The COMPLETE Witching Pen Series, Boxed Set: The Witching Pen, The Sands Of Time, The Demon Bride, The Last Dragon and Wilted

by Dianna Hardy

  She brought the collar up to her face and breathed in. Familiarity washed over her, along with a thousand memories, all of which relaxed her muscles, unclenched her stomach, warmed her heart, and offered her what she so longed to feel right now: safe, secure, certain.

  She took one last breath, like some druggie needing a hit, and stuffed the shirt back under the pillow.

  Her hand found its way to her belly, and she lay it exactly where Pueblo’s had been. Just thirty-one more weeks to go – providing they all lived through the next few months. And if she had to expect more of the same, she wasn't sure how the hell she was going to survive.

  Chapter Three

  “Mum?” Elena slid the balcony door closed behind her and made her way to the figure huddled on the patio chair.

  Jesus Christ, it’s freezing. She snuggled into her fleece bathrobe and pulled the belt as tight as it would go so the November wind wouldn’t get under it. The dawn was yet to greet the sky.

  “Mum, you’ll catch your death out here. Come back inside.”

  “I’m fine, sweetie. Just need some breathing space.”

  Wasn’t that the truth. You’d think it wouldn’t be necessary in a four-bed penthouse, but with the entire apartment occupied by five emotional misfits, you had yourself a new meaning to the word claustrophobia. Okay, so maybe ‘misfits’ was too strong a word. In what category did you put a forty-four year old woman who looked like she was eighty-two and refused to be magicked back to her younger years; an eighty-two year old man who looked like he was twenty-eight and was stoically convincing himself that having a baby with the love of his life had no affect on him at all; a witch, pregnant with the new Messiah – one who literally had two fathers – and a half-angel who had discovered more than he’d bargained for?

  Karl…

  She didn’t want to think about that right now. Three weeks ago, when Karl had finally opened the safe behind the bathroom mirror and read what was inside … he had taken the news in a very non-Karl way. At first she’d thought he just needed some time, but he had slowly withdrawn into himself, growing quiet, shutting her out rather than letting her in…

  “Why aren’t you in bed?” That was said in the no-nonsense ‘Mum’ tone, and it still baffled her how, even at the age of twenty-five, she still felt like a clumsy toddler whenever that tone was directed at her.

  “I still can’t sleep.”

  “The succubus thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Isn’t Karl helping you in that department?”

  “Mum!” Ewww… “I’m not talking with you about that!”

  “Elena, I spent a month in Succubus Land – there’s nothing that will weird me out.” It was said lightly, almost like a joke, except for the hard lines that remained at the corners of her mouth.

  Elena’s heart sank and that wretched feeling about her heritage – about the fact that she was a

  Shanka demon and capable of doing … what had been done to her mother – wrapped itself around her tighter than her bathrobe.

  She did her best to ignore it, knowing, logically, that it wasn’t her fault, and sat down on the chair opposite her. “Yes, he’s helping me, but…”

  Her mum turned her aged face towards her. “But?”

  But he’s not talking to me. “It doesn’t seem to be enough at the moment.” She laughed nervously. “I guess it’s because of everything that’s happened … the energy in the air is just … well, it’s just crazy. And in here, this flat – every time I’m anywhere near Amy and my gra … Paul … I kinda just need to leave. The tension between those two…”

  “Glad I’m not the only one who’s noticed,” she grunted.

  “Karl and I are going to go back to the house after breakfast to see if we can salvage anything – see if it’s liveable.” Their house in Wimbledon, where Gwain and Mary had taken their last breath, was more than a sore point and not least because of that fact. It had been too hard for Karl – or any of them, really – to venture back there until a week ago, only to then find it had been looted and wrecked. By humans or demons was anyone’s guess.

  They had boarded everything up as best as they could, thinking it would be left alone if it looked like it had already been ransacked.

  But this time, Elena was going to go in all guns blazing. She was going to magic that house back to its former condition and Karl was going to have to face his demons – or the legacy of one angel – whether he wanted to or not. At least, he had to start the process. In the meantime, they had this place, Gwain’s penthouse, which had been legally signed over to Karl three days after the apocalypse began, by Gwain’s solicitor who had just ‘turned up’ at the door out of the blue, surprising everyone.

  And, in fact, they didn’t just have the penthouse – they had the whole friggin’ building and a couple of other complexes in the Docklands area, a series of multiplex condos in Rome, high rise building plans in various parts of Europe and America, and an environmental and sustainability project called Great Heights – currently running in Brazil and various parts of Africa – where those on the poverty line were taught modern sustainable agriculture techniques with the use of local, traditional farming methods and folklore, to help them stand on their own feet. The project’s motto? If you can stand, you can soar. Very tongue in cheek. Very Gwain.

  Turned out that Gwain – human name, Gavin Turvey – wasn’t just your ‘average Joe investor’ who had had a lot of time to make a fortune, but a visionary architect in both the first and third worlds who believed in building durability from the ground up.

  And Karl had just inherited two-point-four billion pounds.

  No wonder he’s retreated into himself, thought Elena. It’ll do him good to get back to the house for a bit – a bit of normality, if such a thing exists anymore.

  Her mother’s throaty voice brought her out of her thoughts. “Any further news from the fairy queen?” she asked, dryly.

  Elena shook her head. “Zilch.”

  Other than Morgana and Lucifer’s visit two and a half weeks ago to tell them all about how essential Gwain and Mary’s ‘sacrifice’ had been for the birthing of the last Dragon, which everyone was waiting for on tenterhooks, they seemed to have disappeared. Their visit had not been welcome, and to be quite frank, no one wanted to see them again, the loss of their friends too raw.

  “Watch her, Elena. A woman used to getting her own way, and fighting for so long to achieve her goal, will be hard to pull off her path should she need to be steered away. Those kinds of people have tunnel-vision. Great for success; poor for compromise.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’re not going to be here to see it all for yourself.”

  “Elena—”

  “No. You are not eighty years old – you are not at death’s door. Why won’t you let anyone help you?”

  “Elena—”

  “We risked our lives to save yours, and you’re wishing it away.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Then tell me what it is like.”

  She stood up a little too fast and had to catch herself on the table so she didn’t topple over.

  Elena rose up after her and grabbed her arm to steady her.

  “No, Elena,” she snatched her arm away, then looked regretful of the action and reached forward to lay her hand on Elena’s. “Just … no.”

  She took herself back inside.

  Elena didn’t follow her, but sighed and gazed over the 47th floor balcony onto the changed world below.

  An aeroplane flew low in the sky, heading for City Airport.

  For the most part, you wouldn’t notice too much had changed – there had been more riots, more looting, more confusion and more panic. But most demons and angels seem to have retreated for the moment as they dealt with their sudden lack of abilities, while humans were the ones that discovered their latent powers. Yep – humans had gotten all supernatural. The problem was, no o
ne quite knew how to wield all that mojo and, well, in all honesty, some people simply didn’t deserve to have it. In some cases, it was like giving a child a gun without teaching him how to use it. Yey for free will. Shame it didn’t come with an off-button for stupid people. But then, that had been the whole point of the Witching Pen, hadn’t it?

  Elena sighed again, not wanting to think about the Pen that Abaddon had finally destroyed. She brought her mind back to her friends and family; to the turmoil they were going through – that everyone was going through – now all too real with those veils ripped away.

  The hugest changes were the ones that could not be seen – that’s where the real apocalypse lay: in people’s hearts, their souls, their beings.

  As above, so below. As without, so within.

  They had all changed. And they needed to find their way back to themselves. Whole.

  ~*~

  “Explain to me again,” heaved Pueblo between blows with his duelling stick, “why we’re all waiting for the Dragon to rise?”

  Teigas may have been only three and a half foot, but somehow, he was holding his own against Pueblo’s attacks.

  “Again? Because,” gasped the imp – or, fairy, as he preferred to be called – “the survival of its rebirth means Morgana’s rule is manifest.”

  Pueblo cried out as he took a hit to his ankles.

  Teigas fended off a retaliation to his head.

  “So … what happens after it rises? Ouch!”

  “Keep focused. I've said this a million times: after it rises, Morgana and all the fay regain the full extent of their strength and their magic – the Dragon is to her, what hair was to Samson.”

  “What about her enemies? Won’t they be looking to destroy it before it rises?”

  “After it rises, yes. No one can destroy it while it’s still cocooned underground – no one can reach it.”

  “Wait, wait, wait…” Pueblo held his hand up in a truce.

  Teigas whacked him against the side of his ribs.

  “Hey! That was me calling time out.”

  “You think anyone you’re fighting is going to concede?”

  “I’m not talking to an assailant, I’m talking to you,” he growled out.

  “All riiiighht… Don’t get your loin cloth in a twist.”

  Pueblo flipped him a finger and Teigas grinned. “So, Dessec, what do you want to know?”

  He crouched his large frame into the soft dune sand. “I’m picturing a bunch of fallen angels and demons, waiting at the exact point where that Dragon’s going to come out of the ground, ready to kill it with crossbows and guns and cannons, or whatever they have to hand, and I don’t see how they’ll fail.”

  “Don’t underestimate Morgana – she has a few tricks up her sleeve.”

  “Tricks like what?”

  “Tricks like how I can keep sparring with you without losing my breath even though you’re twice my height.”

  “How can you do that?”

  “Because you’re not holding a staff.”

  Pueblo looked down at the stick in his hands to find his hands gripping thin air. “What… That’s not possible!”

  “Then tell me what you’re holding.”

  He was flummoxed. “But I was holding it.”

  “Close your fists all the way.”

  He did as instructed and found that whatever ‘air’ he was clutching evaporated. “But—”

  “I asked you to ‘hold this’ and made a gesture of handing you something. You perceived what it was and that perception became reality.”

  Pueblo frowned. “No. You asked me to meet you here for training, and then you handed me a duelling stick.”

  “Training can be anything: meditation, lessons in stalking and observation, training in magic … you assumed I meant sparring, and you created the scene with that assumption, turning the nothing I handed you into something. You could have imagined that I’d handed you a compass, or a bag of herbs. You didn’t – you imagined a weapon.”

  “But you have a duelling stick.”

  “Where?”

  Pueblo looked all around him.

  Nowhere.

  Fuck. He’d had the wool pulled over his eyes. He glared at Teigas, accusingly. “You tricked me.”

  “I did nothing to you. You perceived. You created a reality.”

  “No no no, okay? I was here – I fought you. I took blows – you hurt my ribs, I bruised your wrist. How—” Pueblo went flying backwards a few metres before he had time to register the hit.

  Holy shit! Had the imp done that with his mind?

  “That’s how. We were fighting, yes. Because you wanted to fight, not because we had weapons, and not because it was the ‘training’ that I had set out for you. You created your reality. Need me to say it again? The blows we took came from our minds – the will behind our thoughts – and the staff was a vision that your mind conjured to make the scene plausible. You bend time, for goodness sake – how is this concept a problem for you to grasp?”

  What the hell…? “What is it? Magic?”

  Teigas laughed as Pueblo hauled himself up to sitting. “Nope. That was just the mind,” he shrugged. “It’s the single, most powerful tool we have against anything. Fairies mostly work with their will, and so do angels, although up until now, angels have been following God’s will specifically. But it’s still power from the mind, nonetheless. It’s why the two species had no problems connecting from the beginning – at least, until the Almighty got greedy.

  “There are simple mind tricks like glamour and the power of suggestion, to more complicated ones like what we’ve just played out: creating realities.”

  Pueblo paused, letting the information sink in. “That came so easily to me,” he mused.

  “That’s partly because all dimensions have fallen into the human world. Humans have more power accessible to them now, and you’re half human. The only reason the Dessec haven’t annihilated you yet is because their power has diminished. They need to regroup and figure out what they can and can’t do. So do you.”

  “Creating realities … could I change the whole world?”

  “In theory, yes; in practice, not so much. It’s not just your world to change – everyone has a will. That’s a lot of people’s worlds you’d be changing. You’re not aiming to change the whole world, just the little things that lead to the big picture, thus allowing others to see what they choose. Everything is about perception – your task is to become perception’s master.”

  “Oh, is that all?”

  Teigas smiled. “Yes, that’s all.”

  “If humans are stronger now, what about Amy?”

  “She’s a stronger witch now than she was a month ago.”

  “She’s felt stronger in our dreams.”

  Teigas frowned. “I wish you wouldn’t meet up like that.”

  Pueblo shrugged. “Can’t help it, and I wouldn’t change it. If I could just see her … for just a day—”

  “You know you can’t.”

  He sighed and sank backwards into the sand until he was lying flat, just as he had been with Amy the last time they’d dreamt. “I know.”

  The Dessec tribe were after her and their baby, but they had no idea where she was right now, largely owing to Paul’s magical shield surrounding them. But Pueblo was connected to the Dessec by blood. By visiting her in person, he would be a beacon signalling her location and everything they were trying to achieve in keeping her and the baby safe would be for nothing. Besides, he had his own plan: destroy the Dessec. He’d die before he’d let them take his child, and since dying was out of the question for the sake of its successful birth into the world – and Amy’s safety – he’d have to stay the hell away from both her and anything dangerous. So he was stuck here with the fairy trying to learn everything he could about magic and shamanism.

  But they had time on their side – oh, did they ever. You didn’t learn to be a shaman in three weeks. So, Pueblo had bent time, or at least, the time
that immediately surrounded their space out here in the desert.

  In their own little cocoon, he had stretched every second until fifty years had passed. Tomorrow would signal the end of his fifth decade in training.

  The rest of the world, outside their cocoon, continued on as normal.

  He hadn’t told Amy. The last thing he wanted to do was upset her, and he could full well imagine how she’d take the news of him having lived five whole decades without her. Would she think his love for her will have diminished? It hadn’t. For him, absence made the heart grow fonder, but more than that, bending time was his gift. He could move in and out of it at will, so fifty years was nothing in the greater scheme of things, and he had often hopped through the greater scheme of something or another at various periods of time. Fifty years, three weeks – it made no difference. He had once made a silent promise that he would give her what she needed until the end of time – it hadn’t been some empty oath.

  But he did miss her terribly. At least they had their dream meetings which the Dessec couldn’t access – those were solely down to their own blood bond, and the fact that, unlike others of his kind, he could time travel.

  “They’re not just dreams,” scolded Teigas, continuing where he’d left off. “With the dimensions merged, they’re another form of reality. Someone could easily trace the meetings that you have if they knew how.”

  “I’ll take my chances on that front,” he growled. “I can’t not see her at all.”

  Teigas mumbled his disapproval, and then studied him closely. “What else is bugging you?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You have a very emotive face.”

  He raised his eyebrows, then quickly put them down again, wondering if that was what he meant. Great. Read me like a book. Might as well spill, then… “She loves him.”

  “Aaahh … she said that?”

  “She doesn’t have to. We’re blood-bonded. She may not realise the full implications of that, but I can feel her love for him. Besides … they’re soul-bonded.”