in protest.  His fingers closing in around it brought out larger clouds of the stuff, accompanied with a slight burning smell.  It took him a while to unscrew the cap with his fingers, wobbling back and forth as the man stood silently, watching.  With a quick look up, he saw the man nod, slowly and shallowly at his silent question.  As the liquid his his throat, it steamed up, as if he were quenching the mouth and the throat like an iron nail tossed into a bucket of water, but reversed.  It formed into droplets, running down the walls of his trachea in freezing-hot veins.  It hurt, but only for the second where it was at the boundary of fire and water.  Each little coal-hideaway that still smoked inside him felt in its turn a swift demise.  The ashes he was sitting in seemed to ward up, slowly as the process went on, finally to the point where he stood up, uncomfortably, almost falling face first into the ashes in the process.  He staggered over toward the man, out of the ash pile, clutching the bottle and feeling his slowly cooling hands sinking into the leather, searing a print in.  When he reached the grass, he collapsed down, feeling stiff and sore, and finally registering the waves of heat that were still billowing out of the wreckage.  Everywhere inside of him was cooling with the liquid he swallowed, feeling harder and stronger, and down in the bottom of it all was a little puddle of water left.

"Now, Son, let's get ourselves some breakfast, there's a t-shirt and jeans in the back of the truck, and I have a feeling that I've got some stories to tell that you might wanna hear.  There's a Denny's down the road a ways toward town."

Not an Interview with the vampire.

For Clint Hardwood, a normal day on the job turned up nothing.  Magic just wasn't that common with everybody packing into the sardine cans we call cities these days.  It like room to breathe, move around, stretch out.  Not that magic was really alive, not any more than water or air was.  So Clint spent most of his days wandering around, grabbing lunch where he could find it and just kinda smelling the air for anything magical.

Trouble was, the last week wasn't normal.  A hint up in one of the 'burbs had led him on a long trail.  A few whisps of energy here and there, a smudged out run drawn in chalk, and the faint leavings of an unfamiliar aura, he'd checked it against the known practitioners list at the office, and he ended up here, in front of what was left of an old, abandoned apartment complex on the edges of the city.  This either meant they were homeless, criminal, or had a flair for the dramatic, and Clint owed a slight limp to the last time he ran into someone with all three.  A decade to heal it up had done wonders though, he was back up his old agility, or nearly, in the past year.

Digging through his trench coat pocket, he produced a half empty pack of cigarettes and a lighter.  With a few quick motions, tossing the lighter to his other hand and flicking the paper box open, he had it lit and in his mouth in a little less than two seconds.  Just long enough for him to consider exactly how bad this business could get.  That's why they hired him though, because he was good enough for the bad business, or maybe just bad enough to get along with it.  As he stepped into the interior, he muttered to himself, something very arcane and showy as was his taste in magic, and only magic, and his cigarette lit up as bright as a flood lamp.  This was one of the many reasons he always wore sunglasses.

Nothing much held his interest in the foyer.  He paced around the corridors, sniffing every so often, only getting the scent of cigarette smoke and old cigarette smoke for his troubles.  It wasn't a bust though, he had a sense for these things, and his wanderings, as always, eventually led him to the right spot.  At least an interesting spot, that is.  Right wasn't always what you thought is was, so he tried to keep it out of his mind.  It was a stairwell, ground floor, leading down into the basement.  Not that worn, but a bit of disturbed dust sitting around tipped him off.  That and the glow from down in the darkness.  It was a clue, so down he went, as was the nature of his job description.

Pillars, as one might imagine in a parking garage, though this was obviously a cellar, cast long shadows back into the darkness.  Empty crates of what most certainly used to contain toiletries, food, essentials sat around with no clear order about them.  Down in front was an open doorway into a lit up room.  This time Clint didn't walk straight in; he'd had bad experiences with pillars in the past, so he did a sweep of the room first, casual style.  Then he went in, at least sure that anything coming from behind him was sneaky enough that negligence wouldn't have mattered, not that he wouldn't win anyway.  It took more than one shot to bring him down, but it would still hurt.

Anyway, there was light.  Looked like the place had been a kitchen before, ovens and a freezer in the back, plus a dumbwaiter off in the corner.  It had been redesigned to look more like an operating room, now.  Scalpels and knives sitting around everywhere, an operating lamp over the island in the center, causing most of the light.  On the counters around the edge of the room were a few candles, non-scented at least, that flickered a little as Clint stepped in.  He cursed under his breath.  It was either necromancy, or demonology, and likely some kind of perversion of both; the two subjects tended to mix a bit.  That and he could taste the tang of something not quite right in the air, dirty magic.  This was why he was around.  When you didn't quite know what you were doing, it was lucky if nothing bad happened, never mind if anything you wanted came out of it.

The freezer door swung slowly open.  It was a blond man in a light blue bathrobe that was dotted with little splotches of reddish brown.  To call him a man was more to err on the side of responsibility though, he looked like he could have been in his last stages of teenagerhood.  He was smiling a bit.  That little way that seems oh so smug yet everyone else is sure that they overlooked something.  Clint stared him down for a while.

"You crazy, kid?" Clint's hands were in his pockets, his shoulder leaning against the doorway to the cellar.

"Beg your pardon?" A raised eyebrow from the blonde, leaning against his own doorway.

"Crazy, as in insane." He supplied, gruffly.

"I shouldn't think so, but I hear that that's how one would usually describe oneself regardless.  What makes you ask?"

"Well, seeing as you don't seem to have a license to practice in the area, you either don't think the law will come get you, or you're too stupid to know we exist."

"Oh, right, law enforcement" He stood up, trying to smooth out the bathrobe a bit. "I had a thought that there might be something like that, but I figured that I'd deal with it when it came to it, err, me."

"Did you now?"

"Yes, quite so, or maybe after I'd run a few more tests and experiments, really."

Craig looked from side to side, then fixed his gaze back on the blonde.  "Don't suppose you'd tell me what tests exactly you've been doing, will you?"

"Well, I mean, there have been lots, like that one back a few weeks ago with the mice and"

"Generalize."

"Mostly into raising the dead, really."

"Doesn't look like you had any luck, due to the fact that you seem to be in one piece, and I haven't had to play cover up for any. . .incidents."

The boy laughed.  It was a very boyish laugh.  Not menacing, not too high, but not filled with much bass yet.  Just a twinge of smugness.  Then just a grin.  Something moved behind the boy though.  It was instinct.  Clint's hand popped up out of his pocket, flipped the safety off of the pistol, and shot the boy in the chest.  Clint shuffled forward, waiting for the zombie to walk out of the freezer, the zombie the boy had animated and had likely controlled with some demonic pacts of some sort.  Then he saw the birdcage.  It looked like a normal bird.  It was eating birdseed.  It was not trying to break through the cage with feral rage to devour his flesh and rip out his brain.  It still smelled way too magical though, this whole place did, and it was all very rough magic.

"Ow, what did you do that for, man?"

Clint lept back, looked down, and pointed his gun at the blond who was just pushing himself up off the floor.  There was a bigger red stain on the bathrobe, and a bullet hole through it, but not as much as you would expect for a person shot through the heart.  A lot more mobile than that too.

"What the hell."  It was monotone, mostly because Clint did not actually have a reaction for this yet.  First time for everything.

"Oh, right, the not being dead bit.  I moved my heart, right?  It should be common enough, and with the extra room I had when I took out some of the non essentials afterwards, I even had space for some backup organs.  I think that was an extra kidney that I'll need to replace now?"

Clint just stared.  The blonde had pulled the robe to the side a bit to show some scars on his chest.

"Keep talking kid."

"About the operations?"

"Yeah, those, and why you'd have non essentials, as you put it."

"Is becoming a lich that uncommon?"

"A lich."

"Yeah, I found some books on the procedure, though they were a bit out of date with current scientific knowledge, so I tried to piece it together myself.  The problem with it that is.  The books all talked about how hard it was to do right, and how mostly you just ended up with mindless zombies and so I"

"Alright that's enough.  I need to get you into custody for unregistered magic use along with practice of necromancy."

"Is that very bad?"

"Well, I shot you when I thought that bird was a zombie, didn't I?"

"Oh, she is, waitwaitwait, a lich though, no bloodthirstyness, I checked."

Clint glared at him for a few moments.

"But like, prison bad, or execution bad?"

"Prison, normally.  Might make an exception on extenuating circumstances though.  You don't have any of the bloodthirsty ones around, do you?"

"Well, no.  I was using rats for the initial experiments, but I screwed up the first one I managed to get working, which is why I switched to the bird.  The ones that didn't turn out I smashed the heads of and performed the right rituals on."

"Describe them."

"Salt the corpse, burn the corpse, then salt the ashes, right?"

"That's a good one, yeah.  And you made sure to get all of them?"

"Of course.  I can't very well run the risk of them getting away and harming anybody, can I?"

"Good.  Anything else around here, besides the bird, that is dangerous?"

"The books, maybe? Other than that, not really"

"Alright, grab them, I'll wait here."

"Right away, but, uh, can I get dressed first, there's kind of a hole in my bathrobe now, and I wouldn't want to walk around in public with it on."