I took the key, and Lizzy walked around the car to get in the passenger seat. I pulled on the door handle, and the door opened silently and smoothly. It smelled new leather inside, and everything looked like a fancy car in a TV commercial.
“None of this is a glamour?” I asked.
Oriel chuckled. “Nay, lass. Lizzy would sniff that out in an instant, and I think you would, too. Wouldn’t do my reputation any good, either.”
I took a deep breath and turned the key in the ignition. The car started immediately, and the engine purred in a smooth way I had never heard before.
“You’re a smith?”
“Yea.”
“Did you ever make any swords?”
He threw back his head and bellowed out a laugh. “You need a sword? What kind?”
“A Hunter’s arming sword.”
His laughter died. Oriel walked over to the car and leaned down to peer into my face. “You’re the ley line mage,” he said with conviction. “A Hunter’s blade? One would have to know the spells to forge such a sword, and no smith outside the Illuminati has ever duplicated their work.”
I took a deep breath. “If you had the spells, could you cast them?”
His eyes narrowed, and he was silent for some time. “If you had the spells, and they worked, I would forge you a sword and throw in the car as a present.” He briefly raised his gaze to look beyond me at Lizzy, then returned to looking at me.
“You would have to promise to teach the spells to no one else,” I said, shaking inside at the audacity of what I was proposing to do.
Oriel’s lip curled. “The word of a smith. I may only be half-Fae, but even so, I cannot lie. And the word of a smith is worth more than that of a king or a priest. But, that a little girl should have a secret every smith in the world has coveted for ages…” He shook his head. “Bragging is easy. Go drive the car, and speak no more of things you don’t understand.”
He straightened up and backed away from the car. The wall in front of me disappeared, and after a moment or two—so I could buckle my seat belt and collect myself—I put the car in gear and drove out onto the street.
I was incredibly intimidated by driving in Killarney Village, which I’d never done before. The streets were nicely paved in smooth rock but narrow with no straight lines. Every road curved around trees, rocks, and inhuman structures. Nothing ran straight for more than a few yards. There were no traffic signs, just traffic circles when two or more roads met. Luckily, few cars were on the road.
Lizzy directed me out of the Village and back into the real world. About a mile later, she told me to take an on-ramp to the freeway from Portland into Westport.
“Punch it,” she ordered as I drove up the ramp. I did, and the acceleration pinned us back in our seats. We merged onto the freeway doing eighty, and I backed off the gas.
“He does good work,” Lizzy said. “My dad drives a car Oriel reworked. A nineteen fifty-seven Chevy. Goes like a bat out of hell.”
We drove into Westport, past Rosie’s and into downtown, then north across the river and up into the hills. The car climbed the steep roads effortlessly.
On our way back to the Village, Lizzy quietly asked, “Are you going to trade him the spell?”
“There are multiple spells, and I’ll have to copy them. I’ve never cast them, but I assume they’re accurate.”
“You have an Illuminati grimoire?”
I shook my head. “No. I do have a book, though, a history book that contains some spells. But you can’t tell anyone. Lizzy, if word ever got out that I have it, we’d have not only every Hunter and Illuminati in the world but every one of their enemies, including the Fae, descending on me to get hold of that book.”
She grinned. “Not a problem. The funny thing is, my mom probably couldn’t make those spells work, but Oriel and I could because of our human-witch heritage.”
“They’re mage spells, not witch spells,” I said, suddenly concerned.
Lizzy shook her head. “I can do mage spells as well as witch spells. Usually. It’s kind of random sometimes. I can do a lot of Fae magic, but not all of it. Mom and I discover things, simple things, that I can’t do, but any Fae child can. Magic is weird that way.”
We drove a little farther, then Lizzy said, “Erin, be careful. Oriel is of the Winter Court.”
I knew the Fae were divided between the Summer and Winter Courts. Seelie and Unseelie. The Seelie were generally considered to favor humans, while the Unseelie were seen as dark and malevolent. Not evil, but not helpful or friendly.
“Any hints as to what I should be careful about?”
She kind of half-shrugged. “Fae morals aren’t the same as those of humans, and the Unseelie, well, they tend to see humans as a kind of prey. Just keep your guard up, okay?”
We took the car back to Oriel, and I made arrangements to meet with him and bring him the spells. The way he looked at me told me he still wasn’t sure he should believe me, but he promised to hold the car for a week.
When I got home, I checked all my wards, then went into the spare bedroom closet and knelt down against the back wall. I had built a magical box that was hidden behind its own set of wards and invisible even to me. I dissolved the wards, then cast the spell to open the box. Inside was a book, The History of the Illuminati, and my emergency stash of money.
The book was huge and heavy—fourteen inches long, twelve inches wide, and five inches thick—and covered in stiff black leather. The title in Middle High German was embossed in gold letters.
Starting in the fourteenth century, the head of the Order at the time, the Illuminator, chronicled what he considered important. In addition to the Order’s history and details of important events, the book included spells and rituals that were passed down to the next Illuminator and formed the basis of his power. Also included were the locations of Illuminati’s secret lands and houses, treasure hoards, and bank accounts. If I so chose, I could be immensely wealthy by accessing those.
And dead shortly thereafter.
I assumed that Masters of the Order, other than the Illuminator, also knew of that treasure and those banks, but I had no way of knowing who, or if any, of those Masters might still be alive. And there was the rub. If someone, such as the recently deceased Master Rudolf Heine, knew of a bank account but didn’t know the access codes, he could sit and wait for someone with the codes, such as me, to show up.
I could deal with vampires, werewolves, mages, and even other Hunters, but I didn’t fool myself that I could take on a Master. Only luck and help from other mages had kept me alive when confronted with far older, stronger Hunters.
I took the book to my kitchen, set it on the table, and opened it. I had read the entire book less than a year before, so it didn’t take long to find the passage detailing the forging of a Hunter’s sword. Written in small, spiky letters in the later sixteenth century, both the metallurgy and the magecraft were intimately detailed.
I copied all five pages, carefully separating the instructions for smelting the alloy from the spells involved in forging the sword. Then it took me most of the evening to translate them into English. When I was done, I put the book back in its invisible box and took out three thousand dollars, in case Oriel couldn’t make the process work. Then I cast the spells to hide and protect the book and the money again. Maybe Oriel’s magic worked on me as well as on metals, because I really wanted that car.
Chapter 3
I gave Lizzy the translated instructions for the metal alloy to give to Oriel. I had to work the next few nights, so I curbed my impatience and tried to act as though something totally momentous wasn’t happening in my life. After months of walking, depending on public transportation, and begging for rides, I was finally going to have some freedom.
People noticed, though, commenting that I seemed unusually cheerful. A couple of women slyly asked me if I had a new boyfriend. I felt sort of embarrassed to tell them that my happiness was due to me getting a car, which was even bett
er than a boyfriend.
On Monday, I called Wolf Brothers Taxi Service and booked a taxi to take me out to Killarney Village. The address Lizzy wrote down for me seemed pretty weird, but the shifter driving the taxi wasn’t fazed at all. Oriel Garage and Metalworks, far middle meadow beyond silver tree and small pond.
The driver dropped me off in front of a structure that vaguely resembled the one Lizzy and I had visited. I approached the front door and raised my hand to knock, but the world dropped out from under me and turned inside out. When my head stopped spinning, I was standing in front of Oriel at the entrance to a dimly lit room.
“You didn’t include a necessary spell for alloying the metal,” Oriel said as a greeting. He shrugged. “Not a big deal. I don’t expect the Hunters to use anything radically different than the Fae or the Dwarves use for the same alloy. Did you bring the necessary enchantments for the rest of the process?”
“Yes,” I said, handing him the papers with the translated spells. He turned away and walked into the room. I followed him and was hit with a wave of heat. At the far end of the room was a large forge, and off to one side of it sat a smaller forge and a huge anvil. Oriel’s tools were arrayed on a table. Larger tools hung on racks on the walls.
“There is no power in these words,” Oriel said, thrusting the papers back at me. “Go on, read them aloud.”
Shaken, I did as he commanded. He was right. I wasn’t pulling any magic to me. I turned my face up to his.
“I’m sure the translation is correct.”
“Ah. Do you have this in the original language?”
I nodded.
“Read it aloud.”
I pulled the original copy from my pocket and began to read. As I did, I could feel magic stirring around me.
“Louder. More forcefully. Such spells are designed to drive magic into an object, to embed the ley line energy into the metal.”
I started over, speaking the spell the way I would if I intended to bend reality to my will. Ley energy boiled up around us, and I was reminded that I stood almost on the nexus where two major ley lines intersected.
“Enough,” Oriel said. “Now, teach me the spell.”
For the next two hours, I taught him the words and the meanings of the spells written in fifteenth-century Middle High German. Then he took a small bar of metal and stuck it in the forge. When it heated to white-hot, he drew the proper rune in the air, pulled out the metal bar, and began beating on it with a hammer the size of my head while chanting the first spell. When the metal started to cool, he stuck it back in the forge to heat it again. That whole ritual was repeated a twice more, then he drew the second rune, cast the second spell, and quenched the metal in a vat of oil.
Oriel held the cold metal shaped into a dagger up before him, then touched it with his hand. He didn’t look pleased.
“Here. Do you feel any magic?” He thrust the dagger toward me, and I wrapped my hand around the unfinished blade.
“No. Nothing.”
He gazed off into the air for about five minutes. Then he picked up another bar of metal and shoved it into the forge.
“This time, you will recite the spells on my queues,” he said. “Either I don’t have the ability to pull power with these spells, or I’m not pronouncing them correctly, or they don’t work. We shall test that.”
We went through the whole process again, with me drawing the runes and casting the spells. Immediately, I could tell the difference as the magic rose from the ley lines and I pushed it into the metal while he worked it. After quenching the new dagger, he held it out to me. It felt like a Hunter’s blade.
“It is either my pronunciation, or my ability,” Oriel announced. “Let us finish this knife and we shall see what the final product is like.”
“I have a Hunter’s blade if you’d like to compare them,” I said, retrieving the dagger from the sheath inside my coat.
He took it and inspected it. “Yes, the magic is the same.” He held up the piece he had crafted. “This is still unfinished.”
With a grinding wheel, another heating, beating, and quenching, and then more grinding, the raw form gradually took on the shape of a finished knife. He switched to a finer grinding wheel and had me cast the next spell while he sharpened the dagger. Then he buffed and shined it, and I cast the final spell.
Oriel took the knife into an alcove. Half an hour later, he brought it back and presented it to me with a beautifully carved horn hilt and an unusual twisted knob for a pommel. The metal of the guard looked like it had shifting bands of silver and gold.
“I would trade you this for that Hunter’s knife you carry,” he said.
Without a thought, I handed him my knife. “What metal is the guard made of?”
“Elven steel. Iron, titanium, quicksilver, powdered moonstone, gold, and silver. Dwarves would add beryllium instead of the silver and use less carbon in the alloy. Elven steel is stronger but a bit more brittle. The advantage of the silver is its effect on werewolves and vampires.”
“It’s beautiful.” The knife was gorgeous, the workmanship divine. It was perfectly balanced, as was evident when I spun it around in my hand and shifted it from one hand to another. I looked around and found a target with a couple of knives stuck in it on a wall thirty feet away. I flipped the knife in my hand and threw it. It hit the target a bit off dead center but close enough. I would get used to the balance as I worked with the knife.
I retrieved it, and Oriel said, “Come tomorrow and we’ll forge the sword.”
The next thing I knew, I was standing on the street outside his home. I ended up walking a couple of miles, almost to the edge of the Village, before I could get a cell signal to call a taxi. I really didn’t mind. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was late afternoon. Some kind of pastry from one shop and candy from another—almost like strawberry fudge—killed my hunger pangs. I also bought a cute hat.
Walking through Killarney Village in seventy-degree weather was a pleasure, but the temperature dropped back into the forties once I crossed the Village boundary. The existence of the Village wasn’t a secret, and it even appeared on maps. How could humans not know something odd was going on there?
Forging my sword took longer than the dagger, but it went far smoother. Try as he might, however, Oriel could not cast the necessary spells himself.
“Let’s conduct an experiment,” I said, and showed him the rune I used to create a bridge over a creek. It was one of the first and easiest spells I had learned, involving a simple rune and a single Word.
He might as well have recited the recipe for lamb stew. There was no result at all. My magic—the mage magic of the Illuminati—was totally incompatible with the Fae and witch magic Oriel had inherited from his parents.
But the sword that we crafted together. Oh, it was wonderous. Oriel questioned me closely and used his magic to create a mockup of a sword for me to wield. The final product he produced was two inches longer than the Hunter’s sword I had carried for years, and three-quarters of an inch narrower. The balance of the sword in my hands was superb.
He carved the hilt from elk antler, with vines and flowers and winged fairies. I thought at first the texture would be rough and interfere with my grip, but so cunningly were the decorations placed that the hilt fit my hands as though molded to them.
The icing on the cake was the scabbard—tooled leather over hardwood with the same vines, flowers, and fairy motif as the hilt.
Oriel sheathed the sword, then held it in one hand and placed his other hand on my head and cast a spell.
“The glamour is now keyed to you,” he said. “Only you and I are able to see the sword when it is sheathed.” He handed it to me. “Does it please you?”
“It’s wonderful. But I haven’t fulfilled my half of the bargain,” I replied.
“Yes, you did. You offered the spells. That I proved unable to cast them is not your fault. The sword and dagger are yours. I ask only that you occasionally help me to craft a few mor
e pieces.”
“Absolutely.” His rash promise to give me the car in exchange for the spells hung over us. I handed him the money I had taken from my cache. “I assume the price for the car hasn’t changed?”
His strange, alien face lit up with a smile that still rather unsettled me. He took the money, counted it, put it in his pocket, and handed me the car’s key.
“I am glad I met you, Erin McLane,” he said. Then, without warning, he reached out and pulled me to him and kissed me. He smelled like exotic wood and tasted smoky-sweet. He pushed me against the wall, pressing himself hard between my legs, and I felt light-headed, as though he was sucking the oxygen from the air. His hands roamed over me, leaving trails of heat wherever he touched.
My mind clouded, not with the persuasion a vampire or a mage might have used, but with intense desire. It was impossible to separate his desire from my own. I had no idea how long that kiss lasted, or whether he kissed me only once. He could have taken me then—against the wall, or on the floor—and done anything he wanted with me. I didn’t try to stop him, didn’t want to stop him.
And then I was staring into his face as he held me at arm’s length. He was panting as hard as I was. My head was swimming, and I was on fire where our bodies had ground together.
“I have wanted to do that since we first met,” Oriel said. “You are a very dangerous female. Now, go. Take your sword and your car and leave.”
He twirled me around and pushed me toward the car, which was sitting with the driver’s door open just outside the smithy. I stumbled forward, clutching the sword in one hand and the key in the other, and fell into the car. I turned to look at him.
“I shall call you when I need your magic,” he said. “A business arrangement. But if you ever come back for another kiss, I won’t be a gentleman twice.”
The wall of trees in front of me opened. I started the engine and drove out onto the street.
Lizzy came by late that afternoon. “You got the car!” she said when I opened my apartment door. It was parked in front of my building, so of course she saw it when she drove up. “Did you get the sword?”
Well of Magic: An Urban Fantasy (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill Book 4) Page 2
