by Faith Hunter
“I am yoked to a seraph,” he said, tone flat. “The second-unforeseen are neither human nor mage. They are sterile in every way—unable to manipulate creation energies, unable to procreate, unable to experience passion as humans or mages can. We are from both races and are neither. Mule. The term is appropriate,” he spat.
I didn’t agree, didn’t argue. Audric had been free. He had bargained that freedom away in exchange for his life and was now enslaved to the High Host. In the bargain, the life he once lived was gone. I understood. The reverse bargain was made for me once, and I had been severed from the slavery of all mages, a slavery that linked us all in one place, working together, living together, mind-to-mind and skin-to-skin. I had been forced into freedom. I too had grieved.
He spun my throwing blade and offered it to me hilt first. I took the small blade, tilting my head in acknowledgment of his pain. “When I bring her, you will have a ring of protection prepared?” he asked. “I do not relish having her infect every man in town.”
“I’ll be ready.”
Without another word, he whirled and disappeared, moving as only a master of savage-chi can, totally silent. Way cool master of death with hands of destruction. Bound to a seraph. Lost to the world. And majorly pissed off about it all.
Chapter 24
I shoved the kitchen table across the room, out of the way, its leaves let down until it was a fifth its full size. The chairs I hung on wall hooks. The loft was straight and neat. I was dressed in my black dobok, my hair braided close to my head and out of the way, unable to be used as a weapon against me. Only fools and movie stars went to war with hair long and flowing, begging to be twisted around an opponent’s fist and yanked.
All my blades were in place, secured up sleeves, down my collar, and strapped to my legs. The throwing blade had been cleansed by wiping it off on a strip of a rag followed by a quick thrust in a used bag of salt and a thorough rinsing in spring water. Once again it was freshly oiled and ready for battle.
Using a new bag of earth salt, I poured a salt ring on the kitchen floor, leaving a two-foot space open. I placed a chair in the center of the circle and gathered all the implements I might need: candles, a bell, matches, well water, my ceremonial blade, my three crucifixes on long chains, and duct tape. I didn’t add the Book of Workings. I didn’t have time to create and learn an incantation. This would be brute force.
From the depths of bags of salt, I removed stone jars filled with things that needed separating from the world, and placed them in the circle. I added a cloth and the bag of salt, just in case. Quickly, I closed the circle, feeling a momentary spike of fear. If I couldn’t fix the amulets, bringing them to power, and fully charge the stones, I was lost. I would have to start over, carving new defensive amulets. I had been shoving that fear away, but looked at it closely now. Nothing should be able to affect a mage’s amulets, draining them as had been done to mine. I had never heard of such a thing. And I didn’t know what to do.
Was the spelled amulet a simple one-time switch, a sort of on-off switch that temporarily incapacitated my amulets? Or had it been much more, like a computer virus, permanently disabling them? That was a question I hadn’t been able to look at or even acknowledge until now. The charm had been on the necklace, which I had placed near the sphere that activated the ward, and close to the walking stick hilt. Only those amulets had been affected, none of the others in the loft. This soooo sucked Habbiel’s pearly, scabrous toes.
I calmed myself and directed my attention to the amulets. The stones in the necklace and on the walking stick looked dangerously weak, all of them almost totally drained. With a thought, I directed creation energies into them. The irregular pulsing of the amulets instantly smoothed. Within minutes, they began to look healthy again. I breathed a sigh of relief. They hadn’t been poisoned. They had simply been drained.
Simply… Yeah, right. If that happened in battle I was toast. The amulets brightened, growing stronger.
Once, the act of recharging stones would have taken me hours and brought me dangerously close to the creation energies deep in the earth. Now, like the oldest, strongest mages, it took only moments for each stone to glow with strength. More than anything else, this speed of working with energy marked me as different from other neomages. For mages, different is dangerous. In Enclave, there were no unique mages. I was, once again, a singularity. A misfit, unconformed to either the world of humans or the world of mages.
The sky was brightening to a dull metallic sheen when I heard them on the stairs: the faint scuffling of boots, the muted sounds of muffled screams. I dropped the circle, smoothing a new aperture in the salt, opened the door, and stood aside. Audric entered, dressed in black battle dobok, a body tossed over his shoulder. It was wriggling, fighting, trussed, and gagged.
Audric carefully stepped between the edges of the salt opening and deposited Jane in the chair. She kicked him, catching him in the shin, hurting her toes. She screamed behind the gag in her mouth, rage and hate in the tones. Audric held her in the chair.
Stripping a length of duct tape, I secured her right leg to the right chair leg, wrapping the tape around and around. It would hurt like heck coming off, but that wasn’t my problem. Jane had welcomed a succubus into her body, trading its power for the use of her bed. A woman who wanted a man who didn’t want her might do such a thing. Lucas.
I taped her left leg to the left chair leg. Standing, I said, “Okay.”
Audric freed her left hand from the bindings and I taped that wrist to the chair arm. Her right wrist followed suit. With the roll of tape, Audric wrapped her shoulders to the chair back and her hips to the seat in a single long winding. When he finished, he pulled away the cloth that had secured her.
Jane bucked hard, bringing the chair legs off the floor and landing with a solid scuff-thump. The chair was heavy. Unless she got a foot to the floor, she couldn’t move it far enough to disrupt the salt ring. I gestured toward the opening in the ring and Audric stepped through. On the other side he pulled his blades and walked the perimeter of the apartment, checking through the windows, over the stable, into the street.
I sat on the floor and lit three candles, ignoring Jane’s body-wrenching exertions. I had chosen new candles, never used, with clean white wicks. I placed them at the north, northeast and northwest sides of the ring, not aligning them to the compass, but balanced according to the Trine’s peaks. Breathing, I quickly settled into a steady, calm state. Having just been in a mage-state, and having already determined what I would do, there was no time lag as my body adjusted to the needs of my craft. I was as ready as I would ever be. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I opened my mage-sight.
With a handful of salt and a snap of power, I closed the ring and set my amulets over my head. Jane screamed, a long, agonized sound, half muffled by the gag, a sound that came from Jane’s throat, but from the succubus’ fear. It knew what I was about to do. Chatting with a Darkness was foolish. But I needed information, and hoped I had found a way to get it.
I had opened an inverted shield over us, not just a charmed circle. It was like the trap at my spring, an energy construct to keep us in, not to keep others out. Safely inside it, I thumbed a mouse carved from white howlite and opened a different circle, this one a simple privacy circle. Jane’s screams sounded dead, dull tones instantly absorbed by the privacy circle. We would be as silent as if I still slept, alone and warm in my bed.
Not knowing which one would work best, I took up the three crucifixes, one in my left hand, two in my right. I had tried one method to dis-possess Malashe-el, and if the view of the walker and Jane together in the street was any indication, it hadn’t been totally effective. Jane was human, and she had been raised Christian; I hoped this one might work on her.
I didn’t pray often because, according to prevailing theology, the Most High didn’t hear the prayers of soulless beings. But, just in case, I prayed aloud. “Hear me Lord of creation, the Most High One, King of Kings, God the Vi
ctorious. With your servant Mutuol, I do battle in your name.” Beyond the circle, I noted that Audric had stopped pacing and was watching me, his back to the kitchen wall, blades crossed low and ready. “Mutuol, I claim your power to bind this evil.” Jane’s screams intensified and she bucked wildly, sending the chair legs banging into the floor like a drum. “To wrap it in chains. To remove it from the chalice that holds it. To free the body and soul of the woman who was so foolish as to call such a being. Forgive her, for she knew not what she did.” I wasn’t sure the last line was true, but I didn’t know it wasn’t, either.
Standing, I took up the ceremonial knife and cut away Jane’s gag. Her screams were not much louder than when she had been gagged. She spat at me, spittle landing just short of my foot. “My master will come. You are dead, mageling. He will kill you with fire and iron. Or perhaps he will breed with you and produce a litter of sons and daughters before he tears your body to shreds. Children to serve him. My master—”
I backhanded her across the face with the ceremonial knife hilt. Blood flew from her split lip; I heard the sharp snap of a tooth cracking; the smell of sulfur wafted from the broken root, bitter and burning, sulfur mixed with Stanhope blood, Gramma’s blood, the blood of others, my blood—familiar smells that shouldn’t have been part of her. They had stolen my blood in battle and were actively using it against me. I had to get it back.
Jane spat and a tooth landed on the floor, broken and bloody. If she survived this, and if I was able to separate her from the Darkness, I could offer her an incantation to speed her healing. If not, well, there was no mercy shown to a human who cavorted with Darkness. A broken tooth was the least of her worries, dead or alive.
I held one of the crucifixes in my left hand, close to her head. She reared back, hissing. Teeth bared, her eyes widened, fixed on the silver cross with the body of the dead Christ stretched on it in gold. The metal warmed slightly in my hand. Okay, but not perfect.
I looped the chain on my neck to get it out of the way. Next I tried a crucifix made of wood. It once had a tigereye setting and a silver Christ. Now it was singed wood. Its temperature didn’t change at all. I looped it, too, over my head.
The matrix of matter resonated in different ways with the matrixes of evil and good. Some elements of matter worked on some elements of energy, and some didn’t. I would have been taught all about such sciences had I been able to stay in Enclave and learn. I would have known exactly what metals and stones to use on the woman and the thing inside her. Now it was hit or miss. But I did know, from the look in her eyes, that the icons were powerful things to her. Once, Jane had faith. That faith punished her, even now.
Holding the last crucifix in my right hand, I brought it close to her. The sound from her throat was the squeal of a piglet pierced through with mage-steel. She reared back as far as her head could stretch, muscles and tendons straining and exposed, her pulse pounding beneath her skin in a frantic rhythm. “Nonononononono…”
The gold and amber crucifix blazed. So did the bloodstone rings that layered my prime amulet, a green and roseate glow. That was strange. I had never seen sections of the prime work alone. No time to worry about that now. “Mutuol, cleanse her, by the power of the Most High. Transform her and bind the Darkness.” The crucifix Jane had responded to was of the empty cross, hand-carved, amber-inlaid, in a gold setting, and hanging on a gold chain. Tiny little beads of red carnelian were inlaid at each end of the cross, at head, hands, and feet, the places where Jesus bled, if one didn’t consider the thirty lashes with a cat-o’-nine-tails delivered by Roman guards that had flayed his back and chest.
“Cleanse her,” I repeated. “Transform her and bind the Darkness.” With the words, I reached out and let the crucifix rest against Jane’s cheek. The cross blazed with light, so bright that I blinked my eyes. The smells of sulfur, dead leaves, and funeral flowers filled the conjuring circle with a black cloud. And the clean smell of heated amber—the scent of twenty-million-year-old fir trees.
“Cleanse her,” I said a third time. “Transform her and bind the Darkness.” With my left hand I pressed the cross into her flesh. The crucifix sizzled, popped and almost… reached… for her. Before my horrified eyes the amber melted and burned into her face. Shocked, I jerked my hand away, trying to pull the cross off her. The crucifix didn’t waver, remaining firmly planted, deep as bone in her flesh. Black smoke rose from her skin and muscle and skull, a brand, like the brands planted by the kirk.
Jane howled, the sound of a full-grown boar being torn apart by wolves. Her skin rippled, the flesh mottled with Darkness, purpling and blackening like deep bruises. A pustule rose on her forehead and erupted, spilling yellow pus. Instantly, and way too late to do anything about it, I realized what I had in the circle with me, taped to the chair. Not a succubus inside a woman, but a succubus that had possessed, eaten, and replaced a woman. Jane’s skin peeled back in little rips of flesh. Abscesses formed and burst on her chin, jaw, shoulders, and chest. Her clothes stretched as her musculature and skeleton rearranged.
My stomach turned over with a sickening lurch. “Yuck,” I murmured. I backed away, leaving the gold chain dangling against the ruined skin.
The succubus’ teeth elongated. Its breasts grew and formed points at the tips like little claws. Wrath of Angels. This wasn’t just any old textbook succubus. This was a big-ass succubus. The mama of all succubi. Seraph stones. If it got loose from the duct tape, I was worse than toast. I was fried, fricasseed, and served up as an entrée. A laugh tittered in my throat. I was betting my life on duct tape.
“My master will come,” it said, spitting acid. A droplet landed on the arm of my dobok and burned, the leather melting around it before hardening to protect my skin. It smiled at me through pointed teeth, incisors and canines like those of a small carnivore, which, of course, it was, if you consider that the flesh it ate was human male, starting with the private parts.
The succubus’ head was still changing, forming a blunt snout. Its hands were clawed, talons tipped with bright red and orange striped nail polish that had been applied while in human form. The polish cracked and rippled as the beast changed. Red polish on the long, razor-sharp nails of her toes followed suit, drawing to the pointed tips. Tres chic, in a ruination of Darkness kind of way, I thought, still near hysteria. Its skin, where it showed through the torn clothing, was scaled and mottled. Jane was literally enough to scare a man to death, should it transform in the act of sex. “My master will come,” it hissed again, writhing its head as if to get away from the cross that still burned into its flesh. “He will take me back.”
That stopped me. Take it back? From what? From me? I stared at the cross charred into its cheek. Melted in. Branded. I remembered the words I had used asking the Most High and his servant Mutuol to lend a hand. Cleanse her. Transform her and bind the Darkness. This thing couldn’t be cleansed. It wasn’t human, and only humans could be redeemed. But it could be cleansed of its human guise, transformed to its natural structure. And it could be bound. And I hadn’t said what I wanted it bound to.
Feathers and fire. Had I bound the succubus to me? Oh, seraph stones. Somebody up there had a weird sense of humor.
That single thought brought me up short. Someone had heard my prayer. Mutuol? The Most High? And he—whoever he was—had done as I asked.
A shiver of fear slithered under my skin. The succubus laughed, thinking I was afraid of it. But I was a whole lot more afraid of holy things than of evil. To wipe the smirk off its face, I hit Jane with the hilt of the knife again. This time, black blood flew, sizzling when it splatted against the charmed circle. I had bound a succubus to me. Crack the Stone of Ages.
The succubus’ eyes changed slowly as understanding came to it. “You aren’t afraid of me,” it said. When I didn’t answer, it said, “You aren’t afraid of my master.” It cocked its head, looking particularly reptilian. “What do you want?”
The question thawed me from where I was standing, frozen at the s
ight of what I had done. What did I want, now that I couldn’t have what I had intended? Ciana safe. The Stanhopes safe. The town safe. Me safe and able to stay in Mineral City. For starters. I had intended to dis-possess Jane and then question her about what she knew of Forcas’ plans. Could I still question this thing? Being bound, it had to speak the truth, or as much of the truth as it had. Some said pride was the first weakness of any Darkness. Pride had caused the fall of Lucifer and his followers. Pride could be used against them. What came out of my mouth had nothing to do with my thoughts. “I’ve never seen or heard of one like you.”
The succubus’ pupils were slit, goat-eye irises a coppery yellow, like stained sheets flecked with the brown of old blood. “I am the result of a triple mating between a Power, an unwilling mage, and a blood-demon drunk on Stanhope blood and your blood.”
As a child, I had been underground, alone and afraid. Later, I had seen unwilling female mages, rescued from the Trine. If mages had been kept captive long enough to birth a litter, their minds might—would—be gone. And then I caught the timeline. Made of my blood? With that, I calculated its age at less than a month. How fast did these things mature? It acted like a spoiled, rotten child, bragging and testing me. Great. I was stuck in a conjuring circle with a teenaged, power-drunk Darkness. “What is your master?”
“I am a new being,” it said, “created by a Power. A Principality. He desires you.” It smiled. It was a really nasty smile. I couldn’t help my reaction. Seeing me shudder, the beast slit its eyes, baring its teeth. “You fear. This is good that you fear me. I am unique, one not seen since the fall of man. I am a succubus queen.”
I remembered my research into the obscure words uttered by Malashe-el when I had him trapped at my spring. And last night he reappeared with an incubus and this thing. And now I had it captured. No big guess that I was being led by the nose. “What else are you?”
