by Renée Jaggér
That was when the three realized Bailey and Roland weren’t bluffing and something was seriously wrong.
Shannon looked first. “Holy fuck!” she sputtered. “You two fight off those things. I’ll deal with—”
Roland hurled a flaming mass of molten earth over her head, causing her to duck. The meteor crashed amidst a cluster of wraiths and mist-demons, scattering the former and vaporizing the latter.
Bailey looked at him. “Why are you helping them?”
He grimaced. “Not even they deserve to be killed by these things. Besides, we can deal with the three of them after we get rid of the Other’s little welcoming committee. For now, having five mages against those things is better than two.”
There was, Bailey had to admit, a certain logic in that. Her opinion of Roland’s judgment only got better when the wraiths all howled in unison, practically freezing her solid with primal fear. Even Shannon’s nails-on-chalkboard voice wasn’t that bad.
Shannon, for her part, realizing that Roland hadn’t been aiming the meteor spell at her, broke her word to concentrate on the pair and instead spun around, joining her partners in fighting off the hellish swarm that was now bearing down on all of them.
An awkward and impromptu truce emerged amongst the quintet as they all turned their efforts toward the common enemy. Bailey and Roland, physically farther from each other than they’d like, handled the right and left flank, while the coven held back the center.
The werewitch tried her freezing spell again, and three of the wraiths near the edge of the forest solidified and failed to move. Then Caldoria hit them with a blast of kinetic force, shattering them to pieces.
The two young women’s eyes locked briefly.
Callie narrowed her eyes. “Don’t get any ideas or I’ll break your ass next!”
Bailey just snorted. She’d personally fought Callie at least twice by now and wasn’t about to consider the little blonde loudmouth a friend just because of today’s bizarre circumstances.
Meanwhile, Roland and Shannon were collaborating in hurling a net made of lightning and fire at some of the mist-demons, destroying most of the ones in its path. Then Roland was distracted from the sorceresses by a sudden ambush of wraiths.
Aida remained aloof. Bailey had judged her the relatively least-awful of the three, but now she wasn’t so sure.
As Bailey and Roland focused their efforts on blasting the wraiths which increasingly crawled forth from the surrounding woods, the mist-demons advanced on the trio of witches, their ever-increasing numbers exceeding even the powers of a mind-melded coven.
“Oh, shit!” Shannon cried, desperation in her voice. “Fall back. We need to get the hell out of—”
A wraith rose from the ground right next to her and she stumbled over her feet, crashing into Aida, who went sprawling into the mud toward the lake—and the mist creatures.
Before anyone could act, the tall, dark-haired witch was surrounded by the hideous beings, who enveloped her in their smoky white limbs and jaws. She wailed horribly, her magical abilities failing as the demons carried her back toward the black water.
“Aida!” Callie shouted and tossed a mass of ice toward the creatures. It struck two in the rear of the cluster, converting some of their vapor to solid form and slowing them badly, but six more moved in to take their place.
Everyone else was pressed down by others of the horrid entities, wraiths and mist-demons alike, and could only watch and listen with nauseated shock as Aida was dragged into the lake, the fog-creatures pulling her under the surface of the black water. It seemed to rise to grasp at her. Dark fluid bubbled, and the woman vanished.
“No,” Shannon gasped. “Oh, no. Oh, fuck. Jesus, Callie, we need to get out of here!”
“No shit!” Caldoria sputtered.
Roland, his face drawn with remorse for what had happened to Aida, conjured a rain of fiery droplets behind the remaining two witches, which dispersed the mist creatures in its path and allowed the women to hustle the rest of the way up the slope to join the pair.
For a moment, there was silence and a reprieve from combat.
The four looked at each other, their lungs heaving and brows glistening with cold sweat. Bailey wondered if she should kill them both right now while they were weak and not expecting it. No one would ever find the bodies here. Then she and Roland would be free of ever having to worry about these bitches again.
No, she told herself. Absolutely, positively no. I am not a murderer.
“So,” Roland said to his pursuers, “looks like you finally—”
“Hold that thought,” Shannon declared. Some of her customary arrogance was back. “This isn’t over. But yeah, now isn’t the time, so have a nice fucking day.”
She and Callie turned and ran.
Bailey and Roland watched them, stupefied. Their forms grew smaller—it was almost unbelievable how fast they’d managed to bolt—and they disappeared into the trees, moving in the opposite direction of the dreaded lake.
The werewitch and the wizard turned back toward the pool.
To their relief, they saw that the mist-demons had given up. A lot of them had been destroyed or banished, and the ones who remained were sinking back into the dark water. Perhaps, Bailey wondered, their hunger had been sated by whatever it was they’d done to Aida. She shuddered and tried not to think about it.
That left only a relatively small group of wraiths, which even now were struggling up the slope.
“Well,” murmured Roland, “I think we’ve almost won at this point.”
“Almost, yeah,” Bailey agreed.
Working together, they engaged the remaining wraiths. It didn’t take long. Holding the high ground as they did, fighting a much smaller number of adversaries, and freed from having to worry about the witches backstabbing them at any moment, they were able to concentrate on creating a broad field of static electricity that reduced most of the wraiths to steaming black puddles. The few who remained fled, moaning and howling, into the woods to hide in the shadows that had spawned them.
Bailey bent over, resting her hands on her buckled knees, trying not to fall to the ground. “Gods,” she panted. “I don’t know if any of what we just did meets Marcus’s definition of ‘progress,’ but I think we just earned a goddamn all-expenses-paid vacation.”
Roland, leaning against a mossy boulder, tried to laugh, but mostly just wheezed. “Yeah, I like the sound of that. Somewhere warm and peaceful and extremely boring.”
They didn’t speak for a few minutes while they tried to calm their minds and re-energize their bodies. Aida’s hideous fate—whatever it was—hung heavy, but neither wanted to discuss it.
There was still the matter of the other two.
“I wonder,” Bailey mused, “if they know how to get out of here. I’m thinking maybe they used a portal of Marcus’s to get in.”
Roland spread his hands. “I don’t know. Shannon’s actually pretty talented, and the other two aren’t slouches either. Not on my level, of course, but I could see them being able to open a portal. In any event, they’re gone for now.”
Bailey nodded. “Wait! If you’re better than they are, how come you can’t open a portal?”
He scrunched his face in irritation. “You’re good with cars, right? Can you fix a lawnmower?”
“Uh,” she replied, “I’ve never done it, but I, uh, probably could.”
“Exactly,” he stated. “I probably could too, but why risk screwing it up when Marcus has things covered?”
She scowled but conceded the point. “Where is Marcus, anyway? Normally, he’s got our back.”
It occurred to her that she missed him. He’d done so much for them. He was a good man.
Chapter Ten
The three women, clad head to toe in leather, stepped through the midnight-purple doorway and into the misty wastes of the Other.
Lavonne smiled. She could already smell the magical trail left by the American witches who wanted Roland for themselv
es.
It seemed less obvious to her two companions; though powerful and intelligent, they weren’t on Lavonne’s level. She was glad she’d led this final thrust of the expedition, leaving her assistant Savina in charge of the remaining two witches at the motel. Some of them would need to remain behind in the mortal world, after all, to keep up pretenses. And it never hurt to have backup soldiers on hand, in case there was an emergency.
“They are close,” Lavonne stated. “They’ve been moving, and it seems we opened the door just as they were passing this point. But they have not gone far. They fled that way.”
She pointed toward a depression in the earth, where, despite the lower elevation, it looked dry, thanks to the ground mostly consisting of moss-covered rock rather than the usual weeds, mud, and peat.
The other two tilted their heads, acknowledging the duty that lay before them. Lavonne touched their shoulders and they quickly formed a basic coven, combining powers and consciousness for a better unity of action and more coherent use of their collective magical abilities.
They took off at a brisk trot across the flat swampy ground toward a rocky outcropping that separated the marsh from the rocky valley. There was a natural pathway leading down into the depression, and on either side of it were shallow, festering pools of dank water from which thorny trees grew, their branches reaching out like twisted claws.
No sooner had they stepped between the pools than a pack of wraiths ambushed them. Or two packs working in unison, about twenty on each side.
Lavonne walked in the center and her disciples strode at her flanks, acting as her right and left arms. The left made a gesture, and the wraiths to that side exploded before a sheet of flame that engulfed almost all of them, consuming the last few a second or two later. Only a thin sheet of smoking black slime remained where they’d been. The trees, too, had been burned down to nubs protruding from the now-steaming water.
The right, meanwhile, with a flick of the arm, called down a storm of lightning bolts that struck amidst the wraiths on that side, vaporizing the ones hit directly and sending out leaping arcs of electricity to dissolve the others. The bolts knocked over any trees in the way, while the water sparked from having been thoroughly electrocuted.
They walked on, having barely been slowed by the feeble attack.
As they started to descend into the small rocky hollow, orb creatures like floating gelatinous heads rose before them from a crevasse in the ground. The things drooled and gibbered and extended long barbed tongues toward the advancing trio of women.
Lavonne raised both hands, pulling strength from the witches to either side, and struck the creatures with a frontal assault of kinetic force mixed with powerful acid. The telekinetic portion doubled as a shield to keep the corrosive liquid from splashing back toward its casters.
The head-things moaned as they flew back and then toppled to the ground, mostly dissolved by the acid. By the time the witches walked past them, there was almost nothing remaining but a few foul-smelling patches of liquid.
No other creatures emerged to challenge them as they trekked toward their target. The Other was a place of paradox. Large displays of magic attracted its strange denizens, yet similar displays could drive them off. For now, it seemed the sentience of the realm had learned its lesson.
Lavonne, of course, had learned a useful lesson of her own long ago—namely, how to exert complete, perfect control over the arcane, regardless of circumstances. Channeling in the Other was more difficult than in the mortal world, but by no means impossible. It simply required a different mindset and a different way of allocating one’s energies.
The smell of the American sorceresses was stronger down here. Lavonne did not sense the presence of anyone else, meaning Bailey and Roland were unlikely to be in the immediate vicinity. However, they might be useful for pointing the Venatori in the right direction.
There was something else, too. They seemed bereft of one of their number.
Lavonne and her cohorts found them hiding in a circle of tree stumps near a large mass of boulders and low rocky hillocks. Both of them—the reddish-purple-haired one who was clearly the leader, and the short fair-haired one. The tall, olive-skinned brunette was nowhere to be seen.
“You,” Lavonne said.
Shannon snapped to attention. She and Callie were nearly unconscious from fatigue. In a panic, they’d fled from the dark lake, too weak to open a portal home. They had needed a place to rest for a while until that magic could be summoned.
“Oh, crap,” Shannon gasped. Callie just stared.
Lavonne smiled and gestured for them to stand. They did, but not through their own efforts. Magical forces seized them and bore them to their feet, like jerky puppets trying to obey gravity forced upright by pulling their strings.
“We warned you,” Lavonne began, “to abandon your pursuit of the wizard and the werewitch. Obviously, you did not, but that has been fortuitous since you’ve led us to them. Well done.”
The girls looked terrified—Shannon also looked furious—but neither spoke, yet.
The witch to Lavonne’s left spoke. “Tell us where they are, or we will make you exceedingly sorry.”
The one to the right joined in. “We will have the information from you one way or another. This is your chance to give it to us the easy way.”
Shannon bowed her head, looking for a moment like she was about to cooperate. Then her arm shot up and a crackling bolt of magenta lightning leaped toward Lavonne.
The older witch flicked a finger, and the bolt somehow twisted back on itself, striking its caster in the stomach.
“Aw, fuck!” Shannon cried, dropping to her knees and convulsing in pain as her muscles seized up and her hair smoked, the ends of it burning off.
Callie’s eyes bulged in horror.
“You,” said Lavonne. “You look more intelligent than your friend. Tell us where Bailey is. Now.”
The blonde girl stammered, her hands shaking. “Uh, I, ah, I don’t know. Somewhere back, um, that way? I have no—”
Lavonne made a pinching motion, and an invisible force seized a handful of Callie’s hair and ripped it out of her skull by the roots.
“Oh, God! Shit! What the goddamn hell?” The young woman collapsed, clutching the bloody patch on the side of her head.
Again, the Venatori group leader flashed them a tight, professional smile. “There is more where that came from. Much, much more. We are patient when we must be, but we do not like having our time wasted. Cooperate now—or suffer endlessly.”
The Americans exchanged quick looks. Lavonne judged it mostly desperation, but there might have been resolve as well. Most likely, they were agreeing to give in for now and then try some other stupid, useless plan later.
Shannon turned to the Venatori, her eyes blazing. “Go fuck yourselves. If you’re so great and mighty, find them yourself. We’re under no obligation to help you.”
Lavonne stared at them, galled, but almost impressed. She wondered if the girls were trying to protect Bailey and Roland (or at least Roland), or if, more likely, they just wanted to stop the Europeans from claiming the wizard.
The three leather-clad witches looked around. The one on the right noticed something and pointed it out to her leader.
“Ah,” Lavonne remarked. “Over there, just beyond that boulder,” she pointed, “is a cave where some other sorceress, perhaps, imprisoned a slew of utterly horrid creatures. Let us go have a look. All of us.”
She made a small gesture with her hand, and Shannon and Callie rose into awkward positions, floating alongside the Venatori as they casually strolled toward the nearby hill. Lavonne ignored the girls’ crude, moronic curses and threats.
After a moment, the mouth of the cave hove into sight. There was a faint and shimmering white curtain before it. It was mostly transparent, though, and behind it, they all could see a roiling mass of…things.
Much like the mist-demons they were, but somehow worse. They seemed formed less of fog
than of foul subterranean vapors, and their forms were almost unrecognizable, yet hideously nightmarish. Faintly, from behind the barrier, the witches heard keening cries of unnatural hunger.
The Venatori stopped, and Lavonne floated the two younger witches a few paces ahead, allowing them to hover about eight feet in front of the cave opening. They both stared at what lay beyond the arcane curtain.
“Now,” said Lavonne, “tell us where we might find the wizard and the werewitch. They are ours. This is a fact you must acknowledge. Abandon any notion that you will somehow triumph over us. You can see that such an idea is pure nonsense. We are asking you for the last time. Do not squander your chance.”
Shannon’s mouth opened and closed as abject terror overwhelmed her colossal ego. Callie, on the other hand, still pawing at the maimed portion of her scalp, flashed angry eyes at her tormentors.
“Um, how about no?” she spat. “At this point, I hope that Roland melts your asses into—”
Lavonne sheared open the magical barrier with one hand and cast the blonde girl into the cave with the other.
She screamed as she landed hard on the stone within, the shimmering white barrier closing behind her as the unspeakable entities closed in. The remaining four women watched as the writhing creatures blocked the girl off from sight, her screams piercing the air, then fading as if she were being taken far away. Finally, there was silence.
Shannon burst into tears. Her narcissistic façade had cracked beyond any hope of maintenance. She broke down, robbed of anything but self-preservation.
“I’ll tell you,” she sobbed. “Don’t kill me. Please. I can’t die in here. No one would know what happened to me. I-I’ll cooperate, okay? Just don’t.”
“Where?” Lavonne insisted. “Where are they?”
Shannon told them.
“That was, uh, a while ago,” she said. “Not very long. It’s hard to judge time in here, okay? But they were exhausted. They’re probably still there. Please, let me go. You can have them. Just…”
Lavonne snapped her fingers, and Shannon fell from her midair hover to the ground, grunting and sprawling when she collided with the rock. Her face contorted with pain, and her wet eyes squeezed shut.