“Frankie Names used to be the head of the guild,” Sunaka Sensei said. She hefted the sword as if to test its weight and then walked around the table and returned to her brown folding chair. Even though the chair was small, it still made her look tiny. She was a small woman with a very large face.

“What happened?” Craig asked, the investigative journalist in him becoming more curious about the circumstances. He imagined himself going back on television and using this information as part of an expose.

“He grew too old for this organization. It’s as simple as that. All of the branches of the guild have an age limit. Once you hit it, you must leave the guild.”

“But I thought you were all immortal? Why do you have an age limit?”

“Why indeed!” the little man at the end of the table said with a laugh. He seemed ready to jump out of his chair to explain it. Sunaka Sensei looked over and her look quieted him.

“We go bad,” she said. “It’s as simple as that. You can use that spell you learned to keep yourself young up through your one hundred twentieth birthday. After that, to cast the spell, you lose your soul.”

“And if you don’t case the spell?”

“You die,” Sunaka Sensei said simply. “But there is more to our order than just that spell. Much more. There has been fighting among our kind for many millenniums. We are only one order, of course. There are much more of us out there. What Frankie Names did was to put the balance between the orders at risk. You unwittingly assisted him with it. Now you will have to do right for your wrong choices.”

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go treat this wound. We’ll put you in one of the rooms and start your lessons tomorrow. You’ll be here for many months learning our ways and what your new role is. Unlike most recruits, we want you to keep your day job. We will have need of your reach. Do not think this makes you special. The opposite is true. This makes you a liability in our plans. Your training will be more difficult because of it. But you’re used to such difficulties, I’m sure.”

Craig Stevens knew better than to argue with her. Her sword was still on the table in front of her, and even if he could get away from this room, he knew he could not leave the house without someone unlocking the door. There as much he needed to learn, and he had hopes that the guild would be the place to learn it. The skeptical part of him still lived in the back of his mind. He focused his skeptical energies on whether the guild was the force he wanted to back. He didn’t have much choice right now. He knew if he waited long enough, like most things in life, he would get that choice back. And when he did, he doubted he would choose the four pathetic looking people behind the folding table.

It was still difficult for Samantha to accept that Esther was not the same woman she followed around for the past three weeks. She was still tall and lithe and beautiful in a way that Samantha could never be. She spoke with the same Midwestern accent and wore the same perfectly practical by highly desirable clothing that she had before Henry McDougal had taken over her body.

It had taken her two months to accept the truth: that the guild and everything it stood for was a lie. That she had been a pawn over the past twenty years, used to commit murder on people and immortals. That the ability to pull an essence from the body—the trait that the guild had taught was the way to know whether you could identify a soulless immortal, worked on any person after death. In fact, it worked before death as well and could cause the death.

The truths were only the first step of what Esther taught her. Esther was the name Henry used now. He had explained that when he took over the body, he became that new person. His soul or essence shared the body with the original owner. It was no so much a snatching of the body as a neighborly sharing. He was still Esther, or was it she? Samantha was still very confused by it.

Esther insisted that Samantha continue her martial practice. Every day she would wake and spend the first three hours going through the same exercises as she had practiced over the past thirty years. Esther would sometimes stop by and watch. She would sit cross legged on the floor along the gym wall and watch as Samantha stretched and moved her oversized body in the directed motions. She would practice pulling out her swords from the case. Move through single strike katas, always visualizing her movements and where she would end up. She would do laps around the gym, and the push-ups and sit-ups. She started developing the routine when she was still in training at the farmhouse of the guild. It was where she learned that there was more to her than just being overweight.

Even with all of her training, she was never able to lose any weight. It took her many years but she accepted herself at her weight. It gave her certain advantages in the fight, both psychological and physical. Even if she could trade her body for a thin one, she was not sure she would. Especially given what they were preparing themselves for.

They were sitting down at breakfast when the doorbell rang. They were staying at Esther’s rented condo. Samantha had stopped by her house only once to clean it out before moving in with Esther. She knew the guild would be looking for her, and Esther had convinced her that it as best at this point for them not to find her. She left most of her stuff in her old apartment, only taking the bag she had packed at all times for a quick getaway. The guild did not know about the bag. It was there for her to get away from any contingency, even one caused by her employers. She had trusted them at the time—but her trust only went so far. That was probably part of how she made the transition so easily to living and working with Esther. Over the years, the guild never did reach out to her except to provide her with jobs. Even money she had to scrounge on her own. It was strange, for such a far flung organization, it did not seem to have the resources one would expect.

“We are at war,” Esther said as they walked to her car. “Don’t forget that. The guild hunts its own, and hunts our kind.”

“I still don’t understand the war. I understand the belief in the one hundred twenty year deadline. But what is there besides that?”

“It’s more than just keeping the world safe from people like me. It’s about control. Controlling the magic, controlling the destiny of the world and the different dimensions. It’s about controlling the understanding of the world. The guild is controlled by people like me. They are about protecting themselves at the cost of destroying the very fabric that created them.”

“Speaking of the guild, how have you been?” Samantha had not the man approach. He was dressed in an old style suit, the type not worn in hundreds of years. He looked familiar to Samantha but she could not place where she had seen him.

Esther smiled broadly and stuck out her arm with her thumb up and her fingers close together. The man grabbed the hand in both his hands and gave it a firm shake.

“Samantha, may I present to you the illustrious Frankie Names. The man who has tried to out the guild and us immortals on Craig Stevens’s Good Show.”

That’s where Samantha had seen him. He had been on the news many months back. Fifteen minutes of fame, and then never heard from again after Craig Stevens took his hiatus. He was back on television now, giving some of the most amazing interviews. No mention had been made of what happened to Frankie Names. The articles that came out in the weeks following the interview claimed the whole thing as a hoax. Samantha of course had known better. She, like the rest of the guild, had been hunting him for many years. To see him standing in front of her made her fingers itch to grab the sword case off her back and take him to the back alley.

“We’re all reformed guild here,” Esther said and looked at Samantha. She had seen the gleam in her eyes and her desire to go for the swords in her case.

“That we are, that we are!” Frankie said. He seemed overly excited, like there was much he wanted to tell everyone.

“What are you doing here,” Esther asked.

“You are as beautiful as ever!” Frankie said. He took a step back and made a twirling motion with his fingers. Esther laughed and spun around, her sun dress twirling in the spin. She seemed to take a girlish pleasure in doing these types of actions. Samantha wondered how many female bodies Henry McDougal had inhabited. It must have made for a strange transition. Although she knew as she grew older that the differences between the sexes meant less. There were emotional differences, and some behavioral ones, but there were more similarities than differences. Watching the world from the outside—which she had done for the past thirty years—gave her a certain perspective on people’s choices. She had faces both female and male aged immortals, and while each had been different, the ending was always the same. That was what she had found so amazing about life: for everyone it ended the same way, whether you buried the body or captured the essence in a vial. It didn’t make a difference to the former person.

“Should you be out like this? Aren’t they still hunting you?” Samantha asked.

Frankie just smiled at her. “I’m recognized less and less on the streets every day. You, who should have been paying particular attention to my visage, did not even recognize me. I don’t know what it is about fifteen minutes of fame, but it lasts less than that. At least in my experience.

“But we should go somewhere else to talk. There are plans afoot, and I want the guidance of the illustrious Henry McDougal!”

“It is Esther Something now,” Esther said with a smile and a flirty wave. It was the same response she had with the original Henry McDougal at the coffee shop. Not for the first time, Samantha wished that flirt would head in her direction.

“Very well. Let us find an eating establishment and take in breakfast. Things are moving much more quickly than I had planned. But that’s always the way with plans: you set them loose and you think you can control them, and then realize that you didn’t plan as well as you had hoped.”

Frankie continued his banter as he lead Esther and Samantha away from their neighborhood and to a small diner at the corner of street. It was in the hours between lunch and dinner, and the diner was deserted. They chose a small table at the back corner away from the kitchen, and ordered coffee and pastries.”

“You should start at the beginning for the benefit of Samantha,” Esther said. She sat at the edge of the bench. Her legs were crossed daintily over her tight short skirt. She was beautiful, and it was difficult for Samantha to not look at her. Frankie was still talking, but he spoke so quickly that it was difficult to keep up with him. She should have been more fascinated by his stories, but she couldn’t help but watch Esther and wonder what she was thinking of Frankie Names.

Daily word count: 2,030.

Words remaining: 10,746 (39,254).

I have to start wrapping up the story. The three plotlines are just starting to cross. I wish I could see the end game. I keep pushing words that don’t bring me any closer to resolution.