But I couldn’t ward the entire dining room, let alone the entire house. I was fine, but the people around me were going to die.
Miranda pushed open the kitchen door, a tray of food in her arms. Her jaw fell open when she saw what was happening, and the dishes clattered to the floor. “Caden?” she asked.
“There’s a, a gas leak or something! Stay out of the room!” The tendrils were already snaking along the floor, eager to ensnare her.
Miranda stared at me, dumbfounded. The black mist flowed toward her. “Shut the door!” I hollered. She finally slammed it closed. It wouldn’t stop the deadly fog, but it might slow it down.
The mist was coming from outside, primarily through the front door and windows. Ashlyn–or whoever was doing this–was probably out on the front lawn. I gathered my energy and screamed, thrusting my hand toward the front door. A column of brilliant light leapt from my hand, scattering the salt and breaking the ward, but also carving a path through the black fog. The mist recoiled from the light like a thing burned, pooling and stacking up in the corners of the room.
I raced through the path, threw the door open, and ran outside. Ashlyn had added a long fur coat to her ensemble and leaned against a tree across the street, but she wasn’t the one working the choking magic.
The malefactor stood on the sidewalk in front of the bed and breakfast. Her clothes were as black as her hair, and her skin as pale as snow. The expression on her face was one of manic, ferocious glee. She stood awkwardly, like a scarecrow, her knees knocked and her arms bent at odd angles by her side. Her palms faced me. Black mist streamed out from between her fingers, rolled across the grass, and seeped into the house.
“Caden,” she said. Her voice was strained, like she was lifting an incredible weight. She smiled, but her teeth were gritted together. “How’s the air?”
“Rancid,” I said. “You should cross your legs.” And then I hit her with a blast of blue-white magic.
The light slammed into the Littlest Goth, knocking her ass over teakettle and out into the street. Her concentration broken, the black fog quickly evaporated into nothingness.
“Sandra!” Ashlyn yelled. She pushed away from the tree and flung her coat aside. “You son of a bitch!” she screamed at me.
Sandra rolled onto her stomach and fought back to her feet, snarling at me. She muttered something beneath her breath, an angry, guttural chant, and black fog began to swirl around her outstretched right hand.
“I know, why don’t you keep trying the exact same trick that didn’t work last time?” I said, then threw another blast of light her way. This one was more focused, more controlled, and it slammed into Sandra’s hand, dissipating the spectral mist and cracking her metacarpal. She howled and cradled her paw beneath her opposite arm.
Ashlyn charged toward me, golden energy forming a shroud around her. The energy gathered around her hands and became flame–real visible flame, not some subtle effect in the Æther. She was actually trying to beat me to death with flaming fists.
“I deserve this,” I said under my breath. “I watch too many Kung Fu movies. This is karma biting me in the ass.”
I gathered the Æther around my right fist, bathing my hand in pulsing sapphire power.
Ashlyn ran toward me, ready to hit me with a Phoenix Rising Tiger Uppercut of Doom or whatever. She shrieked like a banshee getting fed through a wood chipper and aimed a punch right at my jaw.
I went down to one knee and drove my fist into the ground. The air around me shimmered and shook. Blue-white fire spilled out onto the ground around me, forming a circle about three feet in diameter. The fire rose up into a hollow column with me at its center.
Ashlyn screamed and tried to punch through the fire.
I pulled my fist from the ground and flung my hand toward the sky, releasing the spell. The azure energy held itself together for a fraction of a second, contracted, then exploded outward. The forces buffeted Ashlyn, tossing her away like a rag doll. Sandra was caught up by the wave, too, and thrown all the way across the street.
The energy faded as the circle expanded, fading to transparency and dissipating altogether by the time it reached the sidewalk. Ashlyn and Sandra looked up at me, pure hatred in their eyes.
“Run along,” I said, “before I get angry.”
The girls looked like they were considering another assault, but Ashlyn evidently listened to her better angels. She grabbed Sandra’s arm–which made Sandra wince–and pulled her away.
“This isn’t over,” Ashlyn shouted once they were half a block away.
I cracked the knuckles on my right hand with my thumb. “I didn’t think it was.”
***
I do realize that I had beaten up a couple of girls, and no, I’m not proud of it. But I’m not embarrassed by it, either. Sandra’s hell cloud would have killed more than a dozen people, and even Ashlyn manifested some pretty serious power in her last attempt to take me out.
I’m a big guy, and pretty strong, but here’s the thing: when people start throwing magic around, that doesn’t mean jack. A three hundred pound power lifter would get his ass kicked by a ninety-eight pound girl if that girl could stop his heart by looking at him funny.
My opinion of the Norse cult was shifting quickly. I had assumed that they were innocent–stupid, but innocent–victims in all of this, that they had accidentally stumbled onto one of the few magic books with real power and that the results of their summoning ritual were going to be a surprise. Warren, though, had displayed a zealot’s twisted passion, and his followers seemed just as willing to kill to see their ritual through.
Well, like I said. I already had trouble sleeping at night.
I took a moment to calm myself down, then headed back inside. The breakfast crowd had mostly recovered, although most of them still looked a little pale and rattled. On the bright side, everyone’s near death experience seemed to have made them forget about the trouble Ashlyn’s little show had caused.
An older gentleman was sitting on the floor, a cane lying next to him. His skin was pale and sweaty, and his wife hovered over him, flapping nervously. “Ed? Ed, honey, just breath deep, you’re going to be okay. Someone help him? Please? Can somebody help my husband?”
I knelt down next to him and took his hand, checking his pulse. It was rapid but strong, and so was his breathing. “Ed?” I asked. “Can you hear me?”
Ed eyes were wide and unfocused, but he blinked a few times and turned toward me. “Yes?”
“How are you feeling?” I asked him.
Miranda came out of the kitchen. “I shut the gas line off,” she said, “but I checked the stove and the pilot light was still on. Water heater, too. So I don’t know where the gas could have been coming from.”
She started when she saw Ed, and knelt down next to us. “Mr. Taber? Are you okay? Carol? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Taber said, fanning herself. “He just kind of … toppled over.”
Mr. Taber ran his hands down his beard. “I … I’m alright, honey. Just need to catch my breath.”
The color was returning to his face. I touched his neck, and his pulse had calmed down, too. “I think you’re going to be fine,” I said.
“Here,” Miranda said, giving him a glass of water. “Drink this.”
“Thanks, missy,” he said and gulped the water down.
We stood back up and Miranda helped Ed Taber into a chair. No one really seemed to know what to do until a guy in his mid-thirties just kind of shrugged and left. The rest of the morning crowd seemed to take that as a cue and followed after him, leaving overturned chairs and half-eaten food in their wake.
Miranda swore under her breath and started righting the seats. I started on the other side of the table, setting up chairs as I went.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “You’re a guest here.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “It isn’t exactly a typical morning.”
“Yeah,” she said
. “Damn it. I don’t think a single person paid for breakfast. Not that I blame them, really, but we can’t afford–” She closed her eyes for a moment. “Sorry. I don’t want to complain at you.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “A little venting never hurt anybody.”
“Maybe, but that’s not how I was raised.”
“Stiff upper lip?”
“Something like that, but less British, more Protestant. Put your shoulder to the wheel and do what needs doing, stuff like that.”
“It’s none of my business,” I said, “but are you two all right? I mean, is this place,” I waved my hands around the room, “doing okay?”
Miranda sighed and shrugged. “I guess. I mean, we aren’t going to get rich here, but my Grandma doesn’t make enough from Social Security to live on, and this makes a big difference. It really isn’t enough to support two of us, and I honestly need to get another job, but if I do that there won’t be anyone to help Grandma, and she can’t handle this place by herself, so …”
“So you’re trapped,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said, looking at the floor. “I mean, I love Grandma, and this place has been in our family forever, but sometimes …”
“Sometimes you’d like to escape.”
“I feel so guilty for even thinking that, you know? Like I’m letting her down, like I’m letting my parents down by not taking care of her.”
“I … I’ve never had to deal with that,” I said. “I’m not close to my family, and there was never any real expectation that I’d stick around. We used to do holidays, Christmas and Thanksgiving and stuff, but after a while we just all kind of agreed to stop pretending.”
“Oh,” Miranda said.
I shrugged. “Anyway, Ethel seems like a tough old lady. I’m pretty sure that she’d find a way even if you wanted to finish that medical degree.”
She smiled, and her emerald eyes crinkled. “You remember that?”
“Well yeah,” I said. “Look, it’s really none of my business, but you seem like a smart woman. You’d have to be to make it most of the way through a degree like that. And it’s great that you want to help your family, but if this is all you ever do, would you be happy with that?”
Miranda bit her lip. “I really wouldn’t.”
“There are probably plenty of teenagers in town. I’m sure Ethel could train at least one or two of them to help out around here. I mean, that’s practically an American tradition.”
We finished putting the chairs back and Miranda started grabbing dishes. I couldn’t grab as many as she could–she stacked them on her arms like some crazy Jenga game–but I took as many as I could manage and followed her into the kitchen. Ethel was scraping food off of plates and into an industrial sized garbage can. I rolled up my sleeve, ran the water until it was hot, and started washing.
“Oh, you don’t have to do that honey,” Ethel said.
“I already told him that,” Miranda said. “He’s stubborn.” But she was smiling, and her eyes were sparkling again.
Ethel tut-tutted, but handed me the next dish. We had the place cleaned up in about twenty minutes, and Miranda was right: no one had bothered to pay for their breakfast. I felt really bad about that, since it was my fault Ashlyn and Sandra had shown up. Yes, there was a bigger picture, but the only part of it I could focus on was the fact that Miranda and Ethel had lost one-third of a day’s wages because a couple of wannabe witches had tried to take me out in their dining room.
The utility company sent a guy around to check the gas lines, but he didn’t find anything wrong with them. Neither he nor the DuBois really knew what to make of that, so everyone just kind of agreed to shrug their shoulders and get on with life. Ethel started getting ready for lunch as soon as she got the all-clear to turn the stove back on, and I was ushered out of the kitchen.
I still had a lot of research to do, but the morning’s excitement had added a more pressing concern to my to-do list, so I locked my books up in my bedroom, hopped into my Jeep, and drove to the nearby supermarket. The girl at the cash register, whose hair was a delightful shade of purple, raised an eyebrow when she saw the contents of my basket: a gallon of olive oil, a large box of table salt, and a bag of cotton balls.
I gave her a huge smile but kept my mouth shut. “Whatever,” the girl said and started ringing me up. Twenty-five dollars later–you’ve gotta love small town shops–I headed back home.
The house smelled wonderful, a mix of fresh baked bread, sauce, and some kind of meat, and I could hear the DuBois singing in the kitchen. Good. I needed them out of the way and distracted for a few minutes.
I mixed my ingredients together in the bathroom, pouring a hefty dollop of salt into the olive oil and shaking it up. Salt really is an amazing thing. In the ancient world it was considered so valuable that it was used as a form of currency; the word “salary” comes from the practice of paying a worker’s wages with the stuff. Its value comes not only from its flavor, but also from its ability as a preservative; meat, for example, would be salted to keep it from going bad. That quality lent it a religious connotation, too. The Mashiach told his followers that they would be “salt and light,” that they would be preservatives, that they would fight back against the growing corruption in the world.
But all of that was trivia. I was interested in salt because of its metaphysical properties. All of that New Age crystal stuff? It actually has some basis in fact. Crystalline structures, it turns out, are really good at holding onto the Æther. The crystals you can buy in the mall are still useless–you have to actually have some kind of magic ability to charge one–but the principle is sound. The fancy hippie stones are also way overpriced: salt is just as good at holding a charge as a hundred dollar geode or polished piece of quartz.
I listened at the top of the stairs; Ethel and Miranda’s voices still echoed through the house, which meant I had the top floor to myself. Miranda’s bedroom was locked, but the Thieves’ Key had me inside in a heartbeat.
Miranda’s bedroom was smaller than mine, but similarly decorated. My face burned red. I hated intruding on her privacy like this, but it was necessary. I needed to make sure that this morning’s events didn’t repeat themselves.
I intentionally avoided looking at any of her things and crossed to her window. I dabbed one of the cotton balls into the oil and salt mixture and dragged it along the entire frame. Once the circle was closed–once I had anointed all of the wood surrounding the window–I touched the oil with my middle and index fingers. Blue fire shimmered across the surface of the oil, flared once, and dissipated.
There was nothing special about the oil; it was just a way to get the salt where I needed it. But the salt itself held the charge of the spell I had just cast. For the next twenty-four hours or so, no magical energy would be able to pass through this window. Well, that isn’t quite true, but breaking through the barrier would have required a tremendous amount of energy and willpower, more than most people would be able to wield.
I repeated the process on the door that led out to the wrap-around porch, then locked the bedroom behind me. Miranda’s bedroom was, from a magical point of view, now a safe room, shielded from magical assault.
The DuBois were still singing, so I warded Ethel’s bedroom next, then the two open bedrooms, then the upstairs bathroom, and finally my own quarters. I almost forgot the window in the hallway, but I anointed it on the way downstairs.
God, the DuBois house had a lot of windows. It took me almost half an hour to ward the downstairs, and I was still going to have to find time to ward the kitchen windows, probably later that night.
Finally I warded the front door, blue fire running out from my fingertips and around the frame. Later I would set up miniature replicas of the stone wards around the Vault, sealing us in against any–
“Caden?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin when Miranda came bursting through the kitchen door. “Caden? Why are you on the ground?”
“I, um,” I sa
id, stuffing the cotton ball in my pocket, “thought I felt a draft, but it’s nothing.”
“I hope so,” she said, pursing her lips. “We just had the weather stripping redone this fall. Nothing should be coming through those doors.”
I looked at the threshold and allowed my vision to shift, revealing the telltale blue glow of a ward. “Yeah,” I said, “I think they’re shut pretty tight.”
I closed off my vision, grabbed a handful of napkin-wrapped silverware, and helped Miranda set the tables for lunch.
December 19th
Chapter Six
Lightning split the sky and the old man stood transformed, wrapped in swirling black cloth and crowned with a helm of antlers. A brilliant ruby flashed and flared, reflecting the tempest’s light as a thousand crimson daggers. He lifted his spear, a great shaft of oak tipped with a blade of gold, high into the air, as if defying the power of the storm.
Snarls escaped from the wolves crouched at his feet, smoke rising from their nostrils, their eyes reflecting the same wicked light as their master’s gemstone. Twin ravens leapt from his shoulder, searching for prey.
A gray steed came from the darkness and the Hunter took mount, his cry echoing in the night. His fell company responded to his call, riding forth on fierce black stallions and trailed by the hounds of hell.
The Wild Hunt rushed forward, raising a tumult that would wake that dead.
Miranda DuBois ran through the night. Wotan, the Lord of the Hunt, followed after her.
***
I blinked as the vision cleared. This oracle hadn’t been forced upon me. I was slowly learning to control that aspect of my powers, and I had been able to summon the vision at will. I had hoped to see something different, some sign that Warren would listen to reason, or that the spanking I had given his two messengers-slash-hitwomen would make him think twice.
No such luck. Warren was apparently intractable. In two days the Lord of the Hunt would ride again. In two days, his band of demons would sport once more. In two days, Mirrormont would burn.
The Wild Hunt Page 5
