by John Conroe
The portal abruptly shut as the power ran out. I scrubbed out two of the runes and rewrote new ones, using the last of the battery to power it up. The window reopened but was now looking down at a spot about a hundred yards east of the last one.
Stacia dropped four bombs and fired off eight more shot shells of steel death before the portal closed. By now I had called another Air elemental, this one bigger, to blow more of the filings across the enemy. The iron had no effect on the elementals but melted living things born of Fairie like molecular acid.
In my mind’s eye I could see miniature tornadoes of iron dust and fine steel birdshot twisting about the borderlands of middle realm, eating through Summer’s biological weapons.
The tide turned and the plants were dying off, the bugs quickly turning to little lumps of melting sludge. I was able to get back on my feet.
Summer struck back. A new wave of pain flared up my leg, but I didn’t fall. “Bitch is at it again. Further east,” I said to Stacia, gasping against the searing sensation.
“We’re out of bombs,” she said.
“We only had six?”
“I was gonna make more. I brought the stuff,” she said right back at me.
“You have filings?”
“A couple of jugs of them,” she said, moving over to the supply wagon. I folded down onto the floor and started to draw two more circles. She came back with two big plastic coffee containers and started to pull the lids off them.
The Rowan wood battery on my vest was partially charged, not enough to open a gate across dimensions but still holding more power than a half dozen of the little ones we had issued the witch pack. I pulled it out and powered up the circles, one after another, calling in my head to the elementals near the besieged border.
The bigger of the two tornadoes spun up into the air, dropping its load of filings right into the little tornado. The unburdened elemental shot toward the new attack as the little one kept spinning through the still-writhing plants.
“Okay, dump some through each hole,” I said to Stacia, grabbing one of the containers and pouring our half its contents through the nearest portal.
Windy number two swirled through a space larger than four football fields, picking up about ten pounds of iron filings and covering every square inch of space. The attack faltered, the iron overwhelming the plants.
Back at the first battle scene, the little air elemental had destroyed all of Summer’s weapons and still had filings left in its windy funnel. My first thought was to send it across the border in a counterattack, but my little mental friend, paranoia, whispered it might be a trap. So I had the little spirit of air pile up its leftover metal in a small depression in the ground.
Pushing into the ground, I called the water from the dying bugs and plants to me, building a little cistern of it in the depression. When it was as full as it was going to get, I tried something I’d seen Britta do. The wolf pack had once attempted to engage in a water fight with the witch pack. Dellwood had thought up the idea after watching a YouTube video of a wet t-shirt contest.
The results hadn’t been pretty for the wolves. Water witches rule anything liquid and every bursting water balloon had blown back on the pack. Pulling the water straight up into a suspended column, Britta had held it in place while her sister directed a concentrated stream of air across the top of it. The result would have put a fire hose to shame.
I did the same thing now, staring down through a portal folded in reality to pull a quivering rope of iron-filing rich water up high enough to blast it with a stream of air. The little windy started to help almost immediately, which tripled the distance we squirted the water over the border.
Jungle for a hundred feet deep into Summer withered and died in a big arc.
The elemental at the second battle site had wreaked havoc on the constrictor vines and now it observed our actions and imitated us without the water. A jet stream of high velocity air blew the better part of ten pounds of iron across the border, traveling at least a tenth of a mile before the particles fell upon the lush jungle below.
Earth’s environmentalists would have killed me had they witnessed the destruction we caused to the verdant jungle, all of it instantly melting under the iron onslaught.
“That’ll kick the bitch in the ass,” Stacia observed.
A sharp, biting cold shot through my left foot and I sat down hard. Stacia stared at me, eyes wide. “Winter is attacking the northern border,” I said through clenched teeth.
Chapter 22
“With what?” she asked, a little note of dread in her voice.
“Death,” I said. The attack was happening on the northern edge of the Middle Realm far to the east of Summer’s attack. Something stood among the scrubby ground plants and tough bushes, killing them all with its very existence.
“That’s not helpful. Scary as Hell but not helpful,” Stacia said, eyeing me warily.
It was alien, an entity of both physical and spiritual presence. It was not tall, nor wide, taking up the same space as a thin man. Yet its features were hard to ascertain, hazy as if it stood in its own fog bank. I’d never seen its like, but somehow I’d felt something like it before.
“It reminds me of a demon,” I said out loud, still focused inwardly on my realm-powered senses.
For a second or two, I concentrated on it, then realized she hadn’t responded. Looking at her, I saw her frozen, her tan skin white. She met my look, then suddenly turned and rummaged in the supplies. Her hands shook, just slightly. We’d fought demonic things before, but I never realized till now how much courage it took her to face Hell.
“Got salt rounds here,” she said.
“Don’t bother. I’m not opening a portal to that thing,” I said. “It’s probably hoping I’m stupid enough to do just that.”
She turned, still tense, but not so pale. “What can you do?”
I frowned. Her fear was both understandable and logical. Demons were terrifying. I hadn’t decided if this was, in fact, a full demon, but it sure reminded me of one. But the really odd thing was that I wasn’t afraid. I should have been. Wary of its abilities, cautious of giving it any advantage, but curiously not terrified. That bothered me.
We’d fought death spirits, a death witch and her demon hybrid offspring and of course, as a member of Team Demidova, we’d both been exposed to Chris’s work. I knew how powerful and deadly they were. So why was I lacking the fear I should have had? Instead, part of me was cataloging its power, looking for weakness, thinking strategy and tactics.
I pulled down the ground under it, creating a hole. It simply levitated to new ground. I tried calling an elemental, but the nearest one refused to come, itself feeling of terror. The entity advanced. I dropped a much greater chunk of ground underneath it, simultaneously sending a torrent of water from an underground spring through the new canyon. My awareness of the land informed me of some important bits of information.
Standing its ground, the spirit—as I had decided it was something twisted and malformed by demonic forces but not demonic itself—simply parted the flow of water around it.
Interesting, but I hadn’t expected the tactic to do more than buy me some time. Time to rummage through the minerals in the ground below the thing’s feet and in the walls of the artificial canyon I had just made. In fact, I helped the thing by reinforcing its shield and pushing the water even further to each side, pushing the rush of water hard against the base of each canyon wall. Eroding them. Weakening them. Then helping them collapse inward and down, toward the entity.
It waved a lazy hand, stopping some of the debris that fell its way. But not stopping other parts. Not stopping the deposits of salts buried in the soil. Salt ignores magic. Blocks it.
In fact, the creature helped me, its power providing a perfect filter, a screen as it were, to remove the regular dirt and rock, leaving just the salty compounds of sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, and phosphorus that fell upon it from both sides, right through the shields
it had raised against the water.
It burned. And screamed. And forgot to maintain its shield.
Now my newborn river swirled around it, up against it, the salts falling into the water and dissolving, which would have helped it by washing them away had I not created a rotating pool of now-high-saline-content water. With the creature in the center. Like the vines mixing with iron, the spirit being started to melt, the foggy haze around it disappearing. As it screamed out its agony to the empty, uncaring sky, I acted in on instinct. Reached for it. Pulled it apart, absorbing its energy.
“Get rid of it!” a voice said beside me. I turned my eyes, finding Stacia up in my face. “I said Get. Rid. Of. It.”
With a sigh, I turned back to the northern border, studied it for a moment. Then I sent the spirit’s energy in a lance of death into the forest of Morrigan’s realm. Five trees on the border died instantly, as did the next five behind them, and four more behind them, then more behind those. Death speared a sharp triangle for half a mile into Winter’s territory, everything in its path turning black or brown with immediate decay.
“Better,” she said.
“I wasn’t…” I started to say.
“Huppp, zipp,” she interrupted, pinching her thumb and index finger together in my face. “Don’t. Just don’t.”
Surprised, I shut my mouth.
“You have a talent for death magic. Your aunt as much as told me so. Mixed in with all your other crazy, wonderful abilities. We won’t be encouraging it,” she said.
“But I was gonna get rid of it,” I protested.
“Hmmm, maybe. But when? Listen, I’m just snipping off bad habits before they even start,” she said.
“How do you know what’s a bad habit and what’s a good one, magically speaking?” I challenged.
“Because any habit or skill that makes me want to turn away from you is bad,” she shot right back, hands on hips.
“Turn away?” I asked, surprised, and not in a good way.
“Yeah. When you pull in death, you change. I hate it. Makes my skin crawl. So it ain’t happening, O’Carroll,” she said.
I studied her for a second. She was fierce about this. Deep down to her core. “Okay,” I said.
Her features tightened up like she was waiting for more and ready for a fight. I just looked at her. Didn’t say anything.
“Okay?” she asked, frowning at my reaction, or maybe my lack of reaction.
“Okay. Anything that makes you want to get away from me is bad. The worst. So you’re right.”
Relief flickered across her face, followed by mild disbelief, like she wasn’t sure if she believed me.
“Do you like it when you’re in hybrid form and you want to tear people apart for almost no reason?” I asked.
“No, but I don’t do that. I control it,” she said, now defensive.
“If you have to control it, it must be there, right? That anger and rage?” I asked.
She slowly nodded.
“But you control it. Only unleash it on enemies. Same thing,” I said.
Her mouth opened—she was going to argue my point. She closed it. Tilted her head back and forth, considering. “Sorta,” she said. “But my rage is inherent. Pulling the power of death into yourself isn’t.”
“Point. But it’s the closest analogy I could find.”
“Well, don’t get used to it. I’m gonna ride you about it,” she said.
“Promise?” I asked, eyes wide with hope.
“Good lord, don’t your hormones ever rest?”
“Father, not to interrupt but you should be readying your next response. Those attacks were just small reconnaissance probes. The queens are studying you,” Omega said.
“Thank you, Omega,” Stacia said. “He’s right. We’ve got to prepare. We were caught off guard by the equivalent of a couple of lazy jabs. What are we gonna do next time?”
I thought about it. Both queens had enormous reserves they could throw across the border at will. Me, I had no troops, no armies, just a collection of elementals I was unwilling to drain away to protect a land I really didn’t want to even hold.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Well, we gotta think of something. We got through that by the skin of our teeth. I was sweating it out,” she said.
“What?” I turned back to her, maybe a little sharply.
“What?” she asked, perplexed.
“Sweating?”
“You know, figure of speech,” she said, pretending to wipe her brow as she looked at me with confused eyes. “Oh Jeeze, I can just about see the lightbulb going on over your head.”
“Yeah. Omega?” I asked.
“Yes, Father?”
“What can you tell me about weather patterns here on Fairie?”
Chapter 23
The answer, it turned out, was a lot. With hundreds of drones spread out all over Fairie and spreading further, he had automatically gathered a tremendous amount of data on almost all aspects of the planet—or at least its major land mass.
When I told my AI and Stacia about my idea, Omega actually took like ten whole seconds to process it before answering.
“Controlling the effects after you launch them will be difficult, perhaps impossible, but that’s the case with almost all weapon systems. I will turn my attention to calculating planetary rotational speed differences for the Winter, Summer, and Middle Realms. Affecting the jet stream is likely our best bet. If you can indicate where on this projected map you have elemental resources and specify which type they are, I will plot the required changes in ground and water temperature as well as where and how much to shift the wind speeds and directions.”
“So I said the word sweating and you came up with weather as a weapon?” Stacia asked.
“What else can we easily send across the border without endangering ourselves or our elementals?” I asked.
“Still, you’re going to intentionally mess up the planetary weather system? Doesn’t sound very witch-like,” she said.
“I wouldn’t fire a gun in a neighborhood either unless I had to defend myself or my family,” I said.
“Bit of a difference in scale, don’t you think?”
“Not super excited about it, but here we are,” I said.
“I know. Not ragging on you, just surprised, yet again, at how fast your devious mind works,” she said. “What kind of weather do you think you can use?”
“I think super-chilled arctic air spread across the jungles, warm tropical air melting Morrigan’s glacier base, nasty big thunderstorms, maybe some tornadoes like we had here in Middle land,” I said with a shrug.
“It is likely that you are understating the possible results by a rather significant amount, Father. Between my array of sensitive drones, quantum computational ability, and your unprecedented ability to influence a connected network of Air, Water, Fire, and even Earth elementals at the same time, the effects will vastly exceed your expectations and will occur within a relatively brief period of time.”
He was right. Boy was he right. A mere five hours later, our first salvo began. Apply a little heat here, blow some air there, cool this part by a few degrees, and release a certain amount of moisture into the atmosphere and Shazam, you’ve got yourself some serious results. Like snow and sleet across hundreds of miles of normally hothouse jungles while the temperature plummeted below freezing. Or a massive, volatile mass of tropical air forming an enormous thunderstorm with violent winds and excessive, repetitive lightning strikes that moved slowly across a vast stretch of northern forest.
Stacia’s laptop and my tablet were set up on a desk in Ashley’s study, one tracking drone footage in the north, the other in the south. We each took occasional glances at them as we worked.
“How will we know we’ve got their attention,” Stacia asked me. She carried my messenger bag and handed me supplies as I moved around the apartment, marking wards, glyphs, and runes that I thought might block any portals from forming in our apartment. Includ
ing, I hoped, portal-hopping Bigfeet.
“Well, my first thought was Neeve getting dropped in here unexpectedly,” I said, waving at the last forty minutes’ work.
“No, you’ve blocked that approach. What other way will they attack?” she asked.
It was nice she was so certain of my abilities, because frankly I wasn’t at all sure my efforts would hold back a species with an inborn ability to create gates across time and space like the Winter Queen’s troll.
“Well, maybe another border attack, but if we’re really annoying them, I’d think they might activate a sleeper agent to assassinate us,” I said, finishing a pink swirling Elvish glyph. My supply of sidewalk chalk was taking a beating and I was down to pink, purple, and a hideous orange color.
