“Yeah, I get that, it just seems … I kind of know you, you know?”
“And?”
“And I don’t like having people I know do things for me.”
“That’s … well, I never got around to taking a psychology course, but I’m pretty sure there’s a name for that. Probably a big, long, Latin-ey sounding name.”
“It just seems … subservient.”
She raised her eyebrow and twisted her lip into something that I couldn’t distinguish between a frown and a grin. “You think I’m subservient?”
“What? No, I–”
“You think just because I’m not some high-powered attorney I’m not making a real contribution to society?”
“I didn’t–”
“Maybe I should just dress up in a Slave Leia costume and chain myself to the first guy who offers me a job?”
“Where did this conversation go wrong?”
“Because I chose to work here. I chose to set aside my plans in order to help my grandmother, who doesn’t have another soul in the world to depend on. And if that makes me subservient–”
“It doesn’t. It totally doesn’t. Farthest thing from my mind.”
“Good. So what would you like for breakfast?”
“Um, eggs? And bacon? Maybe on an English muffin? With some cheese?”
“A fine choice. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“Kinda,” I muttered.
Miranda winked at me, turned on her heel, and disappeared into the kitchen. I glimpsed Ethel through the door, wearing an apron covered in cartoon pigs, cooking up a storm and singing to herself.
Remember how a little while ago I imprisoned a demon with some salt and banished it from our plane through sheer willpower? I like to remind myself of stuff like that from time to time, just to keep things like this from ruining my self-esteem.
Anyway, research. I found Warren’s house on Google Street View. It was an old Victorian that had probably been in the family for generations. I didn’t need to do a stakeout–thankfully, since a stakeout is even less exciting that hitting up the internet to answer all of your mystery’s questions–but I knew I might end up there anyway and I wanted to have a feel for the neighborhood. Warren lived about halfway between the campus and the B&B, in a slightly more urban, slightly less wooded part of Washington.
Having located my prey, I cracked open my first book on Norse mythology. I wasn’t looking for anything specific, just general information on the Germanic Pantheon, the main players and their attested personalities, rituals, spells, and powers.
The thing that I noticed, almost immediately, was that the Norse gods were kind of schizophrenic. Wotan was the god of knowledge and the Hunt, a scholar and a killer, a sage and a monster. He was just as likely to bless you with visions as skin you with a blood-crusted, iron knife. That kind of duality isn’t uncommon, really. When people invent gods they imprint a little of their own personality into them. No one is always long in thought and slow of temper, just like no one is always on the warpath, driven by an unquenchable thirst for blood. The gods are just us writ large, and they reflect our best and our worst.
Hell, the Jehovah of the Old Testament and the Abba of the New are entirely different characters, and the savior who told his disciples to turn the other cheek doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the rider on the white horse who slays anyone refusing to bend their knee.
Trust me. I’ve met them.
This duality of the gods was a pain in the ass to anyone who wanted to summon one. You might think you’re getting a god who gives out gold coins and bacon but end up meeting a god who skins men alive because they wash with their right hand instead of their left. I was working under the assumption that Warren and his cult really were trying to summon the “pluck out your own eye to gain knowledge” Wotan and not the “carry a spear the size of a tree and blanket my bed with the skins of virgins” Wotan. Warren’s response, though, the glee with which he greeted the news that the Wild Hunt would ride again, limited the amount of slack I was willing to grant him and his.
“Caden?” Miranda asked. She dropped the bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich next to me, and the plate rattled around on the table.
“Thanks Miranda, this looks–”
“There’s a prostitute here to see you,” she said, then walked away. Her voice could have corroded steel.
“What are you … oh hell,” I said. Ashlyn West was standing in the doorway, occupying a patch of light like a cat sunning herself. She was dressed, for certain values of the word, in knee-high leather boots, a scarf that I was pretty sure she had mistakenly tried to turn into a dress, and a shirt that made tissue paper seem substantial. She must have been freezing on the way over, a fact attested to in part by what was going on beneath her flimsy top. Her raven hair hung down in front of her shoulders, and her lips were stained some shade of reddish purple. She glided toward me, her hips swaying with every step.
Jesus Goddamned Christ. I couldn’t help but stare at her, and I wasn’t alone. Every single eye in the room focused on her. Every man looked like he was ten seconds away from a heart attack and every woman looked like she was a hair’s breadth from pulling a knife.
Ashlyn was beautiful, there was no doubt about it, but I hadn’t realized that she was so intensely sexual. She looked like she wanted to devour someone alive–and make him enjoy every second of it. She nibbled on her bottom lip and fluttered her eyelashes, then sat down in front of me, making a big show of crossing her legs.
No, she didn’t want to devour someone, she wanted to devour me.
“Hello Caden,” she murmured, a less-than-innocent grin playing over her lips.
I coughed. “Ashlyn.” The temperature had gone up ten degrees. I was surprised the windows hadn’t fogged over. Every man there had turned around completely to stare at Ashlyn, ignoring whoever else they were with, wife, coworker, or friend.
Ashlyn laid a hand on my arm and electricity shot from my toes to my scalp. “Warren asked me to stop by,” she said. “He thinks you two got off on the wrong foot, and he wanted me to see if I could,” she shimmied her shoulders, “massage your fears away.”
“That … that seems reasonable.” Like I said, I didn’t think Warren was the bad guy. The demon that was using him to claw its way back into our reality was the enemy. I was sure Warren and I could come to some kind of agreement.
“In fact,” Ashlyn purred, “we were wondering if you’d like to join us. The experience is,” she closed her eyes and shuddered, “incredible.”
“I think I’d like that,” I heard myself say. What could it hurt, right? Knowledge is power and all that. And if I was around when they conducted their ritual, and something went wrong …
Ashlyn slid closer. She leaned forward, which did wonders for her neckline, and whispered in my ear. “That’s good, Caden. Because Warren asked me to be your,” she pulled the lobe of my ear with her teeth, then let it go, “tutor.”
My heart pounded. Sweat beaded up on my brow. I wanted, more than anything in the world, for Ashlyn to take me under her wing. Or under anything else she wanted to lay on me. She was incredible, the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, the most desirable woman alive.
I looked at the men staring at my woman and venom rose up inside of me. How dare they look at her? How dare they sully her with their dirty eyes? I could see them undressing her with their minds, imagining all of the filthy things they wanted to do with her, to her, things that only I–
Son of a bitch.
She was mind whammying me.
I pulled away from Ashlyn and wrenched my mind out of the gutter. The problem with mental magic is that when it works, you usually don’t know that it’s working. The part of you that would figure it out is the part targeted by the magic, and unless you have a really strong sense of who you are–and a metric ass-ton of luck–you’ll never realize that you’ve been suckered.
And even that realization isn’t enough to break the spell, any
more than realizing you’re having a heart attack makes the chest pain stop. But it does give you a chance, a slim window of opportunity, to fight back.
I opened my vision to the Æther, expecting to see some tentacle-faced abomination riding around inside of Ashlyn, but all I saw was an aura, a cloud of Ætheric energy swirling around her body. The aura diffused through the room, condensing around each of the men. But it also flowed down through her hand and snaked up my arm, shimmering tendrils of manipulative light. They crawled up me like beautiful, deadly vines, wound around my head like a halo or a crown, and plunged into my skull, writhing their way into my brain.
Counter magic is hard. If you know what you’re going to face and can prepare ahead of time, if you need a spell the break a veil maybe, that’s one thing. But when your opponent can literally throw anything at you, when you have to think on your feet and craft a spell from nothing, it can be subtle and tricky.
Magic energies are kind of like waves. When two peaks slam into each other their energy gets combined, temporarily making a single wave that’s as tall as the two of them put together. But when a peak and a valley meet, their respective energies cancel each other out, temporarily making calm, smooth water. Counter magic works the same way. To counter a spell you have to understand what kind of magic it is, what kind of energy is powering it, and then throw its exact opposite at it. Like I said, tricky, subtle, and hard as hell.
But it’s doable. My magical power isn’t based on a grimoire or an ancient faith, it’s based on feeling. I internalize what a spell feels like, then I manipulate the Æther to reproduce that effect. Essentially, I’ve reversed engineered all of the spells I can cast.
That skill is key in counter magic. The spell Ashlyn was weaving, the spell that was making me putty in her hands and making sure that no man in the room was going to have sex with his wife for a month, was a perversion of love, a pure and selfish want, unthinking desire. I figured she was channeling the energy of Freyja, the Norse goddess of those emotions.
Instead of unthinking desire, I filled my mind with cold, rational calculation. Instead of selfish need, I contemplated self-sacrifice. Instead of want, I thought of restraint. I let my mind dwell, for a fraction of a second, on the things Ashlyn was trying to take away from me, and then I breathed those thoughts to life.
“No,” I whispered, closing my eyes and slamming my mind closed. A ward, a ward of temperance and freedom and discipline, rose up around my mind. The tendrils were instantly severed. They jerked away from me and thrashed in the air, and I could almost hear them shrieking.
Ashlyn glared at me like I had called her a dirty name. “Sorry sweetheart,” I said. “Nice try with the roofies, but I just wouldn’t respect myself in the morning.”
She jumped to her feet, overturning the chair behind her. “You fucking idiot,” she spat.
“Technically, I’d be a fucking idiot if I, you know, fu–”
“You’re going to regret this,” she interrupted.
I scrunched up the corner of my mouth. “Uh huh. If there’s one thing missing in my life, it’s crazy chicks with golden mind snakes and daddy issues. Have you ever–”
“I wanted to make this easy for you. I was even going to make it fun. But believe me, Caden Lyndsey, one way or another we are going to see our Lord, and if you won’t help us–”
“If you’re not with us, you’re against us?”
“If you’re not with us,” Ashlyn said, sneering at me, “you’d better pray Wotan doesn’t lower himself to notice you.”
“You don’t get it, do you Ashlyn? I’m not worried about Wotan seeing me. Wotan should be pissing himself because I noticed him.”
Ashlyn’s face went slack. She stood up straight and looked at me like an unbelievably defiant child. Which, to be fair, is kind of a common reaction. “You’re going to die,” she said, shaking her head. “Your insolence–”
“Is my most charming quality,” I said, flashing her my best smile. “All the ladies say so. You know, the ones that haven’t been driven mad by a Teutonic god-monster.”
“We’ll see, Caden, we’ll see. You will regret the day you refused Lord Wotan’s generous offer.”
She turned and walked away, every eye stuck to her like a magnet. It’s amazing how many people feel the need to offer “friendship” on behalf of their deity, and how quick they are to threaten wrath when you say no.
Awkward silence filled the room as men turned back to their meals and their wives. Utensils clinked against china, and a couple of brave souls tried to start up conversations, but the aftermath of Ashlyn’s psychic assault hung in the air as thick as her sensuality. Miranda emerged from the kitchen bearing a coffee pot, stopped in the doorway, and tried to figure out what exactly was going on.
She shook her head and came back over to my table. “Coffee?” she asked. She still had a note of agitation in her voice.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“So who’s the trollop?”
“That,” I said, sitting back and running my hand through my hair, “is Ashlyn West.”
“And she’s–”
“Matthew Warren’s lover.”
Miranda’s eyebrows shot up. “But she’s …”
“Eighteen? A student? Terrifying? Yeah.”
“So why did she come here?”
“Dr. Warren thought I may have … misunderstood some of what he was trying to explain to me. He thought I might have a clearer understanding of his faith if I saw them practicing, so he invited me to one of their rituals.”
“Wait,” Miranda said, “his faith? Like, he’s actually some kind of a, a …?”
“The word is Pagan, and yeah, he’s a dyed in the wool, tree hugging, Solstice observing Pagan.”
“That’s … distinctly weird,” Miranda said. She picked up my coffee cup and filled it mechanically. “That’s actually still a thing?”
“Yep. More common than you’d think.”
“So are you going to go?” Miranda asked.
I was, of course, but not because Ashlyn invited me. And that knowledge wouldn’t do Miranda any good, either. “No, I think I’ve got all the information I need. I prefer my creepy anachronistic religions in books, not in my face.”
“What about them?” Miranda asked, looking around the room. Every man in the place was red-faced and sweating. “Are they all right?”
“Yeah, they’ll be okay.”
“What happened to them?”
“I don’t think Ashlyn was wearing a bra.”
Miranda shook her head. “Men. Let me know if you need anything.”
“Thanks,” I said and went back to my books. Ashlyn’s spell was low-level, and the residual energy quickly cleared. Conversation resumed, for the most part, though a lot of men were getting very icy looks from very upset wives. It wasn’t the guys’ fault, and not in a lame “I had to stare at her tits, that’s the way I’m wired” way, but in a “some voodoo strumpet hexed my brain and bewitched my penis” way. But the odds of being able to explain that in a concise, convincing manner was low, so I kept my opinions to myself.
In a way, Ashlyn’s advances were almost a comfort. My visions tend to draw me toward legitimately bad people, people who want raw power and are willing to trample pretty much anyone underfoot in their quest to get it. The Norse cult seemed like children who had found a loaded gun. The fact that they were willing to wave that gun around, to threaten me and endanger the people around me with it, made me feel a lot better about the almost inevitable confrontation.
Ashlyn hadn’t come in here blasting holes in walls and shattering things with her magic, but in a way the spell she had woven was even more insidious. At least when a mage comes in loud, when they set off the fireworks and turn on the special effects, you have the option of fighting back. What they’re doing might be evil, but there’s still something honest about it. Let’s face off in the middle of the street and may the best man win.
The magic Ashlyn has used was designe
d to take your options away, to steal your will and mold your actions into the shape the conjurer desires. It wasn’t just an assault, it was a corruption, a violation of who and what you really are. I didn’t like it when someone tried to light me on fire, but I liked being manipulated even less.
A chill ran down my spine, and I cast a nervous glance around the room. I opened my vision and saw thick black fog, heavier than smoke and harder to see through. It rolled in beneath the doors and climbed up the outside of the house, seeping in through the windows.
The black fog rolled across the floor. No one else could see the spectral mist, but they could feel its effects. People started shivering, rubbing their arms, and looking around in confusion. Ice-cold fire raced up my leg when the fog touched my feet. I shot out of my chair and raised my arms, as if I could block the phantasmal attack with my hands.
Everyone in the dining room stared at me.
Then their faces clouded over.
Then they started coughing.
Then they grabbed their throats, choking, as the black mist stole the life from their bodies.
Chapter Five
The black fog rose up from the floor in writhing columns and seized the diners like a Kraken’s clawed tentacle. The mist bound their chests, wrapped around their necks, and shoved itself into their mouths. The diners gagged, grabbed their throats, and fell to their knees.
I didn’t have the time to cast a proper counter spell. It’s desperately hard to think when you can’t breathe. Your body panics, your most basic, most primal survival instincts take over, and there’s only room in your head for one single thought: air. I wouldn’t be able to calm myself to properly feel the spell if I was choking, and I wouldn’t be able to lay down counter magic if I was unconscious.
Instead of counter magic, I threw up a quick and dirty ward. I grabbed the salt shaker off the table–and the three tables closest to me–ripped the tops off, poured a small circle around myself, then knelt down and released my will into the sodium. Blue fire rippled around me, cutting off the spell in an instant.
The Wild Hunt Page 4
