The Easter Bunny Must Die – Chapter 05

The words hit me like a sledgehammer, slamming into my midsection to elicit a single puff of a word.

“What?”

He just kept walking.

And I must have known, somewhere in a corner of my soul, because somehow it fit, like discovering some family hidden secret that’s warped everyone’s lives without anyone ever saying a word.

It explained so much, explained how gracefully she’d aged, the strokes of luck throughout the years. The…eccentricities and oddnesses, the mindset that had forced her in and out of gentle homes for the gently troubled. The things that had made her unfit to be a mother, but still one. Still my mother, now living in an East Side nursing home on Lake Sammammish.

I followed them down the hallway, trying to think.

My mother, a Supernatural.

What did that mean for me? Surely I was human, as my father presumably had been. I’d been vaccinated, immunized, undergone physicals… surely they would have caught any Supernatural heritage.

Maybe she was my adopted mother. I’d never shown any aptitude for magic, despite the exhaustive yearly tests the ever-hopeful Bureau administered to its employees. They would never have enough registered, certified witches.

No, I couldn’t be a witch. Or some other kind of Supernatural. I was an ordinary as rain.
The Tooth Fairy gave me an unreadable look back over her shoulder. Sympathy? Derision? The Easter Bunny didn’t look back, just shuffled along. He fumbled through his waistcoat for a pack of Nat Sherman Fantasias, extracting a pale blue cigarette with a gold filter.

“Must you?” the Tooth Fairy said.

He flicked a lighter open and paused a step to puff the tobacco alight. “Yeah, I must.” His ear flicked back toward me. “Do you mind, Ms. Amme?”

“It’s all right,” I said politely. “I don’t particularly like the smell, but I’m not going to die of it.”

“None of us are,” the Tooth Fairy said. “It’s not like lung cancer’s going to be able to take one of us. But it’s disgusting nonetheless.”

They reached a door at the end of the corridor. Unlike the other doors in the corridor, which had been unmarked, this one bore a message in crisp black letters: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. It had no door handle; on the wall beside it was a rectangle of translucent white plastic that lit beneath the touch of Santa’s hand.

The door whispered open.

It was vault rather than room that met my eyes. A back wall held rows and rows of drawers. In the middle, a raised dais of what looked like the same white plastic as the panel beside the door. On it was a round of gray stone, perhaps a foot in diameter.

We approached and as we got closer, I could feel the temperature of the air dropping with every inch that closed between us and the stone in the middle. I couldn’t imagine how powerful it might be. Some of the artifacts are demigods in and of their own right. We’d studied a few in classes, but I didn’t recognize this one.

We stood around the dais at equal intervals, Santa directly across me. The Tooth Fairy gave me another of those unsettling attempts at a smile.

“Put out your hand and lay it on the Calendar, Ms. Amme,” Santa said.

This close, the stone’s surface was covered with tangled lines, a carving whose meaning I could not decipher. The air reeked of magic, that odd nostril burn you only get when you’re around the really high-powered stuff.

I hesitated. But what could I do? I’d play along, at least until I’d had a chance to talk to my mother. I stretched out my hand.

It was cold, unbelievably cold, when I touched it. I started to pull my hand away, but some invisible force held my fingers fast to it. It rang like a bell, a sound so loud and piercing it was almost painful, a wave of sound carrying us to another dimension, where senses where different, where everything was bright and three shining figures stood in a circle with me.

One of them laid his hand on the stone as well.

“I give you the power to make much of little, and to travel quickly,” Santa Claus said.

The Tooth Fairy followed.

“I give you the power to trade one thing for another, and to enter any room.”

Finally, the Easter Bunny’s paw.

“I give you the power to bring out the life that is there, and to hide and be hidden.”

With every word, I could feel energy coiling inside me, as though I were hollow and being filled for the first time. it was an odd and unpleasant sensation, but I gritted my teeth.

The stone rang again and as the noise faded, I was able to pull my hand away.

Santa Claus smiled at me, but the expression didn’t reach his eyes. He handed me a folder. “You’ll find your target in there, and we’ll supply an assistant to help orient you.” He walked to the door. “Once you’ve had a chance to met it, you can return here and we can discuss the next step. Think of it as a trial of sorts.” He turned.

“You’ll want to talk to your mother at first, of course. That’s understandable. Quite understandable. But don’t take too long, Miss Amme We don’t try to keep these creatures down for our own amusement.” He frowned at me. “We do it for the good of the world.”