The Failure of Debbie Macky

The Failure of Debbie Macky

She was working at being human and she was very pleased with her results. She had even chosen her name and liked how it sounded. She said it over and over again. Things had been left for her and she could always find them in times of need. Documents, papers and even photographs. The human who might have been Debbie Macky didn't need them any more. She laughed and skipped about. Her hair was dark and her eyes the same.

She stood before the mirror saying her name and smiling. Then for a moment the room flickered and the mirror went black.

She swore and hit the deck as a javelin came through the mirror and impaled in the wall behind her. The mirrors surface was still as smooth as it had been before.

She reached out with her mind and grabbed the tooth paste and flicked a large blob all over the silvery surface. The room was perfectly still and nothing moved. Standing slowly she released the breath she was unaware she had been holding. She retrieved the javelin from the wall with effort.

It's smooth white shaft was covered in hotly glowing runes. It's flint tip had covered in an iron and lead mix but the craftsmanship was beautiful. It's grace showed that some of her race were now working for the enemy. Had she been the other-side she could have tracked down the assailant and made them talk. Here though she was still unsure of how strong she was. She raised her slim arms and cast a protective circle around the room, cutting her thumb on an old razor she sealed it with a drop of her blood.

She was angry with herself for allowing herself to be seen. She would not be able to make direct contact now. Debbie licked the blood from her thumb. She sat down cross-legged on the floor of carpet tiles and placed the javelin before her. It look familiar but she couldn't place it. She began to clear her mind and try and work the remembering. Where had she seen those marks before? She could read all of their languages and that of the enemy. The work on the shaft brilliant, it's magick's shone with gold like radiance but were cool to the touch. Someone of great wealth and knowledge had made it. It didn't have her true name on it, but the power for it to pierce the Veil this deeply was worrying. Passing through was one of the hardest things she had ever done, and only her ring had come through with her. Someone knew she had come through. Someone powerful enough to send things through the Veil. She knew she would need to use this to track her mark this side. The poor fool whom the enemy was using like a puppet to find the Golden One.

How? How could they have planted someone so close, with the whole world to look in? How had they know she was coming she was the best but it had been hidden from all but a few.

Bile arose in her throat. We have a traitor.

She was repulsed. She had no love of humans herself, they were blind for the most part but they were so young and we had all be that way once. Yet the others wanted them destroyed. She knew that this century had been the worst, many of their own side turning after the great blackness had cut into the earth so deeply. She was not a narrow minded bigot, and there were more subtle plays of power in the courts than she hadn't a head for. This was after all, the second war.

Centring her mind she examined the javelin again, and there it was. Proof. The court seal on the shaft half obscured by the magicks but there none the less. A traitor in the court.

She had to warn the Golden One. Yet her mission was more important. She must keep her safe from the other agents first.

A shiver rippled up her spine. Was the traitor using the Dark magick to control the puppet?

“Helfa yr Helwyr”

The javelin began to wobble and then slowly rise from the floor. It jerked violently towards the mirror and then slowly moved like a compass.

More proof that the traitor was controlling the puppet. Debbie felt a flicker of recognition, the traitor knew someone was using his magicks. She clapped her hands and the spear dropped onto the ground. The connection severed.

She looked around the room for a bag to put some things in, then looked at the spear. She grabbed her handbag and with a word dropped the circle and sucked the rest of the energy into her ring.

She rushed out of the door and went out into the world of people.

Debbie grinned to herself as they sweetly and quietly assumed she was one of them. She walked until she found what she was looking for. The snooker hall was badly lit and she had to walk up steep stone steps. The place crackled with a power. Opening the door she smiled at the guy on the door.

In ten minutes she left with a brand new over priced snooker cue, in a long hard case.

On the way back to to Debbie's place, her place, she stopped at a local shop and bought a packet of cigarettes and a mental lighter with a leaf motif on it.

In the disorderly hedges she placed her finger tips onto the trees and asked directions. Their minds were not used to being spoken to but they were delighted.

“My thanks”

She said with a courtly bow and skipped down the road. There were some plants growing outside her house and the weeds reached out for Debbie. Smiling she plucked them as tenderly as she could.

She wrapped them in a soft velvet bag she had found when she got here. Making sure no-one was looking she went into the house. It was a cheap student let with bad furnishings and the smell of damp and over warm plastic.

Everything was as she had left it and she drew a smiley face in the toothpaste in the mirror. The bedroom had a sink and mirror in it probably because there was not enough life in the boiler to heat enough water for the large chipped enamel bath. She thought it unlikely she would stay here anyway. She marvelled at how difficult people made their lives in the name of comfort.

After the ritual she managed to blend the snooker cue and the javelin into the same temporal place. It wasn’t as hard as it sounded as the javelin wasn't supposed to be on this plane at all. It was roughly the same size and weight. The cue adopted the colour of the javelin and the runes still shimmered across it's surface. The tip became heavier and the brass was the leaden colour of the dipped flint. Debbie could have made it invisible but knew that this was better. People didn't not see things like this. They did notice invisible things. Then she began to hunt.

After three weeks of the same routine she frustratingly had very little. At night she went to the park or the common and allowed the compass to direct her. Still she found no trace. One night at half moon she touched a tree just to speak with someone and found it was already awake. They spoke at length in the old language. Then the pine tree gave her the break she had been looking for.

“They put the people who can see in a pen like cattle and try and blind them with poison. They think this medicine.”

“Where is this pen? What is this medicine?”

“I do not know what medicine it is but the place lies over there.”

The tree sent her the map in her mind through the tangle of roots and soil. She had found him. She was sure.

Now she set about finding the things she needed. She would have to do an information sweep to be sure and to get anything she might need. Debbie would need to steal documents and forge her own too. She buried the cue and case under the tree that helped her and asked it to protected it for “Our Lady”.

Behind some tall pine trees in the hospital garden she hid some of the things she might need later, in her duffel bag.

She allowed herself to be less, to shrink all the spark and magick within herself until she didn't even register to people, and she walked around the hospital.

Listening she could hear all the different groups of people. The doctors, the nurses, the patience, and finally the “other staff”. The others here didn't speak much English. Everyone did their best to ignore them and gave them a wide birth due to some of the unsavoury aspect of their job.

Debbie smiled. Perfect. She watched for the shift changed and listened to the Polish and Portuguese laughing at jokes in their own language. As Portuguese was similar to spoken word she already knew she decided to learn that. The orderlies and porters were complaining about the cleaning staff, who had been moaning about the nurses, this made everyone erupt into laughter.

Debbie didn't understand why.

The next night she went to the hospital in an orderly uniform and gave her new I.D. To the duty desk. Her hair was tied back and she smiled apologetically at the nurse who waved her in the direction of someone who had been there a long time. Debbie guessed right, the orderlies organised themselves and with a quick glance at her paperwork Ania Nowikci began her first shift on the “crazy” ward. Nelka was her supervisor and ward she seemed please that Ania kept trying her broken English to talk to her. She chatted with people and smiled and muttered with others. She helped give out medicines and organise the meals. She helped with the paperwork too.

Debbie took some blank forms and merged them with her uniform. It looked as though some ink had smudged onto it. She walked the ward and found the day-room and sat in it was “harmless Gregory”.

After her shift she got everything she needed ready.

Debbie Macky was going to be crazy.

At home she placed the papers before her and visualised the words and the blank forms filled with the untidy writing of Nurse Hixs. Debbie Macky was being transferred to the blue ward do to overcrowding else where. She sat herself on the wheelchair and rolled into the ward.

A few days passed before she found an enemy agent looking for Gregory. He was a nurse, but the patients hated him. She knew she must be on her guard, that she had to get rid of him.

She contrived the assault as she lay in bed hearing a woman down the hall sob into the darkness.

The place seemed to pull her in many directions at once. The patients had such power and fierceness. Some where plane touched others had Varx latched onto them, some were huge, sucking their life force away.

The pity for them welled up in her but her warrior instincts told her to use it, turn it to rage and cleave the place in two. If she could draw the agent out in the open she could make him leave.

It had never dawned on her that the puppet was a person. He had been a threat, yet here a sadness that one of her kind had brought him to this place, had stolen his life to end the war sickened her.

Getting up she opened the locked door with a thought and walked down the hall, silent as a shadow.

She saw the agent leave her room and knew how she would end him.

She had shadowed him all shift until she knew he would be making his way to the day-room.

Slowly she walked up behind him. She placed her hand on the small of his back and she whispered.

“Come now to the whisper tree where the war was ended,

Come now the truce has been made and all is whole between us.

The Golden One has been reborn and she will reunite the worlds.”

The song was in the Oldest of their tongue and the nurse snapped around to find Debbie had paralysed his lower body.

His mouth open, a well of anger and rage in his reddening face. With that she ran full pelt into the day-room.

He howled in pure rage. She could place the accent but it was in the guttural snare of the lowlands, near the west coast. Debbie began her crazy raging and screaming. The nurse lunged at her but she was the better warrior by far she broke his nose, pushing him into the Veil with such force a it almost made him lose his balance. As she predicted the other nurses were behind her now, she tried to push the riotous energy in the room reaching to the women he had hurt. It worked the room went wild. Her fingers still sticky with the blood of her enemy she allowed the others to take so as not to blow her cover. She kept her eyes on Gregory the whole time, and fell into the blackness.

She could feel him near her, the drugs slightly suppressing the raw power in her.

Debbie copied the others a she had seen dosed with such drugs. Numb and pale, hollow with the fog. She answered the questions as though she had been the woman down the hall.

The doctors looked worried and looked at the nurses, then left the room.

She had won and now she needed to see, should she kill the puppet or try and save Gregory. She watched him. Came and sat near him. She tried to decide, but could not.

Should ask the court for it's council knowing it was poisoned from within? No she was alone and she would free them both. Inside the bathroom 2, in one of the cupboards was Ania Nowikci, her passes her uniform and her shoes.

She left and went to get her money and papers as Debbie and Gregory sorted. Once they were out she could take the javelin to the Golden One show her the proof a then heal Gregory. She left them in the bag that was still under the tree untouched by anything even rain. She smiled.

She slipped back into Debbie’s bed and no-one knew that she had been gone.

Everything went to plan and as she sat on the park bench, in her thin summer dress she looked at Gregory as though for the first time. No, people must be protected, they are so weak and vulnerable compared to us. We are right in this.

After she left him she retrieved the cue case and made her way to the Golden One. As she walked across the city it began to rain heavily. Her hair plastered it's self to her her head and her dress clung to her, but she kept moving.

“There is a traitor, I must tell her. I must warn her."

The growing dark of evening was all the quicker for the bullet coloured clouds and the threat of lightening made the street lights fizz. Cars streaked light angry fireflies through the wet streets but she was almost there. The Golden was waiting for her, she could see her, she ran Debbie ran towards her and then; the sickening thud and crush. The truck hit her sending her spinning down the road. The Golden One ran. The lights were around her and Debbie Macky was gone.