She hugged Ollie back. “You’re damned straight.”
“Any word on Dexx?” Ollie muttered into her hair.
Paige shook her head and took a step back, her darker emotions pushed into a box sealed so tight her heart didn’t even twinge at the sound of his name. “How are you with door magick?”
“Not that again.” Ollie groaned as he led the way back. “Okay, I guess? Eldora hasn’t let up on me since all of this blew up.”
“Well, good, because you, me, and half-pint are the A Game.”
He tipped his head giving her a greeeeaaaat look and opened a door. “We have a location.”
The room he led her into was obviously a magick work room, but of the blood witch kind. So, there were a lot of darker witch elements like skulls and ravens that were probably real taxidermized ravens, and a few other animals that were probably also taxidermized. If that wasn’t a real word, Paige was going to make it one.
Paige refused to ask about the elements here. She didn’t want to question them. She had to make alliances with them, and that meant accepting them. Sacrificing people like Merry had done in the past was bad. Yes. But that didn’t mean that’s all they did there. She couldn’t judge until she knew more.
There were about a dozen other witches in the room, lining the walls, standing with their hands folded in front of them, wearing dark robes that obscured their faces and bodies.
Merry stood at the table in the middle of the room. She raised an eyebrow at the kids, then looked at Paige again. “So, we’re taking kids?”
Leslie and Mandy walked in behind Paige. “You have your strengths. We have ours.”
Paige frowned. “I didn’t get word to you. I thought you were busy.”
“I am. And Merry got word to me. Said you might need help.” Leslie released a slight growl as she stalked past Paige and stepped up to the table. “Where are we going?”
Merry shook her head. “Portland. If you have the ability to open a door.”
Right. Paige glanced a look at Leah and Ollie.
If this didn’t work, they’d have to go with Plan B, and Cyn had already said it wouldn’t work.
Leah raised her chin and stepped up to the table, meeting Paige’s gaze. She nodded once.
Ollie joined them with a shake of his head and an expression that said he thought this was a bad idea.
Great. Well, if they were going to be learning on the fly, they’d better get started. They needed the Blackwood witches. The paranormal world was counting on them not to fail.
So, that’s exactly what they weren’t going to do. Fail.
23
The first thing Paige needed to do was to figure out how to lock in on the location Merry and her witches provided. It was one thing to see it on the map. It was a whole different animal to reach out with that pinpoint of information and open a doorway to it. Her mind, heart, soul, and rooted body had to comprehend what that pinpoint meant magickally.
Location spells with Leslie helped her learn bare essentials and that hadn’t turned out terribly. She wished for a moment that she’d had a little more time, like years, with Eldora honing this particular gift. Procrastinating, it turned out, was a terrible idea.
Leah didn’t seem to be as bothered by the lack of training. Youth had advantages. She stepped up to the table, took a look at the map, and oriented herself with the sun and the cardinal directions.
She closed her eyes and went to work. Her magick spun away in black wispy smoke tendrils. That was what the door magick looked like. Inky black magick.
Not so unlike her hands.
Huh. What if her witch hands were actually doors? What if she wasn’t just reaching out with her magick? What if she also was opening doors to other dimensions at the same time she called them up?
Ollie was working through his magick at the same time, a frown of concentration on his face. His magick wasn’t inky black. It was a dark, stained red that was, frankly, quite beautiful to look at.
Paige reached inside of her and touched on her magick. It felt like an old and treasured friend. She wouldn’t say it had a personality. Not exactly. But it had a life. Her magick wasn’t some inanimate object like a blanket or a favorite sweatshirt. Her magick was an un-coiled wild thing that seemed to understand her in ways no one else did or could.
She pulled up her hands, watching as the inky black magick extended from her. She could make those arms as long as she wanted. She could make her hands as big as she needed. Those hands were capable of lifting and doing things her body simply was not.
But were they capable of taking them somewhere else?
Her magick turned to her with a hint of question, as if that living thing inside of her was trying to have a conversation with her.
So, she focused the question toward her magick without using words. Words were thought-limiters that animals and elementals didn’t understand. Every other creature on the planet spoke in broader concepts and thought forms instead of forcing those broad-stroke thoughts into tiny boxes of “understanding.” She focused her question in visions and emotions and thoughts. Thinking without words was a lot harder than it should’ve been. But that’s what happened when you were raised in a society where words mattered more than actions, where what a person said or what words they chose were more important than the things they actually did.
Her magick answered back. Yes. This was within her power of doing.
But what did she need to provide? What did she need to give her magick in order to make this happen? She’d opened a door once before with Eldora’s help. And then something had happened while she’d been fighting, and her magick had stopped working.
She needed a better understanding of how she worked.
A location. But not information. Not numbers or an address. Her magick needed to know the feel of the place. It needed to know the location based off how the earth would see it in this time.
And that was a completely different thought form. The earth spoke in a different kind of language. It spoke in life, decay and change that didn’t make sense because, with the earth, there was this alien sense of time. Time was different for the earth than it was for smaller people like Paige, and that was something she didn’t know how to translate. Or could she?
She opened her eyes and looked at Leah. “I think I found a way, but I have no idea how to feed the location information.”
Leah beamed a grin. “I’ve figured that out. I just didn’t know how to take it to the next step.”
Ollie shrugged. “Just get it started and I can take it from there because…” He shook his head at her, his expression dry. “This isn’t my bag of Oreos.”
Nice reference.
Great. She wished not for the first time that she could telepathically connect with her daughter, but the only telepath they had was Kammy.
Leslie raised an eyebrow. “Are we gonna be able to do this or not?”
The reality was that they might not be able to. They needed the Blackmans. “We’ll get it done, but they might be bringing us back.”
Leslie shrugged. “It don’t have to be pretty.”
Thank goodness for small things.
Paige and Leah couldn’t connect telepathically, but maybe Leah and Paige could connect through their magick.
Paige closed her eyes and reached toward her daughter with her witch hands. That was something she never would’ve thought to do before. She had always thought that her witch hands were tainted. That they were her demon magick and that they should touch nothing living.
But the more she learned about her magick, the more she realized that Alma had no idea how to help Paige. Not really.
Leah reached out with her physical hand, but it was bathed in her door magick, with red veins shooting through it.
When Leah touched her hand to Paige’s, she connected with a sense of where they needed to be. Paige had no idea how Leah had managed to figure that out, but she suddenly underst
ood what “location” meant in a reference of time and space.
Other ideas hit her. If location dealt with time and if they had the ability to open up portals to other locations, then was it possible they could open doors to other times as well? No, she couldn’t be derailed by these new ideas. Focus.
Could they go back in time? Could they do something different? Could they fix events?
Interesting, maybe they could— stop. Focus on the location, here and now. She tucked that away for future exploration. For when she had time, and the world wasn’t crumbling around her
With the location from Leah, she set an anchor. This was her place.
Anchor set, Paige focused on the instructions she received from her own magick and what Eldora had taught her. She reached out with her hands and instead of searching for a soul to rip from a body, she focused on simply tearing a hole in the air.
It wasn’t nearly as easy as a simple tear. Her hands—her magick—was able to tear a hole in space, But it was small and too high to reach. There was no way a human could fit through it even if they were able to get to it.
But it also wasn’t a hole to the location they needed.
No. Instead, it was a hole elsewhere. Very elsewhere.
Screams filled the large room.
Merry frowned. “What are they doing to them?”
“That’s not DoDO and that’s not the Blackmans.” Though, Paige had no idea how or why her door had opened there.
Ollie laced his magick to theirs and the door dipped down to the floor, though it was still small to fit through.
Merry released a long sigh and uncovered a rather large mirror. An ornate gothic piece that pivoted up and down. “Try this.” She positioned it to perfectly level, making the room twice as large from a perfect position.
Paige really had no idea what she was supposed to do with that, but the three of them moved their rather small door toward the mirror.
It flashed and opened, revealing a lush yet foreign landscape. But where were the screams coming from?
A demon’s face filled the opening, his maw open, his horns curled. It wasn’t often Paige got to see them in their physical form. Most demons visited by using their souls. She didn’t know why or how.
His large, black eyes widened. “What are you doing here, summoner?” The harsh sounds were in the demon tongue. Well, one of them. Okay, so she understood demon.
“I’m trying to open a portal to Portland.” she answered back in English.
His skin furrowed in a way that could have been a frown, but with the rough bark-like skin, it was hard to tell. “This isn’t Portland.”
“I see that. Hard at work?”
He came into full view and then pointed the door to the right. The vision blurred slightly as the view changed.
DoDO agents were huddled in a group in the middle of a full, healthy valley of some form of wheat or wild grass.
As she watched, another agent dropped from out of view and landed in a heap among the others.
“I’m dealing with the trash you left behind. They do not belong here.” The demon came back into full view, obviously not happy.
“Oh. Well, sorry about that. I hadn’t intended on dumping them there.”
The demon growled. “Do you want them back?”
Nope. “Sure? I don’t have anything to give in return.”
“Hmm.” He let his head fall back and a mighty roar ripped through the room.
Demons moved, herding the DoDO agents toward the portal.
The demon turned to Paige. “Keep them out of my kingdom. They are a plague that can destroy your world. They will not destroy mine.”
Huh. “Okay. Sure, send them through.”
“Do not send more here. I will hold you responsible.”
Whatever.
The line of DoDO’s was far too long. DoDO agents coming back to Earth. That felt like actively inviting polio infection.
Merry crooked her finger at one of her witches and told them to take the DoDOs to the pens. Damned Eastwood witches. She told them to tend the wounded, and they’d figure out what to do with them later.
There were a lot of wounded.
And a lot of glares.
Well, she’d just sent them all to Hell, so… yeah.
Though, Hell looked pretty damned nice from over here.
After the last DoDO agent was through, the portal snapped closed.
Paige and Ollie shared a look.
Leah beamed with excitement.
Merry set a fist on her hip. “Well that was… informative. Let’s see if we can get somewhere closer.”
“You’re welcome to try it.” Paige smiled. Well, she showed teeth. She put Merry on ignore and tried again.
The portal reformed, with a black iridescent rippling.
Merry stared at Paige with a look of shredded concern.
Yeah. Yeah. Paige was feeling that too. Like, yeah. Sure. Let’s just invite the enemy into our camp. Why the heck not? What could possibly go wrong? Hopefully this wasn’t another portal to a hell plane.
Her magick understood how to unweave what had been woven together. Time and space and matter and so many other concepts of physics that Paige barely understood were simply unraveled as her fingers clawed through the air. She felt like a simpleton using Thor’s hammer. Her magick was so much bigger than she was.
You give yourself far less credit than you deserve.
Paige had no idea when Cawli had decided to show up. Nice trip?
He growled. Focus.
As the portal lost the ripple and cleared to open to the inside of a fairly large warehouse. The Blackman family sat in the open in a circle.
They weren’t surrounded by cages. They weren’t surrounded by guards.
“Trap?” Not really a question, but she should at least ask.
“Trap.”
Great.
Merry just looked over at Paige and lifted one shoulder and a condescending shrug. “Do we need them or not?”
The Blackmans? Of course they did. They were their best offense against the President and DoDO because Paige had just proven that she wasn’t really great at this. And neither was Ollie. Leah? Maybe.
Merry released a small sigh and turned toward her witches.
Leslie turned to Paige, looking really unhappy. “Children with?”
Paige knew what she should say. She had no idea how bad this was going to get. She should leave all the kids there in the uncertain safety of the Eastwood home.
Safety of a murder’s home with a bunch of DoDO agents?
“If we can’t free the Blackmans, we might need Leah.” Also, she just felt safer with Leah beside her in the dragon’s den than in a house with murderers of two kinds. “You can leave Mandy here.”
Mandy gave Paige her best determined teenager look and shook her head. “If Leah’s going, I am definitely going. I’ll protect her.” And to emphasize her point, she flared her fists with fire.
For the longest time, Paige thought Mandy was the stronger of Leslie’s children with her pyrotechnic ability. However, they had discovered that Tyler had the strongest ability as a bard. “Tyler sitting this one out?”
Leslie answered with a growl.
Merry turned her attention to Paige. “These are the details that should have been worked out previously.”
Paige swallowed, not certain she had it in her. But, she was starting to feel the strain of keeping the portal open for so long. She hadn’t made a huge tear in the fabric of space and time. But it was enough to make her realize that she couldn’t keep it open forever even with Ollie’s help.
She turned her concentration inward again, back on her magick. She flexed her witch hands and she hold that opening figure. It wanted to rise into the air. She didn’t know why, except that for whatever reason she got the sense that the door was lighter when it was higher. But it wasn’t as though people could just leap through. Not one of
them had wings or the ability to fly.
And this was the reason why it was so much easier to send demons through the hell gate. They weren’t physical bodies. They were souls that she had shoved back through. Souls could fly.
Bodies couldn’t.
So, she dragged that door down toward the ground with Ollie grunting beside her. It was like trying to put up a tent in a hurricane.
Leah reached out with her hands, and her red veined door magick. She grabbed hold of both sides of the door and pulled down. The door locked into place. That was the only way Paige could describe it.
It stopped fighting her, but it was still draining copious amounts of energy from her.
Merry looked over at Paige and then nodded to her witches. “On the other side, we are to assist the Blackman’s. If you encounter resistance, use any force necessary.”
Paige opened her mouth to negate that command.
Merry stopped her with a look. “Blood magick is stronger when blood is spilled.”
Paige really hadn’t thought that one through. In a battle or a war, Merry and her coven might just be the ultimate weapon. The more blood spilled, the stronger they became.
That wasn’t entirely a comforting thought.
Merry was the first one to walk through the portal, followed by her small army.
Leslie and Mandy followed. Then Leah looked over at Paige. “Should we go?”
“Yes.” Paige wasn’t entirely certain that was true. They were probably going to free the Blackmans and they could certainly create doors. But what happened if they were unable to free them? What if the trap was too strong? Too capable?
But her magick was calm. She had to trust in that.
Leah stepped through first and let out a startled squeak. That warned Paige that there was something she should prepare for.
When she stepped through the portal, it was as if walking through cold shower. And not just a cold shower, but a freezing cold shower. And then, there was this sense of dizziness that slammed into her, knocking her every which way except forward. She seemed almost to get stuck.
But then, her magick came through and pushed her.
Her feet found the ground on the other side.
Whiskey Storm Page 20
