Bewitched, Blooded and Bewildered

by Robyn Bachar

  The moment we walked into Patience’s office, she handed Lex a piece of paper. He frowned down at it and read it slowly, as though triple-checking every word. Maybe he was. This wasn’t a contract we wanted to screw up. While I waited for my turn to read it, I looked Patience over. Today she looked more like an action heroine and less like a businesswoman. Gone was the business suit, in favor of black leather pants, combat boots and a utility vest. What was it with evil chicks and leather pants? Maybe leather pants are the secret source of their power… She wasn’t wearing a shirt under the vest, which was tight fitting and left little to the imagination. She looked like a cross between a biker, black ops and a stripper. I was having a hard time taking her seriously.

  Tattoos lined the woman’s arms like ink sleeves. They weren’t artwork—no hearts with “MOM” inside for Patience Roberts—but instead they were a jumble of magical runes and arcane symbols. I didn’t recognize them, so I assumed it was some kind of summoner thing. Wards maybe? It’d be helpful to have protection in your very skin when dealing with demons.

  Lex handed me the paper, and I carefully read the agreement. It seemed simple enough, but was it deceptively so? Patience spelled out the terms of her assistance, what she was and was not willing to do in the shadow realm to guide and protect us. After my third read through I decided it was good enough, and I nodded.

  “Sign at the bottom, please. True Names. Your married name will be sufficient,” she informed me.

  Good, I’d wondered about that. I mean, I’d had to change my mundane IDs after we were married (we’d had two ceremonies—one in Faerie, one in the human world), so it only made sense that my cosmic ID had changed as well. Especially being married to my soul mate and all.

  For a moment I wondered if we’d need to sign in blood, but apparently regular old blue ballpoint pen was sufficient. We both signed on the dotted lines, and then Patience signed her name as well. She slipped the piece of paper into a filing cabinet and then withdrew two yellowed pieces of paper from it. Patience slammed the drawer shut and locked it and then handed each of us a page.

  “You first, Duquesne. Roll up your sleeve. And don’t tell me you can’t read it, because I know you can,” she said.

  Lex shed his long black coat and set it down with a thunk in one of the chairs. Patience wrapped her hand around his right biceps and waited. Lex sighed, but he began reading as ordered. Latin. It seemed kind of cheesy, like a bad horror movie, but then the scents of burning flesh tinged with sulfur seared my nose as he read the last word. Lex didn’t flinch, but when Patience pulled her hand away a red diamond was tattooed into Lex’s skin, as if someone had stuck a playing card to his arm and a bit of it had rubbed off.

  “Next,” she said. Like a nurse who tired of giving flu shots, she shoved my sleeve out of the way and grabbed hold of me.

  “I don’t remember signing up for being mutilated.”

  “You agreed to a favor. This is your marker. It will disappear when the favor is completed. Now read.” She stared at me—at least I assumed she did, from behind her mirrored glasses. We were pretty evenly matched heightwise. Being on the tallish side, I don’t get to look many women in the eyes, or lenses. But she was a skinny, anemic thing, maybe a buck ten soaking wet. I bet I could take her.

  I started to say, “I don’t read Latin,” but when I looked down at the page the words were in English. Frowning, I wondered if this was some sort of trick.

  “You do know how to read, don’t you, Titania?” the summoner asked scathingly. I shot her an unfriendly look, and began reading the words of the spell. A prickly burn irritated my skin where she touched it, and when I finished the spell, the pain flared into an all-out inferno.

  “Damn it! That fucking hurts!”

  “You’ll get over it,” she replied.

  I looked down at my arm and spotted a diamond identical to Lex’s. Great. A tattoo. I was too old for ink, and if by some bizarre circumstance I decided I wanted some, this would not be in my top ten options. Not even in my top fifty options. But I guess it was a small price to pay to be vampire-free.

  “Are those favors on your arms?” I asked.

  “Some of them.” Patience walked away, back behind her desk, donned a black-leather duster and slung a messenger bag over her shoulder. “Try to keep up.”

  “Where are we going?” Lex asked.

  “Millennium Park. You can follow my car. Well, you can try to follow my car in that piece of shit SUV of yours. If you lose me, we’ll meet up at the gate,” she replied.

  “Which gate?” I asked.

  “Lord and Lady, you really don’t know anything, do you? The Cloud Gate.” I blinked at her dumbly, and she shook her head. “The bean. You’ve seen the bean, right?”

  “Yeah, that big mirrored thingy? Oh. Oh…” I said as realization dawned on me like sunrise over the lake. The bean was a giant piece of modern art in Millennium Park that looked like a big, mirrored kidney bean. It had never occurred to me that it could have more than mundane tourist-attracting powers, but it was a giant mirror. It could be used as a gateway to all kinds of places, including Faerie. Huh.

  After she locked up behind us, we followed Patience out of her office and into the parking lot. The lot was pretty full, thanks to the plethora of trendy bars and restaurants in the area, and she made a beeline for a red sports car. Lex let out a low whistle, so I assumed he recognized whatever it was. I don’t know much of anything about cars, but it looked fast and expensive. Dealing with demons must pay well. We tried to follow behind her as we made our way downtown, but she wove in and out of traffic like she was auditioning for the latest Fast and Furious, and I knew Lex wouldn’t drive that fast with me in the car. Mostly because I would scream like a scared little girl the entire time.

  As we approached the city, the twenty-four-hour Harrison radio station got louder in my head, because he was home in his tower. At first I was worried that he would wonder what I was up to, but then I realized that he was busy entertaining a woman for dinner. She was the dinner. He caught my irritation long enough to comment that he’d rather be eating me, and I told him to die in a fire. Zach went back to playing with his food, and I ignored him.

  We made it downtown and parked in a parking garage that cost a truly obscene amount of money, and walked the rest of the way to Millennium Park. Plenty of people were milling about, and I wondered if there was a concert going on. The crowd helped us blend in, and the long cashmere coat I wore concealed the sword and dagger strapped to my side. Patience was waiting in front of the bean, her hands on her hips. For someone named Patience, she didn’t seem to have much of it. We drew to a halt in front of her, and she reached into her messenger bag and withdrew three rusty, old-fashioned keys tied to long, black ribbons. She slung one around her neck before handing the other two to us.

  “Do not take those off until we’re back here. I mean that. I’m not obligated to go after you if you end up somewhere else in the shadow realm,” she said.

  “Right.” I slipped the key on and hid it beneath my blouse, and it tingled against my skin. “Now what?”

  “Follow me.”

  Patience turned on her heel and marched toward the bean. It was dark, but the park was still open for a bit, and a few people were hanging around. Our guide ignored them, and I hurried to keep up. She walked straight into the mirrored bottom of the bean, and instead of smacking into it, the surface enveloped her. Not unlike my dressing mirror at home when it was tuned into Faerie, but on a more epic scale. Lex and I followed a few moments later, and our surroundings went from twilight to near-total darkness. The ground turned soft and squishy beneath my boots, and the temperature plummeted. One moment it was a chilly October night, and the next we walked right into early December frost. I shivered and then jumped as I spotted a tall, skinny figure standing beside Patience.

  “Whoa. What the hell?” I said.

  The summoner tilted her head and stepped close to me. She pulled off her sunglasses, and I fina
lly got a look at her eyes. They were yellow—not hazel, not gold, not a funky green, but bright, school-bus yellow, and they glowed in the dark like a cat’s eyes. No wonder she always wore sunglasses. There was no way those eyes could pass for human. Patience must be involved in some seriously scary shit to have earned eyes like that.

  “Damn it,” she snapped. “Why didn’t you tell me you’re pregnant?”

  “What?” I said, blinking.

  “This is need-to-know information. I wouldn’t have brought you.”

  “I’m not pregnant.” I think I’d know if I was pregnant. I mean, yeah, I’d just gotten back on the pill a few months ago, but we were being careful. Mostly…dammit, this is what I got for sleeping through first-period health class.

  “Yes, you are. Either that, or you’ve got an alien growing in your gut. Double auras don’t lie, sweetie,” Patience informed me matter-of-factly.

  I looked down, expecting to see my midsection glowing, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Pregnant…I couldn’t really be pregnant, could I? Sure, we wanted kids, but we weren’t even remotely prepared for kids now. The thought of that poor librarian mother dying to defend her baby from the hunters swam in front of my eyes, and I wobbled on weak knees. Lex caught my arm to steady me, and I clung to him like a life preserver. His warmth was comforting, and the butterflies in my stomach eased from frenzied to leisurely fluttering.

  “We should go back,” Lex said.

  Patience swore and shook her head. “No. This is your shot. You might not get a second one. And do you want to stay stuck to Harrison if you’re preggers? Talk about hazardous to your health.”

  “She has a point,” I said to Lex. We couldn’t afford to wait. He sighed, but nodded reluctantly.

  “Okay. We’re pressing on. Harvey, you’re in charge of keeping an eye on her,” she ordered.

  “Harvey?” I asked. I peered at the figure at her side. It—he?—was taller than Patience, but just as thin, with spindly, pointed ears that stuck up from his head like dried antennae. I spotted buckteeth and whiskers, and after a moment of staring at him in the dim light, I realized he was skinless. The contents of my stomach bolted up, near the back of my throat, and I swallowed hard. “What are you?”

  “He’s a pooka,” Patience said. She turned and began walking, and we hurried to keep up. The soggy ground sucked at my boots, and I struggled to walk. Either that or my legs were working against me, still numbed by the possibility of pregnancy. How could she know that? What if she was wrong? Then again, it wasn’t the sort of thing I could see her joking about. Patience didn’t seem the type to yell “Psych! Made you look!” and then laugh like a jackass.

  “I thought pookas were elves,” Lex said.

  I wondered how he knew that. The elves became extinct before the faeries split from our world and created their own. It was the motivating factor for the faeries to leave, because they knew they’d be next. I didn’t know anything about elves other than there used to be some.

  “They were,” she replied and left it at that. Patience didn’t appear to be affected by the cold or the soggy ground. She trudged onward, carrying only her messenger bag, which didn’t seem like it could hold much in the way of weapons. Maybe a notebook or a laptop.

  “How come you didn’t bring any weapons?” I asked her.

  Patience snorted. “Because, here, I am a weapon.”

  Oh, that was encouraging. Skinny bitch with the creepy eyes was a weapon. At least she was contractually required to be on our side.

  We trudged on, coming to the shore of a lake. The water lapping against the reedy bank was the only sound aside from our slurping footsteps. It was eerily quiet—if a tree fell in the shadow realm and no demons were around to hear it, would it make a sound? The sky above us was a dark, blank canvas. No moon, no starlight, no clouds, but somehow it wasn’t completely black. I wondered where the little bit of light was coming from—I worried that it was coming from us. It seemed like the only explanation.

  “Is that Lake Michigan?” I asked.

  “Not here, it isn’t,” she replied.

  “You’re not real chatty, are you?”

  “Chitchat was not part of the agreement.”

  Right. I guess we forgot to add that part. I’d remember it for our next field trip to hell.

  We continued on in silence until Patience and Harvey stopped in front of us, and I nearly crashed into the skinless demon. Patience shushed us—not like we were making noise anyway—and we all froze. Rustling sounded from the reeds. My first thoughts, because we were in a swampy environment and I’d been to the Brookfield Zoo many times, were alligator or giant snake. But we were in the shadow realm, so of course a dozen demons popped out of the reeds like angry pygmies in a black-and-white movie. The shadowy figures were short and squat, maybe three- or four-feet tall, with sharp teeth and long claws.

  I drew my rapier and Lex conjured his guardian spear, one of the few benefits he’d been allowed to keep. The weapon shone like a beacon in the darkness, and that gave the demons a moment of pause, which was compounded when Patience’s hands burst into flames like a comic-book heroine. She looked ready to go all X-Men on their asses, but they were all staring fixedly at me. Not good.

  “Do they die here?” I asked. It was a valid question. In our world, all you could do was banish a demon back to where it came from.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Good.”

  The demons rushed us, and I lunged forward and stabbed the closest one in the chest. For an elated moment I watched it crumple and I thought, Wow, my combat skills really have improved. That was quickly followed by horror as I withdrew the blade and the rest of them closed in. Lex swept them back with a swing of his weapon. The silver glowed, almost blinding in the surrounding dark. A circle of fire leapt to life around us, trapping some demons inside and keeping others out. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Patience punching, kicking, and generally looking like a ninja with flaming hands. Harvey, the former pooka, picked up a pygmy and tossed it into the lake like an evil, wriggling football.

  There was a demon to my right, snapping sharp, black teeth at me. I thrust at it and missed. It snapped at my arm and would have sunk its teeth into my sleeve, but Lex’s spear slugged it aside and sent it sprawling into the circle of fire. It shrieked, the first really loud sound I’d heard since we arrived, and I flinched. I hoped the noise didn’t attract more of them. The light was probably doing plenty of that.

  We made quick work of the demons, with only Lex receiving a minor scrape to his long coat. The thing was practically armor, after all. When the last demon fell, the flames subsided, and I turned to Patience.

  “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “We run.”

  Chapter Nine

  I was almost thankful to Lex for making me quit smoking and putting me on an exercise regimen. Almost. It did allow me to double time my fat ass across the shadowy marsh before more demons showed up. I’d never be able to keep pace with Patience, who moved like a frickin’ gazelle, but it kept me from falling far behind. Lex jogged beside me, and I appreciated it. I didn’t want to be alone.

  A shape loomed on the horizon, and as we drew closer I was able to make out a building of some sort. A really big building, possibly a castle. I spotted what looked like towers, turrets, and walls. I knew there were technical, architectural terms for the features, but I couldn’t remember them as my legs and lungs burned from the effort. Finally Patience stopped, and I flopped down atop a damp clump of grass.

  “There are a lot of new wards around this place,” Patience commented, immune to or ignoring my condition.

  “Can we get around them?” I wheezed.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem,” she replied. “Never had trouble with the old ones.”

  “Are there guards?” Lex asked.

  “Yes. The lord of the manor doesn’t like to share.”

  “Have you met him before?” I asked.

  “A few t
imes. Kris and I don’t get along.” Patience shrugged, her yellow eyes still glowing.

  I shivered, and Lex pulled me to my feet and wrapped his arms around me. Closing my eyes, I leaned into his warmth. Maybe it was the soul mates thing, but a hug from Lex seemed to have curative powers, and I felt better.

  “I’d tell you to wait here, Titania, but you wouldn’t be any safer,” Patience commented.

  “That’s not encouraging,” I muttered against Lex’s chest.

  “Let’s go. And, Duquesne, now that we’re here, try not to whip out your glow stick until it’s absolutely necessary. I’m sure you have less blinding weapons hidden in that coat. We’re going for stealth for as long as we can, and your spear will send up an alarm.”

  “Understood. I want you to stay behind me, sugar, and keep your shields up,” he instructed me.

  Usually I’d argue that I could take care of myself, but if Patience was right and I was with child, then yeah, I’d swallow my pride and sit this fight out as much as I could. I’d gotten stabbed a few times during my first, big demon fight, though it’d been my father who’d done the stabbing and not the demons. And I’d gotten knocked out cold during my second, big demon fight, so my track record was not so good.

  I nodded and then pulled away from him and turned to our guide and her assistant. “How can we be stealthy? We’re glow in the dark.”

  “I’ve got a spell to cover that. It’ll make it harder for you two to see, so just move slow and careful. I’ll slow down for you.” Patience pulled something out of her bag. I couldn’t see what it was, but I assumed it was a spell component of some sort, because she launched into chanting—more Latin?—and raised her hands. Even more darkness showered from her fingertips like a burst of black rain, covering us with stinging, cold droplets. It stole the soft light surrounding us, and I clutched Lex’s hand in the near black.

  We started out again, doing our best ninja impressions, and it was like stumbling around the house with all the lights turned off. As we neared the wall of the compound we stopped, and Patience held up one hand and crouched low. It was brighter here, as though the castle was lit with the soft glow of city lights. A group of four squat demons came around the corner, weapons and armor clinking in the quiet as they walked toward us. Apparently demons weren’t fans of modern firearms either, because they looked prepared to defend against a Viking raid. Afraid to move, I held my breath until it burned in my lungs. The group passed near our hiding spot, and for a second one of them paused and sniffed in our direction. The moment passed, and they continued on.