Jade fire danced around Strawberry Shortcake’s hands and Italian Princess grabbed a flagpole like a spear. I threw up a ward as the spear arced toward me, deflecting it, and smothered the flame with my own magic. Twin blasts of light lanced through the air, striking both of them in the chest, hurling them aside.
Swedish Bikini picked up a pew and threw it at me. These things were fifteen, twenty feet long and made of heavy, solid wood, but she handled it as if it were weightless. The bench crashed into me, clipping my shoulder and hip. My armor rippled, blunting the impact, but the weight crushed me to the ground.
The witches fell upon me, moving with supernatural speed and striking with preternatural strength. Strawberry Shortcake got to me first, pinning me to the ground with her knee and throwing elbow after elbow into my face. Princess started throwing a flurry of punches into my ribs. Swedish Bikini followed an instant later, kicking my skull like she was taking the game winning shot in the World Cup.
Under the Valkyries’ influence, the witches were insanely powerful. Ashlyn had stopped a truck dead with her shoulder, but she was channeling the magic of an actual goddess. Her compatriots weren’t quite as strong, so instead of being assaulted by one tyrannosaurus, it was more like getting beat up by three velociraptors.
Always look on the bright side.
It occurred to me that I was spending an awful lot of my life getting my ass kicked by girls. It also occurred to me that these girls had killed two people since lunchtime, and were almost certainly planning to kill a whole lot more. And that made me kind of angry.
Anger isn’t a bad thing, not always. Anger can spur you to correct an injustice. Anger can give a mother the strength to save a child in danger. And if you weave magic, anger can fuel some damn powerful spells. So I took that anger, the anger at being assaulted, the anger at innocent lives lost, the anger at the shit storm I’d brought into the DuBois’ life, formed it into a tiny, solid little ball, fed my willpower into it, and channeled the Æther through it.
The result was something akin to a miniature, indoor sun.
The Æther pulsed and writhed, the very fabric of reality twisting from the sheer force of my outrage. White-hot magic swirled around me, lighting the carpet aflame and searing the witches’ robes and scorching their flesh. The spirits of the Valkyries blocked out the pain, and the witches continued their assault.
More the pity for them. My anger became a physical thing and rushed out from within me. The witches screamed and the flesh evaporated from their bones, their cries dying out as their lungs turned to smoke. The pews around us became ash, the floors burned down to bare stone. The spell tore up into the air, blasting a hole through the church’s vaulted ceiling. The air rushed away from me with gale force. Stained glass windows shattered.
I stood up, spat blood, and glared at Holda. The only remnant of her witches was a pile of blackened bones at my feet. Holda’s mouth fell open. “Well shit.”
Fire spread around us, from the carpet, the pews, the rafters. My armor became momentarily visible, a sheath of sapphire light surrounding me. I stalked forward, hands balled into fists. Holda slid causally out of her chair and cracked her knuckles.
She gave me that Cheshire Cat grin and leapt toward me when I was still a dozen feet away. She cut through the air like a missile, her fist coming at me like a cannon ball. I caught the blow on my arm–and my armor–but the impact was still stunning. I dropped back a step, trying to regroup, but Holda pressed forward, throwing a flurry of punches. She was as good as you’d expect a Viking god to be. Her attacks were all short, controlled. No wild swings, no overreaching, no openings in which to counter. Just an unending barrage of nuclear bombs and manicured fingernails.
But physical power isn’t my only asset. I blocked one blow, a left hook aimed at my jaw, and feinted a punch to Holda’s bread basket. She bought it, flinching back ever so slightly. I summoned the Æther and formed a ward beneath her, snaring her feet and sending her tumbling ass over tea kettle.
The fire spread, casting the church in a hellish glow. The choir huddled against the back of the dais, as far from the flames–and Holda and me–as possible.
Holda came up in a crouch, grabbed her throne with one hand, and whipped it at me. I slammed my fist into it. Magic erupted and the chair shattered into kindling. I threw a blast of light at her, a blast as strong as the one that had taken out Sandra, but it barely staggered Holda. I closed on her again, gathering the Æther around my fist, and threw a wrecking ball of a punch at her head.
She caught my fist in one hand and squeezed hard enough to make my bones creak, then drove her heel into my solar plexus. The blow lifted me off my feet and sent me flying into the burning pews. The church shook when I hit the ground. A burning timber ripped lose and plummeted toward me.
I threw up a ward. The burning rafter crashed down, breaking in two, and scattered burning embers. The choir members screamed.
Holda pushed her victim off the altar and hoisted it into the air. The altar wasn’t just a table, it was a goddamned enormous table, carved out of marble or granite or something, and it probably weighed in at five hundred pounds. She tromped over to me with the altar held high overhead, then hurled it down. My ward shimmered, stopping the weight inches from my head, but pain exploded between my eyes. I’d been throwing around a lot of power in the last few minutes and I was reaching the end of my reserves.
A door at the back of the church opened and Miranda ran into the burning building. She took a moment to orient herself, then hurried over to the choir. “Come on!” she said, grabbing the closest guy by the arm and dragging him toward the door.
Holda’s head whipped around and she stared at Miranda with pure venom. “I’m not done with those yet,” she hissed.
I fired a blast of light up from the floor, drilling it into the back of Holda’s skull. Her chin bounced off her chest and she tumbled to the ground. “Yes you are,” I muttered, and hit her with another blast of light. She was rattled, her confidence dented if not broken, and she crawled away from me. I sensed weakness and a predatory instinct took over me. I closed in on her, magic swirling around me, hate boiling within me. I grabbed her by the hair and yanked her up to her knees, ready to finished her.
Holda drove an elbow back into my gut. The bitch had been playing possum. The air exploded out of my lungs and I staggered backwards, gagging. Holda stood up, grinning like a cat with a canary, and summoned green flames. “It’s a shame,” she said. “You would have been a good champion. And you would have looked great in the uniform.”
I held out my hands, surrendering. “Wait.”
Holda cocked her head to the side. “Really? Pleading for your life? Huh. I thought better of you than–”
I closed my fist and yanked my arm back. The Æther responded to my call. A ward rushed through the air, making it shimmer like a mirage. The force snared one of the burning rafters and ripped it free. My mind guided it as it crashed to the ground, and it landed right on top of Holda’s head. She was flattened and pinned beneath the burning wood.
She tried to push the rafter off, but I hit her with another blast of light. Holda’s arms fell limp. She looked up at me, glaring hard enough to turn a man to stone. Which is a power I’m really glad she didn’t have, by the way. “This isn’t over,” she said. “I am going to–”
“Yeah yeah yeah, if I strike you down you will become more powerful than I can ever imagine. I get it.” I grabbed her head in both hands. “You ever notice how Obi Wan never did a damn thing after he turned into a blue ghost? More powerful my ass.” With a sharp twist, my physical strength supplemented by the Æther, I snapped Holda’s neck.
Chapter Nineteen
I picked my way out through the rubble, emerging into the blissfully cool, wonderfully soot-free winter air. The choir were being attended to by EMTs, and the sheriff was wandering around, trying to figure out some official action to perform. Miranda was sitting on a cop car’s bumper, nursing a mug of coffee.
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“Good job in there,” I said. “You saved a lot of lives.”
She smiled up at me. Her face was streaked with ash. “All in a day’s work. So will you teach me to blow things up now?”
Behind me, the church rumbled. I turned around just in time to see it shudder and collapse. A plume of dust twenty feet high rushed out and rolled over us. When it cleared, I looked back at Miranda and said, “Yeah, no, I really don’t think I’m going to be teaching you how to do that.”
“Lame,” Miranda muttered.
The sheriff stormed over, his face red. “What in the hell did you do in there?”
“I saved,” I counted off on my fingers quickly, “two dozen people?”
“I helped,” Miranda said.
“Quite right. So maybe give us each credit for half of them?”
“Sounds fair.”
The sheriff looked at us in bewilderment. “I … I have to file a report on this. Three goddamn buildings just blew up in my town! What am I supposed to say happened here?”
“You could try telling them the truth,” I said. “You could tell them that a local community college professor started a group of Norse religious fanatics who tried to summon their god, but ended up summoning his concubine instead, and she killed most of them, possessed the rest, and then took a bunch of hostages so that people would believe in her again.”
“Or,” Miranda interjected, “you could tell them that there was a gas leak set fire to three of our churches and gave a bunch of people hallucinations.”
The sheriff mulled that over for a moment. “That’s gonna be a lot easier to sell than a community college cult.”
Miranda smiled at him. “Glad to be of assistance. Caden? Do you want to get out of here?”
I started back in the general direction of the Jeep. “I really do. Epic struggles against once-upon-a-time deities always make me hungry.”
Miranda held up my keys. “Do you still want me to drive?”
“Yeah. I’m kind of a dead man walking right now. I was pretty close to the end of my rope in there. It’s a good thing you came in when you did. I don’t know that I could have gotten those people out in time.”
Miranda preened a little bit, but nothing obnoxious. I climbed into the Jeep, and Miranda got into the driver’s seat. “So what happens now?” she asked.
I leaned back and closed my eyes. “Now? Now I have some cleaning up to do.”
“What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “In the movies, once the bad guy’s dead everything just sort of ends. Music swells, credits start, fade to black. But I don’t want to just walk away from Mirrormont.”
Miranda was quiet for a moment. “Why not?”
“The biggest reason is that I kind of drove a train right through your lives. Look, I’m not really good at the whole ‘being around people’ thing, but the least I can do is help you put your house back together. Or at least get someone to do it for you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Yeah, I kind of do. Just who I am. Besides, being a Saint is profitable. I can sell good luck charms to bored rich people for ten grand a pop. I’m doing all right for myself.”
“What kind of charms?”
“Nothing too powerful. Portable wards, mostly. Keep the bogeyman away, that kind of thing.”
“Oh.” We drove for another couple of blocks in silence, then Miranda asked, “Is there anything else keeping you in Mirrormont?”
“Of course.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I want to drop by the hospital later tonight, make sure none of Holda’s hostages are actually demons in disguise. I should probably do something about that ritual site by your house, too. I don’t want some Dungeons and Dragons club to stumble on it and unleash Ragnarok.”
“Right.” Miranda’s voice was barely a whisper.
I opened my eyes and turned toward her. She had both hands on the wheel and was staring straight ahead, blinking rapidly. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
Damn it. I had no idea what I did to upset her, or how to fix it, but even I could tell that Miranda was on the verge of tears. “Miranda?”
She looked at me, emerald eyes glistening. “Take me with you.”
“What?”
“Take me with you. When you leave, when you get in your Jeep and drive off to your next big adventure, I want you to take me with you.”
I was quiet for a very long time, and when I spoke it was as gently as possible. “I don’t have a home, Miranda. I live out of a duffel bag, in motels. I don’t have friends, or even a family anymore.”
“I know.”
“And I spend most of my life waiting for the next unholy abomination to try and kill me. I see people at their worst, all the time. Everyone around me is in danger, miserable, afraid. My life isn’t exciting, Miranda. It’s terrifying. And lonely.”
“It would be less lonely if you shared it with someone, wouldn’t it?”
“I did share it with someone. I still have her ring around my neck.”
Miranda’s lip quivered, almost imperceptibly. “I spend my life making pancakes and hoping we sell enough of them to pay our heating bill. I get so angry when someone calls me a waitress, or a maid, but damn it Caden, that’s what I am. I’m a stupid waitress and I live at home and I just can’t … this isn’t how I wanted my life to turn out.”
And here’s where I wish I could actually see the future. Some guy decides summoning Dread C’Thulhu is a swell idea, that I’ll see. Some jackass decides to sacrifice his neighbors to Gozer the Gozerian, that wakes me up screaming. But everything else, the important stuff, that’s as opaque to me as it is to everyone else. Miranda was smart, capable, and beautiful, and I was going to miss her when I left Mirrormont. But she was also young, inexperienced, and vulnerable, and I wasn’t going to put her in danger. My “gifts” had already killed enough.
“Your life hasn’t turned out yet, Miranda. God, you’re what, twenty-two?”
“And you’re world-weary and wise? You’re like three years older than me.”
“The point is, you still have time. You still have options. You could go back to school, get your MD, save lives–”
“You sound like a guy at a jobs fair. Maybe I don’t want my MD. Maybe I want to save the world. Like you do.”
I sunk down in the car seat, suddenly exhausted. “I didn’t choose this, Miranda. No one in their right mind would choose this.”
“So you’re saying I’m crazy?”
“I’m saying you don’t know what you’re asking. I’m saying if you come with me you could end up dead. Or worse.”
“You’re right,” she said, her eyes staring steadily ahead. “It’s way better to live a boring old life and die a boring old death than to die doing something important or, God forbid, exciting.”
“Miranda, I–”
“Don’t.” Her voice was brittle. “Please don’t.”
“I watched my lover die, Miranda.” I took a deep breath and stared at the road for a moment. “I’ve had nightmares my whole life. That was the first time I had a vision. I thought I was going crazy, so I ignored it. My parents had a cabin up by the lake, I went there for a long weekend. But the visions kept getting worse. I ran back to campus. It was pouring rain, and thunder. I broke down Erin’s door and I found him, standing over her, covered in her blood and laughing. She looked up at me, and she said ‘Caden, this isn’t your fault,’ and then she died.”
Miranda’s voice was a whisper. “God.”
I clenched my jaw. “He was just some guy from campus. He’d asked Erin out a few months ago, she showed him the ring, and that had been the end of it. I thought. He tried to do a love spell. A fucking love spell. And a demon took him and used him to kill the woman I love.”
Outside the window, leafless trees whipped by. “That’s why I do this. That’s why I’m here. And that’s why I don’t let anybody get close.”
&nb
sp; We drove in silence. Fortunately, the bed and breakfast was only a few minutes away. Miranda parked by the kitchen door and went inside without saying a word.
Ethel was in the kitchen, sweeping. She didn’t look up at me. I paused by the door. “I’m … I know this doesn’t mean much, but I’m going to have this place fixed up.”
Her mouth twitched, taking on a shape that was neither smile nor grimace, but a mixture of the two. “Thank you.”
“I’m leaving tonight,” I said. “You probably aren’t interested in the details, but the creature that brought me here is dead, so …”
“So my granddaughter is safe?”
“As safe as anyone else.”
Ethel sighed and lifted her shoulders, like she was suddenly free of a thousand-pound weight. “That’s good. I, I was afraid for her.”
“So was I.”
“Caden?”
“Yeah?”
“Is this my fault?”
I scrunched up my face. “What do you mean?”
“Did I do something? Did I make God angry? Did I bring these monsters here?”
That wasn’t an unusual question. People want the world to make sense. They want good things to happen to good people, and they want bad people to get what’s coming to them. When disaster strikes, when everything goes all woolly, people want there to be a reason for it. They don’t like the idea that sometimes shit just happens.
“No,” I said. “You didn’t make this happen. I know it sounds stupid, but you guys really were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Ethel nodded. “All right. Thank you, Caden.”
Ethel went back to sweeping. I went to my room and started packing my bags. It didn’t take very long. I travel light. Aside from my clothes–I was going to have to stop at a Laundromat soon–and my laptop, the only physical things I had were the artifacts I had taken from the Asatru and my own books on Norse religion and mythology. Those I wrapped in protective covers–some of them were literally ancient relics–then opened my laptop and started looking around for cleaning crews and home decor experts.
The Wild Hunt Page 19
