Jake was making English muffins in the toaster oven for our breakfast while Jasper was looking over some plans for the addition-in-progress when I came charging down the hallway from the bedrooms flapping the piece of paper.
“Helena and Byron are gone.”
“Gone?” Jasper grabbed the note right out of my hand and read it aloud.
“Fuck,” he said.
“We need to do something stupid immediately,” Jake said.
“Absolutely, because Hel did something stupid first,” Jasper agreed.
“She went to go fight her cousin?” Billie interjected. “Is that what she did?”
“It can’t be good, whatever she did…”
“Isn’t she somewhat correct that your fighting skills are not up to par?” Gaston said.
“Shut up, Gaston,” Jake said.
“Don’t tell him to shut up when he’s right.” Billie crossed her arms. “You’ll get yourselves killed, and Helena will feel awful about it, and that won’t do anyone good. Jake, all you can do is turn into a wolf. And Jasper, you can heal a little. And Graham, you could probably do something, but you ain’t got any training and you still act like a human.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Excuse me for acting like the thing I always thought I was. But I can’t just sit here doing absolutely nothing when the woman I love might be dying.”
“Absolutely,” Jasper said, and in that moment, we were all perfectly in synch.
Something had to be done.
“I’ll talk to the familiars,” I said. “Maybe they would help.”
“Did she leave her phone?” Jake said. “Maybe we should also tell her brother. She didn’t want him involved, but so what?”
“Because he’s a dad!” Billie said.
“See, I’m liking the idea of having four dads more all the time,” Jake said. “I could go get myself killed and I wouldn’t even have to feel that guilty about it. From what Hel has said about her brother, he’s a better warlock than she is a witch and she probably should have gotten him more involved. She’s just proud, really. I can’t blame her for that. But the time for pride is over.”
“Okay, you call Harris, you talk to the familiars, and I’ll pack some tools and provisions,” Jasper said.
“All right,” Billie said. “We’re coming too. I said I wasn’t afraid to die—”
“We are?” Gaston said.
“Yes, we are! If you get killed, you’ve had a good run.”
We all went our separate ways. I went out the back door where all the familiars were living in the garden. They were all huddling together already, murmuring, in the dewy morning under the citrus trees.
It’s weird how quickly I’ve gotten used to talking to a crowd of animals every morning, like I’m frickin’ Snow White or something. Although I knew they all had human forms, I had rarely seen them, so in my mind, a bird was just a bird. A talking bird. And after a few days of talking to birds and rodents and lizards and so on, I was starting to think of them as my people. That if I had one job right now, it was to encourage and mobilize this bedraggled group of people who had not been paid attention to in a long time. I was in my element, but I also knew how much work was ahead.
I had also never dealt with anything like this before. It was common to have to deal with people who worked against their own best interests because they were loyal to an employer or a religion or something their dad always said, or because change just freaked them out and they didn’t trust me. But my constituents were never actually magically bound.
Even in the midst of their brave rebellion, they knew that they might be forced back into obedience at any second. They lived in constant fear.
“What’s wrong, guys?” I asked, as some of the little familiars shot me anxious looks when they heard my footsteps coming. “Or am I interrupting a private meeting?”
“It’s Lina,” said a small male cat familiar named Horus.
“The brown rabbit?” I asked.
“She got called back just a few minutes ago. The wizards are doing something to force us back to them, and they’ll pick us off one by one! She was sobbing and we couldn’t stop it,” Horus said. “I should never have left. It will be worse when I get home when Millicent knows I tried to betray her.”
“Stay calm,” I said. “Helena actually left this morning to stop this very thing.”
“She might be in danger,” an oriole named Elizabeth said.
“I’m aware,” I said. “And—I know all of you have already endured a lot, and I don’t want to ask you to endure anything else. But I think we’re standing at a crossroads. If Helena doesn’t succeed, I don’t know if the window for familiar independence will open again. Your freedom was an unexpected consequence of the walls coming down. If we fight together, we have a chance to make it permanent, and if you have your freedom, you will also have leverage to have a voice at the table in the magical world.”
They all nodded and vowed to fight with me, down to the grumpiest tortoise familiar who never talked, but just glared. I wondered if this was my incubus charm working on them, but I would have to take it.
Today, I knew I was doing the right thing. If my power charmed people into doing whatever I asked of them, it was good that I had Helena and a family to make sure I never went astray in how I used it.
“We’ll find her,” the prairie dog vowed. “I’m ready to go.”
“I’m all fired up,” an owl said. “I’m not getting pulled back to my warlock; no way.”
I walked in the house and Jake was repeatedly yelling, “Fuck!”
Not what I wanted to hear.
“We don’t have a way of getting to her,” Jake said. “We need powerful magic to travel between realms. What kinda shit is that? What is Harris von Hapsburg good for if he doesn’t know how to…” He waved his hand.
“Teleport people from afar?” Jasper said. “This is some powerful magic we’re talking about, so it’s not really a surprise.”
“It’s stupid! Every little rat and frog out there can go to Helena and we can’t?”
“Jake—take a deep breath, man,” Jasper said. “Harris told us what to do and we just need to do it.” He motioned us into a circle. “The familiars can get to her. Harris said he might be able to get the faery queen to help him travel to her. But we can’t be with her physically. We can cast a spell to send her strength.”
“I see…”
“We’ve just had such a good thing going,” Jake said. “She never even got to meet the family. And if all that ended because…”
“Because Helena felt a pull to help other people,” I said.
“We encouraged her to do that,” Jasper said. “We wanted her to stand up for werewolves and demons…”
“Yeah. It’s true. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, because if she wasn’t the kind of girl who was willing to fight for what’s right, I wouldn’t like her so much,” I said.
“You don’t have to be close to be strong,” Billie said. “That’s my witch advice, you know. You’ve all been working together and that’s like a spell all on its own. It makes you stronger.”
“When you love something, you have to be willing to let it go,” Gaston said, in a rather philosophical turn for him.
“What have you let go?” Billie said.
“Ohh, for a long time I barely wanted to take hold in the first place,” Gaston said, and Billie’s eyes lit like this was the most romantic thing she’d ever heard.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not thinking of some long lost vampire floozy, anyway,” she said.
“Billie, will you help me with the nuts and bolts of the spell?” Jasper said. “The little magic I’ve done is nothing like this.”
“Of course! I want to do what I can, anyway. I hope this isn’t the last time we all work together. I don’t know how often y’all will ever come back to the south, and I hope you don’t, because I don’t need any more competition, but I think that if we ever buy a big mess of a mansion, we ought t
o give each other a call. Helena’s the glue that holds you together, so I want to keep her safe. Even you two have been pretty useful.” She looked at me and Gaston.
“Of course I’m useful,” Gaston said. “I have vampire strength and three hundred years of experience with groundskeeping.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” I said. “I’m glad I was helpful.”
Billie laughed. “If you’ve got strong arms, we can use you!”
“I think we’re all ready,” Jasper said.
“Take my hands,” Billie said, reaching for Gaston and Jasper. Even Gaston, with his immortal aloofness, seemed like he was enjoying himself and didn’t want this to end anytime soon. Jake was clutching my hand almost too hard. Right now, Jasper was a rock for the emotional Jake to lean on. But sometimes I saw Jasper lean on Jake too.
This is what having a family is really like, I thought. We’ve all made each other stronger. This is my family…my friends. My people.
“Good,” Billie said. “I can feel it. We all love Helena and Byron. And we’ll never let a jackass like Piers hurt our friend. That isn’t part of the official spell language, by the way, but the closer our bond is, the tighter the spell will be, and the more we can help Helena no matter where in the world she is.”
“Amen,” Jake said. “Helena can have every drop of strength in my body. I’ve already had dreams about the Sullivan litter. Three boys and they all look like me.”
Jasper burst out laughing.
“Have you told Helena about that dream?” I asked him.
“No.”
“I think you’d better not,” Billie said.
“I won’t.”
“A litter. That just doesn’t sound right,” I said.
“It won’t seem like that many, especially with all the aunts and uncles and grandparents to look after them. But I’ll take them all to the Red Sox games.”
“All right, then I will have one girl and she’ll be the queen of the debate team if we’re just naming off future children,” I said. “Who said we’re living in Boston? My kids aren’t going to have Boston accents.”
“You want them to have a Philadelphia accent? Come awhn, guys! Do you like to drink wodder or kahwfee?”
“Pahk the kah,” I muttered.
Billie was laughing too. “What is even happening right now? None of you talk like this!”
“I think you should just move to Louisiana,” Gaston said. “Because no one wants to buy your house and have control of your parallel and if you really want to help the familiars, you would have huge grounds and your own corner of the magical world to control. And then Billie can sort of move in with me, but when we fight, she can huff off and spend the night in her artist’s cottage. For fifteen bucks an hour I’ll trim your hedge maze and teach your three annoying wolf sons and your insufferably smug and unnnervingly charming debate team daughter to ride horses.”
We all looked at him.
“Okay! We are doing this spell!” Jasper barked at us. “Or no one is moving anywhere!”
Whatever kind of bond we needed to make this spell, I think we had it.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Helena
I thought I was going to die, but it seemed like I had just blacked out for a few seconds. I was on the ground. Byron was trying to rouse me. “Helena, talk to me!”
Lord Variel waved a hand and struck Marisa with a swirl of dark energy that surrounded her, making her shimmering beauty fade by the moment, like a flower wilting. “Go away, little angel,” he said. “This isn’t your fight and you know it.”
“That’s my brother you’re fighting…!”
“Ah. Thank you for informing me which family member I’ll be crushing. I have no interest in you.”
She clenched her fists, trying to fight him, but he was winning. I watched with horror as Marisa struggled in a silent battle of magic and will, and slowly crumpled to the ground.
Piers looked at me with his cold eyes and a smile, enjoying every moment of our pain. “Finally,” he said. “A little revenge. Helena, are you still alive? You’ve bled everywhere. And what was the point?”
What was the point? I thought my blood would break the spell that held the familiars captive, but nothing had happened. “Bevan,” I choked. “Please wake up.”
Lord Variel bent down his massive form and grabbed Bevan’s wrist, pulling him up. “Still a little scrawny for my tastes, but I’ll work on him.” He slung Bevan over his shoulder. “Thank you for the gift.”
Byron moved his fingers over the Way of Paths.
“Stop him,” Piers said. “He’s doing something with that thing again.”
“Stop him yourself, worm,” Lord Variel said. “I am Lord Variel the Devourer. I’m just here to feast on your spoils.”
“Heh,” I managed. “Summoning a high demon not really going like you hoped?”
Piers struck me with a jolt. “Shut up.”
“Ahh…!” I coughed up more blood.
Bevan’s fingers jerked.
“You can’t bring Bevan back into Etherium now,” Lord Variel said. “I have devoured his soul and it belongs to me now. As does the entire House of Soundhunter!”
“No…” I felt so helpless that I couldn’t stand it. I was fighting with every scrap of being but it was pulling me under.
“Let him go,” Piers said. “Or he dies with you.” His wand was pointed at my head.
Byron’s fingers wove over the Way of Paths and Piers stumbled.
“What was that?”
“Helena, get him,” Byron said.
Get him? I’m dying here! But I held out my own wand. I felt dizzy from blood loss. At least I could get one last blow on him. “Fire…!” One final gasp of my magic struck Piers and freaked him out. I knew he was afraid of burns since whatever incident had scarred his face, so I had that to my advantage as his jacket caught flame, but it was also a weak spell in the end. Albert snuffed it out with a counterspell.
Lord Variel came at Byron and grabbed him by his jacket. “A little half-demon,” he said. “With a toy.”
Byron was still clutching the Way of Paths and trying to manipulate the small pinpricks of light on the map even as Lord Variel shook him and then struck his face hard.
“Byron, fight back!” I screamed, belatedly.
Byron’s wings spread and his tail smacked the ground as he was knocked back, so he kept his balance. The blow left a mark on his beautiful face, his eye rapidly swelling, but he kept working the map.
“What is this odd little man doing?” Lord Variel asked Piers.
“He’s not little just because you’re huge,” I said, being a little petty now, but I didn’t like this demon calling my Byron an ‘odd little man’.
“I—I don’t know, but you should probably stop him!” Piers said. He flung a magical blast toward Byron.
“Byron, look out!”
“I know, Helena, I’m working on it!” Byron dodged the blast just as Lord Variel came at him to fight, having dropped Bevan carelessly onto the floor.
“There’s no time!” I gasped. Everything was fuzzing around me. I was losing consciousness again.
Lord Variel wrapped a huge hand around Byron’s neck.
“Gkk…” Byron was still working on his stupid map— (Sorry, Byron, but that was all I could think now.)
“You’re too late,” Lord Variel said. He put a hand on Byron’s Ethereal wing and tore it from his body.
“Byron—!”
Piers was grinning at me. That grin made me sick. When Harris told me that Piers killed his familiar, I thought it was sort of an accident in the heat of battle, but now I knew that Piers was enjoying every moment of this. “Chester!” he called. “Come to me!”
The little sugar glider appeared in Piers’ palm.
“Not like that.” Piers wrapped his hand tight around Chester until he was squeezing the life out of him. Chester was forced to turn into a human, the fragile blonde boy who looked like Piers, excep
t his face was kind and gentle and scared.
“Kill her,” Piers said.
“Please…”
“She wants to kill me. You need to protect me.”
Now, if I had any strength left to strike Piers, I would have to go through poor Chester.
Byron was bleeding, suffocating. I was too useless to do anything. Bevan was unconscious, the color drained from his skin.
Just when I thought I was going to die in the most depressing way, the room suddenly filled with familiars of every sort. Lizards and lemurs, cats and crickets, a falcon and a bearded dragon—all the familiars that had been keeping watch over the house charged in to form the cutest of all forces.
Now the room erupted into complete chaos. The familiars started casting all sorts of wayward spells. Lord Variel was forced to let go of Byron. I tried to crawl toward Byron and a spell smacked me in the face.
“Oops! I’m so sorry!” said a gerbil.
“’S’okay. Byron…what are you doing? Your wing…”
“Just a flesh wound,” he muttered.
“You’re bleeding! The map isn’t doing anything. Maybe you just need to have it out with stupid big boss demon over there…ohh…” I was getting dizzy again.
“I am fighting,” Byron said. “Scholar-style.”
I wasn’t so sure about fighting ‘scholar-style’. And the familiar battle was not going well at all. A few of them were strewn around and probably dead or at least badly injured. I was so relieved to see them appear, but I thought about Graham giving them little pep talks and how he knew all their names already. These were familiars from awful circumstances and they were giving their lives and I didn’t even know their names.
“Stop!” I cried. “Please stop! Don’t get killed!”
“Lady Helena, it’s our lives at stake,” one of them said as he scurried past me. “We have to fi—”
Piers zapped the familiar before he could finish the sentence, and then stomped on him.
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