Inside Straight

Fortune looked up. He was smiling. He shook his head. If they hadn’t been drunk, Jonathan and Lohengrin might have found the right words to talk him back. They might have had the presence of mind to leap forward and snatch the thing from his hand. If they hadn’t been drunk, they wouldn’t have been there in the first place. John Fortune tossed the amulet in the air, caught it, and dropped the cord around his neck. The red stone bauble struck his chest with a low, heavy sound, and then hung there, innocuously.

Jonathan Hive stared at the thing as it shifted slightly against Fortune’s shirt. After a moment, he remembered to breathe. Fortune laughed ruefully, touching the amulet with his fingertips. “Nothing,” he said. “Just another fairy tale that didn’t come true.”

“Look, Fortune. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

John Fortune started screaming. Lohengrin’s mystic armor appeared, a white luminous medieval knight. Jonathan hopped back a step and then forward again. The brass setting lay on the floor, two hollow half-rounds, like a walnut shell with the nut missing. The stone was gone. Fortune was ripping off his shirt, shrieking like a girl.

“What!” Jonathan shouted. “What is it?”

“It’s inside of me! Holy shit! Get it out!”

A lump moved under Fortune’s dusky skin, something forcing its way through him, up his chest, over his collarbone.

“Lohengrin!” Jonathan screamed. “Knife! The big knife! The sword! Get your sword! Cut it out!”

“No!” Fortune cried, but whether he meant the thing crawling in his flesh or the plan to cut him open wasn’t clear.

The knight shifted his attention from Fortune clawing at his own flesh, to Jonathan’s trembling finger. The lump passed under Fortune’s jaw, and then up through his cheek. As Lohengrin stepped forward, the sword glowing into being in his hand, the thing reached John Fortune’s forehead. Something like a detonation filled the room: light and heat and a kind of shockwave that Jonathan felt in his bones though it didn’t blow back his hair or his clothes. The air smelled of dust and overheated stone.

“Mem Gott.”

Where John Fortune had been, a huge she-lion crouched, light streaming from her like a small sun. She bared her teeth at Lohengrin, who stepped back, his sword held at the guard before him. The lioness howled.

“What the fuck!“ Jonathan shouted.

The lioness turned to him, startled by his voice. When she opened her mouth, he saw the billowing flame in her throat. He barely had time to expand out, wasps exploding in all directions, before the blast of fire passed through the space where he had been.

The study descended into chaos. Lohengrin swung his sword, the tip cleaving pits of lathe and plaster out of the walls. Flames burst over him like water while the lioness leaped and roared. Jonathan, not sure whether to flee or try to save Lohengrin from Fortune, or maybe Fortune from Lohengrin, buzzed madly around the room.

The lioness leapt and snapped, growled and screamed. Jonathan split himself, rolling and dodging every time the lioness shot at him.

Fire, Jonathan thought as he fled out to the hallway, why does it always have to be fire?

Lohengrin staggered out, victim of a lucky swipe of the lioness’s huge paw. The lioness followed, pressing her advantage. The screams from the beast’s throat were terrible.

Lohengrin seemed to be fighting a defensive battle, keeping the lioness at bay and trusting to his armor for protection from the flames. The lioness had no such compunction. Her lips were pulled back in a snarl that would have made Jonathan certain that he was about to die if he’d been back in his human form.

With a howl, the lioness leapt past Lohengrin and into the main room. The open architecture served her. There was no way to block her path, and she was able to leap from one end of the room to the other, claws digging into the walls and floor.

“Stop!” Lohengrin shouted. “You must stop!”

Fuck that, Jonathan thought. Go! Let it go! But without the benefit of lungs or a throat, all he managed was a slightly louder buzzing.

An alarm blared. Jonathan felt a few of his wasps cook off and die. And then a few more. Either he was getting worse at dodging the lioness …

No, no—the house was on fire.

In the study, flames had taken the desk and the wall of awards. The hallway was also alight, tongues of blue-and-orange flame licking at the walls and ceiling. The lioness roared again, and flames belched out, breaking off Lohengrin’s armor and setting the curtains on fire.

Jonathan condensed back into human form at the front door. Another fire alarm went off, the high squeal like the house itself screaming in fear. The sound seemed to shock Lohengrin and the lioness both. Two heads—one armored the other leonine—turned toward Jonathan. He threw open the door. “Get out! Now! Out!”