by Renée Jaggér
Having documented that magic-users were responsible for the massacre, he’d soon be able to bring the full force of the Agency—with the strength of the entire U.S. government to back it up—to bear on those responsible.
“Fuck,” he muttered. “This would be easier if I wasn’t alone. I’m not used to this shit, Spall. Didn’t you consider that? Asshole.”
Saying that out loud, if only under his breath, made it feel like someone had just kicked him in the stomach, but once it passed, he felt a little better. The device in his hands finished its beeping as the sirens grew louder, then stopped. The fire department was here.
Townsend ran a hand through his thinning hair and stood up, preparing to speak to the local authorities and take command of the situation. It would be best if he waited in the shadows and arrived on the scene after the firefighters and cops had a chance to “control” the situation.
Of course, this time, he’d have to do one hundred percent of the talking.
“Don’t worry, Spall,” he whispered. “You might have been a dumbass at the end, getting yourself killed, but your heart was in the right fuckin’ place. At least you got two of them. I’ll get the rest. Send ‘em straight to hell so you can finish dealing with them.”
He was looking forward to it.
“Nah,” he chided himself. “Just a duty that has to be done. A categorical imperative. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
In the war to come, it was possible other agents would end up dead, too. But then, the Agency had never sought this. They weren’t the ones who’d started it. All the bloodshed, starting two weeks ago, was the Venatori’s fault.
Townsend would make damn sure that all of it got pinned directly to their asses.
As the fire truck pulled up, he breathed in and out a few times, clearing his headspace in preparation for being an emotionless professional when he spoke to the locals. Professionalism was important. Especially when he had to admit that the whole goddamn thing was now personal.
Nicolas Jezak, apprentice to shaman Fred Grotowski of the Shashka Pack, stood staring with eyes that were wide but somehow blank and hollow with the horror of what he was seeing. A faint tremor of anger went through the ropey muscles of his lean frame.
His teacher didn’t have time to instruct him as often as he’d like, so the training was going slowly. As such, Nick had plenty of time to do other things on the side, such as accompany another shaman, Marcus, on a little sightseeing tour.
The older man extended a hand toward the smoldering crime scene. “You see?” he said. “This is the kind of thing that’s already begun to happen, and I’m afraid it’s going to keep getting worse until things change in a major and important way.”
Nick’s voice was almost raspy as he swallowed the lump in his throat and asked, “What happened? In the name of fucking Fenris, how did this happen?”
The shaman had taken him through a shortcut in the Other to view the scene unfolding south of Olympia, Washington. The two of them crouched inconspicuously in the forest shadows near what used to be a peaceful little trailer park.
Three of four entire square acres had been reduced to charcoal. The inky-black smoke was still rising in places, even after the fire department had drenched the whole place with water. Now cops and paramedics milled about.
They were loading many, many body bags onto stretchers. Putting them in the back of a cargo truck, even.
Marcus sighed. “I might be able to show the final moments of some who died here, a holographic projection of sorts. It would shed light on the nature of the tragedy. But if we do that, I don’t think we’re going to like what we see.”
Nick clenched and unclenched his bony fists. “I already don’t like it. Show me.”
“As you wish,” replied Marcus, sadness in his voice.
He concentrated, recited a brief chant, and spread his hands before the awful scene. That darkness was falling now somehow made it worse since it obscured the details and left too much to the imagination.
A disc of light, purplish-silver in hue, spread on the ground before them like a perfectly circular pool of water. Within it, a movie of the past played out.
They both watched in disgust as screaming, snarling, terrified werewolves piled out of burning mobile homes, their bodies distorted by half-finished shifting, as sometimes happened when a Were was in a bad state of mind. Magical lightning and fire flashed all around. Men, women, and children collapsed in heaps. In the end, fire consumed everything.
Nick looked away, waving his hand, and Marcus snapped his fingers to dismiss the scrying. The images vanished and left only shadows behind. Somehow, the scry had been unable to reveal who had perpetrated it. They only saw the victims, probably because they were the ones whose psychic residues were most strongly tied to the location.
The shaman watched, unspeaking, as the younger man doubled over, holding his breath as he struggled not to vomit. After about two minutes, he stood back up, crossing his tattooed bare arms over his chest.
“Whoever did this,” he stated, “is going to pay.”
Marcus nodded. “It’s tragic that it’s come to this. We have to act before similar tragedies befall other Weres all over the Pacific Northwest. It won’t be easy, though. Whoever did this, it was clearly someone with a great deal of magical power.”
“I can see that,” Nick snapped. “It would be helpful if we saw who the fuck it was, but I think I can narrow it down to one or two likely possibilities.”
The shaman said nothing.
Nicholas Jezak, as near as Marcus could tell, was a channeler of above-average ability. His powers weren’t extraordinary, but they were enough to pose a legitimate threat to most opponents. Rather than raw power, the apprentice’s chief assets were his connections and his persuasive ability, possibly the sign that he was gifted in psychic magic above all else. It was a useful skill for someone who already had a surplus of friends.
He was also impatient with the glacial progress of his training and hungry for an opportunity to advance himself more quickly.
Knowing this, Marcus wasn’t surprised in the slightest when Nick asked the next question.
The younger man stared into the shaman’s eyes, his jaw trembling with the tension of the muscles along it. “Where is she?”
Chapter Six
“I should have known,” Roland grumbled, “that the son of a bitch would send us back here. Sorry. Am I allowed to call a god a ‘son of a bitch?’ I don’t think he’s around to hear, but you never know with supernatural beings who are multiple orders of magnitude above us on the scale of…everything.”
They sat in the muddy sand just past the edge of the Pool of Dark Reflections, their least favorite place in the Other. However, Bailey had to admit the black lake had been instrumental in the progress of both of them so far.
“Yeah, yeah,” she shot back, giving Roland a disapproving glare. “Fenris understands mortals way better than the other gods do, it seems like. He might cut you some slack for saying that shit, knowing how tired and stressed out we both are. But I wouldn’t try it to his face.”
The wizard flexed his hands. “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing.”
Bailey tried not to shudder. “Don’t mention dreams right now. We’ve had enough of the bad kind, thanks to this place.”
Not only had they seen Aida Nassirian, one of Roland’s “admirers” and the right-hand woman of Shannon DiGrezza, dragged into the pool to her death by the realm’s mist-demons, but the mysterious power of the waters had induced highly unpleasant visions in both of them. It seemed to force people to confront their worst fears.
Fortunately, the task Marcus had set for them didn’t involve succumbing to any more waking nightmares. The opposite, in fact. He’d told them to gently channel magic toward themselves through the pool, then try to resist the onset of the visions.
It was some kind of defense against psionic attacks, Bailey suspected. The Venatori had tried t
o overwhelm them previously with waves of terror and despair, so it made sense to know how to protect themselves.
“Well,” Roland commented, “we probably ought to get back to it. I’ll be the first to confess that this nonsense isn’t easy. Essentially, he’s having us deliberately induce an altered state of consciousness, which makes it harder to cast spells, then use rational magic to push back or something like that. Shit.”
Bailey shrugged. “It’s for a good reason. The more we know how to do, the harder it will be for the witches to kill us. Or in your case, enslave you and use you as a sperm donor.”
Roland stretched his legs. “It’s nice to have a woman to talk to about these things. Every time I mention that particular situation to another man, they produce the same old jokes about how much they’d like to be ‘threatened’ with the ‘doom’ I’m trying to get the fuck away from. Doesn’t it occur to them that being reduced to a vending machine would get old pretty fast?”
The girl shook her head. “Men!”
They languished without speaking for a bit, neither wanting to provoke the dreaded pool again but having no idea of what else they might do if they rebelled against Marcus’ instructions.
It had occurred to both of them, though. Bailey was almost ashamed of her feelings, but she couldn’t deny them, either. She was frustrated by the slow, tedious, tortuous path of her training. The seemingly endless strain and repetition, and the lack of clear answers as to why they did what they did.
Marcus’ method of instruction was like making them fight their way through fog with blindfolds and earplugs in the hope that it would develop their tactile reflexes, not caring what it did to the quality of their hand-eye or ear-eye coordination. Or their planning and strategic skills.
Just as they were about to get up, something out in the pool began to bubble.
“What the hell?” Roland pointed at it. “That looks bad. What do you say we get the fuck out of here?”
Bailey stared. The black liquid, too dark and viscous to be water, was rising fountain-like around a mass—no, a figure—emerging from the depths of the lake.
The werewitch and the wizard jumped to their feet, spines going cold. They knew they ought to just run, but they were weirdly fascinated. Some part of them wanted to know what was boiling its way out.
“Shit!” Bailey exclaimed. “The goddamn pool is spawning another vision, and this time we didn’t notice it was happening. We’re not that tired yet, are we? How long have we been in here?”
Roland swallowed and took a couple of steps back, dragging on the girl’s arm to encourage her to do the same.
“We’re not that tired,” he answered her, “and this isn’t a vision. It’s real. Something is coming out of the water, and it’s guaranteed not to be anything good.”
That was just what she was afraid of.
All at once, the thing stood up. The water out there looked deep, yet what emerged was a humanoid shape that towered far enough above the surface that it only appeared to come up to its knees. It looked like a giant plant or a fungus or a mass of algae the same obsidian color as the water, rotten, dripping, and hideous. It had long wet black hair and limbs composed of vines and tendrils wound tightly around decaying chunks of flesh and bone.
Roland made a strangled hissing sound. “Oh, my fucking god!”
The creature was looking at them with wide dark eyes that were somehow familiar. It opened its mouth and out poured a torrent of bile and seaweed-like sludge before it found its voice.
Though the thing now stood in the open air, the sound that emerged from its pond-scum-lined throat resembled something shouted underwater, combined with a bizarre sibilance that reminded Bailey of the wind rushing through a field of grass.
“You!” it jeered. “You did this. You two did this to me! It’s all your fault. Look at me! Look at me!”
Bailey snapped her eyes toward Roland, trying to gauge his reaction. He had shut his eyelids and was quaking in place like a kid having a nightmare.
“Roland,” she urged, shaking him by the shoulder. “Is it…”
“Yes,” he stated, his voice low and ragged. “It’s fucking Aida.”
Staring at the abomination, Bailey was forced to accept the truth. The young woman who’d been dragged into the accursed lake not long ago hadn’t died but had somehow mutated into one of the Other’s myriad demons.
Horribly, her tall and ample-bosomed figure and well-chiseled facial features were still vaguely recognizable, despite how much of her body had been consumed or replaced by alien plant life. Enough of her former beauty remained for them to be nauseated by how badly it had been ruined.
“I,” the Aida-thing went on with a sloshy groan, “am now part of this place. I thought I died, but I didn’t. I stayed alive, even as I was turned into fertilizer for the things that grow at the bottom of this lake. Now I belong to it, and the Other belongs to me. I am a manifestation of the cursed bog, the endless swamps here that hunger for mortal flesh and blood and souls. And I can’t think of anyone who deserves that fate more than you. Come, join me!”
Bailey blinked, suddenly spurred to action. “Hell, no. Roland, let’s ditch her.”
“Good idea,” he agreed. They turned and sprinted up the slope, fighting the steep terrain and the pull of gravity to get out of sight of the awful pond.
Aida’s voice gurgled after them. “No! Come back! You will fucking pay! I can’t even die! I’m in hell!”
In front of them, the weeds and mosses and roots rose up like a mass of charmed snakes emerging from an Indian fakir’s basket, slithering over to block their path, then moving in for the kill.
Bailey raised a hand and sucked the heat out of the mass of plant matter, paralyzing it with cold and causing some of the vines to break off. Then she spun, the heat she’d stolen forming a fireball in front of her hand, and threw it straight at Aida.
“You tried to kill me with one of these,” Bailey reminded her. “Now we’ll see about the whole ‘not dying’ thing.”
The mass of flames struck the swamp creature square in the chest. Half the fire was extinguished at once by the dampness of Aida’s body and the residual bubbling vapors of the lake, but the other half seemed to engulf her. She screamed, but only for a couple of seconds. Then the blaze winked out, and only steam rose where it had burned.
Bailey stared. “Fucking hell!”
Part of Aida’s new body had been destroyed by the blast, but almost sentient black water was rising to cover the damage. The botanical tendrils and blobs of pond moss were regenerating at an unnaturally fast rate.
“So,” Roland observed, his face skewed with that half-crazed look he got when he could barely believe what he was seeing, “she’s a kudzu plant now, basically. Let’s try some weed-killer.”
He swept his arms toward the mutated witch and a cloud of toxic vapor condensed into a sheet of yellowish rain that poured down on their foe, raising puffs of smoke where it struck.
“So, yeah, Aida,” Roland called. “I know a thing or two about the chemical composition of herbicides. Unlike other people, I paid attention in science class instead of texting my friends about whose makeup looked like shit that day.”
Aida shrieked, the noise unnervingly inhuman, and she half-melted, half-withered, sinking partway back into the boggy pool. Again the black liquid came to her rescue, neutralizing the attack and re-growing her ravaged body.
Then, her still-mostly-human eyes flashing with hate, Aida struck back.
Vines sprouted from the earth around Bailey’s and Roland’s ankles, lashing them into place, while a foaming column of black liquid rose from the lake and splashed uphill toward them.
“Dammit,” Bailey growled, weakening the vines with a wave of heat and then tearing them apart. Roland did likewise, and the two of them dove in opposite directions to avoid the crashing wave of enchanted liquid.
It reached for them with dark dripping tentacles, then flowed back downhill, compelled somehow to retu
rn to the pool. Aida gave a strangled cry of frustrated rage.
Roland caught Bailey’s eye. “This isn’t working. We need to get her away from the pool so she can’t regenerate.”
“Yeah,” the girl replied, “or kill her outright by using more firepower.”
They scrambled the rest of the way up the slope and climbed over the ridge onto the hillock.
“Or both,” Roland suggested. “That way, we can kill her, make sure she doesn’t regenerate, and keep blasting the ashes until they’re reduced to subatomic particles.”
Behind them, they could hear the sloshing sound of something moving through the pond in the direction they’d fled.
“Yeah,” quipped Bailey, “let’s go with Option Number Three.”
The pair scrambled over the weedy expanse of the hilltop, reasoning that if nothing else, they could probably outdistance their adversary with ease. The wet, shuffling noises were moving no faster than a brisk trot. Aida had probably lost the ability to run.
“No!” her distorted voice screamed again. “You won’t get away! You deserve this!”
Roland tripped. “Shit!” he gasped, pitching forward, his arms flailing before they extended to brace himself and save his face from crashing into the ground.
Bailey saw with mounting revulsion that grasping weeds had encircled the wizard’s feet and ankles and shins. She jumped into the air, but her left foot, lower than the right, succumbed to the grip of a similar mass of vines. She stumbled and half-rolled on her side in the writhing foliage.
Regaining her bearings as the sentient plants flowed up her legs, she saw that Roland was using careful blasts of intense cold to destroy the tentacle-like weeds and free himself. She quickly fashioned a crude, glowing blade of arcane plasma and used it to slash the tendrils holding her.