by S. M. Reine
He flapped his arms at her, trying to catch her attention. “Stop that! This place is full of antiques!” She was too distracted whipping the fire at the sidhe to notice his flailing.
The shattered admission desk, peppered with sparks, began to smolder. It was resting on a very old, probably priceless rug. James nearly had a heart attack at the sight of it. They were going to immolate the entire damn castle at this rate.
He ducked under the sidhe as she soared over him, clutching the book tightly to his chest. Once he was safely beyond the range of her claws again—she was fighting Elise and the burning tapestry on the staircase—he flipped back to the index, looking for other sidhe species. There were several. James picked one at random and went to that section, skimming for vulnerabilities. The book stated only one.
“Rowan,” James said. “Goddamn rowan .”
But the next chapter—which was about brownies—listed a second vulnerability.
Iron.
Elise went flying and smashed into the wall beside him, hard enough that he could actually hear her skull cracking against stone, even though the screaming hadn’t waned. The sidhe had thrown her again. There was no sign of the burning tapestry now.
She staggered, dazed, and James grabbed her arm to steady her.
“Iron!” he shouted over the sidhe’s wailing, shoving the book in Elise face.
She blinked repeatedly, trying to focus on the page. Her eyes were nearly crossed. “What?”
“Iron might kill her. Try iron!”
Elise shoved James to the floor. The sidhe’s claws swiped over his head as she rushed at them again. This time, their attacker had been anticipating that James would dodge; her blow came a lot closer to disemboweling him. Only Elise’s reflexes saved him. But those razor-sharp claws gave James a bit of a haircut in the process.
He touched the skin above his ear. He was going to have a bald patch for a while.
“I really don’t like the sidhe,” he said to nobody in particular.
Even though he couldn’t hear himself, apparently the spirit could. Her eyes sparked with cold hatred. James could practically see her fantasizing about gutting him.
She didn’t make it two inches in his direction before Elise leaped between them. The kopis waved her arms over her head, attracting the spirit’s attention as she backed toward the dungeon’s stairs. The dungeon would be a terrible place to fight, narrow and dark with no alternative escape routes. It made no sense that Elise would try to lead the sidhe down there.
Unless she’d heard him telling her about iron after all.
There was iron in the dungeon, and plenty of it. The bars on the cells were made of iron.
Dropping the bestiary, James chased Elise and the sidhe into the dungeon. He almost tripped on more dead bodies at the bottom of the stairs. Another tour group had been killed by the sidhe on the same day that Gregg had been killed. Apparently Joseph O’Reilly didn’t consider an employee’s death good reason to shut down part of his castle.
The sidhe grinned at the sight of the bodies—fuel for her screams.
She had Elise cornered and she knew it.
Her smile vanished when Elise jerked a piece of iron bar off of one of the cell doors.
Elise swung the bar at the sidhe. It connected with sickeningly wet crunch. Greenish blood sprayed over the wall.
This time, the sidhe’s scream was one of pain, not one of fury. The iron left a shining welt across her face. It had burned on the briefest of contact, melting a layer of semi-corporeal flesh away.
Elise flinched away at the sound of that scream, pressing the heel of her hand to her temple. One of her makeshift earplugs had fallen out. She was vulnerable.
James ignited one of his few remaining fire spells and dropped it on the bodies at the bottom of the stairs. He focused all his frustration at the magic, fueling it with his anger—especially the anger at his mangled haircut.
The bodies were incinerated within seconds.
When the sidhe tried to scream again, nothing came out but a dry rasp.
“Let’s banish you permanently this time,” Elise growled.
She jumped on the sidhe.
James didn’t watch his kopis beat her to death. It was as brutal as it was necessary, but that wasn’t his favorite part of the job.
It only took a minute.
By the time Elise was done, the bodies of the tour group were ash, the dungeon was slicked with green blood, and the rare and deadly creature known as the beansidhe was dead.
James found Elise sitting on a cluster of rocks outside the back door of Castle O’Reilly. The storm must have been dumping gallons of water directly on her head, but she didn’t look to be aware of the rain. She was picking at the residue that medical tape had left on her arm. Her bare back was exposed by the gapping hospital gown.
He shucked his jacket and settled it over her shoulders. Elise reacted to that as much as she did the rain. “What are you thinking about?” he asked, folding his arms tightly across his chest. It wasn’t much shield against the chill.
“Guinness,” Elise said.
She wasn’t thinking about the exquisite rarity of the creature they had just killed, nor the ancient castle that was burning behind them.
She was thinking about Guinness.
“Ah.” James tried to blink the rain out of his eyes. It didn’t help. “Should I ask why you’re in a hospital gown?”
Again, she said, “Guinness.”
Elise must have gotten in a drunken brawl and landed in the hospital. It wouldn’t have been the first time, either. “How many people are dead, how many of them are human, and how quickly should we plan on leaving the country?”
“None, not applicable, whenever we feel like it.”
James hesitated before sitting on the rocks beside her. The chill of the stones seeped through his slacks.
If nobody had died, then it hadn’t been one of Elise’s usual scuffles. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.
“You didn’t get in another bar fight?”
“No.”
She was being unusually uncommunicative, even for Elise. Sometimes it felt like they would have had better conversations if they’d performed them via physical gestures like a game of charades. James could mimic punching people, Elise would tell him he was getting colder, then he could mimic wielding a pair of falchions…
“If you want to talk about it, you know I’m available,” James said. He didn’t expect her to take him up on the offer. She seldom did.
But Elise sighed and tipped her head back to glare up at the sky. Only then did he realize that her cheeks were pink, and not because of the fight they’d been in. “I drank too much. I blacked out.”
She’d gotten alcohol poisoning.
That was new.
James started to run the mental calculations on how much alcohol it would take to defeat her kopis metabolism. The numbers were scary, so he stopped immediately. “Well,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “it sounds like you must have had a lot of fun.”
She shot a sideways look at him. “Is that all?”
“Do I need to say anything else?”
She shook her head and then groaned as though the gesture had hurt. She rested her forehead on the heels of her palms. “You were right. I shouldn’t have gone drinking. If I’d been with you, we’d have gone to the castle at the same time. The sidhe wouldn’t have almost gotten you.”
“As I seem to recall, you were the one who offered to stay at the apartment. I was the one who told you to go on.”
“Yeah, but you wanted me to stick around.”
When had Elise become psychic? Lord, he hoped she wasn’t psychic. “I didn’t say that.”
She went back to picking at the tape residue on her arm. “You could have been hurt without me.”
“I survived almost thirty years without you, Elise. You’re hardly responsible for my sidhe-chasing whims.” She gazed sullenly at the needle mark left behind, pr
esumably, by an IV. Elise was hunched over, diminishing herself in her shame, hair hanging over her face. She was one tucked tail away from whimpering. “We’re equally responsible for the deaths at Castle O’Reilly tonight. We knew your exorcism hadn’t worked and left anyway.”
“She’d only killed once before,” Elise said. “We couldn’t have known what she’d do to everyone else.”
“Exactly. We’re equally responsible in the sense that we’re not responsible at all. Don’t guilt yourself over it.” He stood up, scuffed his bloody shoes on the grass to clean them. “All right? No more guilt. Today’s over, so let’s move on and think about tomorrow.” James offered a hand to Elise to help her stand.
She gave it a leery look. “No more alcohol, James.”
“That’s a shame,” he said, “because I’ve heard the best way to relieve a hangover is to drink more.”
The corner of Elise’s mouth twitched. It was almost a smile.
She took his hand, letting him pull her to her feet. “I stashed some tequila from our last visit to Mexico in my suitcase.”
“Is that so?”
“Let’s drink it all and get out of the country before the cops find our fingerprints on something,” Elise said.
James thought that sounded like an excellent plan, especially since the high-pitched wail of police sirens were approaching from the distance. Someone had heard the sidhe’s death screams and alerted the authorities. Or maybe they’d noticed the smoke pouring out of the castle windows. Either way, they were about to have company.
They slipped across the grassy moors in the darkness, avoiding the road. Trying to hurry on uneven ground without any light, James nearly broke his ankle twice. Elise laughed out loud during their clumsy escape. It was a very lovely sound—much lovelier than a screaming sidhe—and James enjoyed the exhilaration of it all.
Getting caught with multiple dead bodies and a burning castle would be awkward, to say the least.
Tequila would be far preferable.
Dire Blood
Book Five
I
Four Adepts
August 1979
The three witches standing in front of Pamela Faulkner were young, nervous, and possessed zero self-control. Their energies fluctuated wildly even as they stood, frozen, in front of her desk. She wouldn’t have entrusted a single one of them with a spell that lit candles, much less allowed them to join her in a circle of power.
Pamela drummed her pen on the desk, studying each girl in turn.
The first was Ariane Garin, a petite girl from the south of France with masses of curly brown hair. She was supposedly a healer, although her violently lashing aura was a shade of gold more commonly associated with protection magic. She gnawed on a fingernail and clung to the side of the second adept, Hannah Pritchard, who had a frosty complexion and a glare to match. Pamela felt nothing from her.
The third girl, Christine—well, of course she was powerful. She was Pamela’s niece. Their relationship didn’t seem to make her any less nervous to be in her aunt’s workspace, which was usually off-limits to visitors. It was filled with valuable books, crystals gathering the moonlight’s energy, and a hundred delicate spells in progress.
Yet Pamela was going to have to let these three hormonal, completely untried, preadolescent witches in her office five days a week for the next year.
What fun.
Pamela’s mouth twisted. “Well, Landon certainly has a sense of humor.” She returned her attention to drawing a line in blue ink. “It’s my responsibility to teach you how to control your abilities as witches. If you don’t learn control in the next twelve months, you’ll likely find yourselves dead in the twelve months after that.”
Hannah stiffened. “Dead? Are you threatening us?”
“I don’t need to.” Pamela drew a whorl. “If your capacity for magic wasn’t potentially deadly, you wouldn’t have been given to me. An akashic witch who fails to learn control always dies young, typically because of accidental suicide. It’s a statistical fact.”
“I already have control,” Hannah said.
Pamela shot a look at the adept over her spectacles. The girl’s responding stare could have turned a bonfire into an ice sculpture. “I have two spare bedrooms. The three of you can work out sleeping arrangements among yourselves.”
“This house has four bedrooms in addition to this study,” Hannah said, gesturing toward the cracked door, which was framed by drying herbs. The hinges gave a faint creak, as if stirred by a draft.
“You can count. Congratulations.”
“Then why are any of us sharing?”
“Two of the rooms are occupied,” Christine said, fidgeting with a bejeweled hairclip that shimmered with hints of pink magic. The idiot was already trying to enchant objects? A year was probably too optimistic. Pamela gave her niece a month before she killed herself.
“I already have one adept, and he keeps me very busy,” Pamela said. “He’s already much more powerful than any of you will be as adults—combined—and requires an isolated room to practice his art. He’ll join you for the occasional lesson. Otherwise, none of you are to disturb his studies.”
The French girl spoke up. “Why is he so special?”
“I don’t think I invited you to ask questions, did I?” Pamela finished drawing the rune in glistening ink. She waved the page in the air to dry it. “Consider this your first lesson. Magic is the practice of manipulating the energy intrinsic to everything on Earth. It requires meditation, ritual, and focus.”
Pamela lifted the page she had drawn so her adepts could see the intricate pattern that she had designed. Christine took a step back.
“You three are fortunate. In addition to serving as your coven’s high priestess, I am regarded as the most powerful witch alive, and I have developed ways to channel ritual into an offensive weapon. If you prove yourselves to be more useful than you appear, I may teach you to use this ability.
“In the meantime, you are not permitted to cast magic—or possess enchanted objects—until I’ve given you explicit permission to do so. That is the number one rule of my house. Do you all understand?” The girls nodded, though they seemed somewhat less than enthusiastic about it. “Excellent.”
The priestess spoke a word of power. It fell silently from her lips and resonated off the page.
The room flooded with light, which washed over the girls and then faded. Only pinpricks of starlight remained. They hovered over the crown of each girl and chased away the shadows in the empty hall. Ariane exclaimed and tried to swat the lights out of her hair, but there was nothing to touch.
Hannah’s eyes blazed. “What was that?”
“That was a test of my new detection spell,” Pamela said. “It says that there are five witches here.” She raised her voice. “James, please join us.” After a pause, a slender young boy stepped around the corner. He had brown eyes, black hair, and a bashful expression. “You were listening in, weren’t you?”
He said nothing.
Pamela went on. “These girls are your fellow adepts. You’ll treat them with courtesy and stay out of their rooms.”
James still said nothing. It was Hannah who spoke up. “That’s your other adept? He’s the one that needs his own room? He’s a boy! He can’t be any older than…what, seven?”
She discarded the detection spell, folded her hands, and addressed the new witches again. “Go unpack. Dinner is in an hour.”
They filed out, leaving the high priestess alone with James.
“I’m nine years old,” he said the instant the door closed.
The formal exterior that Pamela used to intimidate her adepts melted away at the sight of James’s pout. She patted her leg, and he came to stand beside her chair. She squeezed his arm. “We’ll whip them into shape yet, sweetheart. Landon tells me that he has big plans for these girls. What do you think of them?”
“They’re weak and uncontrolled. None of them are strong enough to be in the coven,” he sai
d. “Especially Christine.”
“Is that what you think, or are you being mean because she’s your sister?”
His mouth took on a stubborn slant. “I mean it.”
“I hope you’re right,” Pamela said. “I really hope you are.”
November 1979
James was trying to teach the other adepts how to invoke watchtower guardians for a powerful circle of magic, but nobody was listening to him. He had laid out four bowls of ingredients, but they had been pushed aside to make room for Ariane, who was painting Christine’s toenails.
“The guardian of the east likes sea salt,” James said, reaching around her to grab one of the bowls. “Your offering should be made in a glass vessel.”
“I think we should go snow-shoeing once my nails dry. I found some in the shed the other day,” Christine replied, blowing on her spread fingers. Her feet, with painted toenails, were propped up on a floor cushion intended to make lengthy rituals more comfortable.
The boy blinked. “Would that help you learn?”
Nobody responded. The girls seated in his makeshift circle of power were thoroughly ignoring him. Even Hannah, who sat at the window, was gazing dreamily at the gray sky instead of listening. It was snowing, and the forest outside Pamela’s house was a wonderland of flocked trees and icicles.
“This color doesn’t suit you, Christine,” Ariane said. “Let me do the other hand in pink.”
“Aunt Pamela wants us to study,” James protested.
Christine and Ariane exchanged looks—the kind that clearly meant “stupid little boy” without having to say it out loud.
“She’s back,” Hannah said suddenly. “There are two guys with her. They’re heading this way.”
Ariane gasped and almost dropped the bottle of nail polish. “Quick!”
The girls hurried to clean up the living room. By the time Pamela came through the front door, all three of them were sitting in front of James as though they had been listening all along, and he was pouting again.
