by Faith Hunter
“Black light magics? I thought you said most magics are blue or green. Or red.” He thought and added, “Sometimes purple.”
I nodded. “Yellow, orange. Prisms of the rainbow, light and energy as used by a witch. They work like a signature to people who can see them. Angie’s used to be white. Blue sometimes. Rarely with little motes of black power in them. Except the very first time I ever saw them manifest. She was barely out of diapers, and she got mad, and a whirlwind of her magics ripped through the mobile home they were living in. The magics were dark, like an angry cloud. She could have killed her parents. Instead Beast calmed her and stopped the attack. Molly and Big Evan bound her that day for the first time.”
I drank more tea, trying to put it all together in a cohesive timeline. Working with long-lived vamps, I had learned that timelines were important. “When Little Evan and Angie were in the witch circle waiting to be sacrificed by the Damours, Angie was surrounded by dark magic. And when she freed me from the head Damour, there were streaks of dark motes in her magic. I had never seen her magic up close enough to get a good look, and back then I couldn’t bend time, slow it down, to really study it, and I didn’t understand . . . but I think her magic became dark that night. I think she learned something and has been using it. Or was contaminated by it. Maybe not black magic, not blood magic, but something that can go either way.” I looked up from my mug. “This is going to be hard on Molly and Evan.”
Eli nodded. “You want me there?”
I shook my head. “No. Yes. I don’t know.” I thought some more. Having Eli with me would be cowardly. I was not a coward. Or not often. “No,” I decided and stood. I refilled my cup and added more cream and sugar, stirred it, but then left it on the table. I walked out one of the new doors to the side porch. Molly was sitting there in one of the rusty chairs, rocking, her dress full-skirted and flowing out and down to the decking, chatting on the phone. Her red hair was flopping to one side, and the curls followed the same line as the dress. She looked as if she were posing for a painting by some famous watercolor artist. The thought was way too artistic for me, and I shook it away.
Molly’s tone informed me that she was talking to Big Evan, her hubby. I walked over and sat at her feet, my legs curled up guru-style in a half lotus. It was an intrusion as well as an act of submission unusual for me and especially for my Beast. Her perfumed scent was too strong for me, augmented as it was with my Beast senses, and I resisted the desire to sneeze or wrinkle my nose.
Molly’s voice trailed off and we could hear the dripping and tapping of rainwater and the ever-present sound of traffic. “Jane’s here,” she said.
“Would you put me on speaker?” I asked.
Molly tapped the screen and said, “Evan, you’re on speaker. Jane has something to say. And she’s sitting at my feet. Like a house cat.”
I managed a smile. Molly understood what my position and posture meant.
Evan said. “I’m not going to like this one little bit, am I?”
“Probably not,” I said. To Molly, I asked, “You already told him about Angie?” Molly nodded slowly, then shook her head. Mixed signals meant he knew parts. Slowly, I went on, knowing that I needed to say this in a special way, with compassion and tenderness and all that crap. But I didn’t know how to do things like that, and hadn’t figured out how during the walk out here. I was a bull in the china shop of my friends’ emotions. “You know I can bubble time. So when I heard Angie scream, it just kinda”—I shrugged—“happened. And I ran inside. She had her hands buried in the hedge—that’s the new and improved hedge, by the way—over the sabertooth lion skull. The trap part of the new hedge had been activated, and she was stuck. But I was standing outside of time and I saw what she was doing. She was zapping the manacles. And her magic was like black light. She’s using her power raw, without maths to give it form. Controlling it just with her mind and will. And I have a bad feeling that she saw me bubble time, which means she might know how to do that too.”
Molly closed her eyes. Her face went a paler shade of cream; clearly she hadn’t told Evan yet. I caught a whiff of her reaction, which was all tangled and twisted and broken.
“Thanks for sugarcoating it, Jane,” Evan said, the sarcasm so thick even I understood it.
I shrugged and stood, patted Molly’s hands, and walked back inside. I was still barefoot, the wood floor smooth but with the rolling surface of a very old house. At the table, I picked up my tea. “That went well,” I said, lying.
Eli chuckled, and there was no amusement in the sound at all.
• • •
Supper was a quiet affair, though Angie didn’t seem to sense it. Angie had sat Ka Nvsita, the Cherokee doll I had given her, on the chair beside her, and was telling the doll about her day, omitting her time-out and concentrating on the flight and KitKit, who was still hiding on the top shelf in the butler’s pantry. According to the doll chat, Angie had enjoyed a stellar day.
Molly stared alternately at her daughter and at her own left hand clenching in her lap. She ate with determination, but I could tell she wasn’t enjoying the salmon and black rice Eli had made, nor the mixed greens salad—which wasn’t bad for green leaves and veggies and nuts and stuff.
With nothing settled and no decision made about what to do with Angie or the skull, Molly pushed away from the table and called Evan again, her voice low and worried. Together, over the cell connection, they warded the house, Molly’s incantation and Evan’s flute playing following her from door to door and window to window. When the house was protected, Molly took a pouting but seemingly obedient Angie Baby upstairs. I followed and watched as Molly and Evan put their daughter to sleep. They used a new working that Angie wasn’t expecting, a sneak attack that they didn’t announce or warn her about. The little girl’s eyes flew open in surprise and she resisted for some five seconds before she fell back on her pillow, eyes closed, and her breath even. Asleep. Molly looked from the little girl to me and said, “We had to.”
I nodded, relieved, and Mol turned back to her daughter. The music and chanted words of the new magical binding sounded through the house, the energies shivering along my skin and through the soles of my feet, sweet and dangerous and tight as thorny vines.
When Angie woke up, her powers would again be bound, more constricted than ever. I had a feeling that she was gonna be one ticked-off little girl. But safer. Much safer. When Angie was bound, Molly said some sweet nothings to her hubby and I pulled on Beast sight. The little girl’s body looked as if it had been wrapped in a cocoon of blue and red magical strands, with a touch of bright sunlight energies thrown in to seal it. There was no way she would be able to break this one. The bright yellow magics would cancel out her nascent dark magics. I knew next to nothing about how magic actually worked, but I understood this one on some basic, intuitive level.
Satisfied, Molly and I took the stairs down and joined the card game waiting for us at the kitchen table. Poker. Five-card stud. It seemed that I had a natural advantage in the game, because I could smell the difference between players’ excitement at really good hands and their change in scent when they were bluffing. Alex wanted to take me to a riverboat casino offshore in the Mississippi for some high-stakes gambling. I wasn’t interested in risking the money I had put aside, but the Kid wasn’t to be denied his experimentation and, with Molly here, he had another subject to test me against. I won every single one of the matchsticks we bet. Later, the Kid told me that if it had been real money, I’d have made about fifty grand, according to his own geeky conversion mathematics based on a terribly inflated value for the matchsticks.
I still refused to go gamble. Repeatedly. Watching his avaricious eyes go blank each time was priceless.
At nine sixteen p.m., I was holding a perfectly awful hand of a pair of threes, but it beat the other players’ hands if I was still reading the scents correctly.
A boom shook the hou
se. Inside, the lights flickered twice and died. A drawn-out zzzzzz sizzled outside, in front. The sound resembled a transformer exploding and sparking. Or a small bomb? In the next second I realized that it couldn’t be a bomb, because Eli didn’t throw himself on top of the rest of us, but he did draw a weapon and vanish into the shadows. I didn’t remember seeing electrical transformers close enough nearby to make the sound we had heard.
I stood in a crouch so I couldn’t be seen through the kitchen window. Looked out into the street. The houses across from my house were still lit.
Eli’s voice sounded from the living room. “Lights are on at Katie’s.” He craned his neck, visible as a silhouette in the window, which was brighter from outside lights. He added, “And both neighbors have light.”
Molly said, “Y’all? We have a problem.” Her voice quavered on the last word. Her body smelled of sudden sweat and the acrid, bitter tang of terror.
The sizzling, slapping boom came again, followed by the electrical zzzzz.
I pulled on Beast-vision from where I stood at the front window and saw the energies of the ward over the house. It was an older model, one Molly had used before, the spell muted blue, green, and silver, the energies growing up from below ground, as natural as leaves and plants sprouting up from fertile soil, but this time the fertile ground was Molly’s earth magic, augmented by her newer, more deadly death magic. The ward was powerful, self-healing from most mundane (meaning nonmagical) attacks, was resilient, and air permeable, covering the house and most of the grounds. And it was sparking blue and red, like sparklers on the Fourth of July.
“What is it?” I asked her. But she just shivered, her eyes lost in a distance I couldn’t see. “We’re under attack,” I said to the Youngers, “but I don’t see anything. Alex, the exterior cameras have battery backup, right?”
“Yeah, working on seeing what we have now,” he said, his voice distracted, coming from the darkness of the house. “I had to turn on the inverter and get everything going. So far I don’t see anything. Bro, get the fridge unplugged.”
Eli moved to the kitchen, following orders.
“Jane,” Molly said, the word garbled as if she was choking.
I raced to her, but I didn’t make it in time. The boom was massive and the windows rattled as the entire house shook. The ward sent out a shower of sparks, like bloody water falling over a waterfall, the red energies blooming light. Beautiful, but also taking power from the ward. The broken magics smelled of char and burned herbs, sunlight on linen, and the dark of the moon on a winter garden. “What is it?” I asked Molly, slipping an arm around her shoulders. “What’s attacking us?”
“Jane?” Alex said. “It’s an arcenciel. A young one.” He spun the tablet to us. “And this time I can see the scar on its side.”
So could I, though the scar was nothing more than a dark shadow along its snakelike side. She was in the visible range, a rippling of light and shadow, with a human-shaped head, showing small, budding horns. Her mouth was open displaying rows of shark teeth that glinted like pearls. Her transparent wings glimmered in all the colors of the rainbow, and a frill around her head was scintillating shades of copper, brown, and pale white. Her body was snakelike, bigger than the last time I had seen her, with iridescent scales the color of tinted glass and thick smoke and hints of copper. As before, she smelled like green herbs burning over hot coals and the tang of fish and water plants. The shadowy scar ran along her side, healed but a potent reminder that she could be hurt. This was the creature we had wounded in Leo’s basement gym. This was the light dragon who had attacked me before, but at least now she had a name.
Did that give us power over her in some way? Could we use her name to defend ourselves? “Her name is Opal,” I said.
“That isn’t its real name,” Molly whispered, her eyes faraway as she studied her ward and what was happening to it, “that’s just its English name.” She ducked her head and slid from beneath my arm. “I’ve been doing research. Her real name will be a lot of sibilants and cracking sounds and an explosion of light in the correct wavelength. I can’t even recognize it as a name, let alone reproduce it or use it in defense of us.” Yet her hands rose and I saw the power of her magical working—what the mundane and lazy, including myself, called a spell—as it sparkled from her fingers and raced to every window and door, building up the ward in the most probable weak places.
“Molly, you don’t have a circle,” Alex said softly.
“I’m using the ward where it enters the ground as my circle,” she muttered. Which was news to me. I hadn’t known that was possible. Magic was tricky, as tied up in the practitioner’s belief system about the practice of magic itself, as it was in the practitioner’s actual ability. A witch who believed she had a lot of power probably had a way to access more than she might have otherwise. And a witch who believed she was powerless likely was, regardless of her magical potential. And Molly was a freaky-powerful witch, and had become more so, when, in defense of her life and her sisters’, her magics mutated from earth magics with a hint of moon magic thrown in, into death magics, which she couldn’t use without killing something. Or someone. She had found her way back to earth magics, but her hold on them was tenuous and delicate.
There was little any of us nonwitch types could do to help her battle to keep the wards in place, but if they faltered, I’d need to have a weapon, and steel hurt even arcenciels. I accepted the vamp-killer and the small KA-BAR-style knife Eli handed me and strapped the double sheaths to my left leg. The vamp-killer I adjusted for a right-hand draw, up near my waist, and the smaller knife I set back for a left-hand draw nearer to my left knee. As I worked, nothing more happened—no booms, no house shaking, no nothing. Maybe it had gone away to lick its wounds. Or maybe the arcenciel had gone for reinforcements. I’m such glass-half-full-of-blood kinda gal.
I pulled my cell and tried to call Soul, the only other arcenciel I knew, but the call didn’t go through. I had no bars. The sat system Alex was setting up wasn’t working either. I slid the units across the kitchen table, where Alex was tapping. He jumped up and raced to the hardware under his desk in the living room and switched off some of the gray boxes and then switched them back on. Little green and yellow lights glowed. He ran back to the kitchen to work by the light of two tablets. I hated technology sometimes.
Whatever was happening outside, Molly was using the time to spin reinforcements on the ward. Her feet were shoulder width apart, knees slightly bent, almost like the footing for a martial arts move, rooting her body to the earth beneath the floor, balanced and stable. Her fingers were flicking and snapping and the smell of rosemary grew on the air, a strong, intense scent that seemed to wend down the stairs from her room overhead, mixing with the scent of her fear and that awful perfume. When it came to magic, Molly was a battle witch, standing between her child and danger, and I could see the Celtic warrior women of her genetic history in her stance, fierce and tender and unyielding.
From the corner of my eye I saw a flicker as something leaped out of the shadows. I whirled, Beast fast, and caught it, whipping it out of the air. And got lines of scratches for my mistake. KitKit yowled and hissed and did some kinda ninja move and bit my thumb. I dropped her and she landed with another yowl, a whirling cat move, and a faster-than-sight leap to Molly’s feet.
The scent of fear Molly was exuding instantly eased. Her not-familiar had helped her control her death magics. KitKit was a not-familiar because familiars didn’t exist. They were myth. KitKit’s abilities were a big secret, the revelation of which would subject Molly to ridicule and embarrassment. But she couldn’t be without the dang cat.
Disgusted with myself for reacting instead of letting the cat reach her mistress, I went to the sink and washed my wounds. My skinwalker metabolism would heal them faster than similar wounds on a human, and they would heal instantly the next time I shifted into Beast. For now, however, they stung like craz
y. But unless KitKit was rabid or had cat scratch fever, they weren’t life-threatening. I stared out at the night. In battle sometimes the hardest part was waiting for something to happen.
A boom shook the house. A zzzzzzzttttpowpowpow sssssss sound, ending this time with a slap on the tail end of the sizzle. The arcenciel seemed determined to get inside the house and was probably injuring herself on Molly’s wards.
Alex muttered, “I guess you already figured out that all coms are down. I don’t know what that thing is doing, but it’s affecting more than just the power. It’s like a mini–electromagnetic blast. I can use the tablets—ah shit. Now the tablets are down.”
Eli promptly head-slapped him. In his battlefield-mild tone, he added, “Language.”
Alex cursed again, but I think it was Klingon or Elvish or some fictional language, and no one else reacted. I was worried that the juvenile arcenciel’s light show would attract the attention of the cops, who would then descend and possibly get hurt. Or worse, attract the attention of a larger, mature creature, not Soul, but a stranger, and that the larger one would think the humans, the witch, and the skinwalker were the aggressors.
The arcenciel hit the house again and again; the floor vibrated under my feet. The ward beyond the windows spluttered and shuddered, the energies showing signs of cracking. Molly was sweating now, her perspiration full of adrenaline and its acrid breakdown chemicals. The cat was wrapped around Molly’s ankles, purring steadily. The boom sounded, harder, deeper. I shook my head and set my feet, oddly reminiscent of Molly’s stance.
