Episode 8 Cold Forged Iron
Page 6
claw dimpled the underside of my chin.
“You betrayed me.” His voice came from all around. It was in the mist, in the darkness, a part of the night, disjointed from the figure touching me. A hand tightened about my throat, not too hard. Not yet.
I was going to calm him. I'd calmed other things. Frightened horses, cooing goats, even the terrified person from time to time. One thing I was certain of, though, was that I'd never calmed Thaimon.
“They captured me. Threatened to take my life or leave me to rot in a cell. I didn't think that you would come, or that they'd harm you if you did.” I swallowed hard, feeling the pain of the motion as it pressed his claw into my skin. “They told me I could have had a clean slate. A home, a family, a life. Instead, I have this, and no clue anymore about who anyone is or why this is happening.”
“Why did you tell them about me?” he asked, his tone indicating that he hadn't even listened to my first answer.
“I didn't say a word!” My voice was hitting high pitches, unnaturally shrill. It made me feel out of control. I breathed in and out slowly, before continuing. “They told me some bull about Dreamweaver and her husband, and they said if I didn't take them to my husband, they'd forget that I was in their prison. What was I supposed to do?”
The claw tensed and eased up again. The smoke at Thaimon's shoulders slowed its furious motion. “You thought I was Charlotte's husband?”
“I, well...” Wait, was he indicating that I hadn't married this murderous monster? “I thought so, yes.”
My relief matched Thaimon's surprise. The dizzying illness I'd been feeling in my stomach slowly seeped away, the same way that the blood rage slowly seeped away from Thaimon.
He passed a now-entirely-human hand over his short hair and stared at me, genuinely amazed. “I wasn't fit to be anyone's husband then.”
Now that I knew I'd had it wrong, embarrassment gave heat to my words. “What else could you be? Why else would you care to keep on showing up to save my sorry ass?”
He blinked away the last of the red rage, breathing it out into the night as faintly pink fog. “I was a patient.” The red began to stir beneath his skin once more as the smoke rose from his skin and his hands ended in claws. It was the monster fighting the human in him, the monster which had been fed over and over again tonight. He joined with the shadows, his body melding into them as he said, “You were framed. Others pointed their wrongs at you. Called you a woman gone mad from a dysfunctional womb. A violent, mannish intellectual whose divine mothering purpose was ruined by books and science.” His voice became angry, matching the misty red rage consuming his countenance, taking him away. Faint words were all that remained as he was lost to the dark.
“This is not your fault.”
The red went away, and then he was gone. With him went the last of the spell traces that I could see. Not even the dead men's hands glowed even though I knew they should. Dizzy, I decided to sit down, just for a moment, to recompose myself. Minutes went by with me slumped on my knees. I was shivering, shuddering, not exactly cold, just fatigued, my mind a blur with all I'd seen and all I'd learned today. What was I to think of those White Wizards who had taken me? Who had pretended I hadn't existed? Could they have erased every mention of my existence, just for a quick dose of revenge? A cover-up to hide a cover-up, or was it truly misguided vengeance?
A small part of me knew that if the police should happen upon this scene, it would be impossible to explain. Time was going by, and I needed to pull myself together. I needed to get help and get home. How to contact the Kettle, I wondered. Wraithbane had always followed Thaimon to me in the past, but I was fairly sure that he wouldn't come now. Wraithbane had been almost dead when I last saw him. It'd be a miracle if he was capable of walking, nevermind hunting.
At the end of the parking lot there was a payphone. I was half way to it when I remembered the pay part of payphone, and returned to the corpses to rifle through their pockets for loose change. Add that to my growing Bucket List of Things-I-Never-Thought-I'd-Do. Success came on the third dead body, after I rolled him onto his back to check the front pockets. Why did they have to make men's front pockets so deep?
When I was done picking the lint from my handful of coins, I had to sort through them for US currency. The man had Canadian money, Mexican coins, and British pounds. Right when I was beginning to panic, I found quarters. For a few minutes, I leafed through the weather-beaten phone book looking for Black Kettle Cafe or something. Nothing.
Then I thought I'd try calling Kayla's cell. That ought to put me through, even if indirectly. I'd called it enough times for her to find it, usually under the couch or under library books, that I had her number memorized better than anything else.
It rang once. “Brandy, where the hell are you?”
“Umm.” I wasn't expecting Wraithbane to answer. In fact, my entire plan for the conversation had hinged on calling three or four times until Kayla found the stupid phone. I'd thought that I had time to prepare for this conversation, and now I was tongue-tied. “In a parking lot. At a payphone. How did you know it's me?”
He snorted. “That helps us find you. Who else would be calling at this hour? Give me better directions.”
On the other end I heard muffled voices and Jay made a comment about Wraithbane not going, to which there was a reply of, “I go where I want to go.” Then he was back on the line with me, his voice echoing a little oddly. “There. She's on speaker phone. Happy? Brandy, better directions.”
“You might want Jay and them to come,” I said, lifting my head to see around the phone box. No one had noticed anything strange yet, there were no cars or people around. “There are four dead men. Err, people. And a pile of ashes. Did you know about incendiary rounds? Thaimon's got a new body, too.”
There was now complete, dead silence on the other end of the line. I sighed.
“The White Wizard Council wanted to trap him.”
“They couldn't catch a Class Nine ghost with four men even within a sterile enclosure. A wraith is suicide,” Wraithbane said. It was the first time I'd heard a lot of these terms. Class Nine ghost, presumably on a scale of one to ten. Sterile enclosure. It all jarred together like a fistful of pencils shoved into the neck of a bottle.
“Nicholas, they aren't that incompetent,” Willow's voice said.
Wraithbane said, “I don't give a damn if they are or aren't. They've got all the wrong set-up for any wraith, and Thaimon is not just any wraith.”
“I-is that where they kept me?” I asked, suddenly having to lean against the phone booth. “A sterile enclosure?”
His tone lost some of its irritated edge. “Without doubt. Now tell me everything you see. Read off all the signs while Jay looks up this number.”
Jay would find the number a lot faster than they could hope to find me according to what I saw. That it was busywork didn't matter at that moment, however, it gave me something to do, something to focus on which was in no way related to what I'd just seen and been through. I kept talking long after they'd found my location, until I ran out of US coins.
I swallowed a lump in my throat as I shoved a coin in the slot to stop the woman's voice telling me that I had two minutes remaining. “This is my last quarter. Don't know how many minutes it buys. I can't even read the stupid chart. Eyes are too sore.”
“That is fine. Stay where you are, Brandy, stay exactly where you are. Jane Dell and the Harvest Court will probably reach you first, but stay put.”
“Alright.” I didn't want to hang up. Not quite yet. “Are we off speaker?”
“Yes.”
“Thaimon was trying to kill me.”
“He was trying not to kill you. If he wanted you dead, you'd be as cold as the rest of them. He's gone mad. The Council has botched this up, and now the people are going to suffer for it. Any little thing will set him off. A repeat of what you saw him do. I do mean anything at all. Heaven forbid someone makes his coffee wrong.”
“How would they have got
ten away with it?”
“Gotten away with what?”
“Making me disappear.”
“It's the war against the dark arts. The Live Free Act. If you're so much as accused of black magic—”
And that was when the line went dead. The silence on his end made me feel lost, drifting in this world, a misfit of time, a reject of society left huddled alone in a phone booth at the edge of an abandoned grocery store parking lot with an electronic buzz sounding in my ear.
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I'm an author, editor, and I dabble in illustration, all of which earns my husband pitying pats on the back and the promise that one day, I'll make money. After skipping across Nevada, Utah, Montana, Idaho, and Leicester I landed in Yorkshire, UK, where I never get a sunburn and it is seldom too hot to enjoy a steaming mocha.
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Blissed is the scandalous lovechild of thriller, horror, fantasy, romance, and things I don't want my parents to know I've written. The format—deciding to go with episodes instead of chapters—comes about because it's somewhere between a short story and a chapter. Each