Forgotten Magic

by Jayne Hawke

  Rex huffed.

  “I’m a delight.”

  “Sure, you are, sweetheart. A fucking delight,” Jess said with a laugh.

  “How much are you putting on the bean finn idea?” Liam asked.

  He’d opened up a spreadsheet and colour-coded it, ready for people to seriously put down bets.

  “Damn, now I’m torn. Do I go bean finn partbreed, or land mermaid?” Jess said.

  “I’m taking the mermaid,” Rex said.

  I looked between them, unsure if they were seriously betting on these absurdities.

  “Give me offspring of a kraken and a really confused sailor,” Elijah said as he got his wallet out.

  “The money they inevitably lose will go into the coffee and baked goods fund,” Liam said.

  “This is the world’s most convoluted way to get people to pay for coffee and doughnuts,” I said with a laugh.

  “So, I’ll put you down for kelpie, then?” Liam said with a grin.

  “Sure. Why not,” I said as I pulled out my own wallet.

  Given how ridiculous the entire situation was, I was expecting Elijah to come out on top with the half-kraken.

  Thirty-Three

  While the pack was out looking for a half-kraken with a fae wig, I headed down to a small private cove that I liked to relax in. A storm was rolling in on the horizon, and I desperately needed to get my head straight. I’d texted James to see if he had any new information on anything. The stolen items, the murderer, or the person who had been digging into my old coven. I needed something I could wrap my hands around and throttle. Something solid to make me feel as though I was making progress.

  Instead, I got a hydra. I guess I could have throttled it, in retrospect, but only with an element of personal risk beyond what I could really justify. Hydras are a rare case of the human myths getting it almost exactly right. Massive serpents with many heads, all of which are active, regenerative, and, to put it mildly, bitey. Their blood is poisonous for no reason beyond spite, and they can aerosolize venom to give a sort of poison breath effect. All in all, not the sort of thing you want to work out your frustration on. Or draw the attention of at all, for that matter.

  The one that came at me was of the saltwater variety, a young one that was presumably trying to set up a territory for itself in my little otherwise-uninhabited cove. Given my options, I’d have been happy to timeshare the little stretch of sand surrounded on all sides by dark stone, but hydras aren’t the conversational type and I wasn’t prepared to give the space up entirely.

  Before I could react to its presence in the shallows, it was slithering menacingly up the beach, belting out a barking hiss in eight-headed harmony that was probably intended to intimidate intruders. It was working. I ran through everything I knew about hydras and got basically the David Attenborough version and a vague memory of fire magic being the best solution (score another one for ol’ Hercules I guess), which was useful in exact proportion to the available fire magic. That is to say, not at all, given that all I had was the life magic in my sword and the elements around me.

  The hydra was towering above me, a several-metre-long predator I couldn’t cut up still dripping enough sea water to soak my clothes. I could trap it with earth magic, but the earth here was sand. It would need to be transformed into concrete or something, otherwise the hydra would dig back out as fast as I could bury it. Faster. I watched several heads rear back and knew the poison was coming soon, too soon to be mixing mystical concrete chunk by chunk. I was going to have to break my only rule.

  I wondered if this was why Castor had been pushing me to practice shadow magic. Had he known this was coming? Could his goddess, our goddess, see the future? Maybe they all could. Either way, it was the only way I was going to get out of this, and I hated it. I ran backwards, dodging the spray of venom.

  I tugged at the shadow that always sat on the periphery of my consciousness. I couldn’t just sic a bunch of shadow beasts on it; a chewed-off head would grow back just as quick as one cut with a sword. I needed it to be actually stuck in the shadow plane. I wasn’t sure how the shadows were going to feel about that, since it was their plane that the monster would be stranded on, but it was too late to just leave the beach for the hydra so they were going to have to work with me.

  The first several shadows I reached out to sent back complete disinterest. I had the power to force them to behave themselves, but I was still dodging hydra bites in the increasingly small section of the beach not suffused with deadly vapor. I didn’t have the focus needed to argue with scraps of silky blackness. I cast them aside one after another until I started to find meaner, deadlier shadows. Maybe I was going through a bad neighbourhood. I pressed into them the need to pull something dangerous into their world, and they pushed back the image of some horrifying skin golem being shredded by a whirlwind of shadow until only a skeleton remained silhouetted against blood-soaked stone. I repeated my demand that the hydra go back where they came from and added the image of the dying golem, only this time surrounded by blackness. They replaced the golem with an image of me, and I pushed power into them, hurting them, showing them that I wasn’t food. They pushed back, and the force of it hit me hard enough that I staggered in the real world, the hydra’s tail catching me in the moment of weakness and throwing me into a rock.

  I got back up, keeping my focus inward, and pushed the image of the hydra’s heads being removed, growing back in duplicate, and so on infinitely. I added a black background with extra force and shoved it at them. I felt a whirling, dizzy sensation like being caught by a zephyr of silk, and they pushed agreement back along with a sense of my missing the point.

  Apparently having a monster that would never die in their back yard was the upside of the story for them. I’d buried the lede expecting that to be the favour, not the payment.

  They weren’t in any way under my control, and I knew that any attempt to do more than negotiate would result in their abandoning me. At best. Still, they were stronger than shadows I’d dealt with previously and genuinely enthusiastic about the whole thing. It was more than I had any right to hope for.

  I grabbed onto them one by one, tossing them free of their plane and watching them flutter down to the ground before turning into strange, angular variants of earth animals. I was transfixed as I watched them all form. A quiet one that hadn’t interacted before sent me an image of a human shadow casting another shadow. These were the shadows of those animals’ shadows? I began to form a sense of it in my mind. Their plane wasn’t a place like the god plane, they were just in a dimension we couldn’t see. They were the shadows of the shadows we saw, invisible but omnipresent. I started to wonder if those animals were around somewhere, if the shadow plane even had a one to one relationship to our geography, and if these were the shapes they took on for this task or if they really looked like this, and before I could get onto a third topic I had to stop myself.

  I couldn’t let all these shadows run rampant on our plane, or in our dimension, or however the truth of it lay. They needed to do their job and go back to where they belonged, with the hydra in tow if at all possible. It was my responsibility to make sure that happened, and as I felt their excitement building I realized that it was going to be far more of a challenge than the hydra itself.

  I looked on as five shadowy creatures, four of them the crystalline envy of a normal earth being, leapt for the hydra with a shiver of ecstatic pleasure. The first to the target might have been a harpy, feathers like shards of emptiness on a broken computer monitor lining wings too big and too round to suit the tiny body that seemed to spin without ever moving, and it wrapped itself all around three heads, the teeth that sank into it finding no purchase, the venom showing no sign of any purpose at all.

  It tore one head off and held it impaled on two long feathers, and I focused my mind on it with the image of taking the thing back intact. It pushed back an image of a city carved at odd angles by black needles, devoid of life or colour, and I shoved harder,
getting back a sense of sulking. It put the head back, but two more had already began to grow in its place. It slapped them with the head it still had impaled as if telling them they were in the way, but the new heads continued to form nonetheless.

  The second and third shadows arrived on each other’s heels. What might have been a hyena or a strangely proportioned dog grabbed onto the very tip of the hydra’s tail and shook it. The tail shook back, tossing it this way and that, and its form slipped and shimmered even as it held on with easy determination. I didn’t know what would happen if it faded away, but I could only hope it would go home or drop out of existence entirely. An ursine creature that seemed to be covered in spines where the fur didn’t bend or entwine the way real fur would grabbed onto the tail just after the hyena and managed to stop its flailing. The hyena’s image stabilized, and it pushed boredom to no one in particular, the image of a carnival ride slowing to a stop even though no one was in line.

  A human skeleton, the most recognizable of the bunch if viewed from the right angle but immediately just a mess of curves and gaps when it turned even slightly wrong, had been the one to explain where they all came from. It dutifully grabbed onto a few heads, wrapping itself around them like a strange rubber hand and holding tight.

  The last to move was the one I’d been arguing with. It was strange, not geometric but almost geological with the look of something that had no purpose of its own but merely held a form because that was the form it held. It didn’t look like it should have been able to move, but move it did, an effortless, gamboling roll down the sand until it reached its target and, engulfing the entire thing even though it had seemed a fraction of the hydra’s size, began spraying poisonous hydra blood in every direction alongside chunks of meat and bone. I saw more heads grow up over its shoulders and be devoured, the impossible physics of the hydra physiology straining for purchase alongside the extradimensional massacre I’d summoned over.

  I panicked and pushed an image of a big black hole opening under them and dragging them under before closing like a cartoon, modulating my energy so that it was half request, half demand, knowing that if I pushed too hard I was in danger of losing control entirely. It sent back an image of a massive black laughing face devouring the sun, then dropped out of existence entirely with a sensation of deep amusement.

  Thirty-Four

  I was filthy, exhausted, and ready to spend at least an hour in a very hot bath with an obscene amount of bubble bath. So, of course, Elijah was on my front doorstep waiting for me.

  “What happened? Are you ok?” he asked as he greeted me.

  “Yea, just a little run in with a sea fae. What brings you here?”

  Why was he between me and my hot bath? I didn’t have the energy to concoct some lie that would keep him away and thus safe. I’d used up my full stores of deceit changing the hydra into a faerie.

  “You weren’t answering your phone. I wanted to invite you to the pack house tonight, for dinner. You looked like you could use some company.”

  “That’s incredibly kind.”

  “But...”

  “I really want to crash out. That thing hit pretty hard.”

  “It’s barely past lunch.”

  This was not going to plan.

  “Lily, you can talk to me. Is this some witch thing? Are you in trouble?”

  “Well, I do have a murderous stalker,” I said with a stiff laugh.

  “The offer stands. Come and join the pack. You can crash with us for as long as you need to.”

  “I expect he has a nice big bed,” Castor added from behind me.

  Elijah smirked.

  “It is a big, very comfortable bed, as it happens.”

  “Don’t encourage him,” I said.

  “Is everything ok?” Castor asked as he put his hand on my upper arm.

  “Sea fae took a dislike to me.”

  He pursed his lip and reached around me to unlock the front door.

  “Let’s get you inside.” He turned to Elijah. “We’ll see you at seven for dinner.”

  Elijah cocked an eyebrow at the fact Castor had just invited himself for dinner.

  “I’m her familiar,” he said with a smirk before he disappeared inside.

  I noticed the white envelope sitting on the floor waiting for me. Castor nudged it aside, out of view, as he walked inside. I hoped that Elijah hadn’t spotted it.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven, then,” Elijah said as he leaned in.

  He wrapped his hands around my hips, and I reached out to put my arms around his broad powerful shoulders. The stalker entered my mind just as his lips touched mine. Elijah was tender, gentle, and very clearly holding back. I wanted to lean into him, to embrace the passion bubbling just beneath the surface. Instead, I was worried that the stalker was going to try and kill him. Again.

  “Your stalker won’t touch me,” Elijah said with a cocksure smile.

  “They’d better not.”

  “Don’t miss me too much,” he said as he turned to walk towards his car.

  I watched him drive away before I stepped inside to deal with the latest note.

  I knew that you were impressive. You’ve demonstrated you’re worthy of my attentions.

  The note was from the one who called me Amelia rather than my stalker. I rubbed my temples. It had seemed strange that a hydra had come that far from the Greek territories, but sometimes beings move around. Exeter had a harpy, from what I’d heard. She was reputed to be a pain in everyone’s asses. They didn’t kill her because she was something of a tourist attraction. Personally, I didn’t see the attraction of visiting a city in the hopes that some ancient monster would try and kill me. I guess everyone has to get their kicks somewhere.

  “So, this one has started sending monsters after you,” Castor said.

  “Seems like.”

  Again, there was only a touch of magic on the note. Nothing I could use or track them with. There hadn’t been many people that I dealt with while I was in the coven. I was kept to the quiet places, away from anything public. I’d thought they were ashamed of me, but the truth had been so much worse. I was a sacrifice. Someone born specifically to be murdered so that they could steal magic from a goddess. Not that I was bitter or anything.

  “There has to be something I can do to take these assholes out. I’ve worked far too hard to have them take this life from me,” I said.

  “I’ve been looking through the grimoires, but there’s nothing yet. If there’s no magic to trace, then we have to rely on more human methods.”

  “Liam’s already looking into his databases or whatever he does; nothing.”

  “And your contacts? James?”

  “James hasn’t replied yet.”

  James was my best bet. He knew pretty much everything about everyone. I didn’t much like dealing with him, but I didn’t have much choice.

  I hadn’t been able to think of anyone else that I hadn’t already grilled about this. It wasn’t like I could tell everyone I had a stalker. I’d never live it down. Sighing, I checked my phone again and saw that James had replied. My phone was just pissy from the saltwater it had been drenched in.

  Nothing new on the thief. No one has hired them. No word on the missing items.

  I tossed the phone onto the armchair. James had given me nothing, and I was facing down a heap of dead ends. The bodies were piling up, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was running out of time.

  Thirty-Five

  The pack home was unsurprisingly spacious and backed onto the wild forest that surrounded most of the city. The interior was a little darker than I liked, but there was a cosiness to it. The living area had three large squishy couches. I sank into one of them and felt like I was sitting on a glorious cloud. Rex had relaxed somewhat as he stretched out at the far end of the couch on the other side of the room. Jess had curled up on the third couch and was flipping through the channels on the huge TV.

  Elijah had ordered in Indian, and we were waiting for
it to arrive. He’d wrapped his arm around my shoulders and made a point of making sure that Castor was comfortable before he relaxed. Liam sat on the floor between Jess and Rex. I didn’t know what he had against sitting on chairs and couches like a normal person.

  Jess finally settled on a big action superhero TV show where the hero was smashing a fallen god in the face with a large lump of concrete. Elijah ran his fingertips up and down my upper arm, which was oddly soothing. That night was the first time I’d relaxed with a group of people in a setting like that. The coven had made it very clear I wasn’t allowed to their movie nights and other social events. I spent the time in the library learning what they refused to teach me themselves.

  “What’s it like being a familiar?” Liam asked Castor.

  “He lives a life of luxury and barely lifts a finger,” I said with a grin.

  “Oh, it’s just awful! I get up at ten, maybe eleven, depending on if I was out with someone the night before. I enjoy a breakfast laden with calories before I nap in the sun in my fox form. Very occasionally Lily might ask me to help her focus a little magic, but that’s maybe once a year. I’m telling you, it’s just dreadful,” Castor said melodramatically.

  “I might need to look into a change of career,” Liam said.

  “You and me both,” Jess added.

  “I don’t know how other witches work, but I’m very lucky with Lily. She’s more like my little sister than a mistress or some such. She’s my best friend, and I’d be lost without her.”

  “D’aww, that’s adorable,” Jess said.

  We all laughed.

  Food arrived a minute later. I’d read that food was a thing with shifters, but that was my first experience of it. To say it was chaos was an understatement. Rex set the bags of food out on the long low-slung coffee table, which sat between the three couches. Plates were already there, ready.

  Rex opened up the first bag, and the pack descended on the food. There were growls, flying hands, and a lot of food. When they backed away from the table, they each had a plate piled high with food. It looked to be as much as I ate in a week. Every one of them was ridiculously toned and ripped, too. I didn’t know how they did it.