by M. D. Massey
“Unless he had access to magic that could reverse the effects of the spell you cast on him. He’d need a source of power that could both give life and reach across into the realm of the dead.” She locked eyes with me across the fire. “There is one who came with you who has such talents, is there not?”
“Jesse—you’re telling me he’s after Jesse?”
La Onza nodded. “The girl is unique in that she somehow can use both life magic and death magic at once. If he siphons off her power, he’ll have the means of breaking the spell that locks him inside his current host.”
“I have to get back to camp and warn them.” I stood up quickly, already stealth-shifting on the fly. “Will you help us, La Onza? The enemy of my enemy, and all that?”
She shook her head. “It’s not my fight, druid. This is a white man’s war, and it has nothing to do with me. Besides, my responsibility is to protect the gateway from brujos like Ernesto Bylilly. And if you’ve made the deal with my guardian that I think you have, I’ll need to stick close to this place—just in case you fail to defeat the Dark One.”
“Well, I can’t say I blame you, and thanks for the warning.” I looked at the mangy rat-dog sitting beside her. “Larry, you coming?”
“I think I’ll stay right here, druid—no offense,” he replied. “Thing is, if you win, I’m free. If not, then I don’t want to give Ernesto a reason to curse me twice. Sorry, but a chupacabra has to look out for himself.”
“Again, I can’t blame you. Good luck, Larry,” I said as I leapt off the cliff to the canyon below.
“Same to you, druid,“ he yelled. “And not just because I want that curse lifted!”
I took off at a dead run, wishing for about the millionth time that I had the ability to magically gate myself from place to place. I’d been gone for hours, and there was no telling what had happened since I’d left earlier that morning. For all I knew, the Dark Druid had shown up and snatched Jesse, and it was twenty miles to camp across some of the roughest country in the state. Even at an all-out sprint in my full Hyde-side form, it’d take me well over an hour to get back and warn the others.
Or, maybe not.
It’d been a few days since we’d parted ways with the Druid Oak—surely that was enough time for it to heal and rid itself of the tracking devices? Besides, time worked differently in the Grove and the Void, so maybe it was already up to snuff and just waiting on my signal to return.
But could I call the Grove from here, if it was floating somewhere in the Void? I had no idea how my connection to the Grove worked across distances, as I’d never tried to communicate with it when I wasn’t in its immediate presence.
No time like the present to find out.
As I sprinted through the desert, I tested my connection to the Grove and Druid Oak. At first I got nothing, but then I thought I sensed just the barest tickle of the Grove’s presence in my mind. It was there, but distant and ever so faint. I tried to grab onto that tiny thread between us, but just when I thought I had a handle on it, the connection would slip away.
C’mon, c’mon!
Running wasn’t helping my concentration any, so I came to a stop and sat down on a nearby boulder. I took several deep breaths to calm myself, slowing my breathing so I could focus on reaching the Grove. Again, I searched for the connection. When I found it, rather than snatching at it, I simply relaxed my mind and let it come to me. Soon, I felt the bond between us getting stronger of its own accord.
That must be the secret—trying too hard just screws things up. I have to work with the natural flow of our bond, and not against it, just like everything else in druidic magic.
The process of strengthening the connection took several minutes, and I had to resist the urge to jump up and start running back to camp again. But my patience was soon rewarded, as I had a somewhat weak but serviceable link to the Druid Oak and Grove. I sent it a simple query, not wishing to strain the connection between us.
Have you rid yourself of the tracking devices?
The images it returned were faint—dead leaves falling off a tree, metal bugs being squashed by falling branches, and the like. I took it to mean that the Oak had done as I asked.
Good, then I need you here, now. My friends are in trouble, and I—
Before I finished that thought, I felt the Oak’s presence beside me. I opened my eyes, and there in the moonlight stood a fifty-foot tall oak tree, looking for all the world like the most anomalous thing that had ever grown in the Big Bend desert basin.
“Man, it’s good to see you,” I said aloud, meaning it. Images of warm spring days and sunshine washed over me, making me chuckle in spite of the dire situation. “I need to get somewhere, fast. Can you take me there?”
I sent the Oak an image of the plateau where we’d made our camp. An instant later, I felt the distinct sensation of being magically transported into the sentient pocket dimension I’d come to know as the Grove. Before I could even get my bearings inside the Grove, I was outside of it again, standing next to the Druid Oak on top of our campsite plateau.
Hemi was sitting next to the fire when I arrived, keeping watch. The sudden appearance of the Druid Oak startled him, at least until he noticed me standing beside it.
“Damned invisibility and portal magic,” he complained. “I’ll never get used to people popping in and out all the time.”
I took a quick visual survey of the campsite. Everything seemed to be in place, except Fallyn and Bells were nowhere to be found. Thankfully, Jesse was sleeping soundly in a sleeping bag, not far from the fire.
“Hemi, we’ve got serious trouble—”
“Since when do we not?”
“Er, right. First off, where are the others?”
“Fallyn is off hunting, as usual. We saw Bells at the visitor center, while she was packing up to head home. Said she had better things to do than babysit you.”
“Huh,” I remarked with my usual astuteness. “I guess she really is cutting me loose.”
“You think?” he said, lowering his voice so as to avoid waking Jesse. “Once Fallyn got those two to agree that it wasn’t worth it to fight over you, it became a matter of pride for Belladonna to wait and see which one you’d pick.”
“Which one? Huh? Who says I was going to pick either of them?”
“Sshh! You want that one to hear?” Hemi said, inclining his head at Jesse’s supine form.
I looked more closely at her, and it occurred to me that something was off. For starters, Jesse had always been a light sleeper—it was part of the whole druid training thing. Finnegas had taught us that heavy sleepers tended to wake up in the afterlife, so we’d both learned to sleep with one eye open.
And second, she wasn’t breathing.
“Shit!”
I ran over to try to rouse her, but when I touched her shoulder my hand passed right through.
“Fucking illusion!” I tuned my vision into the magical spectrum to get a signature on the spell. The magic was dark and shadowy in nature—definitely not something Jesse would cast, even if she knew how.
“Hemi, tell me everything that happened before I got here.”
The big guy rubbed a hand over his face. “Aw, lemme think. Belladonna left before it got dark, then Fallyn took off as soon as the sun went down. I heated some food, but Jesse said she wasn’t hungry, and she wanted to be alone. She went to go sit by herself, I went to take a piss, and when I came back she was in her bag, asleep.”
“Where was she sitting when you last saw her—awake, I mean?”
“Over here,” he said, leading me to a large flat rock next to the cliffs. “She sat right there on that rock.”
I cast a cantrip to enhance my senses, searching the area around the rock. It didn’t take long to find large, semi-canid footprints, as well as some sort of powder that I couldn’t identify. I pinched a bit between my fingers, and my fingertips immediately went numb where the powder made contact.
“Skinwalkers?” Hemi asked.
> I nodded. “I’m certain of it. I think they snuck up on Jesse, drugged her, and left the way they came, over the cliffs. See this powdery substance? I’ve heard tell that some brujos use a paralyzing poison, similar to the stuff Haitian bokors use. They use pufferfish toxin and other ingredients, and it’s said to be so potent it makes it look like their victims died of natural causes.”
“Aw, Colin—this ain’t good. But why’d they take her?”
“That’s what I came here to tell you. I finally found La Onza, and she turned out to be a font of information. According to the witch, Ernesto and Stanley are working for the Fear Doirich. He’s looking for revenge against me for all the shit I’ve done to him, and he thinks he can use Jesse to help him do it.”
The big Maori’s brow furrowed. “How’s he think he’ll do that?”
“By siphoning off her magic. Finnegas and I noticed something different about her this time around. She still retains a bit of the Oak’s nature magic, and has a sort of connection to the Grove as well—just much, much weaker. But all that time she spent roaming around as a ghost affected her too. She’s alive, but she has a definite connection to the world of the dead.”
“Death magic?” he asked.
“Either that or a form of necromancy. Think about that—life magic and death magic, all in one package. If it’s ever happened before, I’ve never heard of it. And La Onza thinks the Dark Druid plans to siphon that magic off so he can use it to break the curse Finnegas and I placed on him.”
“Colin, if that’s the case—”
“Yup—he’ll be able to take another crack at jumping into my body. And here’s the kicker. Last time I had Balor’s Eye stashed inside my skull, and that made me mostly immune to necromancy. But now? I have no idea if any of that resistance remains.”
“Bugger all, cuz—we need to find that girl, and fast, before they hand her over to the Dark Druid.”
“Way ahead of you. I’m going to partially shift and sniff around, figure out which way they went. You scratch out a note for Fallyn to let her know what’s up. Then, we’re going skinwalker hunting.”
15
The trail wasn’t hard to find, since Jesse’s scent was familiar to me and unmistakable. I wasn’t as good a tracker as Fallyn, but she hadn’t returned yet, so we took off without her. Hemi and I followed the skinwalkers’ trail for the better part of an hour, to the mountainous area below the South Rim.
I lost the trail for a time, until I realized they’d obscured their scent and signs of passing with magic. After that, it was just a matter of following the magic instead of trail-sign, and that led us up an impossibly steep slope to a cleft in the ridge-line that was partially hidden by vegetation. Illusory magic had been cast to further obscure the approach, but it was hastily placed and easy to dispel. Finally, we came to yet another cave entrance, one that was suspiciously left unguarded.
“You reckon they took her in there?” Hemi asked.
I knelt to examine the ground in front of the cave. The surface beneath our feet here was rocky and barren, but I could just make out a few faint scuff marks on the rocks. It was doubtful that Ernesto or Stanley would have left any physical sign of their passing, unless they were carrying a heavy load.
“Someone came through here, possibly carrying a body. Besides, I’m pretty sure that crappy obfuscation spell cinches it,” I replied, standing up and scanning the area around the cave. “Weird that there are no wards protecting the cave entrance, though.”
About that time, I heard shuffling footsteps coming from within the cavern, accompanied by the odd groan or growl. Even without having spent months in the Hellpocalypse, I’d have known what was coming by the smell. Animated rotting corpses tended to throw off putrescence like cheap perfume at a Mary Kay convention—and man, did we get a lungful. A wave of foul air washed over us, just as several dozen ghouls and a handful of revenants came rushing out of the cave.
I backed up a few steps, getting enough space to draw Dyrnwyn. Hemi didn’t bother backing away. He just reached behind him and pulled his massive, axe-shaped club out of thin air. In the same motion, he spun and swung the heavy end at a couple of unlucky ghouls. The club impacted with a loud, sickening crunch, and the pair of them went sailing off the cliff.
It’d been a minute since I’d seen my friend in fighting form, and it was still a sight to behold. His tattoos glowed a pale blue, and his war club left a faint after-image of blue light as he spun and swung it around. Although the long, tapered weapon was almost as tall as I was, and as big around as my upper arm at the thick end, Hemi spun and twirled it like a drum major leading a marching band. All the while, he chanted and stomped and made faces at his enemies, working a haka into his dance of death and destruction.
“Neat trick, pulling that stick out of thin air,” I shouted, jumping into the fray with Drynwyn’s blade lit up like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July. I chopped the arms off a ghoul, kicked another in the chest, and took the head off a revenant as an afterthought. “You’ll need to show me that sometime.”
Hemi paused and took a two-handed grip on the weapon, which he used to shove a half-dozen ghouls back like a cop on crowd control duty. The lot of them went tumbling, tripping up those behind them. A revenant jumped over the crowd at him, and the big guy smacked it across the face, spinning its head and twisting its neck around at an unnatural angle. The rev dropped to the ground, where it twitched once before going limp.
Hemi grinned ear to ear as he hollered over his shoulder at me. “You got that Bag, aye? I think you’re good, mate!”
“Fine, be that way,” I said, ducking under a ghoul’s lunging grasp as I stuck Dyrnwyn’s blade through the underside of its jaw and out the top of the thing’s head. “Keep your secrets—but I’ll remember that the next time you need a ride to the grocery store.”
“Eh, Maki takes care of that stuff now,” he replied, spinning and striking with his club in dizzying patterns. Each time the club changed direction it hit something, caving in skulls, snapping bones, and sending ghouls flying. “Can’t hold that one over me.”
“See how you are?” I said as I dropped into a spinning sweep kick to take a revenant’s legs out from under it. I followed through with a backhand slice of my blade as it fell, severing its torso just below the rib cage. “You get a girlfriend and suddenly you’re all, ‘I don’t need you anymore, Colin.’ What ever happened to bros before—”
“Watch it!” he warned, with a dangerous look in his eye. “Manners, and all that.”
“Okay, okay,” I pouted as I finished the still-squirming corpse off by separating its head from its shoulders. “Sheesh.”
Although Hemi and I had mowed down the first wave, there were still more revs and ghouls coming out of the cave. “Hemi, we don’t have time for this shit! Move back so I can cut loose on them.”
Hemi swung for the fences, tossing a few limp ghoul corpses toward the advancing crowd. Then he skipped aside, surprisingly quick on his feet despite his size. Once he was clear, I muttered a spell and launched a fireball into the midst of the undead. It bowled a few over, torching through flesh and charring bone along the way. But that wasn’t the effect I was looking to achieve.
“Pléascann!” I shouted, uttering the trigger word in badly-accented Gaelic.
The fireball exploded in an expanding ball of superheated gas that enveloped everything inside the mouth of the cave. Most of the undead were consumed by the flames, but the blast also sent goop and body parts flying everywhere, and I caught a lump of steaming slime in the face. Meanwhile, Hemi had ducked around the side of the cave entrance, managing to avoid the worst of it.
I wiped cooked ghoul muck off and slung it to the ground as Hemi applauded my performance. “Well done—in more ways than one, aye?”
“Let’s just go rescue Jesse, and let’s also agree not speak of this again. Ever.”
Hemi chuckled softly. “Oh, slim chance of that, mate,” he said, snapping a picture of me with the burn
er phone Fallyn had given him. “This is going on Faebook.”
Inside, the cave narrowed before opening up into a wider tunnel that led on into the darkness ahead. Hemi couldn’t see as well as I could in the dark, so I conjured a small globe of light that bobbed above us, just beneath the ceiling some fifteen feet overhead. Despite that, the shadows seemed to push the cold white light cast by the orb back toward us. And every so often, I’d see shades flitting past out of the corner of my eye.
“See that, mate?” Hemi whispered.
I glanced around, checking my flanks instinctively for an attack. “We’re definitely not alone. Let’s keep moving, but be ready for anything.”
Hemi took up the rear guard, walking backwards at times while I took the lead and pushed ahead. As we went deeper into the cave, the darkness grew until it became unnaturally thick, and the pool of illumination cast by my light spell receded with every step. I’d seen this sort of thing before, when I’d fought against a nachtkrapp that had been abducting children in Fredericksburg. Certain creatures of the dark had a knack for manipulating shadow, intensifying it and even creating constructs from the darkness that were substantial enough to do real physical harm.
Low, chattering voices began to echo from the dark around us, accompanied by evil, tittering laughter. Glowing orbs appeared in the darkness—grapefruit-sized balls of eerie red, orange, and yellow light that faded in and out of existence as they floated around us, always just out of reach. They began swooping in closer as we moved ahead, blinking in and out in patterns that made it difficult to gauge their location and bearing.
“Don’t let those orbs touch you,” I said in a low voice. “I’m pretty sure they’re lost souls, the kind that feed on living energy.”
“You don’t need to tell me,” Hemi said. “Seen similar stuff in the underworld.”
Not wanting to swing a blade with Hemi in such close quarters, I slipped Drynwyn into my Bag, reaching for my war club instead. It had proven time and again to be effective against all things fae, and while these orbs weren’t made of fae magic, they definitely had the same alien presence about them.
