by J A Campbell
His generous lips spread in a smile, and he spoke in a rich, deep voice, looking each of the three women in the eyes. He slowed his hand movements to a sensuous caress as the inside of the crystal whispered with a high squeak of pleasure. “I have something you’ll like.”
Hagatha sighed as her knees turned to rubber.
Elise’s pointed elbow jab to her ribs got her moving, exclaiming with an oath despite the drool that accumulated in her mouth.
With Elise’s prodding, they exited the crossroads through the other half of the WayGate together.
“What the—” Hagatha swore as the ground vanished beneath her. She tumbled and shrieked. Icy water shocked the breath out of her. It closed over her head, filling her mouth, her ears, her eyes... Hagatha flailed, panic driving any other thought from her mind as her back arched from the cold. She managed to surge to the surface and gasp for breath, screaming for help, before the waters closed over her head again.
Flailing, she tried to find the surface again. She didn’t know how to swim. Her hand struck an object. Something clamped around her wrist. Visions of sea monsters filled her, and she screamed underwater, choking, sinking.
Hands dragged at her. Hagatha fought until her head breached the surface.
“Grab hold,” Melanie gasped as she caught an overturned table.
Hagatha managed to clutch one desperate hand on Melanie and the other on Elise, hacking and coughing up salty water.
“Keep your head up,” Elise’s voice bellowed in her ear as briny water rushed in Hagatha’s mouth. She spat and sputtered.
A wave swamped them. Hagatha lost her grip on one of them as she went under, choking. She fought the urge to breathe, to scream.
Pain shot through her scalp as her hair pulled. Her face came out of the water.
“Grab on,” Melanie instructed. “Pull yourself up.”
Hagatha barely managed to clamber aboard with both Elise and Melanie holding onto the table on opposite sides to balance it. The tabletop rocked with each wave. Dizziness spun her around in circles. Chai and scones spewed out of her mouth and over the side.
“Hold tight,” Melanie gasped from the water.
Elise gripped the other side of the table, trying to balance it so Hagatha didn’t tip over.
Hagatha heard other cries for help, the distant roar of a helicopter, and the slap of water against debris. She hated water. She never wanted to be wet again.
Ghosts swirled around them, men and women of all ages, in all manner of dress, their eyes dark portals into the great beyond. Hagatha shivered, chilled from fear and the night-cooled ocean.
Come, a bare-chested Greek sailor called to her.
My girl, don’t listen to them, Alistair Macrow, her father, said. Buck up. Aid is near.
Her mind reeled with the images until a louder sound intruded. The rhythmic beat put her in mind of a massive cat purring. A helicopter flew above them, stirring the water like a mixer.
She looked up into blinding light.
“Help!” Melanie bellowed, raising one hand to wave. A man dropped down on a line.
“Take her first,” Elise’s voice sounded clearly above the noise of the helicopter. Hagatha shivered as a man clambered aboard the table and fastened her into a harness. He held her as they rose up into the air. She thought her body would turn to ice by the time she passed the stir of the wind on her skin.
Soon Melanie and Elise joined her. They huddled close together beneath blankets, not speaking. The Mediterranean boiled with white waves beneath them. Melanie’s hands clasped around her ears, and her face was drawn in lines of near-agony. One of their rescuers handed her a pair of ear plugs, which helped.
The chopper crew continued gathering passengers from the boat. Women arrived in tattered evening clothes, children in pajamas. None spoke, but their faces were chalk-white and tear-stained. Many bowed their heads, their lips moving, though no sound came out.
They landed at a Red Cross Center bustling with activity. An elderly male intake worker took their names. Volunteers handed them coffee and doughnuts. Lines of people stood everywhere. Some waited to use the phones so they could contact relatives. Others with minor injuries waited for routine first aid. More were in line needing necessary supplies for themselves or their children.
Everything was in short supply. Volunteers wheeling pallets of provisions rushed through the collected people as quickly as they could.
Volunteers at a long table answered phones that rang the minute they put them down. Their voices blended together in a long stream of meaningless words.
Overhead, a PA system called out names.
A soft-spoken Black man ushered them to a large room where people of all ages huddled on makeshift pallets on the floor with only narrow walkways between. Many looked like they had come from a formal, clad in soiled and tattered tuxes and ball gowns. Smells of perfume, alcohol, and wine mixed with the overpowering brine of seawater, but the stench of fear overrode them all. Many wept, while others just stared endlessly into space, too shocked for anything else.
Hagatha waved away the offer of a doughnut, but accepted a cup of strong coffee.
They managed to find a quiet corner. Hagatha seethed with fury at whoever dropped them in this mess. They were going to hear from her as soon as they got back to JM Headquarters.
Elise spoke calmly. She always recovered first. Hagatha suspected she had inherited her calm center from Marcus. Nothing shook the man. That had to make up for the walking psychosis that was her mother, Valonna. The Goddess was, after all, a great balancer.
“We need to split apart,” Elise said. “Talk to the passengers if you can—and listen…”
“Ghosts,” Hagatha whispered. “All around us in the ocean.” They were both necromancers by blood, but Elise practiced and had both the skill and temperament to withstand the spectral voices in her head without losing her mind. Again, thanks to Marcus, no doubt, and some very sane and well-centered adoptive parents. Hagatha was more of an artificer who used objects of power for her magic—stones and wands and such—and her attempts at necromancy were mostly painful memories she had no desire to repeat.
“I heard from some of the casualties while we were in the water,” Elise said. “We’ll talk.”
Hagatha set out down a narrow row of pallets. Not being over-fond of people, she listened instead.
“Dragons,” a raspy-voiced English woman whispered to a man close by. Both were clad in formal attire and smelled of libations. The woman’s upswept hair was falling in a mass of pins and obviously sprayed to near plastic-consistency. “The man who insisted I give him my tiara jumped into the sea with the dragons!”
“I wouldn’t be sharing that with anyone, Margaret,” her companion muttered in very proper British.
Hagatha continued walking, keeping her head down and her face solemn. That wasn’t hard to do. Goddess, she had never seen anything like this and hoped she never would again. According to the JM’s information, the luxury cruise ship was one of the largest on the seas. Water and shock washed away the number of passengers from her memory, but she was fairly certain from the level of wreckage that not everyone had survived, not even with modern communications and advanced search-and-rescue techniques.
She passed the front door, where uniformed personnel stood together conversing.
“Stowaways, are you certain?” one policeman inquired.
“We received a call from an anonymous source that the boat might have had some stowaways causing trouble. Indeed, we have several names that do not appear on the ship’s passenger list.”
Hagatha bit back a panicked oath and walked as deliberately back toward Elise as she could. They probably shouldn’t have given their names to the Red Cross worker, but they would have looked peculiar if they hadn’t. And they might well have slowed the volunteers from getting the names of the real victims questioning them.
“They’re talking stowaways up front,” she said.
Elise nodded ters
ely. Melanie approached them, her normally cheerful expression solemn.
“Come with me.” Hagatha pointed her chin toward the ladies room, where a line formed.
They all went in together. Hagatha snagged the handicapped stall, which was large enough for the three of them.
“Like a bunch of high school girls,” she heard one of the women in the room snipe as they gathered together around the toilet.
“Leave it,” another said. “Times like these, people need to feel safe.”
“They’ve got police looking for stowaways,” Hagatha whispered to Elise and Melanie. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Straight out of the loo and into the merde. Melanie wracked her brain for something she could do to defend herself without blowing herself and her friends up at the same time.
Four huge green-skinned goons surrounded them the minute the WayGate snapped shut behind them. Hagatha briefly noted signs indicating a “Hug Closeout Sale” and people running in all directions.
Fire erupted from Elise’s hands. She stepped to the fore, hitting the biggest creature with a massive bolt of flame. One died. Three took its place. The first started about a foot taller than Elise’s six feet. Melanie had to crane her neck to see the trio’s hideous faces. Stench of burning whatever-he-was nearly made her gag.
“Bugger!” Melanie shouted, thinking of how much she had wanted to be a mage and go to Wizard School back in the day when she had first read fantasy novels—and how bloody unsatisfactory reality was. She added all that anger to the petrify spell she had failed during training back in Neutral earlier that day. Was it really just a few hours ago?
Goons exploded in a shower of nauseating gore, which spattered Elise’s shields and ran down in molasses-slow runnels.
“I do not want to know what you were thinking,” Elise muttered.
Hagatha chuckled wickedly. “I can’t say that Cousin Marcus doesn’t deserve it. Though, you know, he might be able to figure out where the spell is going awry. He’s the only one of us with knowledge of Faery languages and the differences between the two races. Could it be some type of processing difference between Melanie’s brain and ours?”
Melanie swallowed, shook her head, and followed her teachers through to their next destination. Truth was, she never had quite thought like anyone else. Her teachers associated that with a high IQ, but she wondered, after she learned she was fae, whether she even thought like a human.
Curon Venosta, Italy
“Brrrr,” Melanie wrapped her arms around her slender body. She had worn a sleeveless shirt to the Med. The mountainous vista where they stood glowed in the moonlight with snow. That might be fine for a line from a Christmas carol, but not when you’re standing out on a road in what amounted to less than winter underwear. And was that a bloody glacier? She hoped Elise hadn’t made a mistake with the Way. She turned to her to ask. “Where in the blazes are we?”
“Curon Venosta, wherever that is,” Elise said as a long crimson Aran jumper appeared in front of Melanie. She grabbed it and slid the high-necked sweater on, grateful for sheep everywhere. “The ghosts said that’s where the people who attacked the cruise liner were headed.”
“Thank you,” Melanie murmured. She drew a bracing breath of winter-time mountain air and took quick stock. “Okay, we’ve landed outside a mountain village. From the name and the looks of the place, I’m guessing it’s Italian? We have the clothes on our backs and whatever we managed to hold onto through the ocean. Cold as it is, we need to take stock quickly.”
Melanie had her bum roll still fastened around her waist. Chilled fingers trembled as she unzipped the front pouch where her cell phone resided. Briny scent burned her nose. She took a deep breath, stuck her hand in to preserve what contents she could, and upturned the bum roll.
Why hadn’t I thought of that when I was in the center? Melanie shook her head at the thought. Shock did strange things to the mind. If what they had seen and been through hadn’t been enough, there were the other panic-stricken refugees.
Sea water poured out on the road and commenced to freeze. At least time spent in the humid refugee center had given them time to dry off. Otherwise, her clothing would be freezing.
She did the same with the larger compartment. Elise followed suit with her own bum roll as well.
“My purse is gone,” Hagatha said, her voice sounding congested and near to tears. Melanie had once picked up the orthopedically correct bag Hagatha called a purse. Good thing she lifted weights, because the bag weighed about half as much as she did. She joked about Hagatha carrying rocks in it. Darned if Hagatha didn’t open the zippered pouches and dozens of rocks in varying sizes, shapes, and colors tumbled out. This was a serious loss, since many of those stones stored spells and power they could use.
Melanie didn’t answer. Unless she missed her guess, if Hagatha could conjure her purse to reappear, she would have already. Melanie’s go-bag, with her laptop and spare clothing, was lost to the Mediterranean. Small price compared to the folks in the center crying for family members they might never see again. Her own head was full of every song of comfort she could conjure, from childhood lullabies to gospel. Sadly, she couldn’t seem to concentrate on one to play it through.
She set out to take inventory. Her wallet appeared mostly intact. Slots for her credit card and money were plastic; thanks to an early mishap with spilled Chanel #5 back in high school, she had learned her lesson about fluids around money at least. Her sigh of relief misted in the cold night air as she retrieved her personal and company credit cards. Plus, she did have some cash and traveler’s checks left over from the band’s last tour across the pond. She also had the fae metal bracelet King Oberon had given to her. The metal would transform with just a thought from her, making the thing the equivalent of a faery multitool. In addition, she had the stone faery cross that Lilibet, her faery godmother, had given her when she was first born. If need be, she could summon her, but she reserved that bit of magic for extreme emergencies. One never knew whether fae magic was helpful or harmful—which might well explain her own “gifts.”
“Elise, could you make me a scarf, please?” Melanie said, her voice trembling with cold. She’d learned the lesson that warm air prevented colds and lung ailments early from opera singers and generally kept a wool scarf handy when the nights were chilly.
A knitted scarf appeared in her outstretched hands. Melanie quickly wrapped it around her throat and mouth. The two mages set about garbing themselves. Hagatha conjured a hat, but no amount of stretching and cursing would fit on her mass of wild white curls, which had grown exponentially since their previous adventure. Melanie took the hat when she handed it to her, and it fit perfectly on her smaller head. She nodded thanks.
Between Elise and Hagatha, the three of them had reasonable clothing in just a few moments. Considering they lived in Colorado, Elise and Hagatha were good at conjuring clothes for freezing weather, including lightweight but warm and sturdy coats. Elise conjured Melanie a pair of sheepskin-lined boots that were so warm and toasty she doubted she’d ever want to take them off.
Good thing too, as they approached an iced-over lake. The water had frozen in waves near the shore. Veils of fog drifted on the air, obscuring their vision of their surroundings as they passed through them. Glittering ice crystals in the air mesmerized her. So cold. So beautiful.
A bell tolled in the distance off the lake.
“A real bell,” Melanie said with a mixture of awe and surprise. The sound was so pure, so close to a perfect note on the winter night air. “So many of the churches have recorded music broadcast.”
Elise grabbed her arm. Melanie looked down, realizing she’d nearly stepped off the road and headed for the lake.
Why? She looked up into Elise’s concerned face.
“I don’t hear anything,” Hagatha said. Elise nodded in agreement.
“Stay with us,” Elise cautioned. Her hand tightened enough on Melanie’s upper arm that she could feel it thro
ugh the thick coat.
Still, she couldn’t keep her eyes from returning to the misty lake where the bells tolled only for her. Icy veils swirled and danced beguilingly.
Burning cold in her eyes reminded her to blink. Still, she watched as Elise pulled her along.
The fog cleared. A white tower rose above the calm waters. Melanie blinked in surprise and the thing was gone, consumed again by the thick veils of fog.
“Did you see that?” She turned her gaze to Elise, who still held her arm.
Elise nodded, her lips pursed. Hagatha’s hair looked even bigger than before, if that was possible.
“Magic.” Elise’s single-word response was near as chill as the air. “Come on. I see lights. I suggest we hike into the village and find a hotel. We need to find shelter and figure out what’s happening and plan our next move.”
Melanie refused to consider what the locals would think of three women showing up close to dawn to check in on foot. Then again, she’d done some pretty odd hour check-ins with the band when they were on the road. Hoteliers took almost everything in stride, except Keith Moon-style destruction of the rooms to “legitimize the band’s rep.”
One foot in front of the other, she managed to march away from whatever it was calling her to the lake. Her half-drowned and now-frozen mind awakened more as they escaped from where she had heard the bell.
Oddly, neither of her companions heard the sound. She glanced between the two of them, trudging along on either side of her like a pair of sentinels. They’d both been kind, but, then again, she was engaged to their lord.
“Okay,” she said as they approached a Tyrolean village, feeling some of her reason returning. “Let me be the road manager, just follow my lead.” While both women were incredibly intelligent and magically talented, their exposure to the outside world was limited. They’d spent much time mewed up in Macrow House after college and then went straight to a very small town in Colorado, where the truly eccentric found a home.
