Magic Burns

by Ilona Andrews

  “Has he invited you to dinner, dear? Gifts, flowers, the usual?”

  I had to put my cup down, because my hand was shaking too much. When I stopped laughing, I said, “Curran? He isn’t exactly Mr. Smooth. He handed me a bowl of soup, that’s as far as we got.”

  “He fed you?” Raphael stopped rubbing Andrea.

  “How did this happen?” Aunt B stared at me. “Be very precise, this is important.”

  “He didn’t actually feed me. I was injured and he handed me a bowl of chicken soup. Actually I think he handed me two or three. And he called me an idiot.”

  “Did you accept?” Aunt B asked.

  “Yes. I was starving. Why are the three of you looking at me like that?”

  “For crying out loud.” Andrea set her cup down, spilling some tea. “The Beast Lord’s feeding you soup. Think about that for a second.”

  Raphael coughed. Aunt B leaned forward. “Was there anybody else in the room?”

  “No. He chased everyone out.”

  Raphael nodded. “At least he hasn’t gone public yet.”

  “He might never,” Andrea said. “It would jeopardize her position with the Order.”

  Aunt B’s face was grave. “It doesn’t go past this room. You hear me, Raphael? No gossip, no pillow talk, not a word. We don’t want any trouble with Curran.”

  “If you don’t explain it all to me, I will strangle somebody.” Of course, Raphael might like that…

  “Food has a special significance,” Aunt B said.

  I nodded. “Food indicates hierarchy. Nobody eats before the alpha, unless permission is given, and no alpha eats in Curran’s presence until Curran takes a bite.”

  “There is more,” Aunt B said. “Animals express love through food. When a cat loves you, he’ll leave dead mice on your porch, because you’re a lousy hunter and he wants to take care of you. When a shapeshifter boy likes a girl, he’ll bring her food and if she likes him back, she might make him lunch. When Curran wants to show interest in a woman, he buys her dinner.”

  “In public,” Raphael added, “the shapeshifter fathers always put the first bite on the plates of their wives and children. It signals that if someone wants to challenge the wife or the child, they would have to challenge the male first.”

  “If you put all of Curran’s girls together, you could have a parade,” Aunt B said. “But I’ve never seen him physically put food into a woman’s hands. He’s a very private man, so he might have done it in an intimate moment, but I would’ve found out eventually. Something like that doesn’t stay hidden in the Keep. Do you understand now? That’s a sign of a very serious interest, dear.”

  “But I didn’t know what it meant!”

  Aunt B frowned. “Doesn’t matter. You need to be very careful right now. When Curran wants something, he doesn’t become distracted. He goes after it and he doesn’t stop until he obtains his goal no matter what it takes. That tenacity is what makes him an alpha.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “Scared might be too strong a word, but in your place, I would definitely be concerned.”

  I wished I were back home, where I could get to my bottle of sangria. This clearly counted as a dire emergency.

  As if reading my thoughts, Aunt B rose, took a small bottle from a cabinet, and poured me a shot. I took it, and drained it in one gulp, letting tequila slide down my throat like liquid fire.

  “Feel better?”

  “It helped.” Curran had driven me to drinking. At least I wasn’t contemplating suicide.

  I SLID THE BEAT-UP VOLUME OF MYTHS AND LEGENDS close and flipped to the index. If I was going to see Bran, it was best to go prepared. I needed a better grasp on this situation. Unfortunately my brain insisted on replaying the memory of Curran offering me soup.

  Raphael wrinkled his nose. “Your books smell like chicken.”

  “They’re not mine.”

  “If you’re going to look for Julie, I’ll help.” Andrea brushed Raphael’s hands off her shoulders. “She’s my responπsibility.”

  I shook my head. “No, she’s mine. There is nothing I can do for her right now. But I can find Morrigan’s bowman.” I explained the coven and Esmeralda’s books, and reeves, and needing Bran’s blood, although I didn’t go into what it was for. “When the reeves attacked us, the Shepherd mentioned the Great Crow. Let’s see…”

  I ran my finger down the index. No Great Crows. Loads of Fomorians but no Bolgors or Shepherds. What else? Something had to connect them all. Let’s see, what did I have? A Hound of Morrigan, bow, covens, missing cauldron…

  I found the entry on cauldron: “Cauldron of Plenty, see Dagda.” Dagda was Morrigan’s main squeeze for a while. “Cauldron of Rebirth, see Branwen.” I flipped to the right page. “I will give you a cauldron, with the property that if one of your men is killed today, and be placed in the cauldron, then tomorrow he will be as well as he was at his best, except that he will not regain his speech.”

  “Any luck?” Raphael asked.

  “Not yet.”

  That was certainly interesting. The reeves were partially undead…Maybe they came out of the cauldron of rebirth, somehow. I went back to the index. “Cauldron of Wisdom, see Birth of Taliesin.” Anybody with a drop of education on Celtic mythology knew of Taliesin, the great bard of ancient Ireland, the druid who succeeded Merlin. I knew the myth as well as anybody but found the right page anyway just to be thorough. Blah-blah-blah, Goddess Ceridwen, blah-blah…

  If it was a cobra, it would’ve struck me.

  “What?” Andrea wanted to know.

  I turned the page and showed them the illustration. “Birth of Taliesin. The goddess Ceridwen had a son of incredible ugliness. She felt sorry for him and brewed a potion of wisdom in a huge cauldron to make him wise. A servant boy stirred the potion and accidentally tasted it, stealing the gift of wisdom. Ceridwen chased him. He turned into a grain of wheat to hide but Ceridwen turned into a chicken, swallowed him, and gave birth to Taliesin, the greatest poet, bard, and druid of his time.”

  Andrea frowned. “Yes, I see that the boy was reborn through the cauldron, but so what?”

  “The name of the Goddess’s ugly son. Morfran: from the Welsh mawr, ‘big,’ and bran, ‘crow.’ The Great Crow.”

  “This is the guy?” Raphael asked. “The guy in charge of the Fomorians?”

  “Looks that way. And more, he is a crow just like Morrigan. Very similar names plus very uneducated witches equals…”

  “Disaster,” Raphael supplied.

  The Sisters of the Crow. It was a terrible name for a coven.

  Andrea shook her head. “Those idiot Sisters couldn’t actually be that ignorant. Fumbling spells—yes, but screwing up enough to accidentally pray to the wrong deity? Morfran and Morrigan aren’t even of the same gender.”

  “Maybe they started out praying to Morrigan, and then fumbled just enough to give Morfran an opening. Maybe Morfran managed to make a deal with Esmeralda. She wanted knowledge and he offered it to her. Taliesin, Morfran’s half brother, served as a druid for King Arthur after Merlin. It follows that Morfran was probably also a druid. Who else would’ve taught Esmeralda druidic rites?”

  Andrea leaned forward. “Okay but to what purpose? Why go through all that trouble?”

  “I don’t know. If you were a god, what would you want?”

  I refilled Aunt B’s teacup and then my own.

  “Life,” Raphael said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I would want life. All they do is look down on us from wherever they exist but they never get to take part. Never get to play.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” Andrea said. “Post-Shift theory says a true deity can’t manifest in our world.”

  “You see reports of deities all the time,” Raphael said. He was kneading her shoulders again.

  She shook her head. “Those aren’t actual true deities. They’re conjurer’s constructs, wicker men for their imagination. Basically magic
molded into a certain shape. They have no sense of self.”

  My brain had difficulty wrapping around the fact that deities actually existed. I knew the theory as well as anybody: magic had the potential to give thought and will substance. Faith was both will and thought, and prayer served as the mechanism to merge them and to catalyze the magic, defining it much like a spoken incantation defined the will of the in-cantor. Practically, it meant if many people had a specific enough image of their deity and prayed hard to it, the magic might oblige and deliver the deity into existence. The Christian God or the neo-Wiccan “goddess” would probably never gain an actual form, because the beliefs of their faithful were too varied and their power was too nebulous, too encompassing. But something specific like Thor or Pan could theoretically come to life.

  I held that “theoretically” like a shield between me and Morrigan and Morfran. Few things are more frightening than the thought of your god coming to life. There is no such thing as privacy between a deity and his worshipper. There are no secrets, no glossed-over failures. Only promises kept and abandoned, sins committed and imagined, and raw emotion. Love, fear, reverence. How many of us are ready to have our lives judged? What would happen if we were found wanting?

  Andrea’s voice penetrated my thoughts. “First, most people imagine their deity within some magical realm. I mean, what worshipper pictures Zeus strolling down the street with a thunderbolt under his arm? To manifest on Earth would require independent will on the part of the deity. That’s a pretty big hurdle right there. Second, deities run on the faith of their congregations like cars run on gasoline. The moment the magic ebbs, the flow of faith cuts off. No juice, no powers. Who knows what would happen to a god? They could hibernate, they could die, they could be jerked out of existence…”

  In my head Saiman’s voice said, It’s magic time. Time of the gods.

  “The magic is simply not that strong and the shifts are too frequent for a deity to appear…”

  “Unless she does it during a flare,” I said.

  Andrea opened her mouth and closed it with a click.

  “During the flare, when the magic is at its peak for several hours, a deity could manifest and vanish back to its hiding place before the tech hits.”

  Aunt B set her cup on the table. “If that’s so, nothing good will come of it. Gods aren’t meant to meddle in our business. Good or bad, we’re running things our own way.”

  I looked at Andrea. “You said something really smart a couple of minutes ago, about the boy being reborn through the cauldron. Manifestation is a rebirth, in a sense. What if the cauldron is Morrigan’s way into our world? A cauldron is missing from the Sisters of the Crow’s gathering place. I saw the imprints of its legs and it was huge. I don’t think even Curran could lift it. Who would bother to take a giant cauldron unless it was really important?”

  Andrea sighed. “It makes sense, I suppose.”

  “One big problem with this theory. I have no clue how the Shepherd and Red’s necklace fit into it. Everybody wants the necklace, but nobody will tell me why.”

  “Where is it now?” Aunt B asked.

  “I put it into Curran’s hand. He promised to keep it safe.” I rose. “I’m going to chat with Morrigan’s bowman. Andrea, you wouldn’t watch my things for me while I do my hop and dance, would you?”

  She got up, moving the chair back with a screech. “You don’t even have to ask.”

  “Why not just ask the bowman?” Raphael said.

  I smiled. “Because he’s a thief and a liar. The Witch Oracle is neutral and will tell me the truth.”

  BEHIND THE BOUDA House LAY A NICE WIDE FIELD. In the middle of the field grew an old oak. Massive, its branches spread so wide they almost touched the ground, it cast a deep shadow in moonlight. Perfect.

  “This isn’t complicated.” I headed to the oak, carrying a big ceramic bowl and a pitcher full of water. “I’m going to do some weird dancing. If all goes well, I should disappear.”

  “What do you mean, disappear?” Andrea followed me and Raphael followed Andrea.

  “Go into the mist. A calling is a very old spell. It’s used by witches to find their familiars. Usually it’s done in the woods. The witch dances and her magic draws the most compatible animal to her. There are many variations of the spell. Some are tailored to draw a man, although in my experience nothing good ever comes from that one. Some draw the caster to a specific person. It won’t work with a normal person, otherwise I’d be where Julie is right now, but Bran is so saturated with magic, he should be able to pull me to him.”

  I unzipped my leather vest and put it under the oak. Next I unbuckled Slayer’s sheath and handed it to Andrea. Boots and socks followed the leather. Technically the dance worked best when done naked, but I didn’t feel like prancing in the nude into Morrigan’s Hound’s arms. I’m sure he’d be thrilled to see me.

  I stood with my toes touching cool slick grass and took a deep breath. I knew how to do a calling. Someone had taught me a very long time ago, so long, I couldn’t even remember who or when, and I’ve seen a couple of them done. I’d just never done one myself.

  Andrea sat in the grass. Raphael landed next to her.

  I poured water into the bowl, unbuckled my belt, and sprinkled the herbal powders from the compartments into it: lady fern and ash for clairvoyance, and a touch of wormwood to keep interference from curious things to a minimum. A bit of oak, for masculine reference. I had done a shabby job grinding the oak and instead of fine powder a few leaf sections floated on the surface.

  I didn’t bring my spinner but a few weeks ago I had happened on a very good staff of European ash and promptly defaced it by carving small chunks from the shaft and loading my belt with them. European ash was one of the best woods for a holding enchantment. I dropped one of the ash chips into the water and whispered the incantation.

  The makeshift spinner shivered. It trembled like a fishing float when a fish nibbles at the bait, and spun in place, at first slowly, then faster and faster.

  “What is it for?”

  “It connects the herbs with magic.” I pulled my throwing dagger out and gave it to her. “If something goes wrong, drop the dagger into the bowl. Please don’t try to dump the bowl or take the spinner out.”

  “How do I know when something goes wrong?”

  “I’ll start screaming.”

  I took off the wrist guard I wore on my left arm. There go the silver needles. The other throwing knife, the three shark teeth, the r-kit…

  “How much hardware do you carry?” Raphael raised his eyebrows.

  I shrugged. “That’s about all of it.”

  I stepped into the oak’s shadow. I was stripped down to my T-shirt and pants, no belt, no sword, no knife. Except for the blood collecting kit and the knitted square of hair and nettle, I carried nothing. I imagined a wide circle in the oak’s shadow and dropped the knitting in the middle.

  I returned to the imaginary circle boundary and began to dance.

  Step by step I made my way around the circle, bending my body, following the dance. Midway through the second circle, a tight line of magic snapped from the small knitted square and clutched at me. It flowed through my head into my feet, splitting into smaller currents where my skin touched the ground, as if I had become a tree. It led and pulled me.

  Vaguely I saw the boudas gather from the shadows, drawn to me like moths to a flame. They watched me with glowing red eyes, swaying gently with the silent music of my dance. And then I heard it, a simple distant melody. It grew with every second, heart wrenching, sad but wild, pure but imperfect. It caught me and wormed its way into my chest, filling my heart with what my Russian father called toska, a longing so intense and painful, it made me physically ill. It weakened my knees; it sapped my will until only melancholy remained; it made me miss something, what, I wasn’t sure, but I knew I missed it keenly and couldn’t take another breath without it.

  I danced and danced and danced. The charmed boudas dissol
ved. Mist swirled around me. A dark dog trotted past me through the gloom. Slowly the fog thinned. Through the whiteness I saw a gentle yellow glow beckoning me.

  My feet found wet grass and rocks. I heard the quiet splashing and the popping of wood burning in the fire. Sharp salty smoke tugged at me.

  A few more steps and I stepped onto the shore of a lake. It lay glossy, black, and placid in the moonlight, like the surface of a coin dipped in tar. A small fire burned in a stone fire pit near the water. Above the fire on a spit was a carcass of some small animal, a rabbit maybe.

  I turned. Behind me the forest lay, dark and jagged. The mist crawled away to the trees, as if sucked into the woods.

  The attack came so suddenly, I reacted on instinct. Bran lunged at me from the right, and I stepped aside, redirecting his momentum and tripping him without thinking. I had practiced this maneuver so many times, I didn’t realize I had done it until I saw him fly past me and land with a splash into the lake.

  He whirled in the water and grinned at me. Damn, he was a handsome bastard. I realized he was half-naked. Blue swirls of tattoos painted his chest. When God made that chest, he did it to tempt women.

  “No sword this time.”

  I shrugged. “Yes, but you can’t disappear.”

  “Don’t need to.” He sprung from the lake, black hair dripping, and ran at me again.

  I dodged his hands, kicked him in the knee, and danced away. He launched a quick kick that whistled a hair from my cheek. I swept around him and rammed my elbow into his side.

  He hooked me with a quick punch. I took it on the shoulder—it hurt—and swiped his legs out from under him. He jumped to his feet and hopped away. He frolicked like a hyper puppy. Run up, play bite, let himself be swatted down.

  “That’s no way to treat a lover.”

  “I didn’t come here to sleep with you.”

  “Then why go through all the trouble?”

  “I need some of your blood to save a girl.”

  He flexed his right arm. Veins bulged. “Some of this blood?”

  “Yes.”

  He winked at me. “I’m sure we can deal.”