Baehrly Beginning (A Goldie Locke Short Story)
Elizabeth A Reeves
Copyright 2013 Elizabeth A Reeves
Copyright © 2013 Elizabeth A Reeves
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 9781301321063
Dedicated to the 8 year old in my life who loves elephants, the 6 year old who loves pandas, and their big dreams of owning preserves for both. I love you, Kevin and Noah!
Chapter One
“Well,” I said out loud to nobody in particular, “it’s a lovely day here in Siberia.”
There was no answer, but I wasn’t really expecting one.
I was standing in the middle of nowhere. Literally. My map actually called this place ‘Nowhere’. Of course, the map-- a gift from my deceased father-- did have an exhaustive sense of humor. Or was it exhausting? I could never be quite sure.
“Cute,” I growled at it, giving it a shake before stuffing it into my pack. It was going to give me hell later for treating it like that-- it insisted on being folded properly-- but I had more important things on my mind than trying to figure out finicky accordion folds.
I’d been trying to track down the leak of miniature mastodon relics into the Magical black market for months. Ivory, wool, bones, teeth-- they all had been appearing at a reckless pace considering that the species was almost completely extinct.
“Freakin’ idiots,” I muttered as I pulled on a pair of mittens from my pack. It was freezing out here. Wasn’t it supposed to be summer?
Apparently someone forgot to send Siberia the memo.
Good thing I was always prepared.
I patted my hip to make sure my sword belt was still in place after being transported around the globe in seconds. I always half-expected to leave something behind.
Just as I was about to set off into the wilderness my pack let out a truly obnoxious sound. It was something between a foghorn blast and the shriek of steel that usually marks the demise of a vehicle via crashing into a tree.
It was also unfortunately familiar.
“Fred,” I scolded, as I yanked my bag off of my back again and opened it up.
My zombie silkie rooster blinked up at me with his obscene red eyes.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded, dumping him out with little ceremony into the cold ground. It couldn’t hurt him-- after all, he was already dead.
Once, Fred had been someone’s cute and fuzzy pet silkie-- silkies being the lapdog of the chicken world-- that is, until he had been hit by a truck. Some wiseass had decided the best thing to do at that point was to reanimate him.
Little cute zombies could be a pain in the butt.
Of course, it was my job to take care of Fred and keep him out of trouble, which is why he was supposed to be at home being watched by my sister at this moment.
I was seriously tempted to take Fred back home then and there. I would have, too, only transportation spells tended to make me feel sick to my stomach-- and the further I traveled the worse the sickness was.
It just wasn’t worth it.
I tucked Fred under my arm. I couldn’t expect him to hike, after all.
“You’re becoming a vegetarian when we get home,” I told him seriously. “How about an all onion diet?”
Fred cocked his head and gave me some serious stink-eye. Even the idea of onions got his feathers in a bunch.
“Last time I ask Iris to keep an eye on you,” I muttered to my chicken. I frowned. “Though I wouldn’t put it past her to have stuffed you in my bag herself just for that reason.”
Fred blinked at me.
I sighed. “So, maybe it’s Iris that needs some onions.”
Fred preened his feathers.
Ugh. I was having a conversation with a chicken and, unlike my twin sisters, Starrie and Rainey Skye, I couldn’t understand what he might be saying back.
Maybe that was a good thing.
I didn’t really need to know what my zombie rooster thought of me.
The terrain grew rougher as I headed up the track the map had marked as ‘deeper into nowhere’, in its usual helpful manner. I muttered a brief spell, one that was pretty much just a plea to the earth to stay under my feet.
Immediately I felt a little sturdier.
I was nowhere as powerful as my mother-- the most powerful Earth witch of her generation, but I was a pretty good witch in my own right-- as a healer for the most part.
But it was my father’s legacy that had set me on the path I was currently on, both figuratively and literally.
When I was sixteen years old, my dad had been killed by poachers, while he’d been trying to work towards conservation of magical habitats. Ever since then I had been determined that his legacy live on.
And that’s why this particular group of poachers was interesting to me.
I had a hunch that they were the same ones that had killed my dad three years ago.
“I’m going to catch them this time, Dad,” I promised. “They’re never going to hurt another creature or person ever again.”
It wasn’t a vain vow. I knew enough about magic-- having been around it my whole life, never to make a promise out loud that I wasn’t going to be able to keep. I had vowed to bring my father’s killers to justice.
It was the kind of vow that was totally unbreakable.
I would succeed or literally die in the attempt.
Under my arm, Fred kept up a commentary in a series of low clucks. I couldn’t tell if he approved or disapproved of my hiking skills.
Who knows, maybe he was just singing some kind of camping song.
I was halfway up a particularly steep embankment when I came across the first sign that I might actually be on the right track-- a tuft of pink hair was caught on a low-hanging branch-- a shade of pink rarely seen in nature, outside of newborn piglets. Only a truly magical creature would ever be quite this pink.
I picked up my pace.
Maybe I’d get lucky this time, I thought to myself, maybe I would be in time.
I almost was.
I would probably wonder for the rest of my life how things would have been different, had I come up the slope a few minutes earlier.
Instead, I walked into a massacre.
I gagged as I took in the vivisected corpses around me. Whoever had done this had not completed their work-- all of the tusks of the mastodons had been removed and were gone, but only one of the bodies had been skinned and the pelt was still there, next to it.
What a sickening, useless waste.
Four miniature mastodons lay dead in the middle of nowhere, and I was the only one that seemed to care.
I knelt down beside one of the bodies, feeling tears stream down my cheeks. I hated crying. I hated feeling weak, but this time I couldn’t help it. I scrubbed my face and focused on getting mad instead of sad.
The scene had been so similar, three years ago. The hacked up carcasses of the nearly extinct mastodons, the waste... only, last time my dad had been there, too, and they had killed him.
“So close,” I muttered. “So very close.”
I shied a rock at Fred, who was lapping at a pool of blood. “Leave it alone,” I told him.
I dragged the corpse closest to me towards the one that had been skinned.
“They deserve better than this,” I told Fred, who regarded me with one of his most jaded expression as if to ask me while I was allowed to play with the meat, and he wasn’t. “I’m going to build a funeral pyre. I don’t suppose you’re much help.” I huffed under the weight of the mastodon. This one had been full grown and probably wo
uld have stood at nearly three feet tall. It took every ounce of my strength-- and a little earth magic-- just to move him.
Fred settled down to watch me work.
“I should have named you ‘Useless’,” I told him as I started dragging the second body-- a juvenile male-- towards the pile I was forming.
Fred clacked his beak at me, offended.
The last body belonged to a mature female. I frowned as I regarded her still form. With so few miniature mastodons left in the world, this one female was worth so much more alive than dead.
Which was something the poachers would never understand. All they answered to was the siren call of the almighty dollar. It blinded them to the rare beauty of these majestic creatures.
Soon there wouldn’t be any left in the world at all.
“Why are people such freakin’ idiots?” I asked Fred, catching my breath before I tried to move this last pacyderm. “Why is everyone so blind? They’re the ones that should be killed, not these innocent creatures.”
Fred cocked his head at me.
“Don’t even think about it,” I warned him. “You set one fluffy feather out of line and the authorities will sweep in and it will be the blowtorch for you. You’re not so bad, for undead poultry. Let’s keep you undead a little longer, ok?”
Fred settled back down to watch.
I really hoped that meant he was agreeing with me.
I bent to grab onto the dead female and... something moved.
I bit back a shriek and swallowed hard.
I wasn’t a wimp... but I really didn’t like maggots, which were the only things I could think of that could make a clearly dead elephant move.
The movement came again, followed by a strange snuffling whimper sound.
“Oh,” I breathed, stooping to push aside some of the female’s heavy fur, “it’s a calf!”
The little mastodon was tiny, and young enough that its lavender-tinted baby fur hadn’t fallen out yet, which meant it had to be only days or weeks old. It was so tiny-- I’d seen bigger Chihuahuas.
And it was a female.
“Oh,” I repeated, absolutely stunned as a pair of sapphire-blue eyes stared up into mine.
She was just beautiful.
She let out a sad little trumpeting sound, running her impossibly tiny trunk through her dead mother’s fur.
I swallowed the lump in my throat.
“I’ll take care of you, little one,” I promised.
Suddenly all my goals shifted. I had to get this baby out of here before the poachers came back and found us here.
Nothing mattered anymore except getting the little one to safety. As much as regretting abandoning the desecrated bodies of the calf’s herd, they were no longer my priority.
I used my sword to hack off a chunk of the mother’s fur to wrap the baby elephant in.
“Don’t even think about hurting her,” I snapped to Fred as he came towards us, curious about the funny noises coming from the tiny creature.
He puffed up his feathers, offended.
I quickly ripped open my pack and pulled out my map and spare clothes to make room for the baby mastodon. I stowed her in the pack with the tuft of her mother’s fur inside of it. She wrapped her truck around the fur and made that horrible sad sound again.
“I’ll have Iris make it into a blankie for you,” I promised the baby. “Iris owes me, anyway.”
Fred made a creeling sound at me.
“No, I haven’t forgotten you,” I told him. I tucked my clothes back around the baby and held out my arms to him. “Come on, we have to get out of here as fast as we can.”
Fred hopped into my arms and settled himself down for the long trip.
I closed my eyes, calling the Earth magic around me, picturing the safety of my little apartment.
There was a sickening lurch, the world turned on its side beneath me.
And then we were home.
Chapter Two