by Harry Nix
He had to get Nia back, he knew that for sure. His mind was constantly straying to his mate who’d taken a car and then vanished to who knew where. Stephen was somewhat further down the list. They hadn’t found the kid and had eventually given up the search.
It wasn’t long before Alex pinpointed April’s location, the chimes of her music growing louder. He could feel the tug on the magic around them, but instead of a harsh pull, the way that some spells felt, this was harmonious as though she was gently guiding the magic where to go, not forcing it but asking it. He approached one of the back fences that had a rusty gate leading to the yard behind it. April’s music chimed and then he heard her speak.
“Oh Augustus, come on now. It’s not that bad,” she said in her coaxing tone. Alex stopped and listened. He was in human form but the night was quiet and he could hear well enough. Who was Augustus? He listened but he didn’t hear any response.
“Well that’s why we’re doing this. If we work together, we can keep the moisture in the ground, but I’m going to need a little bit of help from you, buddy,” April said. Alex peeked through a gap in the gate and saw April had her hand on the trunk of a lemon tree sitting in the middle of a backyard that appeared half overgrown. Part of it was lush with life, but the rest was dead and desolate. He must’ve made a sound because she suddenly looked in his direction, but then smiled. Alex opened the gate and walked through. He was still barefoot and there was a small patch of lush grass that soon petered out to hard earth.
“The lemon tree’s name is Augustus?” Alex said
“Well, right now he’s Augustus. Lemon trees are hermaphroditic, so sometimes she’s Augustina and sometimes both at the same time. Right now he’s feeling a bit more Augustus,” April said. Then she turned to Augustus and patted the trunk. “Just need to get those roots growing and maybe a few more leaves.” She turned back to Alex.
“You can feel it, right? Maybe you can convince him,” she said.
Alex shook his head, not sure if April was just screwing with him. “I can sense there’s a tree there but that’s it,” he said.
April came over and held his hand, pulling him over to sit in the dust underneath Augustus. “Connect to the nature and feel the trees around you, but then I want you to focus on Augustus,” she said.
Still not entirely sure she wasn’t just screwing with him, Alex did as she asked. His connection to nature had grown stronger in recent weeks. He was able to get there faster, and as his senses expanded, he felt the lemon tree, Augustus, and various bushes and shrubs, a few succulents, and also a ground creeper over in the corner. It was slowly inching its way across the ground, juiced by a dose of April’s magic at some point earlier. He tried to turn his attention to Augustus, but it was like picking one voice out of a crowded room with everyone talking.
“Just think about Augustus, his roots in the ground. It’s dry and hot. He’s been trying to grow, but it’s a struggle. Just focus on him alone,” April murmured, her hand in his.
Alex did as she instructed, and soon he felt Augustus begin to stand out. The rest of the plants dropped away as Alex began to feel the tree just as April had said. The root stuck into the hard earth struggling to go further down to access scant water. Augustus wasn’t having a good time, not with the extreme heat and this backyard that hadn’t had any other plants in it. There was nothing else to provide shade or keep the ground cool to decrease evaporation. Augustus had dropped leaves in his stress but that just made things worse, leaving him sunburned and hot most of the time.
“Now just ask him to grow that largest root down a little more. There’s some damp earth just out of his reach,” April said. Alex felt a little foolish doing it, but he could feel the will of the tree almost as though there was a person there. Augustus was tired, bothered and stressed out.
Alex directed his will, murmuring mentally that the damp earth was further down and all he had to do was reach a little more. For a little while, he didn’t feel much. Then a change came over Augustus, a determination to grow roots deeper into the earth to seek out the water. Alex heard a chime of magic as April nudged, giving Augustus a boost, and then with surprise, he realized he could feel a faint tendril, a newly formed root beginning its way down through the hard earth. The sensation evaporated as April removed her hand from his and he was left with only the general sensation of the plants around him as though Augustus was now whispering somewhere in the distance.
“Wow,” Alex said. He felt the slightest bit thirsty. It was an odd feeling that felt like it came from outside him, imprinted from Augustus.
“Yeah. You’re going to want this,” April said, retrieving a bottle of water that she’d left sitting in the grass. Alex gulped it down and passed the bottle back to her. Here in the night with the moon high above, things were painted in shades of silver, April’s hair a faint pink. He watched her gulping down the water and saw that she was faintly grimy from the gardening she was doing. April finished the drink, closed the bottle, and threw it onto the grass before smiling back at Alex, perhaps reading the thoughts that must have been visible on his face.
They stood there for a moment before Alex felt a sudden surge of guilt at the idea of jumping April while Nia was missing. It was like some form of cheating. Through the lingering connection via nature, she must’ve felt it too.
Alex sought to get his mind off it and switched the topic. “You never told me why it was so urgent we find Stephen by the way,” he said.
April nodded and went over to the bed of grass, sitting down on it and patting the space beside her. Alex sat down, feeling the slight coolness beneath the overhanging vine.
“The kid is a necromancer so hopefully he knows how to cleanse himself. The things out there, the ones that want to come back, even the most benign of them will start killing the host eventually. Then they always go the same way—attempting to move hosts. A human is the strongest host, so that means kidnapping. Eventually, they’ll grab someone and take them somewhere isolated. They tie them up for a few days—no food, no water—until they get sick and weakened, and then just as their body’s breaking down, they try to move,” April said.
“So if he doesn’t get rid of whatever the dead thing was, he’s going to kidnap someone?” Alex said.
“That’s if it’s one of the very small, almost benign types of things that are out there. Some of the others are hungry and angry. They have agendas, mixed up plans from when they were alive. Or they’ve gone completely mad out there in the dark. I don’t like how quickly he vanished. I mean, that could be a really serious, powerful thing that latched on to him,” April said.
Alex sat back and looked up at the moon, crushing guilt pressing down on him again. He’d failed to protect the kid. Now there was a parasite inside him apparently driving him to murder. April picked up a leaf from the ground and passed it to Alex. It was fresh and green. Then she picked up another one that was dry and brittle, baked from the sun.
“The trees make leaves, which eventually fall and they rot. They get broken down. Eventually recycled, becoming new life,” she said.
“So that thing I pulled back is a soul, and if we left it out there, it would break down?” Alex said.
“You can call it a soul if that helps. A person dies and then it goes into the black and breaks down and that material becomes new souls, new life. That’s why some people remember fragments of past lives. They didn’t fully break down out there. But others go toxic and harden. They want to come back over here as they were,” April said, crushing the dead leaf in her hand, the fragments sprinkling down onto the ground.
“But why? I mean, are they returning to get back at their ex-husband, that kind of thing?” Alex asked.
“It’s warm here. I think that’s most of it. They miss the warmth and then they concoct all these crazy plans, these desperate moves to stay here, something to pursue, but really it’s all to the same end. They want warmth. They desperately want… connection. They’re scared to let go, to dissolv
e back into the whole,” she said.
With the leaf in his hand, Alex could feel the faintest sensations from it. Some of the cells were still alive, although slowly dying, cut off from the main tree. He dropped the leaf onto the ground and the sensations vanished. He had a feeling that April was talking about something greater than just why dead things came back.
“I never told you what happened at the school where I grew up. You remember how when you visited, all the rooms were empty? There were sheets in all the cupboards, but no one was there,” April said.
It had been a while ago, but Alex still remembered it clearly. He’d gone searching for clothing to wear as he had destroyed his in his first wild run when he shifted to werewolf. He’d only found bedsheets with unicorns on them and had to make a toga, but in his investigation, he’d opened rooms covered in dust that had been locked for years. He nodded and let April talk.
“I’d get these urges to head deep into the forest. The part of me that came from my father, the earth elemental, was calling me to connect with the earth. Then the half from my mother, the nymph, was obsessed with the trees and the life above it. It was like the two sides of me both wanted something out there and so I would leave my classes and go wandering, some kind of communion with nature. Sometimes digging holes but other times planting things. I’d been gone for about a week, and when I came home, no one was there. Even though it’s miles away from civilization, there were security cameras, so eventually I went to check. Only the previous day, this man, just an average looking man, came walking out of the forest and went inside. Then all the teachers and all the girls followed him out. I didn’t even see him casting any magic. They just stopped what they were doing and trailed after him. Then they all just left, walking back into the forest,” she said.
“This is like the Pied Piper. Is there magic that can seduce people like that, and force them to follow?”
“There are some kinds of magic but between students and teachers, there were twenty-five of us there and trying to control twenty-four, which included a few witches and other strange children like me, abandoned hybrids with their own intrinsic magic powers, it would be almost impossible. I followed the footprints but there was nothing. They stopped like they just up and vanished. Eventually I went home and I stayed there. Of course there were no parents to call up, since everyone there was abandoned. Even the teachers were former students.”
Alex remembered how April had stood up for him when he’d challenged Jasper of the Greenacre pack, pledging the elemental lands on his behalf so he had standing to fight the alpha.
“I thought you owned the elemental lands. You couldn’t track this man or the girls?”
“That’s not quite what ownership means. Out there is called the elemental lands because there are a few elementals about the place. With just me staying there and growing plants, learning about the land, the continuous association, it became mine. One day I woke up and I could just feel it and it was natural. I knew the borders, the places that were mine. I haven’t been back in a while now so eventually it may become another’s.” She leaned over and took Alex’s hand, gently squeezing it.
“I came with you. Despite attacks, despite war, despite death. You are who I’m meant to be with. This is what I meant to be doing, even though I’m far from home trying to grow plants in an abandoned industrial zone. But if you went out and started burning down the forest, paving over the dirt, ripping up trees, polluting the water, that’s not right. That’s not what you’re meant to be doing. You’re honorable, you have integrity. If you kept doing it, I’d leave. Those mages, they silvered our land and then they silvered Julius’s land.”
Alex sat still, feeling like April had taken a baseball bat to his brain, smashing it out of his head. Bish had died in the Xavo attack, murdered by the mages, and then Alex had captured Stephen and what had he done? Not punishment, not revenge. He’d ignored the will of his pack, making a deal with someone who had indirectly contributed to murder. He could see it clearly now. All of those excuses and justifications he’d used. The kid… even calling him a kid that was all part of it. Alex saw he had made the deal because he’d been greedy, wanting to learn spell writing to advance his power.
April’s words hit hard and with them came a new realization that to make money and to get access to more magic, he’d made a deal with the black market trader, Vorbo.
The child slaver.
“We can’t deal with Vorbo, can we?” Alex said.
April shook her head. “He’s a slaver. Even being close to him means the stain begins to transfer, and yes, you’re the alpha, you’re the one in charge. You can do it if you want to. I have no plan to get us money. I don’t know where we can get it to keep the volume of werewolves we have in our pack. We might all starve otherwise and starving with integrity might be okay on some level, but it’s still starving. So I understand the decision. But you have an entire pack looking to you, and beyond that, other werewolves and supernaturals. You’re upending the way it has been for centuries, and whether you like it or not, that means you must be a certain way,” April said.
Alex flashed back to standing in the kitchen, Nia digging her claws into Stephen’s neck. It was now so obvious. Like the brain and the body going into open revolt, throwing insomnia or an illness, attempting to break things when it all was going the wrong way, Nia had done the same. She had seen the path ahead far more clearly than him and had taken action to pull Alex off it. Alex groaned and rubbed his hands over his face.
“Where do you think Nia is?” Alex said. Both April and Juno had said earlier that they had no idea but Alex suddenly had a new insight that perhaps April did know but thought Alex wasn’t ready.
“I have an idea,” April said.
She touched him on the arm again and Alex leaned back and looked up at the moon. If he was in wolf form, perhaps he would howl at it, but it would be a regretful cry. He’d felt forced to do things and he could see now how those cascading false decisions had led him to more desperate actions, including making an alliance with someone who had silvered his territory. No matter how much magic the kid had to offer, it was an unforgivable crime. Just like no matter how much money Vorbo had to offer, it was a bad deal. April stood up and then held out her hand to pull Alex up with her.
“Come on, let’s go get her,” she said.
18
“So she’s in there somewhere?” Alex asked, looking at the abandoned school.
He wasn’t quite sure how long ago it had been abandoned, but it was slowly running to ruin. Most of the classrooms had smashed windows, although a few were intact. In the middle of the night the school gave off a distinctly creepy vibe.
“Yeah, I think so,” April said.
“What happened to the place?”
Juno flicked his ear from the back seat before slumping back.
“Probably got cursed by an upset witch who got woken up in the middle of the night by a werewolf, demanding she go somewhere when she’s having the best sleep of her entire life,” the little witch complained, pouting.
Alex rubbed his ear. That flick had stung.
“Yeah, well, I can’t disobey my own rule and go out with just April,” he said.
Juno obviously wasn’t listening.
“The curse, the curse,” she chanted from the back seat.
“Duh, that one’s easy. The Mummy, 1999,” April said.
Juno sat bolt upright, gripping the seat in front of her.
“What? You know that?” she said.
“Oh c’mon. ‘Thebes, City of the Living. Crown jewel of Pharaoh Seti the First. Home of Imhotep, Pharaoh’s high priest, keeper of the dead. Birthplace of Anck-su-namun, Pharaoh’s mistress. No other man was allowed to touch her. But for their love, they were willing to risk life itself,’” April said.
“Are you serious? I love that movie. I asked you to watch it with me!” Juno said.
April gave a sniff. “I just didn’t feel like watching it right then.”
<
br /> “That’s it. Everyone’s getting cursed. Super cursed. Like double cursed with another curse on the side,” Juno said, throwing herself dramatically back.
“I’d check the gymnasium,” April said to Alex, who was grinning away.
He left the girls behind deep in conversation about Rick O’Connell and walked into the school grounds. Although Alex was a werewolf and knew he was more than capable of taking anything on, there was something deeply unnerving about an abandoned school at night. He could see into some of the classrooms, the ones that hadn’t been damaged. There were still old posters on the walls from the days when it was an operating school.
He spotted a gymnasium in the distance. He walked through the darkness, feeling the urge to shift to hybrid so at least he could see better. He held back from doing so because he had no idea who might be squatting here and didn’t feel like being smacked with the Great Barrier right now.
As he walked, even with his human sense of smell, he caught a faint scent that triggered part of his brain. Nia was near. Alex soon reached the building. Unlike the rest of the school, which was fairly run-down, this one looked like it had been sealed up well. All the doors were locked except one which had something heavy wedged behind it.
He had to put his weight to the door and shove to get it open enough for him to slip inside. He dislodged a pile of cinder blocks someone had stacked up behind the door. Once he was inside the gymnasium, he thought to hell with it and shifted to hybrid form. Colors and scents leaped up as he did.
There was definitely a werewolf here somewhere in the vicinity and he was fairly sure it was Nia. At the far end of the gymnasium was a raised stage, and dangling above it was a large banner with The Wizard of Oz printed on it, the remnant of some old stage show.
The wooden floors hadn’t done so well with time. They were warped, although still holding together. Partway down the gymnasium was a wreck of metal that had busted a hole in the floor. Alex looked up and saw that it appeared to be part of some kind of lighting rig that had been attached to the roof. There was what appeared to be a small room up there previously only accessible by climbing along the lighting rig to get to it. He guessed that was where the projector must’ve lived at some point.
