by Faith Hunter
We were facing civil war, the orthodox against the rest of the town’s religious groups. Fighting among humans in the name of the Most High was a sure means to draw an angry seraph back, especially an Angel of Punishment. I didn’t know what to do. At my side, I could hear Ciana whispering. It sounded like prayer, and her pin burned brighter.
A small man shoved his way between the two groups, limping. He was bathed in blood, and his skin, showing through cracked and drying ooze, was blistered and burned. One foot was mutilated, boot half torn off, exposing mangled toes. Beside him was a television camera, perched on the shoulder of a woman. Durbarge, his face below the eye patch pale and drawn in pain, glanced at me, his eye full of angry promise, meeting mine between the shoulders of my supporters. He turned to the crowd before I could interpret his expression, his arms raised. The camera scanned the mob, panning until it focused on Durbarge.
“Townspeople of Mineral City,” Durbarge shouted. “You know me. I’m an investigator with the Administration of the ArchSeraph, entrusted to protect sentient beings and to prevent religious violence. This mage is legally licensed, free to live among humans with the permission of the AAS and the High Host of the Seraphim. Any violence against her will be construed as violence against the seraphs of the Most High. There will be no more blood spilled. Go home. Prepare to bury your dead.”
At that, the camera swiveled smoothly until it captured my face. I must have reacted, because Ciana squeezed my hand reassuringly. It was the reporter who had tried to get an interview with me, her coat splashed with blood, her shoes sticky with it.
“Thorn St. Croix brought succubi into this town,” Culpepper shouted, his face red, a vein throbbing in his temple. “She brought those . . . things.” He pointed at the dead and mangled body of a dragonet. The reporter moved for a better shot of the townspeople and the angry elder. “Before she came, Mineral City was a peaceful town. She brought us discord. She brought us lust. She brought us evil and death!” he screeched.
Suddenly, fireballs danced above Ciana’s shield, leaving trails of phosphorescent blue and green, their brilliance blinding. They swooped at the crowd, flying into the mass of orthodox, scattering them, then back, to hover directly over me. The support of the Minor Flames was clear. I counted five, and remembered the two who slammed to the earth early in the battle. I hadn’t seen them since they fell.
The reporter’s face was smoothed in professional lines, her mouth unemotional, but her eyes were full of fear. If civil war broke loose and the seraph returned, she would die, along with the combatants. “This is SNN reporter Romona Benson,” she said into the sudden quiet. “We are here in Mineral City, covering the events surrounding the appearance of winged beasts called dragonets, and the seraph who answered a call of mage in dire.”
In front of the shield, Durbarge put a hand out, grasping at air. Slowly, he toppled, hitting the snow, his face whiter than the crust he landed on. Thadd, lurching to catch him, followed him down and placed two fingers on the assey’s throat. Mouth tight, he rolled Durbarge to his back, white face to the sky, and hit the assey hard, one fist slamming to his chest. He checked the pulse again and slid one hand beneath his head, the position opening Durbarge’s mouth. He breathed in and the assey’s chest expanded. I had never seen CPR done in person, but I had seen the method demonstrated on SNN. Durbarge was dead.
Chapter 19
“Drop the shield,” I said to Ciana. Without demur, she touched the pin on her chest. The energies fell to the snow with an unfamiliar crackle of power, a backlash of electricity that stung the skin on my legs. Pushing the reporter aside, ignoring her incessant questions, I knelt at Durbarge’s side as Thadd again breathed into his mouth.
A small voice in the back of my head whispered that my life would be a lot easier if the assey were dead. He had never done a thing to help me. Even his current defense could be construed as self-serving. I lifted a healing amulet from my necklace and snapped it loose, placing the stone, a mottled black and clear agate carved like a frog, on his stomach. Thadd placed his hands on Durbarge’s chest and started pumping.
The Flames, all five of them, whirled around my head, darting in front of me, stealing my vision and leaving plasma burns on my retinas. One landed on Thadd’s hand, and he yelped, knocking the Flame tumbling. It regained its shape and shot toward me, hovering at chin level, blinding, emitting an awful, high-pitched buzz. I closed my eyes against its glare and swatted at it. “If you can’t heal him, get out of the way,” I said.
Instantly, the Flame darted at Durbarge’s torso and disappeared inside. Thadd jumped back, yelping again as if stung. Durbarge’s body lurched on the snow. Lurched again. A second Flame darted to Durbarge’s side, penetrated a three-fingered claw wound, and vanished inside. The other Flames whirled over him, making that shrill vibration that hurt my ears. Thadd didn’t seem affected, but I wanted to slap something. Durbarge jerked a third time. And took a breath.
“Tears of Taharial,” the reporter whispered into her mike, her mouth at my shoulder, the mild blasphemy going out over the SNN airwaves. Thadd risked a shock and touched Durbarge’s carotid.
The two Flames reappeared, plunged once around Thadd’s head, and joined the mad dance over the assey’s body, singing a bright song that was giving me a headache. With a final swoop, the Flames separated and flew in five different directions, each landing on a wounded human or darting inside a body.
“As you’ve just seen, the mage commanded the Minor Flames to heal,” the reporter said to the anchor only she could hear, “and they did. Healing is a talent never demonstrated by these minor seraphic warriors. How did you do that?” She thrust a mike under my jaw, eyes imploring, knowing the danger had been lessened but was still present.
All I could think of was, seraph stones, much more vulgar language than she had used. Someone called my name and I turned away from the reporter. Miz Essie was bending over a teenage boy and I moved to help, pulling another healing amulet and activating it with my thumb.
The boy watched wide-eyed when I placed the amulet on his bleeding wound. The mob, which had had fallen silent, began to stir.
Thadd pointed to a knot of miners. “You men. Get some stretchers. You”—he pointed to a man in the front of the mob—“find some medics and get triage started. You. Get a fire brigade and start a bonfire to burn the spawn and succubi.” Thadd pointed at Culpepper and ordered, “You. Get the meeting hall open for the wounded.” Culpepper opened his mouth to argue, but stopped when the camera focused on him for a close-up. Casting one last furious look at me, he turned to obey. The mob began to break up.
At my side, Ciana sighed with relief. I touched her chin and turned her face to me. “Thank you. But if you ever again step in front of a seraph to save me, I’ll beat you black and blue.” She grinned at me, a gamine expression, unrepentant. “How’s Zeddy?” I asked.
The small girl shrugged. “Okay. I guess. I left one of those things over him.”
Following her finger, I saw Zeddy propped against the wall of his house, Jacey bending over him but not touching him. Arching over his supine form was a pink shield, prickling with ruby lights, a shield I could see with human vision. I had never seen anything like it and moved to get a better view. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. The pin told me to open it.”
As we approached the edge of the shield, I inspected it with mage-sight. The conjure was a healing incantation in the shape of a bell, the force of it pulsing with power that rolled across the sides like sound waves and into Zeddy’s body. I had no idea how it was made.
Jacey, seeing Ciana at my side, grabbed up my stepdaughter and hugged her hard, weeping, trying to get words past the joy clogging her throat. “Thank you. Thank you so much.” Ciana grinned at me over Jacey’s shoulder, her legs and feet swinging.
Zeddy opened his eyes and whispered, “You’ll crush her, Mama.” Jacey laughed, a broken sound, and set Ciana on her feet, stroking her face and hair. The huge boy’s
cheeks, neck, and shoulders were puckered with wounds in half-circular spawn bites, indentations where flesh had been torn away and eaten, dried blood where the teeth had pierced. There were dozens of bites along his legs and torso. Hundreds.
No human could survive that much poison; Zeddy should be dead already. Even a mage would have a problem surviving that many bites. The scars tracing my arms and legs zinged with remembered pain. Beneath the shield, Zeddy was alive, his bleeding had stopped, and the wounds were scaling over. It would take a while to clean all the spawn poison out of his system, but I was pretty sure he would live.
I looked at Ciana. “Can you make more than one of these shields at a time?”
She shrugged again, and I could see exhaustion in the set of her shoulders. “Maybe. Why?” It wasn’t fair to ask what I wanted, but if she could make other healing shields, she could save some of the more grievously wounded. I explained what I wanted, and she looked down at the pin on her chest. It was glowing softly. “I can try. But then they’ll know about me. And the pin.” She didn’t add that they would fear her, as they feared me.
“If you want, you can pretend the shields are mine.”
She slid her hand in mine again and said, “That elder would try to take away my pin if he knew it was me.”
Ouch. But I agreed with her assessment, as well as the plan to fool the town. “Okay.”
Satisfied, Ciana and I walked together toward the old Central Baptist Church. The fighting was over, but we had a second battle before us, as dangerous and difficult as the one with the Darkness. Many had been bitten by spawn and were poisoned. Except for the Flames, if they stuck around, and healing amulets, there wasn’t much that would clear spawn venom from a human bloodstream.
For me, the rest of Saturday night and all of Sunday passed in caring for the injured while the town fathers burned Darkness and cleaned up the town. Abbreviated services—praise for the survival of the town, mourning for the dead—were held in the town hall when the kirk was found to be fire-damaged. I didn’t attend.
It was three a.m. Monday when I locked my loft door and reset the ward over the building. Ciana was asleep in her nook of a bedroom at Rupert’s, my worn-out friends sleeping the sleep of warriors. It would be dawn before I could rest. I had too much to do.
Before I cleaned myself, I rinsed my weapons in the kitchen sink, then thrust each into a bag of cleansing salt to remove microscopic traces of Dark blood. I oiled each blade, inspecting the cutting edges for nicks and slivers, and piled the weapons and my amulets on the kitchen table as I peeled off my ruined clothes, tossing them onto the gas-fire logs. The bloody cloth blazed up in a cloud of sulfur and acid. Darkness could use the smell to find me if they wanted. Once that would have frightened me, but now I was pretty sure the Power on the Trine knew where I was. When it was ready, Forcas would come for me again. For me, and for Mineral City.
Standing under a hot spray of cleansing water, I inspected my hands and feet, arms and legs as caked black and crimson-rust blood dissolved and washed down the drain. I was a lot better off than I had expected. Close proximity to Ciana’s healing shields had provided a residual effect, leaving me with fresh, shiny, red skin in place of blood-crusted wounds. The new skin was thin, filled with fluid, and very tender, but it was way better than open wounds. Even my feet, which should have been burned and frostbitten, looked better than I expected.
I had suffered three spawn bites and one really nasty claw wound—enough to kill a human—and they were partially healed as well, the surrounding flesh creased and tight, the wounds themselves knitting together. I wasn’t sick from the poison. I had learned the hard way that my childhood exposure had given me an immunity to spawn poison. As silver linings went, that one was pretty good. Too bad I didn’t have an immunity to ugly scars. The new batch were pretty gruesome, and I smeared ointment over them after the shower.
I wasn’t thinking about the fight. Wasn’t thinking about the attack of the townspeople in the street. I was trying to keep it all, all the blood and stench and death and betrayal stuffed into a little pocket in a corner of my brain. So far I was succeeding, but as I cleaned up my body and my weapons, little bursts of memory occurred, vivid blasts of individual images. The sight of a man’s face, bled out in the snow, lips blue, skin crusted with blood and ice. A severed dragonet leg, twitching, the joint opening and bending shut. The remembered smell of rotting meat brought me to my knees, gagging. The sound of a child’s scream as it found its father dead. The crying of another child, dying of spawn bites.
Ciana’s pin had helped to heal me, but it hadn’t restored me, hadn’t taken away the shock of real war. The only time I had fought before, except for the mock battles with Audric, was underground, alone. It had been followed by an attack on the Trine; a handful of humans, Thadd, and me against a small horde of spawn and daywalkers. Neither had prepared me for all-out war, with women, children, and men dead in the street, dinner for spawn.
I knew I’d never sleep. And though I was exhausted, I still had work to do. I had to have a little talk with Lolo. Blinking away the images, I dressed in soft, warm clothes and turned up the heat in the loft.
Sore in every muscle, I pushed aside the kitchen table. The five Flames had disappeared. The two I had seen wounded I had picked up and carried back to my loft in a pocket. They were now among the pile of weapons. The burned-out Flames looked like smoky quartz with black coal-like inclusions. I held one to the light and wished I could fix them both, just like their buddies had healed so many of the townspeople.
The makeshift hospital was filled to capacity with bell-shaped healing shields and recuperating townspeople, many of whom had been healed by the Flames. Thadd had taken over the defense and military organization of the town. The reporter, whose name I had forgotten, had probably won a Pulitzer or a wartime certification for her footage on the attack and the town’s defense. And the healing of the fighters afterwards.
I figured I was famous. Which would have really ticked me off, had I any energy or emotion left for trivialities.
I set the Flame down and cast a charmed circle, using clean earth salt. Around the outer perimeter I placed seven aromatic candles, because their spruce scent would clear my head and remove the smell of dead and burning spawn that filtered through my windows. In the center of the circle I placed my silver bowl filled with springwater, its bottom lined with a layer of moss agate nuggets for life and growth. My ceremonial knife and amulets went beside it. I didn’t need the stones or blood to scry for Lolo—all I supposedly needed were salt, water, and a calm, meditative mind—but after my last failure and the attack by Darkness, I wanted to be ready for anything.
I closed the circle the old-fashioned way, with a call on creation energies in the center of the earth. When I had enough for the working, I placed my necklace over my head, and the power draw stopped. I called on Lolo, speaking aloud. “Lolo. Hear me. Awaken, priestess,” I added, remembering it was the middle of the night. “Lolo.” I called for several minutes but nothing happened. It was like talking to myself. I wasn’t getting through. It was as if Lolo had blocked me. Or as if I was doing it all wrong, or as if the overused and drained amulet necklace was sending feedback, any and all of which were possible.
I wasn’t very good at scrying. It was a use of power that required that a mage’s gift be alive and open to study and attempt. I had left Enclave before I could learn, and I had never practiced. Who would I have talked to? No one knew I was alive except Lolo, and she wasn’t the chatty type. Pulling the bowl to me, I took my prime amulet in my left hand, settled myself, and leaned over the bowl. I set the amulet into the water and chanted softly, “Lolo, hear me. Open to me. Knowledge I seek. Truth I seek.”
On the third repetition, the water in the bowl began to change, gradually darkening, growing murky. But it wasn’t the Enclave priestess I saw in the bowl. It was a small clap-board house, painted white, with a low-pitched roof and aqua shutters. It was our vacation house on the Gulf w
hen I was a child. The only vacation we had ever taken. The only time my parents had been certified to leave Enclave and, even then, it was only a few miles east, almost within sight of the extravagant, ornamental prison.
Palm trees waved in a brisk wind, fronds bending, all to one side. Dark clouds raced across the sky as my position changed, and waves crashed on a nearby shore. Lightning cracked across the sky and sheets of rain pounded the ocean, moving closer. But the vision was murky, cloudy, shadowed by the passage of time. I heard neither wind nor ocean nor approaching storm. Only silence. And the sound of my heartbeat as it began to race. I leaned in closer, hoping to make the vision in the bowl come clear, fearful, yet unable to look away.
A woman walked from the front door, a mage visa around her neck glinting in the sun. One hand shaded her eyes as she looked out to sea. Her mouth opened, calling. Calling. I knew her. I knew what she was saying. I remembered this day. It was my mother, and she was calling my twin and me, wanting to get us inside before the storm hit. “Thorn-y-Rosie.” All one word, the way she always called us. “Thorn-y-Rosie!”
I knew what I was seeing. I knew what was about to happen. Once again I had bungled my attempt at scrying. I had performed a truth vision instead. I shivered, my throat closing up, my eyes on my mother’s face as my tears blurred the scene. Out on the water, the Gulf of Mexico, a cloud twisted into a long roll along the length of the sky, a cylindrical shape, spinning, as warm and cold air masses collided; a tornado trying to take shape.
I watched as if hanging in the air. That day, Rose and I had been playing our version of hide-and-seek, and I was searching for her, hoping to catch her in the backyard. If I answered Mama, my twin would run, reaching home before I could tag her. So I didn’t answer. And neither did Rose.
A tornado formed over the bay, arching first one way, then the other, vaguely S-shaped, dropping slowly. When it hit the storm-tossed sea, it whitened as a waterspout developed. It headed straight at the small house.
