by John Conroe
“Can you put some kind of magical cloaking on us?” Chris asked.
“Possibly. Lots of stuff becomes easy when you have an unlimited supply of raw magic on hand. We’ll have to see what I can come up with,” I said.
“What about anti-drunkenness precautions?” Stacia asked.
“Aunt Ash made me a vest. Well actually, she modified one of Darcy’s tactical vests and wove some Craftings right into it. The spell work pulls some of the magic around me out of the air and stores it into the extra batteries I’ll bring with me. There are four uncharged ones, and the one we use to open the portal will be almost entirely discharged, too. I have no idea how long the vest will take to charge each one, so we’ll play it by ear.”
“Can you make some more? Tonight, before we leave?” Chris asked, getting up to leave.
“I have enough stuff for like three more,” I said, frowning as I thought of the work involved. I had hoped for some alone time with Stacia.
She patted my arm, then also stood. “Good. That will keep you busy while we go shopping for freeze-dried food, shotgun ammo, and stuff. What about water?”
“Spring in the back of the cave. Lots of water all around the area and I can call more to us if needed,” I said, gathering my stuff as we headed for the door.
“You can call water?” Chris asked with a grin.
I shrugged. “Since the last trip, I have some abilities with water and more with air. On site, I can manipulate things to suit us.”
“Define some?” he asked.
“I can move water and definitely pull it. Not real nuanced stuff, not like the Water witches, but then again, I’m pretty new to it.”
“And the girls here can do more?” he asked.
“Yeah, a lot more. Stop flowing water, reverse a river, part a pond or stream, sense things through pipes in a building or house, stop blood in a human body,” I said.
“What about the pipes? Like showers?” Stacia asked, voice suddenly sharp.
“Ah, well yes, I guess,” I said. No guessing. I knew damn well but I wasn’t foolish enough to say so.
“Like when you’re in the shower?” she asked.
“Nope, at least not now. I mean, they know I’m off-limits since we started going out,” I said. Chris was on her other side and I saw his face palm and head shake.
“They did it before?” she asked, eyes starting to go yellow.
“There were a few attempts, long ago. I foiled them. I sent some of the wolf pack into the shower in my place. Those guys bragged to everybody what had happened and who had done it and that was that… It ended.”
“Who? Who did it?” she demanded as Chris opened the door and we stepped out into the hall—and right in front of Erika, Tami, and Alice Morloft.
Something ultra snarky died on Erika’s lips as she saw Chris. Alice’s eyes got wide and Tami just nodded at each of us. “Wolf,” she said to Stacia.
“Witch,” Stacia said back, then turned to Alice. “What’s your name? Are you a water witch?” she asked, voice dangerously friendly.
“Ah, Alice and no—Air,” the girl stuttered. “My sister’s Water.”
Stacia drew a breath and her eyes went even more yellow. I grabbed her hand. “Elise is what? Sixteen? How does she like her first few weeks at Arcane?” I interjected.
Alice looked very confused, Tami was inscrutable, but a suspicious gleam had entered Erika’s eyes.
“Ah, not till October—still fifteen. Kind of young for this, but she seems to like it,” Alice said, tucking her hair behind her right ear, her eyes darting to Chris with almost every other word. “Misses home a little, but she’s just a kid. Ya know?”
“Yup, we do,” I said, trying to move my werewolf along. She set her feet and it was like I was trying to move a wall.
“Alice and I are both Air and our sisters are both Water,” Erika said. “Interesting coincidence, right? But my sister is the same age as we are. My identical twin, in fact,” she said, pulling back her shoulders just slightly and flipping her hair. Her eyes gleamed with anticipation. A natural born troublemaker.
“Britta still bonded to that young werewolf?” Chris asked. “They’ve been together since I met you guys.”
A micro expression of annoyance flashed over Erika’s features and then was gone. Tami snorted. “They’re like one person. Kinda of sickening,” Tami said.
Awasos, still in wolf form, pushed between our group and the girls, his right shoulder bumping Stacia and rocking her out of her stance.
“Well, we have to go. Lots to do,” I said, pulling my off-balance girlfriend away from the witches.
She came with me, her face looking disappointed, and the partial witch pack continued down the hall. Behind us, I heard Alice use a too-loud whisper.
“Why is he with a werewolf?”
“Come on. Look at her,” Tami said, voice normal. “Plus she’s like the Hulk—every time she gets angry, she busts out of her clothes and ends up naked. Hey Erika, she’s found a way to show more skin than you do!”
“It’s not the amount of skin, but how and where you show the skin,” Erika said, her tone superior.
“Bullshit,” Tami said as they rounded the corner.
Stacia stopped, which stopped me, then whirled around to me. “Well?”
“Oh I agree with Tami,” I said.
“No, you moron. Which witch was it?”
I frowned. “One: Nothing happened. Two: It was before us. Three: We are not going to restart the witch hunts. I don’t go hunting down every werewolf that’s ever hit on you,” I said.
“No shit. You’d still be at it,” Chris said absently. Then he caught our combined glares. “Just saying.”
Chapter 8
We stepped onto Fairie the next morning, leaving an overcast March Vermont and arriving into the pitch blackness of the cave I’d selected.
‘Sos went first, in bear form. “He likes to just charge into things,” Chris said.
“Works pretty well if you’re almost a ton of supernaturally tough Kodiak,” I said, following Stacia as she went through, the tactical light on her shotgun illuminating the rough rock walls of the ancient cavern. Chris stayed on the Earth side, watching as Awasos and Stacia secured the cavern. “Looks all clear,” my girl said. I was busy with reintroduction. Middle Realm sat up and paid attention.
“It is—for about a mile in every direction. There is a fox den four hundred yards to the west of the cavern entrance and a small herd of deer downslope a half mile,” I said, absently pushing a small ball of light up to the ceiling of the cavern. Micro drones were whirring away into the darkness, dispersing from a cloud that had both preceded and followed me through. The land was calling my name.
“Showoff,” my girl said, turning to study me. I was prepared this time. Still rocked my world, but not as bad. But the land itself was unsettled and now it was settling as I paid attention to it. Or tried to. I was distracted by the very air around me, which was saturated with raw magic, and I knew every stone, twig, insect, and rodent in the cave around me. The vest with the Rowan wood battery seemed to help though, keeping the magic that flooded me down a bit, making both breathing and thinking easier. The closest I can come to describing it is that hard-to-breathe moment when you step into a fully steamed up sauna. That need to take small, shallow breaths because the heat is a pressure on your lungs, all while talking to a hundred people at the same time. A thousand.
“You guys ready?”Chris asked, still on Earth, peering at us through the portal doorway. “I don’t want to get cut in half when this thing runs out,” he said, nodding at the battery on the table in the tack room behind him. I’d set the portal up there so that it was sheltered, out of sight and easily guarded by Robbie and Draco.
“Right,” I said, dropping down in front of the rectangular opening across space-time. First I chalked the proper symbols, then I went back over them with a bottle of acid that made the limestone fizz as the lines became etched into literal stone.
<
br /> Chris was passing supplies to Stacia through the portal, boxes of food, clothing, camping gear, and ammo for the shotguns. Mostly food though. She worked around me.
“Whew, that stinks,” Stacia said as she caught a whiff of the fumes rising from my etching.
“Almost done,” I said, raising a breeze to clear the air as Chris carried the last big box of dehydrated food through himself.
“We have water here?” he asked.
“There’s a natural seep in the back that’s fed from an underground stream that passes close by. The pool holds twenty-seven-point-six gallons of potable water, natural filtered, although the supplement that Aylin made us will give us temporary immunity to any water-borne parasites.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Right, like you three actually need that. Gives me immunity. But it will make breathing the air here easier, even for you superhuman types,” I said.
“Says the dude who’s plugged into a third of the continent,” he said back at me. “How does it work again?” Chris asked.
He knew damned well, but triple-checking everything was part of his job description.
“The portal back will open for any of you as soon as any of the drones see you near it. Fifty or so are staying here, the rest out and about, and some always with us,” I said, reaching up to touch a micro drone on my shoulder. “After we get set up and I get the full lay of the land, I’ll build a portal to take us to Idiria. Same thing with the drones.”
“What about power for them?” he asked.
“I’m linking a battery to each. The batteries are self-charging while they’re here on Fairie.”
“Can anyone else access the gates?”
“Anyone else who Omega recognizes. On Earth, though, only someone who can enter the barn and get past Draco and Robbie. Only Darcy and Jetta could waltz past them, besides Mack and my aunt.”
“Good,” he said.
Stacia came back from stacking the last of the supplies, her body language antsy, ‘Sos back in wolf form by her side.
“You said there were deer?” she asked.
They wanted to go hunting. Wolves hunt, and werewolves are half wolf. Part of me was suddenly protective of my land’s animals. Part of me wanted them to have a good hunt in wolf form. I paused for a moment, feeling the land.
“The herd is directly downhill, but you’ll have the wind at your backs as you leave the cave. That will reverse as the rising sun heats up the ground outside but for now, your scents will go straight to them. However, there is a very old stag about three quarters of a mile to their east. He’s near the end of his life but he’s a fighter and I think he would prefer to go out in a last chase and battle rather then just passing away in the night,” I said.
All three looked at me. Understanding on hers, surprise on Chris’s, and eagerness on ‘Sos’s.
“Alright,” she said, handing me her shotgun. Awasos turned and bounded for the cave entrance and she took off after him, tugging off her boots as she went. Chris turned back to the supplies, grabbing the folding table we would use for command central, but I watched as my girl finished undressing, waving when she glanced back at me, her body all lithe curves and tanned skin in the shadows of the cave. Her body rippled and shifted and suddenly a big white wolf looked back at me with yellow eyes. Then she turned and bounded off into the early morning light.
“Don’t mind me. I’m just going to set up our headquarters is all,” Chris said, tone half joking and half sarcastic.
“Oh thank God,” I said. “I thought you were going to ask me to help for a second there. Instead, I can sit on this crate and check out the rest of the Realm.”
“Sure, make it sound reasonable, like a logical division of labor,” he said, casually lifting a two-hundred pound box of dried beef and setting it against the cave wall.
I closed my eyes and focused on what the land was trying to tell me. To our west, Idiria was quiet and slightly less populated than when I had left. No dragons and no Winter or Summer Courts. To the east, the land was angry and distraught. Tired maybe. Storms raged across the plains; canyons and gullies flooded with turbulent currents, herds of plains animals displaced from their normal ranges, landslides and crevices torn into the very earth. Slowly, gently, I quieted the raging, shushed the outrage, and calmed the anger. The damage was extensive; rivers washed out from flood deluges, lone islands of trees on the endless plains flattened and splintered by tornados, cliffs and ridges shattered by earthquake.
Once the winds and earth subsided, I became aware of the bodies. Lots of bodies. Elves and goblins, horses and other things. Something like a pterodactyl’s body with a head that was broad and almost toucan-shaped, but with teeth instead of a beak. Lots and lots of teeth.
“Well, anything to report?” Chris asked. He had set up a small folding table with monitors that showed camera feeds from Omega’s drones.
“Looks like a shit ton of Summer troops died trying to cross the realm,” I said. “There were ongoing storms like hurricanes, with tornadoes and earthquakes. Must have been hell on Fairie,” I said.
“How about now? With the storms and stuff?”
“I calmed it all down. Try to let it rest a bit,” I said.
“Think that will alert them?” he asked.
I frowned, wondering what I was supposed to do, like I was supposed to leave the land raging?
“I’m not second guessing you,” he said, holding up a palm. “You have to stop it and let it come back into balance. I just wonder how they’ll read the situation is all.”
Settling back, I let go of my own instant anger and tried to think it through.
“Well, that would be one conclusion. Or the energies needed to keep that violent weather going simply exhausted themselves, might be another one.”
“It’s been blowing up since you left?” he asked. I nodded. “That is a long time. Almost a month. Where did the realm get the power to keep it all going?”
“I don’t really know. I don’t understand this whole thing or my connection to it. I sense things that are facts, like the current temperature of the water flowing past this cave underground, and I get feelings like the anger and outrage that killed all those Summer troops. But the actual time I have spent connected to this realm is probably less than a full hour,” I said.
“In that case, more time here on the ground has got to yield some answers. Anyone trying to cross the realm right now?”
I closed my eyes and extended my thoughts. “There’s something big flying across the realm, out over the plains. Like pteranodon big, not dragon big or anything. Like one of those flying reptiles are mixed in with the dead elves.”
“Summer flying scout perhaps. What about around here?”
“A big-ass eagle is circling the air over ‘Sos and Stacia’s kill, but it feels like a normal part of this area. Like it’s just looking to scavenge scraps,” I said.
“They made the kill?”
“I didn’t like pay attention or anything but ‘Sos is basically sitting on a stag carcass and Stacia’s on her way back.”
“Hmmpf,” he snorted, rubbing his chin and looking at me all thoughtful like.
“What?”
“That’s just a little weird is all. Whole omniscient god thing,” he said.
“Not omniscient. I have to concentrate on an area to know what’s going on. I kinda know if something is in the local area but otherwise it takes some serious focus,” I said, maybe a touch defensively. “You’re creeped out, aren’t you?”
“No, no, not at all. Well, okay just a tiny bit,” he admitted.
“Oh, like your conversations with invisible angels isn’t? Or when Grim takes over and you just know everything going on around you?”
“Hmm. Well played, young Jedi. But let’s not stray off topic—where is this kill?” he asked.
“Like about two miles south of here. Puts it within a couple miles of the Summer Realm border…”
“What? What is it?” he ask
ed.
“Something at the border,” I said, trying to focus on what I was feeling from the land.
“And?”
The sense of activity just off the edge of my realm suddenly solidified as a foot came down on my side of the line. “Goblins! A bunch of goblins, crossing the border and heading north—straight at ‘Sos and the kill!”
Chapter 9
Chris was just suddenly on his feet, the transition from sitting to standing too fast for me to register. “How far?” he asked, moving for the cave entrance but slowly enough that I could keep up, if only barely.
