by Chloe Garner
Samantha crossed her legs, leaning back further in her seat, speaking for the room now, for Jalice’s benefit.
“I told you once that there were all kinds of groups who did what the Rangers do,” she said. “Jalice is a member of one of the more hypocritical groups.”
“You speak deceit,” Jalice said. Sam felt Samantha smile, catty, unmoved.
“They hunt demons, true enough, and we end up aligned with them from time to time in… sensitive situations, but their definition of demon is a bit non-traditional.”
“I’d heard your mate looked like an ape,” Jalice said.
“She’s here because she wants to kill you, or because she wants something?” Sam asked.
“Oh, she wants something,” Samantha said. “But she considers me to be a demon by virtue of being a magic user.”
“Ah,” Sam said.
“Using the enemy’s power against him is not wrong,” Jalice said. “You won’t shame me.”
“Fun fact,” Samantha said, glancing up with Sam, humor sparkling in her eyes. “Demon hunters like Jalice are some of the most proficient witches I know.”
“Is that so?” Sam asked, turning his head to look at Jalice again.
“You won’t shame me,” Jalice said. Samantha shrugged.
“What do you want, Jalice?”
“I’d heard that the enemy had swallowed you whole again,” Jalice said. “Benin said you would fall, but I’d always hoped that, being spat out once, you’d stay out.”
“I appreciate your concern,” Samantha said. “Speak.”
Jalice dropped her hood back onto her shoulders, revealing long, dark hair.
“I need your help.”
“Why haven’t you asked Peter?” Samantha asked. Jalice looked to the sides of the room, her eyes quick and suspicious.
“Redly tried to kill him last week.”
“That does put a damper on any working relationship,” Samantha said. “Is he okay?”
“The demon lives,” Jalice said.
“I mean Redly.”
Scorn. Scorching scorn. Sam pressed back a smile. Samantha’s people were nothing if not contentious.
“What do you ask of me?” Samantha asked, shifting in her chair.
“There is a family of demons like a termite hill out in the swamps, taking people. We’ve lost three to them, trying to excise the disease. We require your help.”
“Was that a request or a demand?” Sam asked.
Samantha looked up at him again.
“She considers it within her authority to order me around.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Does she, now?”
Samantha smiled.
“She does.” Her attention turned back to the dark-cloaked woman. “Why should I help you?”
“It’s your role,” Jalice said. “You have a responsibility, and the woman I knew all those years back wouldn’t walk away from it.”
Sam felt himself edge forward. Jalice had known Samantha before he had. He was always curious about what she’d been like, no matter how many stories she told him from that period. Her stories were clouded with a lot of insecurity and rage about Carter, and he found that outsiders had a very different picture of her.
“You have Bane and Argo to pick from,” Samantha said. “You know my region.”
“Wandering and unreliable, just like them,” Jalice said. “Neither of them would claim this land. Argo doesn’t like to get his feet dirty and Bane is tired.”
Sam had to admit, that did sound like them.
“Did you ask?” Samantha pressed.
“I came to you,” Jalice said. “You will help me, or you will heap dishonor on your own head and deny my request.”
Samantha sighed loudly.
“You know my region, Jalice.”
The other woman stood, stony, and waited.
“You didn’t even ask?” Samantha asked. “I can’t just go charging in when they haven’t even had the chance to tell you no.”
“Termites?” Sam asked. “Literally, or figuratively?”
Samantha looked up at him mentally, without turning her head, trying to tease out what he’d heard. Jalice’s dark eyes turned to him with a bladelike precision.
“What do you know about it?” she asked.
“I’ve seen the inside of one,” he said, the memory of it seeping back in, disquieting him. He’d seen a lot of things, in his life. He’d killed things that made a big mess when they died, and he’d watched Samantha do some remarkably cruel things to demons, but nothing held a candle to the hellfactory he’d explored psychically, way back when that had still been a physical challenge to him.
“Demon,” Jalice snarled.
“Psychic, if it matters,” Samantha sighed. “You’re serious? They’ve burrowed?”
Jalice raised her hands to make a symbol.
“Darkness descended,” she said, glaring at Sam. “My soul is my own.”
“Don’t know what I’d do with it,” he answered. Samantha was growing weary of Jalice.
“Jalice,” she said. “Focus. Tell me about the colony.”
“Wait,” Sam said. “No. You don’t get to come in here and call her a demon. She may think it’s funny, but it isn’t.”
“Sam,” Samantha said. “Don’t need rescuing, here.”
“It’s not about you,” he said, a lie, to be sure, but one with enough truth to it that she begrudgingly let him go. He stepped down, and Jalice stepped back. He felt the lash of warning from Samantha that Jalice might be unexpectedly violent. He brushed it off, taking a loose grip on time and watching out in front of himself. It caused wicked echoes, trying to talk like that, but it kept him safe.
“You don’t get to come to Anadidd’na Anu’dd’s home,” he said, hearing Samantha murmur the correct translation behind him, Eloin Anadidd’na Anu’dd, but ignoring her technical correction. “You don’t get to walk into this room and call her evil to her face. Think what you want, but you will respect her more than that.”
Jalice’s hand twitched by her hip and he jerked his chin to the side.
“Don’t.”
Eyes warned him that she was on the edge, and he stood straight, waiting.
“She is what she is,” Jalice said darkly. “I won’t treat her as something else.”
“I’ve never known anyone who has done more for people than her,” Sam said. “If you can’t see that, then you don’t deserve her help.”
“Sam, that’s too far,” Samantha said, standing.
“The demon takes many forms,” Jalice said. “If you won’t help, I’ve wasted my time, and the lives of my friends.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help,” Samantha said. “Just that you’re putting me in a bad spot politically.”
“He doesn’t speak for you?” Jalice asked, jutting her chin at Sam. Samantha laughed.
“He does, but so do I. He’s going to have to get used to your beliefs, but I’m not going to lie and tell you that I don’t appreciate him saying it.”
Sam took a step back, turning so he could see Samantha. He got it. People treating her badly was just a part of her life - one she’d long accepted - but he didn’t have to be happy about it. She sent him warmth, then stepped around him to speak more confidentially to Jalice.
“I will come and I will do what I can,” Samantha said. “You knew that I would. You’ve got to keep your temper in check, though. Picking fights just wastes everyone’s energy.”
“I won’t compromise my purity for your convenience,” Jalice said.
“How about your pride?” Samantha asked. Jalice didn’t answer. Samantha sighed.
“They haven’t gone underground in a swamp,” she said. “How are they keeping everything contained?”
There are hills in swamps,” Jalice said scornfully. “They keep above the water, but out in the muck where no one but the alligators go.”
“That’s one way to get rid of a drained body,” Samantha said. “How
did you find them?”
“People talk,” Jalice said. When Samantha sighed pointedly at her, she shrugged. “Stories from swamp people are hard to find truth in, but it’s there. We listened, and then we looked.”
“All right,” Samantha said. “I have a couple of things I need to do here, and then we’ll come down there and help you.”
“People are dying each day,” Jalice said.
“And you could have called instead of showing up here in person for dramatic effect.”
“You don’t use a phone,” Jalice said. “Everyone knows that.”
Samantha sighed.
“No, I don’t have a phone. It’s different. I use them.”
She looked at Sam and it took him a fraction of a second to figure out what she wanted.
“Oh,” he said. Strange. Okay. “Yeah. Give me… your cell phone?”
Jalice took a perfectly modern smart phone out of her pocket and he put his number into it. Swords and psychics and witches, and they called each other on cell phones. He wasn’t sure why it hadn’t struck him as strange before.
“Abby?” Samantha asked the ceiling. “Keep an eye on her, okay? Lemme know if there’s anything I need to know.”
“You still speak to the dead?” Jalice asked. “Necromancer. I hoped you would abandon it.”
Sam felt Samantha press back the urge to correct her. She did talk to the dead, once in a while, but Abby was alive and in New York. Sam frowned. Surely Jalice knew that, if she knew the rest of them.
“That,” Samantha said. “Being difficult for its own sake.”
“We never stop trying to rescue the lost,” Jalice said. “Come quickly. I’ll meet you at the hall.”
“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” Samantha said.
Jalice turned, her lightweight cape flaring out behind her. Without looking back, she left.
<><><>
Ash sat on the end of his bed, playing video games. Samantha leaned against the doorway for a moment, just watching, before she knocked on the doorframe. He looked up, then smiled.
“Hi, Sam,” he said.
“Hey, Ash,” she answered. “Someone just came… We’re going to have to go to Louisiana for a little while.”
“I’ve never been to Louisiana,” he answered, standing.
“No, just Sam and me.”
“Oh,” he said, shaking his head. “Yeah. Sorry. So… I’m just going to stay here?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”
He glanced at the floor, then pushed shaggy blond hair up out of his face.
“Okay. Um… Jason’s gone, isn’t he?”
“He and Kara left about an hour ago.”
“Did Kelly stay?”
Samantha shook her head.
“No, he went with Jason,” she told Ash. The boy was sixteen, physically there on the verge of manhood, but in the awkward stages of transition. It didn’t help that his parents had very recently been killed.
Ash was a Child.
Aside from being very sweet and earnest, it meant that anything he believed tended to become true. To simply be true. She knew that, but he didn’t. He just knew that it was strange that he was able to close his eyes and be somewhere else, when he chose, and that he wasn’t supposed to do it in public.
“What do I do?” he asked. She wished she had a good answer for him, but she didn’t. “David and Jenny are leaving today,” he continued.
Samantha very nearly smacked her forehead. She hadn’t thought about them all day. Worse, she hadn’t considered that they were here, much less that they were leaving. The last few days had been hectic, and both of them had basically disappeared as soon as the internet connection was live.
She didn’t want to leave Ash here on his own, but there was no safer place for him to be. She’d sent him to stay with Abby a few times while they’d been hunting down the demons that were after him, but she couldn’t ask Carter and Abby to take on that kind of risk full time, and there was no way she was going to send a teenage kid to stay with Carter, regardless of how warm and cuddly he was compared to how he’d been when she’d come to him.
Which left very few alternatives. She could count on one hand the number of structures that were fortified the way Carter had fortified Eloin. Nuri and Kjarr’s club was, albeit with dark magic, but a kid didn’t belong there any more than he did with Carter. There were two or three places in Europe and she’d heard rumors of one in Shanghai, though she’d never been there. And that was it. Neither she nor Carter had thought that she was interesting enough to justify the firepower he’d spent here, when she’d bought and fortified the house with Justin, and while her apartment in the city with Sam had been bulletproof, it was designed against a very specific set of bullets.
The number and variety of demons who would be willing to come after Ash, and the creativity they would have shown in finding ways to manipulate him, justified an entirely different level of security.
Samantha understood this.
Carter had gone over the building plans with her, drawing back the curtain on any number of angeltongue symbols hidden in the architecture itself, and then he’d given her the list of spells and potions he’d used on it. She was still studying them in the evenings, untangling the complexity of the interactions, there. She’d almost been afraid to let Jason in the front door, after she’d gotten the magic list on Eloin, given how intricate the magic was on his sword, Anadidd’na. The possible interactions were… beyond her ability to comprehend, let alone predict, and that was saying something.
Ash had to stay here, unless he was in the company of one of a few select people who had the skillset to defend him. She wasn’t sure he could be killed, but if she clued him in on that… well, you didn’t tell a Child what he was. Weird things start to happen. His power is in faith. Pure, absolute faith. Faith like a child.
Faith requires an element of doubt.
When a Child’s faith can make anything true, the line between faith and fact becomes very faint, and the literature on them was so thin that Samantha didn’t know what would happen if Ash stumbled across it.
So she kept most of what she knew about him to herself. Sam had guesses as to what ‘Child’ meant, but she didn’t confirm any of it.
Doubt, uncertainty, was her friend.
It frustrated her how little she knew about past Children, even how many there had been, but she understood the need for secrecy and how hard it would be to actually know anything about them with confidence.
And in the face of that lack of knowledge, both she and Carter defaulted to extreme conservatism.
They played defense.
The poor kid.
“I need to go talk to David,” she said. “We probably won’t leave before tomorrow morning.”
Ash chewed the inside of his cheek.
“You’re sure I can’t come with you?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Until we know more, I can’t let you out of the house.”
He nodded glumly and sat back down on his bed. She hadn’t the heart to tell him that she didn’t have a clue when or if house arrest would end.
Poor kid.
“I’m going to go talk to David. I’ll come back here after. Okay?”
He nodded at her, the goodwill there in his eyes an indictment.
Sam felt her unhappiness and sent her a query. He was packing in their room. She sent him anger. Outwardly-directed anger. His response was patience and mild amusement. Yes, he was packing the good potions.
David and Jenny’s temporary lodgings were on the human wing of the mansion.
She knocked on the door and Jenny opened it, smiling.
“Sam,” she said. “Come in.”
Most of the bedrooms in the mansion were designed for temporary or non-human tenants. A bed, a television, and enough electronics and fixtures to make the place livable for a few days. Kelly had one, as did Maryann, and neither of them used it as anything other than
a personal space when they needed it.
The human wing had suites with bathrooms and kitchenettes and real furniture. After the expense of building and warding the place, Carter had probably barely blinked at what it cost to furnish it, but everything was high-end and preposterous.
Examining that thought as it went by, Samantha wondered if Carter hadn’t gone over the top simply to annoy her.
It would somehow be right in character.
“How are you finding the room?” Samantha asked.
“Right where we left it,” David called from the bedroom. Jenny rolled her eyes.
“It’s very nice. It might be nicer than our house.”
“Our house doesn’t wander, either,” David called. Jenny sighed.
“Stop while you’re ahead, dear,” she called back. David came out of the bedroom, grinning, with a pair of black nylon gym bags slung over his shoulders. Their luggage.
“I was about to go load the car,” he said. “I’m glad we caught you on the way out.”
“Simon,” Samantha said. “We need to talk.”
David, long known to Sam and Jason by his online handle, sat the bags down at the door and came back.
“All right,” he said. “Come on in here.”
Samantha followed David and Jenny into the kitchen and sat down at the small table.
“What is it?” Jenny asked. “Is everything okay?”
Samantha winced her eye, thinking of the poor kid playing his video games on his own.
“It’s Ash,” she said. “Well, start at the beginning, it’s that Sam and I need to go to Louisiana to deal with some stuff there. Jason and Kara left this morning.”
“Did I miss them?” David asked. “Damn. I meant to be there.”
Samantha smiled.
“He’s still used to you being online.”
“Like he ever talked to me,” David said. “It was always Sam.”
“I know. He’s just not used to you being a real live person.”
David smiled. Jenny shook her head, putting her hand palm-down onto the table quietly.
“What about Ash?” she asked.
“There aren’t any grown-ups left,” David said. Samantha nodded.
