by D. Levesque
“Can’t guarantee that. But I will make sure that the next purple fireball is yours.”
“Gee, thanks,” I tell him with a sneer.
“Now, we truly need to get this information to your mother. We need to figure out our next target,” Lina tells us all, bringing us back to reality.
“Shit, yeah. Going after Sir William won’t be easy. He has so much security. He is better protected than the President himself,” I tell the girls. “I saw an exposé on him and saw the electronic security at his place in California. It makes the Pentagon look like a treehouse,” I tell them all.
“Oh, electronic security won’t be an issue,” Roger says. “I can get past all that. Now the guards, that is another thing, and if they have the Void in them?”
“Yeah. We need to talk to my mother,” I tell them with a sigh. Not that I mind my mother, but I never expected her to be my ‘handler’ as they say in the spy shows. I watch way too much of that shit, I think.
“All right. Since we are done here, and we eliminated our targets, let’s get back to camp,” I tell everyone.
“Yes! Can I get more coffee once we are there? New body, and I want to experience that high, as you call it, again,” Roger asks excitedly.
Rolling my eyes, I just say, “Sure,” causing all the girls to laugh.
10
The drive back was pretty quiet. We were all weary from the battle we had just been through. Once we got to the car, we all reverted back to our human forms. Roger decided to stay with us this time, in the car. He actually floated down into the seat next to me and just ‘sat’ there, offering comments now and then.
Lina was in the front with Johanne this time, and it was Sylvana who was sitting next to me, or more like leaning against me. She was asleep, so we were talking quietly, so as to not wake her up.
“So, what do you think your mother will want us to do?” Lina asks, turning and leaning partially over the seat.
“I would say she will want us to go after the target,” I tell her with a sigh. “My mother has always been single-minded in the things she wants. And if she wants this Void destroyed, I know she will have us go after this Stewart. Jesus, I still cannot believe he of all people is infected,” I say, shaking my head.
“Is he a big shot. I mean I have heard the name, but that big of one?” Sylvana asks me.
“Yeah, you could say that. This guy owns so many tech companies it’s nuts. Not only is he like the Elon Musk of software, but even Bill Gates has also hired him, or at least his company has. He has software that even the Pentagon is running. If he is infected, I don’t even know how many people in government he has turned.”
“Maybe we’ll be lucky and he is picky?” Johanne says, hesitantly.
“Well, we can hope. My concern is, what if has a mentor of his own and he isn’t the end of the line?”
“What do you mean?” Lina asks.
“What if, and I hope to God I am wrong, what if the top person in power isn’t the top person infected?” I say worriedly.
“Oh shit,” Lina says.
“Yeah, oh shit. We might be going after powerful people, only to find out that on the totem pole of the Void, they aren’t anything,” I tell them.
“A sort of feint?” Sylvana says.
“Yeah. A smokescreen. While we go after the powerful people in our society, they are really only little fish, but the powerful ones are walking around as normal looking people,” I say with a sigh. “Let’s see what my mother says.”
So for the next two hours, we drive quietly with no one talking, all absorbed in their own thoughts. Mine are mostly of what the fuck have I gotten myself into? Or more like, what the fuck did I get pulled into? Looking through the front humvee windshield, I see we are nearing the cabins. I had been so preoccupied with my thoughts that I hadn’t seen Johanne turn off onto the dirt road that led to the camp.
Johanne pulls up next to the other vehicles and parks. I have no idea if my mother is here yet, because honestly, she doesn’t travel by car. No idea how she travels, but she seems to get around pretty easily. As I get out of my side of the car, Trent walks around the cabin and heads our way.
“How did it go?” he asks me, looking at the girls, I guess to make sure we are all still alive.
“Good, though we now have a bigger fish to catch. Is my mother around?” I ask him, getting right to it in case he needs to contact her and get her here.
“Yes, she is waiting for you all in the main cabin. Was the target eliminated?” he asks me again point-blank.
“Yes, she is dead. And so are the rest of her staff,” I tell him, nodding.
“Good. Come,” Trent says, turning around and heading back the way he had come.
Once we get into the main cabin, I see my mother sitting with a cup of something hot. Knowing her, it’s tea. She always hated coffee. I, on the other hand, got hooked on it by my dad at the age of sixteen. Hearing us, she glances up with a questioning look.
“We got her,” I tell her. My God, I cannot believe I am talking to my mother about killing someone like it was a normal thing. “Also, some of her men were infected, but we found out that stabbing them with our silver daggers after they are dead kills the Void in them. And don’t worry, all our silver daggers are with Roger,” I tell her. Mind you, she should be good now after I bit her.
She places her mug of tea on the table, stands up, and walks over to me. She puts her hand on my cheek and then gives me a big hug. “I’m so glad you’re back in one piece,” she says.
“But I need to know. Am I safe from silver now?” she asks me worriedly.
“I honestly don’t know. I would assume so since you are now like the girls. Did you search for the magic inside you?” I ask her.
“I,” she starts. “Honestly, I have been afraid to even attempt it without you here, Brandon. Or at least one of the girls.”
“Oh! Let me!” Sylvana cries happily. With that, she grabs my mom’s hand and drags her quickly out of the main cabin. I assume to take her into our sleeping cabin. The two other girls, Johanne and Lina, follow them both, laughing.
I look at Trent, and he just shakes his head. “Don’t want to know, once was enough. You owe me for that,” he says gruffly.
“Done, you name it,” I tell him enthusiastically.
“Can you bite me? Not the full treatment!” he blurts. “Just for me to be safe from silver? I cannot protect your mother if I get shot with a silver bullet.”
“Well yeah, I guess. And honestly, I don’t need to bite you in the neck. As long as I have access to your veins, I can even bite you in the wrist area,” I tell him.
“Really?” says the big man, intrigued now.
“Yup, but it will still knock you out, so do you want to do it now?”
“Hmm, can we do it tonight? We will be staying here for a bit I think, and you can bite me before I head to bed?”
“Sure, we can do that,” I say, but then Johanne comes running into the cabin in a panic.
“Sylvana needs you! Your mom is going crazy,” she shouts.
“Shit,” I say and run out of the cabin. Once I get outside, I hear growling noises coming from the other cabin and what sounds like things being broken, which I hope is fucking furniture. I run through the door of the sleeping cabin and stop dead in my tracks. There is a huge female lion in the room, and she is swatting at Sylvana and Lina in their half-hybrid forms. The lion must be my mother, but she is fucking huge! And she is pissed about something.
“What’s going on!” I scream in the cacophony of noise.
My mother looks at me and growls menacingly.
“We don’t know. She isn’t herself. We can’t get through to her,” screams Sylvana in frustration. “It’s like she is locked up in her mind, and the only thing left is the wild lion.”
I change quickly into my Incubus form. It’s gotten so easy that I hardly feel pain anymore. Once transformed, I look at my mother in her lioness shape, and I put power into my wor
ds.
“Sleep,” I tell her, looking into her eyes. She shakes her head, almost as if she’s in a drunken state. Her eyes clear up and she is just about to jump at me, but I reach down and grab as much power as I can, before I look her in the eyes again and say in a deep growl that shakes the walls of the cabin, “Sleep, now!”
She shakes her head once more and then falls over sideways. Soon, she is snoring away.
“Shit, what the fuck happened?” I ask around the room.
“We aren’t sure,” Lina says, rubbing her head. “We tried to get her to reach inside her for the pool of power like you had us do. But when she closed her eyes to do so, unexpectedly that,” and she points to my mother’s lioness form, “came out instead and started attacking us. We had changed into our half-hybrid, just in case, which probably is a good idea. Will she be all right?” she asks, worry in her voice.
“I’m not sure. I don’t even know what happened,” I tell her, scratching my head in confusion. Walking up to my mother, I look at her. She is in her full lioness form, and she is a beautiful sight to behold. She is yellow in color, and her fur is lustrous. But what gets me is her size! I mean, she is almost on par with what I saw in my dreams with Titus. Titus!
“Wait, maybe it’s because she was injected with the blood of the progenitors before I was born? Maybe me pushing my own blood, now that it has been changed, caused some reaction?” I wonder out loud.
“Wait, your mother had the blood of an El─,” Roger starts.
“Yes, the blood of the progenitors,” I tell him quickly and give him a hard stare.
“Right, the blood of the progenitors injected into her?” he says lamely.
“Yeah, apparently. That’s how I was born with my current genetic makeup,” I tell him. I don’t remind him that he has my memories, but I guess he remembers since he says, “One moment, processing.”
After about a minute of silence, during which I make sure my mother still has a strong pulse, he comes back. “Well, shit, as you would say. Let me scan her,” he says.
Roger hovers over my mother, and suddenly blue laser lights start tracking across her body. When they get to her head they intensify, until suddenly the light goes out, causing some of us to blink.
“Well, that would explain it. Your mother’s blood, mixed with the progenitors’ blood, even though so minute, and then mixed with your blood, caused an animalistic reaction. She couldn’t control all three, so she, well, went wild,” Roger says.
“So, what can we do?” Sylvana asks him worriedly.
“Only one thing, we need to take the progenitors’ blood out of her,” Roger says.
“Right. Hmm. And how do we do that?” I ask Roger.
“The same way you put your blood in her. Take their blood out of her,” Roger tells me.
“What? And how am I supposed to do that?” I ask him.
“You will figure it out,” he says.
“Right,” I tell him with a groan.
I sit next to my mother and put my arm on her. Her fur is softer than I expected it to be. Closing my eyes, I try to think this through. When I pushed my blood down the Thread of Faith, it was simple. I just moved my blood. But now, how was I supposed to pull blood to me? And not only any blood. If it was my mother’s blood, I am sure it would be easy, but I am supposed to find this blood that is barely there in her and pull it out? Right.
Can like call to like? Or more like, can my blood call out to Elveesian blood? Thinking about it that way, I look at the Thread and think of using it as a beacon of sorts. I know that a lot of this magic stuff is visualization. What if I imagine I am using the Thread as a lightning rod? Not that I want to attract lightning, but just the Elveesian blood in my mother. So that means I would need to imagine somehow pulling the blood towards it.
So I look down the Thread at my connection to my mother’s blood, send out what is essentially a call of ‘Elveesian come to me,’ and I wait. After a couple of minutes, there aren’t any changes and I start to wonder what I am missing. Magic! Is that the missing component? Going deep to take a small amount of magic from my wellspring, I push a tiny bit through my Thread. I am really not sure if this will work. I know I can push blood, but magic?
I feel the magic go through the Thread, but what surprises me is it goes through easier than my blood. I mean, it seems to slide through quicker! I still have my hand on my mother, so I can feel her body vibrating. Not shaking, vibrating. Then, the lighting rod I had set up gets hit with a drop of blood. That’s it-a single drop-and it gets absorbed down my Thread and into me. I almost get the impression that the blood drop is looking around inquisitively and nodding, and then it simply disperses. My mother stops vibrating under my hand.
I feel her shifting, and looking down, I see she is transforming back to her human shape. I move quickly and place her head in my lap, so she doesn’t hurt herself. Once the transformation is over, my mother blinks her eyes open as if waking up from a deep sleep.
“Hi,” I tell her with a smile.
“Hi back,” she says softly. “What happened?”
“Well, it seems you reached for your magic and all hell broke loose. You attacked the girls- don’t worry, they are fine” I say quickly at the panicked look on her face, “and I ended up having to use the Voice on you to make you sleep,” I tell her.
“Do we know what caused it?” she asks me, hesitantly.
“Yeah, the progenitor’s blood in you. Roger thinks that with the mixture of your blood, my blood, and its blood together, your body didn’t know what to do, so it reverted to its feral version.”
“My lioness,” my mother says, with a sigh.
“Your lioness, which by the way mother, looks fucking badass!” I tell her with a grin.
She slaps me hard on the arm holding her and says “language,” but she laughs, letting me know she’s not really upset.
“Well,” she says with a shiver, “I now know what it feels like to go wild. I did not like it one bit.”
Right, I remember them telling me that some Werefolk go wild and are hard to bring back to normal. I am sure for my mother, who has always been, for lack of a better word, a control freak, this would have been extra unsettling.
“But you are good now,” I tell her. Nodding, she slowly sits up and looks around at all the concerned faces. She sees the girls.
“I am sorry for hurting you, if I did,” she tells them.
“It’s all good,” Lina says with a grin.
“Yeah, we are just glad you are all right,” Johanne says.
“You gave us a big scare, but we still haven’t accomplished what we came for,” Sylvana says, sitting down in front of my mother.
“You want her to try it now?” I ask her in surprise.
“Why not?” she says, looking at me. “She isn’t injured. We aren’t injured.” Turning back to my mother, she says, “Did you want to try again to reach that magic?”
Before I can tell them to give my mother some time, she blurts out, “Yes!” Throwing my hands up in the air, I get up and go stand next to Trent. I can tell he is visibly relieved.
“She is good?” he asks me, still watching my mother like a hawk.
“She is. She is a tough person,” I tell him.
“That she is,” he says with a sigh. “That she is.” Damn, I need to get him alone one night and just ask him questions about my mother.
“Now, what I want you to do is what you were doing before. Reach down,” Sylvana looks at me quickly. “She is all right for this now, right?”
“Yes, the blood that was in her is gone and is in me now,” I say with a smile.
“Good,” she says, looking back at my mother, who honestly looks like a child on Christmas morning, I think with a chuckle. “I want you to reach down and imagine inside you a well of power. I want you to picture first what size it seems to you. Don’t rush it. Take your time.”
My mother closes her eyes and does what Sylvana told her to do. I can see a frown start to
appear on her face, but then it clears up in surprise.
“I feel it! I can feel almost like a container of power! Is this what magical power feels like?” she says in awe and excitement.
“Yes, what size did you feel it to be?” Sylvana says, just as excited
Closing her eyes, my mother takes a deep breath and then says hesitantly, “It feels like the size of a small pond like you would find in a park?” she says.
“Like maybe the size of a large swimming pool?” Sylvana asks her.
“Yes! That’s a perfect analogy. It feels like the size of a large swimming pool!” she tells her, opening her eyes.
“Now, all we need to do is, later on, show you how to cast a spell,” Sylvana says with a grin.
“Nope,” my mother says and stands up quickly. “No need.” With that, she lifts her hand up.
“Paina nala thula melo,” she intones, and a bright ball of light hovers over her hand.
“It worked!” she cries excitedly and laughs.
“How?” Sylvana asks her in shock, standing up quickly herself.
My mother looks at her with a big grin and says, “You forget, I have an assistant and half daughter who is a Half-Elf and can cast magic herself. I have been watching her for hundreds of years, and we have talked about it. And there has never been a rule about not teaching it to Werefolk, only humans. So we had long discussions over tea on magic, and its uses. I might not have been able to cast it, but I always wished I could. And now I can!” she says, giggling.
Did my mother just giggle? Looking over at Trent, I see he is in just as much shock as I am, and I don’t think it’s because she can do magic.
“Never saw her giggle before?” I ask him. He turns to me and shakes his head. I turn back to my mom and notice that the ball of light is gone.
She walks up to Lina and grabs her hand, and that is when I notice the large gash on Lina’s arm. Shit, how did I miss that? My mother puts her hand over the wound and is about to cast heal, but I stop her.
“Mom, instead of saying the words out loud? Want to try something?” I ask her.
