“Keen observation there Sherlock.” I tell him as I kneel down and check for a pulse on the Were, the one that held a deep burning undying hatred for me and had many times promised to tear me to bloody pieces and then eat those quivering pieces. Lately the only thing stopping him from making good that promise, was the no harm order that The Council had put out on me. This is the first time I have seen him since magically giving him a little shove into a bon fire, during what my lady love calls the difficulities of a few months ago.
But not being a total asshole, I check for a pulse on the poor mauled bastard anyway.
He has one.
Not sure whether to put that particular piece of info into the good or bad new category.
“He has a pulse we need to get him and us out of here.” I tell Marcus looking up at him.
Marcus nods and then digs out his cellphone and hands it to me. Power flares around him as he begins a strong enough translocation spell to carry all of us back to my aparatment.
I hit the speed dial button and it only rings once before Genevieve picks up on the other end of the line.
“Guess whose coming to dinner love…?” I ask her and then the connection is broken as Marcus wraps us all up in the spell.
I cringe a little, because I know that this is going to be a bumpy ride.
Chapter Twelve
Genevieve gasps in some alchemy of pity and shock as she kneels down beside the torn up man, lying bleeding on her faded carpet. She wastes no time asking any questions and begins immediately tending to his wounds.
“Bring me water!” She commands and shaking off the nausea and dizziness from the translocation spell, I push myself off of the wall that was holding me up and lurch into the kitchen. Pulling open the fridge I grap a bottle from our supply of the dozens of them on the lower shelf and bring it to her.
She holds the bottle to her lips and whispers an incantation under her breath, the bottle is suddenly lit from within by a slight shimmer of golden light. A fresh scent, smelling like a waterfall on a hot summer day fills the room.
The magic she is using is different from what Marcus and I are accustomed to, it is older, less organized and more primal. Elemental magic is powerful and capricious, the spell balances on a razor blade edge of helping or harming. Marcus gestures sharply and tries to nudge it in the direction we need it to go, with his magical strength.
I keep mine out of it, I don’t have enough control to dare make things worse than they already are.
Raising the bottle high above her head, she whisper another incantation and pours the water all over her patient.
I watch as far more water than the bottle could of possibly held, splashes across the unconscious Were.
As I watch the water washes away all of the blood and his face slowly relaxes from the painful grimace he came in with. His ragged breathing smooths and becomes deeper, as he slips into a deep sleep. As we watch his wounds begin to heal and fade away.
“I need a shower.” She tells us weakly as she stands up and goes into the bathroom.
“Did you know she could do that?” Marcus asks me quietly, staring at the Packmaster lying on our now soggy rug.
“No clue. Every single day brings new surprises.” I tell him with a shrug of my shoulders.
Which is true, to all who see her walking with me down the strip, she seems like a pretty ,young normal human female.
She isn’t.
Once she was a water nymph, bound to the fountains at the Bellagio Hotel to keep the tourists entertained. She then used her considerable power to not only escape her bonds, but to rescue me from a really bad situation.
This is where is gets weird.
She then was transferred into the physical shell of a Succubus, more specificly, the shell of the Succubus that was Marcus’s mother, well at least in a manner of speaking.
Did I leave out the part where she made a deal with the Devil to make some of this happen?
My bad.
Yeah, my life makes the most outrageous Jerry Springer episode look like a fucking Brady Bunch rerun.
All of that really just means that she isn’t human, she is something else and we are still in the process of figuring out just what that something else means.
The shower starts up and that is our signal, we both grab a beer from the fridge and sit down. Both of us keeping a wary eye on our guest.
“Talk to me.” He says simply as he settles into this chair and takes a long pull off of his bottle of beer.
So, I do.
I tell him everything I can remember from my encounter with the Fey, from the moment that they grabbed me up outside of the restaurant, to the moment I staggered out of the warehouse and back into our world. He doesn’t interupt even once, he just listens and nods occasionally.
We sit in silence for a little while.
The kind of silence that two good friends can manage to sit in.
“I hate Fey Seers, it is all vauge physic babble. It all tends to make sense long after what they predict actually happens. Them mentioning you playing a role in how things play out, doesn’t mean that you are any kind of chosen one, or that it is any heroic thing you do. It could mean anything from you not eating cheese on some random Tuesday or what movie you decide to watch next, something that you do or don’t do somehow ends up tilting the balance in some way.” He tells me as he goes and grabs another beer.
Our guest growls in his sleep, but is still looking more or less harmless curled up in the fetal position on my floor. Scars, old and new criss cross his muscular frame, but he is looking less torn up by the moment.
When he wakes up, hopefully he can tell us what that hell is going on.
When he wakes up, hopefully he doesn’t try and tear my guts out.
Pretty sure that I got the priority on that wrong.
Marcus feels it first, I can see the look of confused alarm cross his face as he turns and trys to take a couple of steps towards me.
I manage maybe a step towards him, before the full weight of the summoning spell from The Council gathers both of us in a nimbus of golden light, that builds towards a painful to look at, crescendo before winking out taking both of us with it.
Pretty sure the whole golden light thing is total bullshit and is just for dramatic effect, by the way.
True or not we are both gone by the time that my love turns off the shower and grabs for her towel.
That is the thing that I find that I am the most pissed off about, by the way.
I generally really like being there for that moment.
As most of you have probably figured out by now, it really sucks to be me sometimes.
The sound of the shower ending is the last thing that I hear, before the spell sweeps me into darkness.
Chapter Thirteen
The summoning spell doesn’t dump us in the Council Hall as expected, instead we slam hard into the floor of the head of The Council’s private chambers. The floor is cold marble, laid out in a intricate weaving of magical symbols, a depressing amount of which, I don’t have the training to recognize. She is lying on a dark leather couch, dressed in a red silk kimino with similar patterns woven into it in gold thread.
Helena Regret arches a perfectly plucked eyebrow at us.
“Good evening gentlemen, thanks for stopping by.” She greets us softly in her husky voice.
Marcus rises slowly, his fists tightly clenched by his sides as he struggles to control his temper. He is the head of a major house of Warlocks and is definitely not accustomed to being treated like this.
I am, so I get up just a little calmer than he does.
Not picking a fight with the single most powerful Sub Rosa in Vegas, falls right in line with my general survival plan.
“Calm yourself, Warlock. I apologize for the hasty and ungentle summoning, but this is off the official books and I was pressed for time. I had to act while the Council’s attention was elsewhere briefly.” She stands up as she speaks and there seems to be some sin
cereity in her mollifying tone.
He gives her a slow nod and unclenches his fists and dials down the power he was pulling to himself.
“Dabbler, your dance card has been pretty full lately. Odd that the pair of you keep ending up tangled up in events isn’t it?” She turns her attention to me and there is hint of accusation in her voice.
“Odd and dreadfully inconvenient.” I tell her with a shrug.
She speaks a word under her breath and her magic hits me like a sudden splash of cold water. It takes my breath away and for a moment all I can do is stand there as it works its way through me. It is a investigative spell and it is measuring me in countless ways for her.
The magic leaves me as suddenly as it hit and I stand there shivering a little from the after effects. She stands staring intently at me for a long moment, before gesturing towards a couple overstuffed chairs that I swear weren’t there a few seconds ago.
She seems subtly disappointed by whatever her reading spell showed her about me.
“Please sit, we have much to discuss and not a lot of time.” She tells us as she sits back down on the couch facing us.
Marcus and I exchange a quick glance, he gives me a small shrug and we both decide to pretend that she was asking not telling us and we sit our asses down in the fancy chairs.
Even I can feel how deeply shielded and warded this room is, nothing said or done here will be detected by others. My paranoid side whispers that she can disappear us right here and now and nobody will ever know what happened to us. Marcus is somebody in our world and that fact might slow her down for a moment, but not if she decides it is really necessary.
“Forces are at work here that we don’t fully understand, the Goblins have turned on some sort of dire machinery in their halls and it seems to be affecting the Seraphin to some degree. Lucifer walks the streets all but chortling with evil glee, while rubbing his hands together and hints at carnage to come. I don’t think he engineered what the Goblins are doing, but he is taking full advantage of it. The Fey whisper of prophecy that they don’t even comprehend and even our very own Libarian can not make heads nor tails out of the whole mess.” She paces before us restlessly while she talks, her body language screaming out the tension that isn’t showing up in her voice.
“There is a wounded werewolf in my apartment who says that an Angel was killing his pack.” I tell her grimly as she walks by.
“We are aware of it, an Angel swooped down and somehow pulled the beast out of one of them and put it into himself, so he could and I quote ‘become one of God’s righteous wolves’ end quote. He used the dying Were as a puppet to announce that little tidbit. Other Angels hauled him away before he could do much more than slaughter a few Weres.” She answers blandly as she continues to pace.
Pretty sure that the pack isn’t as cavileer about the whole ‘much more than slaughter a few Weres’ bit, but she takes a bit larger view of things than most of us do.
“Why did you bring us here? Surely with all The Council’s resources, you don’t need us to tell you what is going on? If you have questions, then asks them otherwise release us.” Marcus demands.
“I wish I knew why I brought you here, truth be told, I simply followed a gut instinct that I needed to see you. To talk to you, to try and make some sense of all this madness. Something is coming, and unlike the unofficial slogan of Vegas, I don’t think what happens here will stay here. I think the fate of the world is at stake.” She snaps at him, her cool finally broken, giving us a glimpse at the desperate rawness of her need to understand what is happening. At her need to control and fix the problem.
The smart ass in me wants to scoff at her drama, fate of the world is at stake, sounds like a line from a bad campy horror flick.
Bad news folks, it has the simple ring of truth to it.
She stops pacing and sits back down on the couch facing us and gives us an expectant stare.
So, we sit and we tell her everything that has happened since the Angel went postal in the bar, in what seems an enternity ago now, so much has gone down since then. Marcus and I take turns talking and we interrupt each other to fill in any gaps in the narrative. We tell every damn thing that we know or even suspect about what is happening.
Bad news again folks, it ain’t much.
She listens intently, only interrupting to softly ask the occasional clarifying question. When we are done she stands abruptly and resumes pacing the room.
“None of that makes any sense whatsoever, I feel like a pawn in a game so massive that there is no hope trying to grasp the scope of it. I fear that it will come down to surviving what is to come and doing enough damage control that we can come back from the damage done. That is not a point of view, I fear, that the council will embrace. Even if I am the head of it.” Her husky voice speaks of how unused to helplessness she really is.
Suddenly there is a loud and very insistent pounding at the door of her chambers.
Cursing under her breath in a language I don’t know or even probably will ever speak, she gathers a banishing spell to her and without warning hurls it at us.
It sweeps both of us away in a wave of cold darkness and raw magical power.
Then it dumps us hard and dirty back onto the floor of my apartment and for a few seconds we both just lie there stunned.
After I catch my breath, I notice a couple of things.
First thing is that the wounded were is now sitting on my shabby couch dressed in the Star Wars pajamas my love bought me and that I have never worn.
For the record they are way too small for him and he looks ridiculous.
He also looks alarmed and is pointing a shaking finger in the directon of Genevieve, who is leaning against the kitchen wall holding her very swollen belly and panting softly.
Yeah, her looking extremely pregnant is the second thing that I noticed.
“Don’t look at me Dabbler, I never saw this bitch before in my damn life! I just woke the hell up and she was like that!” Dominique tells me emphaticly.
Marcus struggles to his feet first and stumbles over to help me stand up as well and together we start to wobble over to her.
This has all the earmarks of being a very long and weird night.
Chapter Fourteen
Marcus flings a binding spell on our werewolf guest, locking him to the couch more securely than the strongest bong hit and then even as exhausted as he must be, manages to transport himself, myself and my suddenly quite pregnant girl friend to the nearest form of help.
Us Sub Rosa types, don’t have a lot of choices when we need medical care.
Being basically supernatural is totally a pre existing condition.
Most of us are pretty damn durable all things considered, but none of us are immune from harm in one form or another. When we are hurt we can’t go to human doctors, so we rely on what we have available to us.
We go to a small underground walk in clinic of sorts, staffed by Greg Smith and a handful of volunteers. He is an Alchemist slash hedge witch of sorts, truth be told not a very good one.
Well, truth be told at least not a very reliable one.
Greg is kind of a fuck up.
Back in his day he used to work feverishly at the classic Alchemist task of turning lead into gold, after years of study and experimentation he managed to turn gold into lead, but in the process, did two quite unexpected things.
Thing one was blow his workshop into damn smithereens.
Thing two was to somehow in the process of that become, basically immortal.
He is well over eight hundred years old now, but looks like the same thirty something screw up he did back in the day. These days he drinks too much, smokes like a chimney, chases anything his unfocused eyes tells him is female and tends to the bumps and scrapes of our community.
As we walk in, he is busy extracting a silver bullet from a stocky Hispanic male werewolf’s hairy ass, with a pair of surgical tongs and an ungentle approach. We could hear wolf boy howling before we e
ven hit the small dirty waiting room between us and the doc.
“Shut up you big baby! Next time keep it in your damn pants and don’t get distracted when you know that a bounty hunter is tracking you. Your own damn fault it is.” He tells his patient as he yanks the bloody bullet free, his Eastern European accent adding a guttural thickness to his speech.
Yeah, his bed side manner kind of sucks.
“What you want?” He snaps at Genevieve and I as we walk into the place, hand in hand.
“She is pregnant. We don’t know how it happened…” I start to tell him over the howls and moans of the patient he already has on the table.
He arches a perfect eyebrow, crosses his blood stained arms and give me a level stare.
“Well my Dabbler friend, I am on a limb going to go out and imagine it had to do with all of the sex that you two have been having. That will be one silver coin. Next patient please.” He barks out while waving at the nurse on duty. She nods solemnly and hands him a bottle of vodka from which he takes a healthy pull.
Yeah, his bedside manner could use a little work.
He hands the moaning werewolf a hello kitty bandaid and a cheap sucker and shoos him away from the table as he beckons us towards it, once he realizes that despite his genius pronouncement, we aren’t leaving.
Genevieve lets out a low moan of pain, soft really barely noticeable and all of a sudden the drunken little shit is all business.
Gently he lowers her onto the table and pats her arm softly as she settles in, he snaps his fingers and his assistant puts two pillows under her head.
He doesn’t have an xray machine or CAT scan set up, instead he has to rely on his own talents and senses.
Closing his eyes he holds one hand over her swollen abdomen and says a secret chant under his breath. I can feel the cool whisper of magic wash across the room and then fade away.
Letting out a shuddering breath, he touches her swollen belly once and smiles at her brightly. He turns to me and gives me a broad wink.
Sin City Angels: The Dabbler Novels Book Two Page 5
