by Steve McHugh
“Not a who, it’s a where.”
“Then let’s go see whoever controls them.” A determined expressed settled on her face.
“Not until I know what’s going on. The king and I have…history.”
“They have a king? Does the constitution of this country mean anything to anyone who isn’t human?”
“Of course it does; Avalon let you write it in the first place. If they didn’t want it, you’d be ruled by the British or French, or hell, maybe even the Canadians. This country was easier to break up, easier to manage, when it got its own identity.”
“So, the War of Independence was a lie?”
I shook my head. “For the most part, Avalon lets human governments do as they please. They have their people in high-ranking positions, but unless it adversely affects their plans, Avalon leaves them alone. When the humans started to rebel against the British, Merlin and the rest of the council—which includes people like Hades, Ares, and various high-ranking members of different species—saw it as an opportunity to have America be its own place, but they also saw it as an opportunity to break up America into manageable chunks. Each piece governed by different groups. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way and very little of the country is actually under the control of only one person or group. Most are controlled by a hodgepodge of different people or different species. It’s why they created neutral states.”
Caitlin raised an eyebrow in question and I quickly explained the concept of the neutral states.
“Are Europe and Africa and the like all the same?”
I nodded. “Very few countries or territories on Earth are ruled by only one party. Even England, which comes under Avalon, has parts that are controlled by someone else. In a weird sort of way, it keeps the peace. No one person or group has enough power to control large amounts of land, not without a fight anyway. And most form alliances with whoever else is in their territory, so fighting is the last thing on their mind. And those who do fight, spend so much effort on it, they never seem to have time to actually consolidate their power.”
“So, Shadow Falls controls Maine?”
I nodded. “They’re independent from any of Avalon’s influence. Which, I can tell you, is pretty damn rare. But Merlin agreed to let them live separately in exchange for them forgoing all rights to have a say in how Avalon is governed. It works out quite well for the most part, although it resulted in a lot of very stupid stipulations about anyone from outside of Shadow Falls not being allowed to step foot in the state.”
Caitlin was silent for a moment, probably absorbing the information she’d been given. “Merlin is in charge of Avalon, yeah?”
“He’s meant to be, although there are far too many people in there who use it as an excuse to do as they wish. A lot of the more powerful members or groups, like Hades or the werewolves, have their own security and deal with internal problems in-house. But no one dares try to overthrow Avalon. There would be anarchy, for a start. And that’s if Merlin and his cronies didn’t incinerate anyone who tried.”
“Merlin’s that powerful?”
“Merlin is easily in the top ten most powerful things on the planet. And while he’s nowhere near as interested in the day-to-day running of Avalon as he should be, he’s not someone you cross lightly.”
“And you used to work for Avalon?”
“I worked for Merlin.”
Caitlin exhaled in surprise. “Are you meant to be telling me about this?”
There was no indication of shock at hearing the name; clearly she knew of Merlin’s existence. But that didn’t really tell me much. “Discovering the existence of Merlin, Avalon, and those who worked for and against them isn’t illegal or met with fire and brimstone. Many people know about them, but taking that knowledge to prove to the world that they existed, that is illegal. Basically, it’s not illegal to find out, but it’s illegal to publicly tell people about it. Besides, you’re not human, so I think you’ve earned the right to know. I’m curious, though, why haven’t you ever worked for Avalon, or even know a lot more about them then you do?”
“I had to deal with members of Avalon when I worked for the FBI. They’ve not exactly forthcoming with details about that whole side to the world. I think I had contact with them twice.”
“Didn’t you tell them you were an alchemist?”
“They never asked and I didn’t like people finding out. My mom told me about it when I was little—she told me never to tell anyone. I guess some things she taught me stuck.”
“So, no one knows what you can do?”
Caitlin shook her head. “I thought I was alone in the world until I was sixteen and I met a sorcerer. He was a cocky little shit, but I was entranced by him. Young, stupid love, I guess.”
The fact that Caitlin had never integrated herself with a whole world of people was kind of sad. I couldn’t have imagined growing up with no one to share my magic. It would have been awful. “So, who taught you how to use your alchemy? Your mum?”
“My mom didn’t teach me anything except how to distance myself from people. My parents are human, so I mostly taught myself.”
She clearly knew what I was thinking about her parentage, because she already had an answer.
“Which, yes, means that one of my parents isn’t my birth parent. My dad met my mom when she was already pregnant. I don’t know the ins and outs, but he’s my father as far as I’m concerned.” She was very matter-of-fact about it, something she’d come to terms with a long time ago.
“Fair enough. So how did you learn about alchemy?”
“I met another alchemist, Melissa, when I was in college, and she taught me a lot. We were in the same dorm and would sneak out at night so she could show me how to control my abilities. Melissa told me about my longer life, about living for millennia, about my healing and how I could use my alchemy to affect the world around me. Probably the most fun I ever had. What was Merlin like?”
I tried to think of an answer that didn’t make me angry. “That depends on the year. When I first met him, he was kind, patient, attentive. He would sit and let me ask him a million questions and he’d always answer them honestly. Over time, he became more detached, distant from everyone. But then you’d talk to him for a while and that old Merlin would come through. After a while that spark became dimmer and dimmer until it just vanished. Even then it took a long time for me to figure out something had changed. By that point I only saw or talked to Merlin when he needed something. The rest of the time, he left me to my own devices.”
“So, what did you used to do?”
“All sorts of things: negotiations, peace talks, spying, anything needed.” Assassinations, murder, theft, regicide, blackmail, those were the things Caitlin didn’t need to be told.
We didn’t speak after that for over fifteen minutes until she decided to break the silence. “I know you’re a killer. The weapons in your car tell me that. But I want to know, is everyone from Avalon like that, do they value life as such an easy thing to remove?”
“No,” I said honestly. “Like humans, some have trouble taking a life and some don’t. I fall into the latter. I’m not psychotic or evil or anything so damn melodramatic, I just don’t have the luxury of second-guessing myself. If someone is coming to attack me or the people I care about, it’s them or me. Simple. If they want to push something to that degree and they threaten a life, then theirs is now forfeit. That’s not to say there aren’t people I’ve killed who stay with me, ones I regret ever having to take or being put into a situation where it’s them or me.”
“You sound like its normal for you.”
“It is,” I said. “I was born over sixteen-hundred years ago. I killed my first man before I was a teenager. That wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for the time period. If taking a life means people I care about are safe, then I don’t think twice about it.”
Another long silence. Apparently, Caitlin had a lot of information to think about. She fished a piece of paper out of her pocket and passed it to me. “This is why I was in New York. It was left for me at the reception desk. It’s why I got changed and decided to go incognito.”
I opened the folded paper and read the sentence on it: Make them fear you, and once they’re dead, you will live free.
“What does it mean?” I asked, handing the paper back.
“The psychopaths who are murdering people, the ones I’m here for, they left that message for me in New York. They’ve left similar ones at the previous four crimes scenes around the country. It’s why we know they’re connected.”
“Why no task force?”
“I’m not exactly the Bureau’s favorite agent; apparently I get involved too much. I think my boss was pretty happy with assigning me the case. I have issues with playing with others.”
“No shit, really?” I said with mock surprise. “Sounds like you’re close to the investigation. You sure you’re okay with being involved?”
She nodded, but brought her knees up to her chest and hugged them against her. She was scared, although I doubted she’d admit it. “I don’t have the luxury of stopping now. They need to be caught, and I’m the only one who can. I need to stop them.” She stood up, knocking dirt onto the fire, which flickered a few times before extinguishing. “Fuck.”
I was about to restart it when I saw movement outside of the cave.
I closed my eyes and used my fire magic to change my vision, but instead of night vision, my eyes now operated as if could track a thermal image. Everything above absolute zero gives off infrared radiation, so the landscape before me was now a mass of dark blue with small dots of red, orange, and yellow where heat could be found.
There was some small movement to my right, which I quickly identified as a rabbit or other small mammal—it was difficult to say exactly what anything was when all you can see is their heat signature.
After a few seconds, I spotted what had caught my attention. A massive deer was eating something from the ground. I was about to remove my magic, when I noticed movement to the far left of the deer. Five very large objects were moving slowly through the trees toward the deer.
“What do you see?” Caitlin whispered.
“Your lions,” I said. “They’re hunting a deer. But something doesn’t seem right.”
“What?”
I didn’t answer, as the mass of color from the creatures heat was immediately replaced with my night vision. The lions were maybe a hundred feet away from us and I could see them clearly, three females and two males.
“They’re too big,” I whispered.
The lions went from crouched to sprinting forward in an instant. The deer never knew what was happening until one of the females landed on its back and drove it to the ground, grabbing it around the throat and holding on as the deer struggled against the overwhelming power of its attacker.
As the deer died, three more lions appeared from the darkness; apparently my thermal vision had a distance limit. Six of the eight lions moved away from the carcass and watched as a male and female, clearly the pride alphas, padded toward it and tore open its stomach, spilling the contents onto the leafy earth.
The sounds of their eating filled the night, and once the two alphas had finished the rest of the pride was allowed to have their fill.
“What do you mean, they’re too big?” Caitlin asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Barbary lions,” I told her. “They’re extinct in the wild, and you have eight of them running around a forest in Maine.”
“How is that possible?”
“It isn’t.” And it didn’t leave a whole lot of good answers either.
“So, what are they?”
“Very bad news.”
I was about to say more when Caitlin’s phone started to ring, and even though she managed to switch it off before it played music for long, a few notes managed to escape.
One of the lions, a big male, turned toward our cave and took a few steps forward. He was quickly followed by a few more lions, all of whom had dark red maws where they’d been feeding. “We need to get out of here, now.”
“No lion is going to get through solid rock,” Caitlin said. “I think we’re safe.”
The alpha male lion was slowly moving toward us, the alpha female at his side, and for the briefest of moments, I saw her smile.
“They’re not lions, and they’ll tear through that rock wall like it was made of paper.”
“Okay, so what do we do?”
“Create a thicker wall,” I said. “It’ll give us time to go farther into the cave and find another way out.”
“Can’t you fight these things?”
“It’s dark, raining, and there are eight of them. I’d probably take out three or maybe four, but then I’m just as dead as anything else. And I definitely couldn’t give you odds for your survival. Now make the damn wall.”
Caitlin placed her hand against the cave and once again the rock groaned. The lions must have sensed that something was wrong, because they set off in a flat sprint the second the noise went out into the night.
They hit the outer wall in seconds, just as Caitlin had finished creating a second wall by turning the rock into a layer of interlocking rock spikes that would certainly give our would-be attackers something to think about.
The lions thundered into the front of the cave like a freight train, knocking pieces of rock loose with an explosion of deafening sound that bounced around the interior.
I grabbed Caitlin’s hand and led her to the rear of the cave. “There’s a drop here, can you make stairs?”
“No, I can’t see a damn thing. If I start moving rock around blind, I could cause a cave in.”
“Okay, then you hold onto me and we’ll drop down.”
Caitlin stared down into the dark abyss beyond. “That isn’t any less insane.”
“There are a lot of jagged rocks, but I should be able to avoid them.” The sound of crumbling rocks and the low growl of lions told me we didn’t have long and I grabbed Caitlin around the waist and jumped.
CHAPTER 12
You know when people say that the landing is always worse than the fall? Well those people are idiots, because the fall is just as awful.
I couldn’t avoid all of the stalactites or stalagmites, whichever one it was that I crashed into and sliced a huge gash in my arm, but I managed to use my air magic to avoid or destroy most of them as Caitlin screamed bloody murder into my ear hole for the entire fifty-foot fall. It only took a few seconds until we hit the hard rock bottom, but it felt like a hell of a lot longer.
We both rolled along the cold, wet cave floor as the roar of angry lions filled every inch of space around us. “Run, little rabbits,” a man’s voice called out. “I’ll see you soon enough.”
“I’m blind down here,” Caitlin said.
I created a small ball of fire in my hand and tossed it into the air, using more magic to keep it floating a few feet above Caitlin’s head. It wasn’t a huge amount of light, and I still used my night vision, but it gave off enough light that Caitlin could see a few feet in front of her. Unfortunately, it also allowed the lions high above us to see more easily too.
“We should get moving. That fall won’t stop them for long.”
Caitlin nodded and we followed the only direction that wasn’t solid rock. The ground was wet and slimy and occasionally I saw bats flying, high up in the cave ceiling above us.
“We’re walking on bat shit, aren’t we?” Caitlin said as the sounds of the lions faded behind us.
“Yep, bat shit and bug guts. They’re not exactly the cleanest animals on earth.”
“Nor do they smell very good.”
She was right, the stench of bat permeated the very essence o
f everything around us, but occasionally there was another smell fighting for space. A rank odor that I couldn’t quite place, but one that sent a chill up my spine.
The cave walls shrunk for several yards, causing us to walk hunched over and in single file for a hundred feet or so, until it began to open out again.
We stopped walking and took our bearings in a huge open area with several man-sized pathways that had been carved into it through quite probably millions of years. I jumped over a small stream that moved down the center of the room and investigated a few of the pathways, but quickly found that they became too short or narrow to navigate without chopping off my head or arms, neither of which was a very good solution.
Caitlin offered to move the rock around to create an exit, but it’s easier to use one that already exists than make one that would have taken us who-knew-where. An alchemist can move around and shape nonorganic matter with ease, but the matter they move has to come from somewhere, so moving a large rock around was easy, but moving the walls of the cave, would leave a huge hole in the cave.
The more advanced alchemists can shape several types of matter into one form, or collapse an item into its base components, but I doubted that Caitlin was anywhere near old enough to manage either of those.
“We’re stuck,” Caitlin said as she exited from one of the holes. “All I’ve found were bugs. Oh, and a gigantic fucking spider that I’m hoping wasn’t the last of it’s species as its now a large stain, after I dropped part of the cave on it.”
“Did you feel better after doing it?”
“I did after moving the rock around a bit to make sure it was good and paste-like.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “After you’re done ridding the world of arachnids, you want to help me consider which of these tunnels to go down. There’s no way of knowing where they actually go. We may get really lost.”
“Well there are three left, which one should we choose? And if any of them have that damn spider out of Lord of the Rings down there, I’m going to be really pissed off.”
“No promises,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s likely.”
