by Renée Jaggér
“It depends on the needs of Bailey’s training. And because she obviously considers you a potential consort, I will not retaliate against your challenge. But don’t do it again.”
Roland refused to respond to that.
Bailey tried not to dwell on that word “consort” since it was true.
Fortunately, Marcus had other business to discuss, and his next words saved her from awkward mental explorations.
“Here.” He picked up the stone cup, which he’d placed at the edge of the campfire to heat the liquid within. It gave off wisps of silvery steam, and it smelled spicy but bitter. “You must drink this. But first, let me explain what you can expect.”
“For once,” Roland snarked.
The shaman paid him no heed. “It’s a magic potion, similar to what you’d call a hallucinogen. As it’s made with arcane components, it will not hit you as powerfully here in the Other as it would on Earth, yet the effects will be more profound as it goes along.”
The girl looked at the mug. The liquid within was purplish-brown.
“You should know,” Marcus extrapolated, “that this will be dangerous. It’s not all in your head, not this time. Your mind and spirit will be transported to a world of phantasmal visions. Strange things will emerge, things which might surprise you, and they will test you severely. Nothing will be as it seems, and everything will carry some deeper meaning.”
She nodded. “Like at the black pool.” Her spine tingled with the memory.
“Somewhat, but not exactly.” The shaman handed her the cup and she held it with both hands, waiting for his command to drink. “The important difference is that in this case, your actions and feelings will have real consequences for your body and mind and soul. The effects will linger long after the vision is over. You will interact with things as though you were a spirit, but as you remain tethered to your body. Any damage you take or bad decisions you make will impact the rest of you. Remember that.”
The young woman doubted it would be possible to forget. Seldom had she been more nervous.
Roland raised a hand. “Wait a minute. Is this some kind of sympathetic-magic scenario where if she hallucinates an undead warrior throwing a spear through her chest, a giant hole is going to open between her ribs in real life?”
Fenris looked up at him. “Possibly.”
The wizard snapped his face aside, probably to avoid spouting profanity, and his hands clenched and unclenched.
“Listen, Roland,” said Bailey, straightening up. “I know you’re worried about me, but I trust Marcus, and I’m the one who’s most directly affected. If it’s good enough for me, it should be good enough for you, y’know? You trust me, so by extension, trust him. Whatever I need to do to get through this and become a proper shaman, I’m gonna do it. That’s all there is to it.”
His grimace slowly melted, leaving a faint yet warm smile in its wake. “So be it. Good luck, Bailey.”
Marcus laid a hand on the wizard’s shoulder, and he tensed for a second but didn’t object. “She will be fine, Roland, provided she follows my advice and has the necessary strength. I would not have chosen her if I didn’t think she did. All will be well.”
He shrugged. “You’re the expert on Were stuff. Let’s keep watch over her, though, shall we?”
“We shall,” said the god. He made a sharp vertical motion with his outstretched hand.
Breathing in deeply through her mouth and out through her nose, the werewitch raised the cup to her lips and drank.
She awoke in a world that made the Other seem bright and cheerful. It was a land of blackness and fog. There was only a dark, flat sky like a starless night in autumn that seemed to encompass everything, as though the horizon were lower from the sky eating into it. There were no mountains or trees or any other features that might be called a landscape, only darkness.
Fog covered the ground, or perhaps “floor” would be a better term. Bailey looked down. The mists were lazy and oddly capricious, contorting into new shapes at random and writhing, seemingly for a thousand miles in every direction. Yet they only came up to her ankles.
From what she could see, her body was hazy and indistinct. Not quite transparent, but like an out-of-focus image. Yet she felt far too lucid for this to be a dream.
She was in the spirit world. Nothing here could be compared to anything else she’d seen in her short life.
Bailey looked up and started. Her brothers were there, lounging amidst the nothingness, just as they might be doing right now at their house. Everyone was sitting in his usual spot in the living room.
Yet they didn’t have physical bodies. They were like ghosts of translucent blue light, combined with generous helpings of the fog that had been forced to conform to a particular shape. None of them seemed to be aware of her presence.
“Hey,” she greeted them, and her voice sounded muffled and distant. “Jacob. Can you see me? Russell, Kurt? You guys there?” She waved a hand, hoping to catch their attention with motion as well as sound.
Then a jagged mass of lightning, a central bolt with branches in all directions, struck right where the TV would have been, sending shockwaves that engulfed the Nordin boys, making them writhe and smoke.
“No!” Bailey cried out and reached for them. A tendril of lightning leapt from the horrible carnage and encircled her wrist and she jerked back, her skin burned and her muscles seizing up.
Then the living room scene and the apparitions of her brothers were gone, and she was stumbling through a void of still-greater darkness. The mists rose to her knees, and after some moments, the pain in her arm subsided and other visions appeared.
Everything was outlined in deep-blue light. Figures were everywhere, many of them familiar. She held her breath even if she was not sure she had lungs and watched.
People—and wolves—milled around in what seemed like the chaotic aftermath of a titanic battle and a drunken party. Or perhaps a natural disaster. She recognized faces from the town, people she knew well and others she didn’t, although she’d seen them before.
There were werewolves, most of them shifted, leaping to and fro, fighting each other and attacking the humans and striking them down.
Witches appeared as well, cruel-faced women unknown to her, slaughtering wolves with powerful blasts of magic. Ancient warriors, many of them Norse like Baldur’s host of the slain, joined the combat wherever they could, hopelessly throwing themselves into a struggle that seemed to have no meaning.
At the center of the violence, looking harried and bewildered and on the verge of defeat, was her teacher. He did not see her.
“Marcus!” she called to him. “Fenris! What is this? What am I supposed to do, dammit?”
For a second, it appeared that he would turn to her and answer. Then a great wind came up—one that exerted no force on her, only on the vision—and whipped the blue light and dark fog into oblivion, leaving only a clean black slate.
Silence and nothingness. Bailey, confused and unreasonably frightened, trudged slowly forward. No direction was any different from any other; she might as well have been in deep space.
She saw something out of the corner of her eye, turned, and spied two figures ten paces away. One was a shifted lycanthrope who was familiar as a member of her species, but she could not discern its individual identity.
The other was a woman dressed in the strange leather outfit of the Venatori. Seeing her, Bailey tensed, but the face above the armored clothing was curiously young and innocent.
Both of them were badly hurt. The wolf had had a third of its hair and skin burned off and broken its leg in a fall. The woman seemed to have taken a great gouging blow to her abdomen and might have been holding her guts in with her hands.
“Help me,” the witch begged in a wispy voice. “Please.”
Bailey stared at the mismatched pair. “What happened?”
“This wolf attacked me,” said the young woman. “It needs to be put down. I only acted in self-defense. Kill it bef
ore it hurts someone else!”
The wolf, for its part, whimpered in pain. Then it turned its eyes toward the injured woman and growled, essentially leveling the same accusation at her.
Bailey froze, not knowing how to react or who to believe. Her instinct was to take the side of her own kind, the children of Fenris. However, she’d just come from a brawl with Weres who’d had few compunctions about turning on her, picking a fight for no good reason.
It was impossible to assign guilt, and she couldn’t bring herself to destroy one or the other, fearing that putting either figure to death would be reckless, callous, and unforgivably stupid.
And if she saved one, they might turn around and murder the other.
Then both died. They slumped and melted into the fog.
“No!” Bailey screamed again. She’d taken too long deliberating; both had been slowly expiring of fatal wounds. “That wasn’t fair. I should have saved one of them. At least one! Right?”
She kicked, and the aroma of sweat and peat and burning wood filled her nose. She felt muddy, weedy earth against her back. Her eyes flicked open.
Bailey was back on the little island in the marshes of the Other. A fire burned to her right, and Marcus and Roland stood over her. She gasped and sat up, trying not to cry.
The shaman knelt beside her. “Tell me what happened.”
She did. The details were distinct in her mind, like something she’d really experienced. It was not analogous to the way a dream grows muddled as one wakes up and then slips away altogether.
And her right hand had a slight electrical burn.
Marcus nodded slowly, his face somber and placid. “I see,” he intoned. “Believe it or not, in the last vision, you were right and did what you ought to have done.”
She squinted at him. “How is that possible? They both frickin’ died!” She felt awful, as though someone had stabbed her with a hypodermic needle filled with acid.
The tall man gave a sad shrug. “You can’t save everyone. By acting rashly to take sides in a fight that wasn’t yours to begin with, you might have condemned someone without need or justification. Instead, you let things take their course. They attacked each other; neither was innocent, and both died of their stupidity.”
She frowned and bowed her head. “In a way, that makes sense. It’s just so…ugly and cruel.”
Roland’s hand was suddenly squeezing hers. She squeezed back.
“Sometimes,” said Marcus, “the world is like that. But you’re not done yet. We need to send you back to finish your task.”
Her stomach clenched. She’d rather fight the Shashka pack again than deal with this shit. But Fenris had undoubtedly trained countless other shamans before her. She would do as he instructed.
The tall man raised the stone cup to her lips again, and she took another swig. The world darkened and faded, and a moment later, she stood once more in the world of black shadows and blue mist.
Another battle was raging now across the plains of darkness. A veritable horde of werewolves, a legion of them, streamed across the ground. All had shifted, and their jaws grinned with crazed wrath, much like what she’d seen on Nick’s Shashkas while his berserker buff was in effect. They plunged headlong into the fray, hides bristling, saliva trailing behind them in the wind.
Their opponents were witches interspersed with a few wizards, magic-using humanoids all and on the defensive. There were thousands of them against tens of thousands of lycanthropes, and it was a massacre. A figure at the center of the great horde stood on a raised moving platform like a palanquin or maybe a chariot, directing the slaughter.
Some of the sorcerers had given up and fallen to their knees or were trying to run away. The wolves paid no heed and tore them apart.
“Stop!” Bailey exclaimed. “You can’t do that!”
In front of her, a huge lycanthrope was about to pounce on a pair of wounded and helpless women. She jumped in and tackled the wolf, knocking it aside, and slammed its head into the ground with her forearm. Then she sprang to her feet and made toward the leader.
The blue light of the apparitions grew brighter, and the figure on the central platform turned.
It was her.
The girl sucked air into her lungs, hissing defiance at the reality of what she saw yet somehow unsurprised. She flashed back to her first vision beside the Pool of Dark Reflections when her doppelganger had emerged from the black waters and fought her.
“You again,” she growled. “This is not how we do things.”
The shadow-double saw her now, and the chillingly familiar face split into a savage grin. “Yes, it is,” she stated. “I’m the caretaker for our people. I’m leading us to absolute safety—a world without enemies.” She laughed.
Bailey lunged toward the clone, knocking barreling wolves out of the way as she went. “No. This is wrong. We defend ourselves if we have to, but we don’t just go around killing everyone.”
Part of her wasn’t sure she believed that, though. Part of her found the sight of the battle thrilling and understood the doppelganger’s words. To preemptively destroy their foes was to remove the possibility of being destroyed.
But it wasn’t right.
Bailey jumped onto the platform, which was a kind of wagon drawn by half-changed werewolves like the ones used by ancient warlords on rampages of conquest. At once, she found herself grappling with her shadow form, the version of her that wanted to bring this about.
The doppelganger spat in her face, insulted her weakness and naiveté, tore her hair out, and gouged her eyes.
Bailey responded in kind, clawing the shadow’s face, kicking its legs and stomach, and shouting at it to give up and shut up and go away forever. They traded magical blasts of telekinetic force and ice and burning plasma, but nothing got through the other’s defenses. All around them, the massacre continued as wolves fought and killed.
Soon Bailey found herself grappling with the doppelganger, their arms entwined, her fist a foot away from the leering face she refused to recognize as her own. She remembered then how she’d defeated the leader of the last Venatori band, the one time she could think of when killing had been the right thing to do.
The essence of her magical power formed a long spear blade of red light that protruded from her fist, cleaving straight into the face of the shadow-clone. It shrieked and dissolved into a wispy mass of fog, which blew away and was gone.
Then Bailey was at the reins. The nearest Weres looked up at her.
“Stop,” she commanded. They slowed down.
She drew a breath and shouted, “Stop!” This time, most of the wolves in sight halted or hesitated, looking at her.
“STOP!” she howled.
Then she woke up, sweating and thrashing as Marcus and Roland laid hands on her shoulders and spoke in low, soft voices.
“It’s okay,” said Roland. “It’s over.”
Bailey gasped, blinking and rubbing her eyes, glancing around to make sure the vision was gone and she was safely back in the Other with her friends. “Yeah,” she panted. “Over…”
The men helped her to her feet, and Marcus’ hand never left her arm. He turned to Roland. “Leave us. Fly over the swamp in that direction and wait on a rocky hill you find there. I will fetch you when we’re ready.”
“All right,” he muttered, though clearly, he’d prefer to be there to help if needed. He jumped into the air and floated off between the slimy black trees.
After Bailey had had a moment to catch her breath and calm down, Fenris asked, “What did you see? What did you do?”
She didn’t want to talk about it, but she did.
When she came to the end, she felt better. Putting it into words, and now safe from the hideous sight of her dark clone, it seemed as though she’d won some kind of victory. Maybe.
To her surprise, Marcus smiled. “Good. Bailey, I’m proud of you.”
She looked away for a second as a lump formed in her throat.
“Congratulations
,” the shaman went on. “You demonstrated self-control and initiative in tandem. I’m training you to be a leader, and a good leader requires those two things. You are meant to stand above them and command them, but in a way that demonstrates self-discipline, wisdom, and good judgment. A good leader is not a monster, flattening everything she sees and acting on cruel whims. A reckless war overextends the pack’s resources, leaves them open to flanking strikes, and makes too many enemies. War is only to be waged prudently and in self-defense. The total elimination of one’s enemies ultimately creates more problems than it solves.”
Bailey nodded, her eyes tired and heavily lidded. “I understand, Fenris.”
She did not tell him that there was another reason she’d stopped the killing in the vision.
Roland. Witchkind were his people just as wolfkind were hers. He was proof that they weren’t all bad and didn’t deserve total destruction, despite the actions of those like Shannon DiGrezza and the Venatori.
She had no desire to inflict pain on the families of the people she loved.
Chapter Eleven
Marcus had offered Bailey a short break, and she’d insisted on speaking to Roland alone. The shaman had not objected, and she’d left him there while she floated to the rocky hill where the wizard had, it seemed, been waiting for her.
“Oh,” he quipped as she landed, “there you are. What did your Jedi-Master-slash-deity have to say about whatever it was you saw in there? If you don’t mind talking about it. I have to confess I’m curious.”
She sighed and embraced him with a sudden motion. “You suck at being serious, you know?” she observed. “But lately, things have been a little too serious, so that’s okay with me.”
“Thanks,” he replied.
“Anyway, he said I did just fine, so that’s encouraging. And yeah, I’ll tell you all about it.”
She released him after a moment. Then, on a whim, they flew off the rock and over the trees and landed on relatively dry ground closer to the places they’d seen before.
They strolled aimlessly, and Bailey recited her visions. This time, she told of them in slightly less detail because she didn’t feel like going through it all again. She summarized the main points.