Forged in Fire

by J. A. Pitts

  He smiled.

  “But when Megan was born we had a pretty rough time. Da woke me in the middle of the night, and we disappeared. Ma was still in the hospital with Megan, and we didn’t go for them. We spent three weeks living in our car, moving from wooded lot to abandoned farmhouse. Anytime he heard the slightest noise, he’d grab everything and we’d run for it. I thought we were gonna die.”

  I stood up and paced over to the cabinet and grabbed a glass. Then I went and got water from the fridge.

  “I cried a lot. I really wanted a sister. Never could keep friends long, so I figured if I had a sister, I’d at least have someone to be friends with, even if she was a crying poop machine for the first year.”

  Stuart chuckled at that.

  “Around midnight one night, it was cold and blowing, snow and ice beating down on the roof of the car. I lay awake in the front seat, freezing and exhausted. Neither of us was sleeping much, but I knew he was keeping me safe. I’d stopped asking about Ma and Megan. He only got angrier every time I asked, so I clammed up.”

  “Harsh.”

  “Yeah. I was lying there, thinking that some hit men or something were after us, when I started my period.”

  “Oh, crap. That’s not good.”

  “No, not at all. I was only twelve, and, while I knew it was going to happen soon, I had no idea it would be while my dad was sacked out in the back of our station wagon. I started crying. We didn’t have any sanitary napkins or anything, and I was so damn embarrassed.

  “I finally woke him up, begged him to take me to a gas station so I could try and get cleaned up, but he lost it. First time I ever saw him cry, to tell the truth. He just sat there in his sweatpants and a wife beater, unshaven and unbathed. We were both a little too ripe, in my opinion, and for the last three days we’d been eating cold beans out of cans.

  “I think he’d been so sick with worry for Ma and Megan and so equally scared that we were going to get caught by whomever he was running from that the little detail like his daughter getting her first period was too much for him. He hugged me, told me how sorry he was, and drove straight to an all-night truck stop. We went in, and he went with me to pick out the product I needed. I was horrified, and I think he was, too, but he stuck with me until I had what I thought was the right thing.

  “He ordered coffee while I went into the restroom and got cleaned up. I changed into my only other set of clothes from my emergency pack and went back out to meet him. He got his coffee to go and we drove straight home. Mom had returned to the place we were staying when she left the hospital. I found out we’d run to keep me safe. Not sure what that was about, but Ma wasn’t in any danger, he told me.”

  “So, he didn’t hit you?” Stuart asked.

  “No, he never hit me,” I admitted. “But he kept secrets and didn’t like questions. It was not too long after that time that I gave up believing in him.”

  I sat back down, letting the nervous energy bleed from me. “I told him I wanted a real life, wanted someplace where I could have friends. Someplace where we didn’t have to leave Ma and Megan behind ever again. I told him if we didn’t find someplace to call home, I was running away.”

  “Oy, I bet that went over well.”

  “I’d read Vonnegut and a bunch of other authors he didn’t know about. I’d squirreled away maps and tour guides whenever I could find them. I told him I was going to run away to Seattle because it was so green. We were living in Kansas at the time, and I was sick of the flat lands. I wanted trees and mountains and the ocean. I’d never seen the ocean, but I was only twelve.”

  Stuart watched me, let me work my way through it.

  “We moved out here, first to Bellingham for a couple years, then out to Crescent Ridge. Something about being in the shadow of Rainier calmed him down. Never figured out why, but we’d pretty much stopped talking to one another by then.”

  “Running from somebody seems fishy, sure, but it sounds like he was trying to protect you from something.”

  I rolled my head, trying to relieve the tension in my neck and shoulders. “You see, that was the problem. He was protecting me from everything. Everything terrified him when it came to me. Up until that year, he’d been the best dad, always hugging me, reading me stories, even helping out with whatever Girl Scout troop I landed in at the new house. But something changed on that trip. Something scared him so bad he was willing to abandon Ma and Megan, even for a little while, to protect me.”

  “Sounds like he loved you.”

  And he was right, of course. “Loved me with his heart and soul. And smothered me to the point I couldn’t breathe. He picked the books I could read, chose my friends, even went so far as to homeschool me in case I learned something he didn’t want me knowing.”

  “When did he find out about you liking girls?”

  I looked up and shrugged. “Don’t think he knows, honestly. Didn’t need to say anything to him to know how he’d react. He was clear on his beliefs. Heard it from the pulpit two or three times a week. Heard it from his own lips more than I care to recall.” I rubbed my temples. “I love him, never claimed different, I just can’t stand the man he became.”

  Whatever Stuart was going to say disappeared when Anezka walked into the kitchen. She’d been sleeping. For a moment she didn’t have her shields up, and she looked happy for the first time in a long while. When she saw us, however, she let the mask fall back into place—cold, aloof, and protected.

  “Hey,” I said, smiling. “Did you and Gunther have a good walk?”

  She shrugged. “Fair enough.”

  Stuart winked at me. “At least the company was good.”

  The look she gave him was a cross between knowing and disdain. “He’s a gentleman,” she said.

  Not sure she thought it was a good thing.

  Stuart laughed and stood up. “Well, I can see how that wouldn’t appeal to everyone.”

  Uh, oh. I watched her for a reaction, but she just smiled at him. “He’s unique, I’ll give him that.”

  “Fair enough.” Stuart nodded to us and went toward the back of the house. Once we heard the door to the basement open and close, I patted the chair he’d just vacated. “Come sit with me a minute.”

  She eyed me, but sat.

  Twenty-five

  At one point, I thought Anezka would make a fantastic mentor, but then her world went to hell and I got swept up in the mess.

  “I have a proposition for you.”

  She got a wicked grin on her face and started to say something, but I forestalled her. “Nothing naked, geez.”

  There was an evil twinkle in her eye. “Afraid I’d make you forget that perky little brunette you’re banging?”

  Oh, yes. She was a real charmer. That hadn’t changed. “I thought you might want to work. Do some smithing.”

  “Fuck, yeah,” she grunted, looking at me with a different kind of lust. “I’ve been jonesing for that for a good while now. Only, they won’t let me near anything that could burn the place down, or explode.”

  Good. She’d nearly killed me at her worst. And she wasn’t exactly stable yet. “I need to make a gate, real intricate job. You want in on the deal?”

  “I’ve made tons of gates,” she said. The weirdest thing happened. It was like a veil had been parted and I saw the real Anezka. The thought of working iron, building with fire, pushed aside the crazy, or so it appeared by her demeanor. She was suddenly calm.

  I showed her my drawings and my specifications. We worked for nearly an hour making adjustments for weight and accurate swing of the gate, etcetera. It was probably the most rational conversation I’d ever had with her.

  “If we could get to my place, I have some specialized gear that would make parts of this go really smoothly,” she said. It was the first time she’d mentioned her place that I knew about. “But that’s fucked up beyond all recognition.”

  “Aye,” I agreed. “Something we’ll need to get cleaned up sooner rather than later.”


  “I’ll sell the place, as soon as I can get back to it,” she said.

  I watched her, but she seemed sincere.

  “Soon,” I said, patting her on the arm.

  She glanced down to where I’d put my hand on her arm and she very gently covered my hand with hers. We sat like that for a long while. It was very sweet.

  “I’ve been having dreams,” she said to me, taking her hand off mine. “I haven’t told anyone but Gunther, but I think you’d understand.”

  “Try me,” I offered.

  “It’s always the same,” she said, staring at something I could not see. “I’m standing on the side of a mountain. I think it’s Mount Rainier, but I can’t be sure. I’ve never been up there.”

  I was getting a tingling in the bottom of my stomach.

  “There’s a tree, huge, like something I’ve never seen. It had branches that seemed to reach up to the stars, and the roots reached down to the gates of hell. It was that big.”

  I didn’t interrupt her, but I knew where she was going.

  “He’s calling to me,” she said, lowering her voice. “The one-eye’d god is crucified on that tree, and lightning is flashing across the sky, cracking down against the mountain, striking the tree.

  “‘Where are my children, Smith?’ he screams at me. ‘Why does no one miss their presence? Where are the kith and kin? Why do you shirk your duty?’”

  I listened to her, sick with dread. I knew that dream. Knew the one-eyed god, Odin, and the way the mountain began to come apart, crashing down around the crucified man, burying the world in rock and snow.

  “Am I crazy?” she asked me. “What does he want? Why does he come to my dreams?”

  I took both her hands in mine. She was shaking. “It’s not just you,” I assured her. “I think it’s been bleeding over to anyone who can hear him.” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I’ve had that dream myself.”

  Her eyes widened in surprise and a little relief. “He’s not angry with me?” she asked, nay begged.

  “No,” I assured her. “Not you. Me.” How had I blocked the dreams? What had I done to stop picking up the Norse god emergency broadcast signal?

  Her shoulders slumped, and a smile blossomed across her face. It was moments like this where her inner beauty shone through. “I thought it was something I’d done, a debt I owed, you know?”

  I nodded at her. There was a debt owed, but I’m not sure by whom. “You know there’s weird shit in the world, Anezka.”

  She nodded slowly. Of course she knew.

  “There is something he wants me to do, the one-eyed man. A geas he put on me.”

  “I don’t want to know,” she said, emphatically. “I will tell him to seek elsewhere when next he enters my dreams.” She lowered her voice. “Like Justin,” she looked ashamed. “He used to come to my dreams, to my bed.” She shuddered.

  “But, no more?” I asked.

  She looked up. “Not since I’ve come here. He can’t find me here.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You bet your ass,” she said, straightening up and clearing her throat. “Now, I need a nap.”

  She stood and made her way to the back of the house. I waited until she was in her room before I took out my cell phone and called Skella. Time for me to go home.

  Twenty-six

  Jimmy, oblivious to the cold bite of the mountain air, sat on the deck long after the rest of Black Briar was asleep. He rolled the ring around his palm, over and over, thinking. There was some piece he was missing. He could feel it—something tied to the Valkyrie statue his father had hidden the ring in, but he couldn’t place it. Or had his father picked the figurine at random?

  He thought about the coded note that had been hidden in the Valkyrie statue with the ring. The double-blind code was based on the writings of Marcus Aurelius and a mathematical skip pattern involving a complex key that they’d only partially solved. Something about Katie niggled at him. She was seriously pissed at him for excluding her, but he was only protecting her.

  Unfortunately, there was a connection there that kept eluding him. What was he missing?

  He put his head in his hands, massaging his temples. He needed to do something. Spending every waking moment in the basement poring over ancient records and breaking the code his father left was maddening. The daily goings on at Black Briar had fallen off his radar, and he needed to correct that.

  Beauhall had set up a watch schedule out in Chumstick, even arranged that elf girl, Skella, to provide transportation. Maybe he needed to go out there, check on the setup. What kind of leader was he? Things were definitely out of control.

  He picked up his cell phone and checked the time—two thirty. Shift change had been at midnight. Trisha and her crew were on duty.

  He glanced over to the barracks where they lived. Maybe they should make some small apartments or something. They had plenty of room on the farm. Some of the members only stayed here when they were on guard duty but went back to their real lives. Trisha lived here full-time, and now with Frick and Frack she would have a hard time reintegrating back into normal society no matter what.

  His life had become a menagerie. With the troll twins, Bub, Anezka, and the Black Briar regulars, he wasn’t sure the world wasn’t tilting right off its axis.

  Skella answered on the third ring, but she’d obviously been asleep. She agreed to transport him, though he thought she might not be too happy about it.

  “I’ll add a bonus for this type of thing,” he assured her. “And I’ll come back with the next shift change.”

  She hung up and he went inside the house. She’d appear there in the next five or so minutes, and he wanted a few things.

  He went back into the house, checked that Deidre was asleep, and slipped into the basement. The sword he’d used in the dragon battle hung on a coatrack ensconced in its scabbard, and he felt the need to carry it. Magic screwed up modern machinery, which included guns at some level.

  The shotgun Sarah had taken from Anezka’s house was covered in crazy carvings that Bub had insisted would allow it to work in the most heavily infested magical areas, but he wanted to leave that for Deidre, in case something happened while he was gone.

  Putting on the sword reminded him of his own father. He’d only seen him don this weapon once, but it had been to protect the farm and refugees from marauding giants when he was a wee lad. It was the deepest part of the night when he missed his parents the most. He leaned against a long display case and took several deep breaths. Tears were not welcome. Once he had it under control, he climbed the stairs, shutting the door to the basement with a quiet click.

  “Ready?” Skella asked him from the living room.

  She had on a pair of jeans and a long white T-shirt that obviously did not belong to her. The band on the front was something that Beauhall would like, so he speculated it had been her shirt at one time. Katie told them how Gletts, Skella’s brother, had stolen a bunch of clothes from Sarah before he had been injured in the battle in Vancouver. Ghosts, it had been, or some form of spirits. He didn’t argue semantics with Katie. She had a dozen names for different types of haunts.

  “Sorry about the time,” he said, grabbing his heavy coat, gloves, and a stocking cap.

  She shrugged. “Don’t make a habit of it.” The mirror rippled at her touch, and, within seconds, he stood at the Black Briar encampment in Chumstick.

  Nancy Butler whirled around when he stepped through the mirror, her crossbow loaded for bear.

  “Don’t shoot,” he said, holding up his hands.

  “Jesus, Jimmy,” she said, aiming to his left. “What the hell are you doing out here?” She paused, then added, “sir.”

  He shook his head. “Felt the need to see how things were going. Where’s Trisha?”

  “She and Benny are doing a circuit of the place.”

  “And I’m right here,” Gary said, stepping out of the shadows. He had his crossbow loaded as well.

 
; “Glad you folks weren’t sleeping,” Jimmy said, smiling.

  They returned to keeping watch, and Jimmy walked across the road to stare at Anezka’s place.

  The energy dome over the house and grounds was still intact—strong as ever, by the looks of it. He bent down, grabbed a handful of gravel, and chucked stones at the wall for a few minutes, thinking. Not everyone could see the dome, frankly. It had the effect of diverting the eye, forcing the attention to focus elsewhere. He had to really concentrate to keep it in view.

  He didn’t like being in the dark, didn’t understand Qindra and her magic. His own mother had been a witch of middling power. Not that he had any specific details. There were hints, notes left behind, remembrances of a young child. But this. He tossed another rock against the dome, annoyed and relieved that it bounced off.

  Spirits went in but did not come out. What kind of magic was this, and how was Qindra keeping it going after all this time?

  The unknown scared him more than all the dragons and trolls combined. He hated feeling helpless.

  Everything in the world was sliding off the cracker, and he was sick of his family and friends being in the thick of it. This year had been so off the charts, he was afraid for the new year coming. Hell, Christmas wasn’t that far off. The years were slipping by faster and faster. His parents had been gone now for thirteen years. For most of them, he’d had very little interaction with the “other” world. Now, since the spring, they’d been attacked by dragons and visited by gods. There was definitely a shift happening, and he couldn’t get ahead of it. Was it Beauhall, that sword of hers, or maybe it was he and Katie. Hell, he had no real answers, but plenty of questions.

  Snow began to fall around him, dampening the sounds of the world. He watched the white flakes fall around the house, but not through the dome. It kept even the snow and rain out. But not the cold, he bet. He could see spirits trapped inside, wispy things that were drawn to where he stood. It was as if they could sense him, body heat, living spirit, something. On the other side of the domed wall, they grew thick, like hot breath on a cold window.