by Stark, Jenn
“We…” I looked at the old man more closely, but there was nothing obvious in his demeanor to mark him as anything but a Connected of middling ability. “Ah…you’re a druid too? It’s a family thing?”
“For centuries untold.” he nodded. “But I’d be worried even if I didn’t believe in magic, I tell you plain. We’ve good reason to believe my son will start his campaign in earnest tonight, to draw out the Tuatha dé Danann by first summoning their avowed enemies, the Fomorians.”
“You mentioned them before. They don’t sound like a barrel of laughs.”
“They are not,” he agreed. “If the Fomorians walk again in the light, you can be sure the Tuath Dé will follow. Conal’s going to get a lot of people killed before all this is done, and that’s not the worst of it.”
“Conal,” I echoed, frustration lighting along my nerves. “Conal McCarthy. That name rings absolutely zero bells, and if he’s this big a problem, I should’ve heard of him before now.”
“Heads up, everyone. They’re moving.”
The words flowed across the open space of the spectral warrior tent city with a hiss and a crackle, and I scowled past the old man to the bush beside him—where I realized a small speaker had been set up. Similar speakers piped the alert up and down the narrow lane.
“Wait, who’s moving?” I asked, trying to peer through the tents.
“The Neo-Celts,” Seamus said with satisfaction. “They don’t know who they’re dealing with, though, if they think they can attack us with Justice among our ranks.”
I shoot him an exasperated look. “Are you seriously hearing yourself right now?”
“We do have movement, dollface.” Nikki pointed to a break in the tents, and sure enough, a procession of people in long green robes were holding electric torches aloft, and the sound of Celtic music was growing stronger. It was slow and melodic, almost mournful, but there was a magical quality to it that whispered through my bones.
This couldn’t be good. I eyed the approaching group more nervously. “Why does this feel like Enya’s version of the dance scene from West Side Story?”
“I don’t like it,” Nikki agreed. “There’s nowhere to move in this lane. We need to take this—”
“Hey!” A good fifty feet away from our location, a shout rose up that was loud, irritated, and decidedly drunk. “You can’t come walking through here when I’m doing a reading, man! That’s totally rude!”
“Uh-oh,” Nikki muttered.
The angry-drunk voice continued. “And who the hell do you think you are with that—yo! That’s my kettle you’re knocking over. It’s time for you to back off, bruh. Hey. Stop that. What in the actual fu—”
Without any further warning, an explosion of birds, smoke, and fire ripped upward into the sky.
Chapter Three
I burst past the line of spectral opposition warriors, or whatever the hell they were calling themselves, and, together with Nikki, ran into the melee. The central problem seemed to be with a group of men and women dressed as Roma traders who’d pulled their colorful wagon-style kiosks into a loose circle around a permanent fire pit that was clearly part of the park’s foundational décor. The traders had set up all manner of kettles and bowls around the fire, all of which were for sale at festival pricing, and the advancing Neo-Celts or whatever the hell they were calling themselves had knocked over several of their wares. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a big deal. The kettles and pots were made of metal, from what I could tell, and nothing had been broken—but the insult appeared to be all the spark needed to ignite the already smoking fuse.
To make matters worse, everyone around the commotion seemed to be paying attention to it, so I was definitely not making good time through the throng.
“Get security!” I shouted to no one in particular, least of all Nikki, who’d be far more useful to me in the middle of a fight than running through the crowd looking for guys in khakis. Still, it felt like someone needed to say it. I swept the line of assailants with my third eye, breathing a sigh of relief. The Neo-Celts were Connected, somewhat, but they weren’t amassing any electrical load worth worrying about. The men and women of the traders’ village were all shapes and sizes, but their electrical signatures had no Connected spark whatsoever. That meant this fight should be—
A fireball landed to the right of the clearing, a direct hit for one of the colorful wagons.
Not just any fireball either. The conflagration that immediately erupted in its wake parted like a doorway, and three dancing tongues of flame leapt out, each of them crackling and popping with energy. They weren’t sentient—this was all an illusion—but it was an impressive illusion. People screamed, apparently scared for the first time, and I wondered for a split second what effect their reaction would have on the firebomber. Quell him into submission or jack him up?
I didn’t have to wait long for an answer. Another bomb exploded next to me, near enough that I jumped back.
Crap! Not an illusion—this was real-ass fire!
“Who’s throwing that?” I demanded, whipping around to identify the source of the flames. To my shock, it was a girl no more than ten years old, her mouth open in a silent scream as she stood in the center of the clearing, surrounded by larger girls and boys, all of them wielding long, gnarled staffs. I couldn’t tell who were the Neo-Celts and who were the Roma in this scenario, but it didn’t matter. This little girl wasn’t intending to throw fire, she was simply scared. A very scared, very powerful little girl. I looked around self-consciously for Drew Barrymore standing in the crowd, then opened my own palms, feeling the sparking electricity that was always skittering at a low ebb inside me spring to life.
Near the young girl, an older woman was on her knees, her face a mask of terror as she implored the girl to think, to pause, to breathe. Terror, but not surprise. She’d seen this before. Seen it and understood it for what it was.
Unfortunately, the kids with the sticks weren’t reacting with terror—but with glee. “To light, to light,” they chanted in a language I could instantly translate for all that I couldn’t place its origins right away. An onboard Google Translate function was one of the perks of my job as Justice, but I didn’t have time to research conjugations. The language was old, it was powerful, and it’d been co-opted by spell-casters since the dawn of time.
The tops of the twisted saplings being held by the older kids burst into flame, and a game of fried chicken was instantly in play.
“Mommy,” the little girl wailed, and I didn’t wait. Regardless of who started this fight, none of these asshats should be playing with fire until they learned how to control it better. I thrust my hands forward, and my own wave of spectral flame shot out, toppling the kids like bowling pins. With their connection to their magic momentarily disrupted, the fire winked out—
And not a moment too soon.
“Sara!” Nikki’s shout was my only warning as I felt a dark presence rush up beside me, not a shadow so much as an absence of light. I whirled in time, but I couldn’t evade the creature, not with so many humans around. I didn’t know which side summoned it. I didn’t care. It didn’t belong here. I thrust my hands out again, and light poured from my fingers, exploding it into dust.
Then I looked up and saw the real problem.
The Roma had fled. In their wake, two lines of adversaries squared off against each other, the Neo-Celts and the spectral opposition warriors. Even as I raced forward, I flicked my third eye open, studying the lines of energy—
“Son of a bitch!” Nikki’s bawl of fury redirected my attention, and I whipped around to see her swinging an enormous spiked club at the chain-mail craftsman we’d noticed earlier near the front gates of the fair. She was grinning—but so was he. Dressed head to toe in metal, the hulking bodybuilder went after Nikki with a hatchet that looked like it could actually split skulls. Meanwhile, the spectral opposition warriors were closing in on a knot of conjuring Neo-Celts who were exhorting green mist to spurt up from a cauldron the
y’d apparently hauled along for the party. Around them fluttered a half-dozen butterflies that seemed to be…clapping?
“God save the Queen!”
I whirled to my left. In front of me an entire company of Elizabethan soldiers—and three honest-to-God horses—came barreling in from the side, one of them executing a damned near perfect jump over several kegs of beer. From the other edge of the clearing, a group of kids lofting real-enough-looking spikes and staves roared forward, some of them dressed in robes, some in armor, and some pulling longbows from their backs.
“Leeeeeerrroyyyyyy Jenkinnnnns!” another voice shouted, and I spun a third time as a group of twenty-somethings in full-on Wizards of Warcraft gear pounced on what looked like a miniature army of dwarves, only the dwarves were shooting fireballs against them, catching their opponents’ clothes ablaze. All this would have been really cool in a video game—but this wasn’t a video game. This was a knot of chaos in the middle of Las Vegas, Nevada, and somebody was bound to notice.
As if thinking of him made it so, an all too familiar voice cut across the clearing.
“Ah, shit. Sara! I knew I would find you here! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—”
I grinned even as I knocked the dwarves nearest to me senseless with a puff of blue fire, rounding up the assassins’ guild for good measure. Meanwhile, racing through the Elizabethan knights and all their stamping hooves was a man in a suit too nondescript for him to be anything other than a cop. A cop with a particular aptitude for knowing when I was going to be in trouble, anyway.
“LVMPD!” Detective Brody Rooks roared as he pounded up to me, barely able to be heard above the chaos. His gaze pinned me. “A little help here, Sara?”
I lifted my hands, then cut them wide—
And everybody froze.
Solid. Unmoving.
“Ummmm…” I looked around, startled, as I shook out my hands. Brody was caught midsnarl, while Nikki’s delighted grin stretched wide as she heaved her club over her head in preparation for the mother of all strikes against Captain Chain Mail. All the various knights errant and their infidel opponents looked like players stuck on an invisible chessboard, and last but not least, the spectral opposition warriors and the Neo-Celts remained poised in intractable opposition. Everything was frozen in place in the city, time held out of time.
Had I done this? I hadn’t done this. I couldn’t have done this.
Then, time started moving backward.
Nope, I totally wasn’t doing this.
“Miss Wilde.”
I straightened carefully, and a moment later, Armaeus Bertrand stepped up beside me. As always, my pulse jacked as I shot a sideways glance at the demigod who’d claimed me, heart and soul. Tall and sleekly muscular, his features made the most of his French-Egyptian heritage, as the son of a pile-driving crusader knight and the Egyptian priestess he’d met and fallen in love with while fighting for his king. Thick, glossy, raven-black hair winged back from his forehead, and his leonine golden-black eyes were the strongest feature in a face chiseled in bronze. Those eyes looked at me now in patent amusement.
I blew out a long breath. “Oh, good. I was hoping it was you.” My ever-evolving abilities were super impressive, but not that impressive. Which I was okay with, since what was going on in front of me was off the chain.
“You gave me no choice. You didn’t step in quickly enough,” chided Armaeus. “You won’t always have the power to interrupt a crisis, Miss Wilde. But you can still change the course of events to preserve those who should remain hidden.”
“But that’s the problem. These guys don’t realize they should be hiding,” I said. “They’re using their powers, in the open. They don’t know what they’re about to invite down upon themselves.”
“Agreed. So I think, perhaps…” the Magician’s voice softened as time slowed then finally stopped once more. “I believe this is your cue.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice.
The little girl screamed, fire erupting around her in little breathy pops, catching tents on fire. Her mother reached for her—but this time, I got to her first. I swept the little girl up into my arms and turned toward the older children advancing on her with sticks, casting out my own blue fire in a wide arc to silence the angry spattering of the weapons. And all the while, I didn’t stop talking.
“There will come a time when you will be stronger than anyone around you, little one,” I said. “There will come a time when you will go up against a force that is your equal. There will finally come a time when you will recognize that, despite all your many strengths, you are not the strongest person on the battlefield. In all those times, your response with your powers should be the same: do what is just. Choose your friend wisely and your enemy nobly. Do not make victims of those you defeat, lest you make enemies of them in the same breath.”
By now, the girl gaped at me, whether because the message was going over her head or because she couldn’t believe I spoke her language. But the result was the same. She stopped crying, and she stopped making spontaneous fireballs.
The distraction of the child gone, I shoved her back to her mother and turned to the rest of the crazy people. One by one, I blanked their memories, scrambling their minds with a current of power until they didn’t know what had brought them to this place, bearing weapons for no good reason. The cops still came, Brody still showed up, but by the time both events happened, the erstwhile fighters were all standing around staring at each other, looking somewhat bemused.
Except Nikki and her chain-mail master. Those two continued fighting.
Ignoring their clanking and swearing in the background, I tried to focus on Brody.
“—and I would like just once to enjoy a day off without having to untangle some mess you’ve found yourself in the middle of,” he finished, clearly at the tail end of an impressive rant. He looked at me pointedly, and I nodded with as much understanding as I could muster.
“I’d like that for you too,” I said, already trying to edge away. “I’d hate to get you into trouble. Maybe I should make myself scarce.” The crowd who’d assembled to watch the “mock battle” was already beginning to drift off, and Nikki and her sparring partner would eventually come to terms. Old Seamus McCarthy had disappeared back toward spectral warrior-ville, and the Neo-Celts were slinking away as well. Only the Roma, knights errant, and cosplay groupies seemed at a loss where to go, and they’d been dragged into this through no fault of their own.
Brody was watching the approaching police cars. “So—I’ll go ahead and move on, then,” I said helpfully. I needed to find Seamus McCarthy and nail him to the wall until he gave me the full scoop on the guy behind all this. The Green Knight or whatever.
The detective swung his gaze back to me, flinching when Nikki delivered one last, clanking blow to her opponent, the man going down with a grunt. He glowered at me. “You already see Sariah here?”
That stopped my retreat. I ignored the high-pitched laughter of children off to the side as I focused on Brody.
“Uh, no…” I allowed. Sariah Pelter and I went way back. Way, way back. All the way back to when I was seventeen years old and faced with a trauma so intense that my psyche sort of…split. The woman who eventually became me, Sara Wilde, ran away from the fiery explosion of the only home I’d ever known like my life depended on it. The essence of my spirit that rebelled against running away from anything, that wanted nothing more than to scream in outraged indignation and pile back into the flames, beating the crap out of whoever or whatever had done this to me—had broken free. I’d run forward and became a Tarot-reading adventurer dedicated to protecting the most vulnerable of Connecteds, while Sariah had gone straight to Hell. And she’d remained there for more than ten years, until a job had brought me face-to-face with her again.
Now she had returned to the world above, struggling to find her place. Well, maybe not struggling. Maybe I was the only one who was struggling with it.
Either way, our relationship w
as…complicated.
“Sariah’s here? As a tourist, I hope?”
Brody snorted. He and Sariah had a complicated relationship of their own. “Sariah goes nowhere as a tourist. She’s set herself up as a reader.”
Suddenly. the postcard from the boy felt like it weighed twenty pounds in my pocket. “Let me guess. Mistress Malificorem?”
He smiled grimly. “Be sure to ask for the friends-and-family discount. And get a stiff drink while you’re at it.”
Chapter Four
I collected Nikki and pulled out the postcard the kid had given me. Mistress Malificorem was due east, a path that would take us straight through Neo-Celt land. Probably a good idea for me to check that out anyway.
Beside me, Nikki was rearranging her outfit, surprisingly unharmed by her altercation with the chain-mail craftsman. When I offered her the card, she took it, making a face as she shook it. “Mega gross. It’s still wet,” she muttered.
“I think it’s got some sort of weird finish on it.” I peered over to the chain-mail guy, already struggling to his feet. “We should’ve had Brody arrest him,” I said for the third time.
Nikki snorted as she adjusted her wig. “For what? A half-assed hatchet job? That guy was a softy.”
“That guy weighed nearly two hundred and fifty pounds. I’m thinking most of it was muscle.”
“And you would be right.” Nikki sighed dreamily.
We breached the collection of green tents that marked our return to Celtlandia, everything looking remarkably normal for a group who’d just been on the warpath, and I glanced back over my shoulder, measuring the distance to the spectral warrior tent city. For supposedly avowed enemies, these two were awfully close to each other. “So what do you think about—”
“Oh, blessed be. You’re back.”
The woman who ducked out of the tent in front of us bounced up and down with excitement, her wings bobbing behind her, bringing Nikki and me to an abrupt halt.
“You must step in for a reading,” she said, clapping her hands. “You stopped the conflict, and the time is quickly coming to an end for anyone to be able to do that.”
