In a flash, my plans went up in smoke, except one faint hope. “Is there any chance I could beat Eichmann?”
He looked me up and down, as though seeing me for the first time. “Honestly? No, not without a lot of training and more wins under your belt. He’s accumulated his power by attacking other sorcerers. Most of the time he doesn’t buy talent. Instead, he steals slaves from someone else.”
That was how my last owner head gotten me, by attacking my previous owner. It was a lot cheaper than buying gladiators on the open market.
“Fuck!” I said. “Sorry, Travis. I’ll watch my language. Dammit. How am I supposed to get her back now?”
Katie patted my arm. “I guess you’d better hope that Ian still has room for another disciple. The only way you’re going to get Dana is by fighting for her and winning.”
I glanced at him and looked away. Speaking to no one in particular, I said, “I’ve been free for such a short time. It really has been amazing. And Katie needs my help.”
Ian shrugged. “It’s completely your choice. I do have one slot for a disciple still available. We could both try it on a see-how-it-goes basis. Either of us could back out with a week’s notice to the other.”
It was an incredibly generous offer, and I felt like a real idiot for not snapping it up right away. But Katie’s needs had to come first.
“Don’t decide yet,” he said, “but let me know in the morning.” With those words, he stood and walked back into the house.
“You’d be stupid not to take the deal,” Katie said.
I didn’t doubt her in the least. “You’ll need help for a few months.”
She laughed. “We have a nanny lined up. I’d hate to lose your companionship so soon, I feel a great friendship beginning, but we can hire hundreds of helpers if we need them.”
I shook my head. “You won’t be on your feet for a while.”
She laughed. “I’ll be fine in a day or two, and Tess will be around for at least a week. If you’re going to save Dana, you need to start training hard.”
“Okay, here’s two other things. First, I’m being selfish, as usual. You remind me so much of my mother. I’d hate to leave you.”
She beamed at me. “What a marvelous compliment! But sometimes we have to make temporary sacrifices for others, like your sister. Learn what you need from Ian, free your sisters and mom, then come back here. Assuming we don’t fall into the sea, I’ll be waiting for you.”
The lady had an answer for everything. “Here’s the worst problem. Basically, I hate men. Every single damned one of them I’ve known has screwed me in the end, and for most, I mean it literally.”
She stroked my cheek. “You have every right. They’ve done you wrong. But Ian’s different. I know him very well, and he’s as honorable as they come. Plus, you couldn’t find a better teacher.”
Coming from her, that meant a lot. I said goodbye to them both then stood.
Before I left, she said, “One last thing. Keep a close watch on your anger. When you’re ready to deal with it, I might be able to help.”
Everybody around there seemed to read me like an open book. “What anger?”
She smiled and waved goodbye.
I went searching for Ian and found him in the library talking on his cell phone.
He waved me into the room. I half-listened as he talked to someone about a rescue mission planned for next Monday.
When he got off the phone, I said, “I don’t need until tomorrow. Thank you for your very generous offer. I accept.”
He poured two glasses of cognac from a bottle on a table nearby and handed me one. “Perfect. Here’s to a happy alliance, and may all sorcerers rue the day we joined forces.”
We both drank and stood silent for a moment. Then he said, “We plan to leave Friday morning. I’ll induct you as my disciple before then. How about early tomorrow?”
It was time for me to remember what servitude felt like. “Sir, that’s perfect. I live to serve, sir.”
He looked at me askance. “So, that’s how it’s going to be, eh? I’m no slave driver, but still you worry.”
“It’s baked into my DNA.”
“Mine, too. We’ll come to terms eventually. In the meantime, do you have an e-reader?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ll send you two books to study. The first is a series of children’s fables, or so they seem. It will give you a good start on Holar’s fighting magic. The sooner you stop using that dark magic to protect yourself, the better. The second is a book I wrote, a biography of Gill Carmichael. It will give you a great understanding of what a determined witch can accomplish. Neither book is publicly available, so you’ll have to sideload them. Can you do that?”
“No problem, I do it all the time.”
-o-o-o-
RIGHT AFTER LUNCH, Ian, Laura, Tess, Christina, and I headed to the private beach at the cliff house. Sure enough, Ian had towed a small trailer behind his SUV that contained a couple of three-person kayaks. He’d never visited Gill’s and Katie’s new home, so I gave him directions.
His eagle, Lazarus, flew overhead. That bird was creepy, with its enormous claws and beak, but he hadn’t attacked me yet.
Before we got too far down the road, I asked Ian, “How do you know the ocean won’t be too rough today?”
“The Coast Guard posts up to date conditions at sea, including how large the waves are along the coast. Except for the rogue waves, of course, which come out of nowhere.”
I knew that too damned well. Hopefully, it wouldn’t happen again in my lifetime.
When we got to the house, Ian, Laura, and Christina insisted on checking the place out. Then Ian drove the SUV with Tess and me down the access road as far as he could. I’d told him about the tree trunk blocking the road, so he’d brought a large chainsaw.
“That toothy machine looks dangerous,” I said. “Are you sure you know how to use it?”
He stood with his hands on his hips. “Are you questioning my manhood, lady? I grew up on a farm, and my parents heated their house with a wood stove. Unfortunately, I have way too much experience with these things.”
And he didn’t seem to be kidding. The trunk was about twelve feet long and two feet in diameter at its narrowest point. He chopped it into four pieces, and he, Tess, and I lifted each piece and tossed them over the side of the road. The giant chunks of wood tumbled down the hillside and made a satisfying thunk when they hit the bottom.
By now, Laura and Christina had walked down the road behind us. They got in the back of the SUV because the bottom part of the road was covered with mud. Ian drove through it with no problem, crunching over smaller pieces of driftwood and piles of dead kelp. One advantage to becoming Ian’s disciple was I wouldn’t have to help clean up this mess up for Gill and Katie. Luckily, they were rich enough to hire pros.
Ian drove down onto the beach and out onto the sand. He and I unloaded the kayaks and carried them down to the edge of the water. The tide was mostly out, which made the distance farther. Laura and the others carried armfuls of gear, mainly paddles and safety equipment.
Neither Tess nor I had ever kayaked before, so we were basically dead weight. After we got our life vests and helmets on, Ian explained the basics of boating in general and kayaking in particular. Then he put me in the front of one kayak, which was floating in knee-deep water. Christina sat in the seat behind me, and Ian took the back, where he could steer using foot pedals that controlled a tiny rudder. Tess and Laura rode in the second kayak.
It took me a few minutes to get the hang of paddling. The paddles had blades on each end, and they weren’t lined up with each other. Christina was an old hand at this, and she explained how to rotate the paddle so the blades were oriented in the water correctly. I had no idea why it had to be so complicated, but they obviously knew what they were doing. That had to be enough. If something went wrong, I could always abandon ship and swim for shore, except t
hat the water was damned cold.
It was surprisingly hard to get the boat out beyond the surf. Large waves came straight at us, only twenty seconds or so apart. The kayak was heavy, but the front tipped up and down sharply with each wave as it hit us. It took me a minute to figure out how to catch a breath between each deluge. Being in front, I got soaked the most.
In addition, each wave knocked us backwards, so despite paddling my heart out, we didn’t seem to be making much progress. Then Katie and Tess shot ahead of us somehow, and Tess made some joke about me looking like a drowned puppy. That made Christina burst out laughing, which told me she thought the description was spot-on.
“If it was rougher,” Ian said from behind, “we’d have to wear wetsuits, but after we get past the breakers, we should dry out.”
Damn, this water was freezing. My teeth chattered, despite it being a warm, sunny day. I had worn a long sleeve synthetic shirt and pants, and I was soaked to the skin. Not for the first time it seemed like Mother Nature had it out for me.
Finally, we made it past the breaking waves, and I put my shoulders into paddling. I was a battle-hardened warrior not a pansy. Christina and Ian rowed faster, too, and we shot past Laura and Tess. I said something to them about being sissies. Something about this experience had brought out the snotty little kid in me.
After we got farther out, the waves rolled under us, but the swells were high. It was like riding a roller coaster that went eight feet up and down constantly. My stomach turned queasy, but after my wisecrack about being a sissy, I couldn’t say anything.
Christina and Ian were obviously hard-core kayakers, because they coordinated with short, crisp phrases. I tried to pull my own weight, but I could hear their paddles splashing in the water much more often than mine.
Ian pointed us at the group of islands visible from the cliff house. It was easy to hear the seals barking across the water, and as we got closer, I could see their heads bobbing up and down as they swam. They were in their element, unlike me. Because it was cloudy, there wasn’t any glare on the water.
Lazarus soared back and forth along the cliffs riding on the winds buffeting the cliffs. Ian had told me he could share bodies with certain animals, including the eagle, and I wondered what it would be like to see us from Lazarus’ perspective. We probably looked pitifully puny.
Gazing back out to sea, I searched for otters but didn’t see any at first. The islands were surrounded by beds of kelp that grew up from the bottom far below. The kelp fronds floated on the surface, and each stem had little balloons that were several inches in diameter attached to it. The balloons were about the size of an otter’s head, so I wasn’t having any luck distinguishing between the two.
After a few minutes, our boats were floating in the middle of kelp beds. For some reason, the fronds reminded me of hands reaching up for me. That didn’t make my stomach feel any better. Then it occurred to me. I’d never been out in the open ocean before. As a kid, during our few trips to the beach, we splashed around in the waves but never swam out for any distance.
Below the boats, the seafloor was at least thirty down, and only the gods knew what creatures swam below us. Whales could pop up at any instant, or worse, sharks. I rapped the hard, plastic shell of the kayak and wondered whether it was tough enough to survive a shark bite.
I almost asked Ian, but then I remembered Christina was behind me. I didn’t want to scare the hell out of her.
“There’s one!” she said a moment later.
I spun my upper body around, and almost pitched all three of us into the briny deep. “Sorry, where is what?”
With her paddle, she pointed off to our right. “Two otters, maybe a mom and dad.”
All I could see were kelp fronds and balloons, with a seagull floating calmly among them. Then a dark brown head popped up and vanished forty feet away. A few seconds later, I saw it again. The otter rolled onto its back and held something, maybe a crab, in its two hands and chewed like mad. Then a second one surfaced next to the first and ate.
They wouldn’t stay still for more than a few seconds at a time, but it was a lot of fun to watch them bobbing and weaving around constantly. Even better, after we got near the islands, they sheltered us completely from the big rollers. That meant the kayak barely rose and fell anymore. This was a blast.
We wandered back and forth among the islands watching the seabirds, otters, and seals living in their native habitat. I finally understood why Christina was so excited about sea creatures. They were amazingly graceful, she told me how the otters had almost been wiped out by fur trappers. Now they were making a comeback.
Then, a nasty thought hit me. This is going too well. Mother Nature hasn’t screwed with me yet today. I’m overdue.
Chapter 15
EVENTUALLY, LAURA SAID something about getting back to the vineyard for dinner. Christina fired back, “Okay, but first we have to circle the islands. We don’t know what great stuff is on the other side.”
I almost objected, but my stomach had settled down. And how long could it take to paddle for an extra quarter-mile or so?
Ian agreed, and turned the kayak south. Within a few seconds, we hit the eight-foot swells again, but my stomach seemed okay. Maybe I was getting my sea legs, as sailors liked to say.
But I never should’ve thought about sharks. We were most of the way around the islands, when I spotted a telltale dorsal fin sticking a foot out of the water.
“Big fucking shark!” I screamed. He seemed like he was going to pass about twenty feet in front of us, but then he veered to come straight at me.
Ian yelled, “Paddle steady. Don’t freak out.” He turned the boat to head straight for the closest island.
I tried to focus on paddling, but the shark turned and headed toward the front of our kayak—the part where my legs were stretched out.
My stomach thrashed and churned. Before I knew what’d happened the damned living torpedo reared out of the water and chomped on the front of our kayak.
“Hit him on the nose,” Ian said, “if you can without falling in to the water.”
That was exactly the image I didn’t want in my head—me falling into the ocean with that hungry killer.
Thought became prophecy. I twisted to the side, and smacked the giant fish on the nose with my paddle. He turned and hit the boat with his huge tail as he took off.
The force of the swat knocked me sideways and pitched me into the water. Out this far, it was much colder than near the beach. I couldn’t breathe. Not a damned bit.
I held onto my paddle, by some miracle, and it was just buoyant enough to stop me sinking.
This was the weirdest thing that’d ever happened in my weird life, but I didn’t panic. It seemed like I was watching myself from a distance. I was having trouble keeping my head above water.
Then it got weirder. I floated upward, completely out of the ocean, like one of the gods had pulled me away from harm.
I tried not to move, in case that might make the god drop me. I drifted over the front of the kayak and settled back into my seat, still holding my paddle. And I could breathe again.
“Way to go, Dad!” Christina screamed behind me.
It hadn’t been a god, but my Prince Charming. I turned around to see him grinning. “A little something I learned from Holar’s book. It’s worth the read.”
No shit! “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.”
My whole body was freezing, but my butt was particularly cold. It was because I was sitting in water. “I think the shark punctured our boat.”
“We’ll head behind this island and check,” Ian said as calmly as if he was talking about reading the weather in the newspaper.
Laura pulled alongside me in her kayak, reached into a bag, and pulled out a small clamshell case. A yellow powder was inside, and she took a pinch between her fingers. “You must be freezing. Stick out your tongue. This will warm you up long enough to get back to the beach.”
I stuck out my tongue, and the powder burned like crazy for a second. Was it made of chili pepper? But the pain dissipated as the heat flowed through my body, and within a minute, my tongue felt normal again. Even better, my chills had vanished. I felt like I was sunbathing on dry sand.
Laura and Tess backed away from me, and Ian steered us to a spot on the island where I could walk out of the water on a sloping rock that a couple of seals were basking on. As we approached, they rolled into the ocean and disappeared.
Maybe Mother Nature was justified in hating me. I hadn’t been all that animal-friendly in the past, and now I was harassing wildlife.
The sloping rock was slippery, so I crawled up it on my hands and knees.
“Check the front for punctures,” Ian said.
I pulled the front of the kayak up on the rock and quickly found a few deep gouges. “He got us good.”
Ian tossed me a nylon bag. “I put a dry towel and a roll of duct tape in the bag. Dry the hull and patch the holes. Can you handle it?”
Any idiot could’ve. “Sure, boss, sir.”
“Good, I’ll bale the water out back here while you’re doing that.”
It all seemed so normal. I’d been attacked by a great white, knocked into the water with him, and floated out. Just another day at the beach.
I dried the shell of the kayak and liberally applied duct tape. Lazarus dropped onto one of the rocks beside me, I supposed to check the quality of my work before we tried to head back to the beach. He didn’t seem to want to get too close, but I said “hi” to him several times. What else should I say to bird?
“The water’s too rough,” Tess said. “I’m not cut out for ocean voyages either.”
But she hadn’t stopped breathing like I did. “Why couldn’t I get any air?”
“Cold water shock,” Laura said. “It’s a common problem along the Pacific Coast. It’s instinctive, has something to do with preventing you from drowning in freezing water. You can’t breathe, so you can’t pull water into your lungs. Of course, without air, you can’t swim for long, and you sink like a stone. Folks die from it.”
Freedom (The Sorcerers' Scourge Book 4) Page 14
