“I like it!” she said, thrilled. “I think part of sussing out my place in this new world is getting into my own juju groove.”
“Shitty Ritchie agrees!” the little dude announced. “Took me a few centuries to perfect my tornado move. Shall I demonstrate?”
“Absolutely not,” I said in my outdoor voice. “We’ve seen it, and my house paid for it.”
“Just trying to help,” he said, pouting. “If there’s someone here that we don’t like, I could eat them.”
“For the love of everything that could bring my fuckin’ lunch back up,” Candy Vargo shouted, then electrocuted the dolt. “How many times do we have to tell you, that you can’t go around eating people, you twat?”
“Shitty Ritchie is sorry,” the tiny man screamed, slapping out the fire covering his body. “Sometimes I forget. MY BAD.”
“Alrighty, then,” I said, trying to get what was devolving into a hot and violent mess back on track. “How about we focus on Jennifer?”
“An excellent plan,” Charlie said, approaching her. “Jennifer, let’s begin by learning from examples. Watch how Candy Vargo deals with that tree, please.”
“The huge pretty one?” Jennifer asked, pointing to an oak across the field that had to be several hundred years old.
“Yep,” Candy told her. “What I’m gonna do is pretend that fuckin’ tree is the enemy. That there tree is pissed and powerful. It’s comin’ at me and wants to rip my head off my body.”
“Holy crap,” Jennifer muttered. “A tree can do that?”
Candy looked at her like she had three heads. I knew she wanted to yell, but it was very difficult to be mad at Jennifer. She was that nice. “Umm… no. I think you might have missed the wordpretendin that last fuckin’ sentence. I’m gonna pretend the tree is the enemy. Got it?”
“Thank heavens,” Jennifer said with a laugh. “It would be all kinds of awful if I had to go around destroying trees all the time.”
“Right,” Candy Vargo said with the smallest eye roll she could muster.
It wasn’t all that small.
“Focus, please,” Charlie commanded. “Candy, attack the tree.”
“With fuckin’ pleasure,” she said.
In the time it took to inhale, the Keeper of Fate’s body shimmered a blazing orange. She sprinted at the tree so fast, she disappeared from sight for a moment. As her body came into contact with the enormous oak, she bellowed in a language that, while I didn’t understand it, the meaning was clear. The hundred-year-old oak split like a twig.
The sound of the explosion as the tree splintered into millions of woodchips echoed through the field as if the Universe was screaming in anguish. It was a sight to see. WhenCandy was done, she walked back over to the group. She was banged up and bloody, but she was also grinning.
“And that’s how it’s fuckin’ done!” she announced.
Jennifer stared at the charred chunks of wood scattered all over and frowned. “Y’all, I feel kinda bad.”
Charlie wasn’t following. “Bad?”
“For the tree,” she told him.
Candy Vargo walked over to her. “I just killed the enemy who wanted me dead.”
“But it was a tree,” Jennifer pointed out. “Not a real enemy.”
The Keeper of Fate blew out a loud raspberry. “Would you rather the tree had decapitated me?”
“Hell to the no!” Jennifer assured her and gave her a quick hug. “You’re my friend. I just wish the tree had survived, too. Not the enemy—mind you—but the tree.”
“I’m feelin’ about as confused as a fuckin’ fan in a fart factory right now,” Candy announced, scratching her head.
“Maybe we should decimate boulders,” Tim suggested. “It’s quite difficult to have an emotional attachment to rocks.”
“Fine point. Well made,” Gideon said, still reeling at how the training session was going. “Would destroying rocks upset you?”
