by Jayne Hawke
The stone district was a very wealthy area full of pale silvery stone houses worth a few million apiece. It was said that the area didn’t exist before the Fall, that the fae had created it from whole cloth. Sometimes I wondered what the world had looked like before their influence on the Isles.
“So they have money,” Rex said.
“It looks that way.” Liam held up a picture of a three-storey pale-silver building with tall windows and a heavy black front door. “This is their location. Surveillance shows that they’re there right now.”
“Any word on a security system? What’re we walking into, here?” Elijah asked.
I did a mental inventory of the magic within my charm bracelet. I still had that wildfire magic, that would slow them down if need be.
“No sign or record of a security system, but they might have woven something themselves.”
“Entrances and exits?”
“One front. One back. The front is very public; as you can see, it looks onto the street. The back requires climbing over a wall and running across their garden.”
Elijah curled his lip. Neither was a good bet.
“Lily, can you cast an illusion to make it appear that we’re just friends strolling in for a few late-night drinks?”
I raised an eyebrow at him as I drank the last of my coffee. He clearly had no idea what kind of weaving he was asking of me. Sure, a sidhe with an illusion specialisation could pull it off with ease, but I wasn’t a sidhe.
“We can do it together,” Castor said.
“Since when have you been amazing at illusions?” I asked.
“I’m old; I’ve studied a great many things,” Castor said.
Another reminder that there was so much I didn’t know about him.
“Get dressed. Bring every conceivable weapon and put on your protective leathers. We’re going to need every bit of an advantage we can get,” Elijah said.
I pulled Castor over to one side.
“I don’t know how to pull off an illusion of that complexity. You’re talking about covering noise, movement, and appearance here. I have to construct an entire scene from a movie out of magic,” I said.
He put his hand on mind.
“I’ll guide you.”
There were too many secrets. I could feel our friendship eroding.
“Ok,” I said with a smile.
I jogged upstairs and pulled on my charm bracelet and full fighting leathers. They’d help keep me safe from blades and some magic. Given what we were going up against, they might only buy me a few seconds, but every second counted.
The jaguars really were throwing money around. The stone district was an exclusive neighbourhood with views over the ocean and the forest. It sat upon a small hill, ensuring that the nearby neighbourhoods could see it. The contrast between the fae-made area and the main body of the city was particularly striking at sunrise and sunset when the warm red and gold light hit the pale silver. The main city was a lot of red brick and old grey; it drank in the warm light and formed deep heavy shadows. The stone district appeared to glow.
Elijah drove carefully so as not to draw attention. Every one of the broad silver buildings with their neat gardens out front and heavy steps leading up to reinforced front doors was wrapped in top-end security systems. The magic sparked and tickled my senses where it was covered in fine barbs. No one would be going near any of those buildings without bringing down a few lightning bolts onto their heads.
Then there was the jaguar house. No signs of any security. Not so much as a thin thread of magic to assess people’s intent. They were either that arrogant or that trusting. I was leaning towards the former.
We pulled up a street away from the jaguar house, having circled around the block twice to ensure we hadn’t missed some security measures somewhere. Castor walked at my side, a distinct tension between us. I tried to keep my focus on what we needed to do, but he’d been my friend for a long time. This whatever we were going through hurt. I needed to clear the air, to get everything out, but saving the Isles came first.
“I need you to trust me. To allow me to do most of the weaving,” Castor said.
Traditionally familiars were the batteries, but Castor wasn’t a normal familiar. If I opened myself up and allowed it, then he could use my magic, including the magic held within my charms. We’d only done it a couple of times as practise. He’d said it would be a good idea if I was injured and he needed to get us out of there. It had been easy to open myself up and trust him then. This time, I wasn’t so sure.
“Talk me through it. We’ll do it together,” I said.
It was riskier, as I didn’t know what we were supposed to be doing, but I couldn’t open myself up like that in that moment. Castor nodded in understanding, a flicker of pain crossing his face as he did so.
“It’s like a large glamour. Pull together the air magic and carefully knot the life essences in the area so that its warped and tied into the image,” Castor said.
Fuck me, that was a huge undertaking. We’d only be doing this on those who were awake, so I hoped that wasn’t many.
The pack paused outside of the jaguar house. Castor and I stopped on the sidewalk behind them. I reached out to see how many life essences were around us and active. There were none inside the house and only three awake in the nearby houses. That made life easier.
“I’ll form the images, you know the essences,” Castor said.
Exhaling slowly, I focused on the delicate wisps of essence that lay within the people’s minds. It wasn’t easy wrapping something that was almost like mist into a knot. It slipped between my fingers and refused to solidify enough to bend into a knot. I was growing frustrated when I finally pulled it off.
Castor’s side of everything was going beautifully, because he had the gods only knew how much experience behind him.
“In we go,” Castor said as the door clicked and opened.
Jess narrowed her eyes at it.
“I unlocked it and opened it. I’m already using air magic,” Castor said.
“It was still creepy,” Jess said.
“Come on, get inside,” Elijah said.
Forty-Five
The interior of the house could have been something spectacular. The crown moulding was intricate with vines and flowers pressed into it. Unfortunately, the walls sat bare, pure white and stark. There were no traces of anything personal there. We checked the downstairs rooms and found each room to be entirely barren. There wasn’t even a scrap of furniture. So, they weren’t planning on making it a real home.
We moved upstairs, splitting up to cover each room more efficiently. I took the furthest bedroom and hit the jackpot. A large bed was in the very centre of the room, and the walls were covered in what looked to be magical notes. A lot of it was in a weird symbol-based language that I was clueless about. I did, however, recognise a few images that tied into magical rituals and ceremonies.
The word ‘Huracan’ and ‘storm’ came up quite a lot.
“Got it!” I called out.
The pack rushed in and began systematically trying to make sense of what we had here. Jess was carefully handling the ceremonial knives made of obsidian or some other black stone. Rex was shuffling through a pile of papers covered in that symbol-based language. Castor stood with me trying to figure out exactly what the ceremony was about and when it was going down.
Elijah was leafing through the books, all of which were leather-bound and heavily illustrated inside. They appeared to be a few centuries old with gold leaf and hand painted imagery. I wondered how much they were worth and was willing to I bet it was more than Seth was supposed to be paying us.
“There’s a scrap of paper over here,” Liam said.
“There a whole pile of paper in this room,” Rex pointed out.
“I bet they’re not as useful as this, though. This one has a time and address on it,” Liam said.
Elijah gestured for the fox to hand it over.
“The Narrows, an
hour from now. Looks liked an abandoned building. Big enough for something impressive to go down,” Elijah said.
“This ritual or ceremony looks big. I’m seeing something tied into storms, god magic, blood. There might be a human sacrifice planned. I’m not entirely sure, as it’s not done in the style I’m used to,” I said.
“Can we all just agree that this is obviously a trap?” Rex said.
“Agreed,” Elijah said.
“And we’re going to walk into it, because it’s the best lead we have,” I said.
Even as obvious setups went, an abandoned something-or-other in the middle of the crime district wasn’t on the subtle end. Still, the critical difference between a trap and an ambush is that a trap is best avoided while an ambush is best exploited. In this case, we were fairly confident that the jaguars would face us directly, which meant we might very well turn their plans against them. Of course, if they just locked us in and burned the place, that would be another thing entirely, but the murder business is all about risk and reward.
With Jess, Rex, and Castor having found or made their own entrances through which to assault when the time was right, Elijah and I entered the building, which turned out to be some sort of arena, long abandoned. The jaguar guardians were nowhere to be seen, but that wasn’t unexpected. I drew on the shadows to give myself armour and weapon, then cast a several-minute sunlight spell to all but banish the natural shadows from the bulk of the ring. If they wanted us, they wouldn’t be able to drop out of a shadow and take us back through with them. This would be a stand-up fight.
Or rather, it would seem to be a stand-up fight for as long as it took to force engagement, at which point our backup could put a period on this unpleasant little episode. Their entrance took long enough that I began to wonder if we were made, but before I could come around to the idea of giving up and waiting for another chance, they stalked in from opposite sides of the building in unison.
They walked up to us in businesslike silence. Their faces and stances were neither friendly nor threatening, masks of placid danger that seemed perfectly suited to their faintly feline features. Elijah and I stood back to back, and before they had a chance to make their move we made ours. We each drew our weapons, each of us carrying the longswords that paired so perfectly to each other despite having been our standbys since before either of us knew the other existed, and rushed our targets.
The jaguar guardian in front of me eyed the shadow blade for a moment, weighing some stratagem I couldn’t imagine, but seemed to discard the idea. He drew a macuahuitl from his back, the embodied perfection of the haphazard toys the sewer cultists had carried, and struck out at me the moment I came into range of his weapon. I raised my blade to parry and he withdrew the strike, immediately making a thrust under my guard that swept through my shadow armour. I felt every blade of his weapon as if I had been wearing nothing at all and knew that I was in deep trouble.
“I have your alpha. Stop this,” came a voice from behind me.
I circled my opponent until I could see the other guardian, and I found he was telling the truth. He held Elijah’s weapon by the blade, no blood in sight, and Elijah himself by the throat with his claws extended. The slightest gulp would have sent him to an early grave. We were leaderless. I saw Rex and Castor behind him and shook my head subtly, not ready to test the jaguar’s commitment.
Rex’s commitment proved stronger. With a roar of outrage and defiance, he sprinted across the empty space, half-transformed with teeth bared, ready to throw himself at the guardian. From my periphery, I saw Jess in the middle of an impossible leap across the arena to bring down her glaive in a massive overhand chop. Her blow never landed. Shouting a curse in a language long dead, the guardian threw Elijah at Rex and leapt into the air, catching Jess’s weapon just behind the head and slamming it back into her face, grabbing her by the hair and tossing her a dozen feet to his left before landing and catching Rex, who had dutifully ducked his alpha’s flying body, along the side of the head with the glaive’s shaft, dropping him with a crack.
I didn’t know if this was a protocol they had set up for this sort of situation, the two of them having a similar idea on what the guardians would do, or simply overwhelming rage, but they were on the same page while Castor and I were both on a far more cautious wavelength. It was looking like we’d made the smarter play, though theirs had at least gotten Elijah free of the clawed grasp of his captor.
The guardian turned to me and said, “I came here to have a conversation. If I have to have an execution, that’s going to make me feel angry. It will not stop me from doing what needs to be done, and neither will you. Put your shadows back where they belong, or I will take the lives of every mortal in this room and we will eat well tonight.”
Forty-Six
“Did he just threaten to eat us?” Jess asked.
I returned my shadows to their own plane and looked at the guardian, waiting. Elijah was back on his feet, and Rex was snarling at the guardian but remaining put.
“We know that Seth hired you to find the Huracan pot. What you need to understand is that he already has the pot. And he plans on using you as sacrifices.”
The second guardian, the slighter, shorter one with softer eyes took a step towards me.
“I am Henri, he is Alexander, and we’re trying to save you and your Isles.”
“Keep talking,” I said.
“Seth was being truthful when he said a guardian had gone rogue. What he failed to tell you was that he was that guardian. This all started a year ago. It’s a grand and complex plan. You have met his co-conspirators. They told you they were students.”
“I knew they were sketchy!” Jess said.
Alexander gave her a disdainful look.
“Seth manipulated them. They were eager, arrogant young fools. Seth led them down a dangerous path with the promise of making them gods upon the earth. Together they stole a number of god artifacts. Seth told them the plan was to crack open the artifacts and use the magic within to elevate themselves. Of course, that would never work. There isn’t enough god magic in any one artifact to do such a thing,” Alexander said.
“But there is in a collection of them,” I said.
“Exactly,” Henri said.
“Where do the sacrifices come in?” Elijah asked.
“The ceremony that Seth has planned required a lot of magical blood. He has found a way to break open the god artifacts and leech out the magic within. This is something he has spent millennia perfecting. Anyone else would die a quick and painful death long before making a hint of progress, but with his dedication and skills he has found a way no other could,” Alexander said.
The admiration was a little creepy, but I let it slide.
“So Seth’s going to make himself a god?” I said drily.
“How original,” Rex added sarcastically.
“If we do not stop him, then he will succeed,” Henri said.
“Why do you need us if you’re so powerful and amazing?” Jess asked.
“We are just two people. A little back up would be useful,” Henri said.
Looking at them a little more closely, I saw that Henri was the more relaxed and softer of the two. His entire stance was much more casual, as were his choices in clothing. The faded jeans and rumpled t-shirt made him appear to be far closer to a normal person. Alexander, however, stood with his back straight and a deeply irritated expression on his harder face. His eyes were darker, and the tips of his jaguar teeth poked out beneath his top lip, giving him an almost vampiric look. It wasn’t a good look.
“When? Where? And what exactly do we need to do?” I asked.
Henri smiled, a warm genuine smile.
“I’m so glad you’re being sensible about this.”
“You’d better pay us triple for this,” Rex said.
Alexander snorted.
“Of course,” Henri said easily.
“Come. We’ll discuss this at our place,” Alexander said.
&nb
sp; And just like that, we were working with the guardians to try and save the gods only knew how many lives.
“I told you Seth was the bad guy!” Jess crowed.
I had to admit, I was impressed she’d managed to hold that in that long.
We were gathered in the jaguars’ house with nowhere to sit and nothing to eat or drink. Talk about a lack of planning.
“Seth’s ritual is going to take place in the sewers. It’ll take us forty minutes to get to the vault in question. There will be eight potential sacrifices there with him. We’re not sure just how loyal they are. There is a chance that they’ll fight for him, instead of against him. Be prepared to kill them,” Alexander said.
Henri was leaning against the wall with one leg crossed over the other looking the very picture of chilled. Given what we were talking about, it really didn’t seem appropriate.
“The shadow will be blocked. There is too much risk of it influencing the ritual, which means no shadow weapons.” Alexander looked at me pointedly. “Keep in mind that Seth will be doing his best to make use of any blood spilt. He will rip out the magic within it and add it to the now-pure god magic that he will wield.”
“Don’t fear. His body isn’t ready to hold the god magic, so he’ll only be able to throw it around in short bursts. And he won’t be able to control it properly, as he’s not a trained witch,” Henri said.
“Oh, what a relief,” I said sarcastically.
“The only way to end this is to remove Seth’s head, heart, life essence, or all of the above,” Alexander said.
“Let me guess, he has protections in place so we can’t just hack his head off,” I said.
“As I said, he’ll have all of that god magic,” Alexander said.
I rubbed my temples. We were going to try and take down a demigod with fuck knows what type of magic, in an enclosed space, with potentially eight allies working with him.
