by Bill Hiatt
“Or to encourage it to emerge,” said Stan. “I don’t think it would have mattered which. Either way, we would have needed as much as magic as we could get. That would have meant accidentally feeding Amenirdis enough power to enable her to try to reach out to Amun—potentially damaging the barrier between two planes of existence.”
“That’s a pretty big stretch,” said Winn.
“But if it’s even a slight possibility, we have to take it seriously,” said Tal. “It’s probably desirable for you to contact the Order and arrange for additional backup if we need it. The rest of us will go to Orcutt to inspect the scene.”
“All of you?” asked Winn, raising an eyebrow.
Tal laughed. “Don’t worry. I’ll put a don’t-notice-us spell around us in case any more reporters are nosing around.” He winked in my direction. “I’d rather have overkill than walk into a situation in which we’re overmatched. That said, I don’t think we’ll need a full security team, but it would be nice to use one of the vans and a driver.”
Dan looked at his watch. “I’m not sure Carlos and I should go. Remember, we’re supposed to testify before that tribunal in Annwn?”
Tal frowned. “I suppose you’re right. Keeping in mind the different speed at which time moves over there, I’m not sure you’d get back from Orcutt fast enough.” He looked quickly at the others. “We can’t afford to delay the investigation, though. Amy’s situation is too unstable, and we don’t know enough to help her as much as we should.”
“We’ll join you as soon as we’re done,” said Dan.
“Does that change your mind about a security team?” asked Winn.
“No,” said Tal. “Assuming the threat’s magical in nature, there’s not much they can do to help. Let’s stick with a van and driver.
“It’d be faster to go there by portal, or Viviane could take you by water,” suggested Winn.
“That would also make us more conspicuous to anyone watching for our magic. The van ride will give Amy a little time to ask some of the questions I know she has.”
“Are you reading my mind again? I thought you said—”
He laughed again. “I don’t have to read minds to know you have questions. Any normal person would.”
Winn went grumbling off to arrange the van. I could tell she wasn’t happy about being overruled. That gave me a good first question once we had all piled into the back of the security van and were on the road.
The large back compartment into which we crowded was well-lit but windowless, like those in action-movie vans. The enclosed environment would have put me off a few days ago, but I wasn’t going to let it distract me now.
“Tal, I don’t understand how Carrie Winn fits into all this. She seems to be providing the money—but you seem to be in charge.”
“Doesn’t seem the type to play second fiddle, does she?” said Magnus. His voice was so much like Tal’s, but Magnus’s was more touched by sarcasm—and something else. Bitterness maybe.
“The truth is that there is no Carrie Winn,” said Tal.
I raised an eyebrow. “Weren’t we just talking to her? Or was that all just a hallucination?”
“Remember the story about Ceridwen and Gwion Bach?” asked Carla. “Carrie Winn was originally a fake identity created by Ceridwen. She’d learned that, as long as Tal lived, she could never reproduce the knowledge potion he’d drunk accidentally. Unfortunately for her, every time one of his incarnations died, he reincarnated fast enough to block her efforts. Her faerie ancestry made her long-lived, but even she could not have outlived someone who was constantly being reborn. She became obsessed with trapping his soul to break the cycle.
“Santa Brígida was a town specially designed to lure Tal’s parents here so she could attack Tal when the time was right. Ceridwen died during our battle, but we couldn’t very well have let people discover that. That meant we needed to have someone else take over the fake identity. Vanora had come from the Order to help us, and she took over.”
“The Order?” I asked.
“The Order of Ladies of the Lake,” said Viviane. “Both Vanora and I are members.”
“So that’s why Carrie Winn behaved so differently after Halloween in 2012,” I said. “How did Vanora manage to pull that off?”
“Like Ceridwen, she can shapeshift,” said Tal. “Quite aside from the benefits of not having to explain how Carrie Winn died, it’s nice to have the financial resources to make things easier. Having Carrie Winn’s miniature army at our disposal doesn’t hurt, for example.”
“Does Carrie Winn—Vanora—have as much control over the town as it seems as if she does?”
“Not in the way the fake Dennis McBride suggested,” said Tal. “She doesn’t make people disappear. There are times when people see something they shouldn’t, and their memories need to be changed, but Magnus and I handle most of that. It’s easier to insert a convincing false memory if you can read a person’s mind and work the details out seamlessly. Someone like Vanora can command a person to remember differently, but that means the person’s own subconscious has to work up the false memory. If more than one person is involved, there will be…discrepancies.”
“Why would you have to change someone’s memories, though? What could they possibly see that would be so terrible?”
“How did you feel when you realized the motel where you met McBride had disappeared?” asked Carla.
“I felt as if I were going crazy.”
“Wouldn’t you rather have forgotten all about it?”
“I…I guess so. But I wouldn’t have wanted someone else to make that choice for me.”
“Think about how life would be if you saw things like that all the time and couldn’t explain them,” said Viviane. “Enough supernatural intrusions occur around here that quite a few people might end up in a situation like that. They’d be afraid to talk to anyone else for fear of being thought crazy. They might easily come to believe they were crazy Think about living the rest of life burdened by that misconception.”
“At some point, you’d probably go crazy for real,” said Gordy.
“You still look skeptical, but what we do is really for the best,” said Tal. “For a variety of reasons, the supernatural community doesn’t want attention drawn to itself. It would try to punish those supernatural beings who draw the attention of ordinary humans, but it might also come after any humans who saw too much if it thought there was any chance they’d talk.”
“Do you mean…someone might come after me?”
Tal shook his head. “You’re supernatural yourself now. The same rules don’t apply in your case.”
The evidence suggested he was right about that—but I didn’t know for sure, and the thought sent shivers up my spine. Nor did I know if I could really trust people who could so easily reorder reality to suit themselves. Maybe not—but I wasn’t sure I had a lot of options. They obviously hadn’t sent Dennis McBride—or whoever that really was—to inspire me to investigate them. That meant there were other players in this game. At least for the time being, I had to stick with someone who knew the rules better than I did.
Shivers were still radiating through me. I needed to think about something else.
“Where’s Annwn?” I asked Khalid.
“It’s a…uh, what’s the word?”
“It’s a different plane of existence,” said Stan.
“Yeah, that’s what I meant,” said Khalid. “It’s the home of the Welsh faeries. You can only travel to and from it by magic.”
“What’s the connection? Are you…all related to the faeries?”
Lucas chuckled. “I’m the only one who has faerie blood, at least in this life, and it isn’t Welsh.”
“We had to get help from Gwynn ap Nudd, the king of Annwn, while we were preparing to fight Ceridwen,” said Viviane.
“And since then, he’s helped us a lot—and we’ve helped him,” said Shar. “That’s how Dan and Carlos became witnesses to a murder over there.”
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“Murder?” I asked. I was jumpy already. The thought of that kind of violence wasn’t exactly calming.
“Faeries aren’t like the way they are portrayed in children’s stories,” said Carla. “Psychologically, they’re pretty much like humans—for better or worse.”
“Are there other planes of existence as well?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know the answer, but it had to be less nerve-wracking than a discussion of violence in faerie society.
“There could be an infinite number,” said Stan. “Only a few of them are connected to Earth, at least as far as we know. In other words, two-way traffic is only possible between Earth and a small number of them, and even then it’s usually difficult. The faerie realms are the easiest ones.”
“Because of what Lucas, uh, Chango said earlier?”
“Exactly,” Stan replied. “Too bad in a way. There are some I’d like to explore.”
“Yeah, but we wouldn’t want their explorers coming here,” said Gordy.
Stan chuckled. “True—humanity might not be able to survive—and certainly wouldn’t be able to cope with—ancient beings of great power walking the Earth any time the mood struck them.
“The only plane aside from the faerie ones where we’ve spent much time is the home of the Olympians, who were once worshiped by the ancient Greeks. Three of us—Tal, Shar, and Alex—were descendants of Olympians in past lives, and Shar at least is also related by blood in this life. That’s the only reason we were able to get there.”
“I spent much time in Erebus,” said the woman I didn’t know from my research. Her eyes looked haunted as she spoke, though her voice betrayed little emotion. “That’s a region of the Olympian plane near the Underworld. It is where the shadows of the dead go.”
She looked at me as if she expected some response, but I had no idea what to say. “Why did you visit such a place?”
“I didn’t visit. I was abducted as an infant and raised to believe I was a shadow. The shadows—the Populus Umbrae—benefit from a loophole exploited by their imperator. That’s how some of them could come to Earth to take me.”
I wanted to ask what that experience was like, but I couldn’t find the words. My mind conjured up pictures of blood-curdling trauma, but her toneless words conveyed no sense of her own feelings.
“The Populus Umbrae could not completely remove my flesh, nor did they want to. From what we learned later, I was an experiment to see if a human’s greater tolerance to light could be used to their own advantage.
“Of necessity, they made certain…modifications. I can see in the dark, even with no light at all. I can manipulate shadow to conceal myself or blind an opponent.
“I knew I was different—not as good, I thought—as the shadows around me. I never saw another human until I was sent to kill one on my training mission.”
No one else reacted, but I pulled away. The woman was an assassin?
“There are more diplomatic ways to explain that,” said Lucas, patting her on the shoulder. “Please forgive Umbra’s bluntness. She’s been with us for almost six years, but she’s still working on conversational skills. Yes, she was raised by the Populus Umbrae to be a hired killer—but she never actually murdered anyone. I was her training mission, and as you can see, I’m still very much alive.”
“I did try to kill him, though,” said Umbra. “I would have succeeded if I had been told of his special abilities.” She sounded defensive, as if she didn’t want me to think she was an incompetent assassin.
Lucas smiled, his cheerfulness a sharp contrast to Umbra’s grimness. “She was raised to believe that her only value lay in her effectiveness as a killer. She now knows differently, right?”
Umbra nodded. “Lucas, Taliesin, and the others helped me to understand how my…how the Populus Umbrae’s training had twisted me, how there were other ways to live, better ways.
“I now use the skills I learned for good. Would you like to see my dagger? It is bonded to me, and I to it. I can will it to be coated in whatever poison I require.”
There was something almost childlike in Umbra’s manner and the way in which she drew her weapon and handed it to me like some treasured possession. Yeah, childlike—in a bad seed kind of way.
Lucas put his hand gently on hers. “Amy’s not a fighter, Umbra. I don’t think she wants to see your dagger.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Umbra, sheathing the weapon so fast I couldn’t really tell what she’d done with it. “I did not mean any offense.”
“We don’t go out of our way to find battles,” said Tal. “When one finds us, though, Umbra will always have our back. Her ability to manipulate shadows comes in very handy.”
“Not that we have to fight all that often,” said Lucas, giving me a reassuring look.
“No, not more than once or twice a week,” said Umbra as if daily violence would be more normal.
I should have let the conversation about faerie murders run its course. I almost feared to ask any more questions, but another one occurred to me.
“Are leprechauns…real as well?”
Khalid chuckled. “You’ve been with Mrs. Doyle, haven’t you?”
“They prefer luchorpán,” said Lucas.
“You mean—”
“They exist, but not in her garden. Those really are just stone.”
It was nice to know something was what it appeared to be.
“I felt as if they were watching me.”
“Probably one of her spells,” said Tal. “She’s a druid-in-training, and her power level isn’t that high, but every so often one of her practice attempts has more kick than she realizes.”
“How many people…like her are there in town?”
“Like us, you mean,” said Magnus.
“If we run across someone with some magic and a good heart, we invite them to settle there,” said Tal. “It’s good for them to be in a place where they can get some support, and the more of them who settle there, the more help there is in an emergency.”
“Classic symbiosis,” said Stan. “Everyone benefits.”
Tal wasn’t being specific about how many people in town had magic, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. The more people who were involved in this magical world, the harder it was for me to deny that I was one of them—whether I liked it or not.
I was relieved to feel the slight bump that signaled our exit from Cabrillo Highway onto Clark Avenue. That relief lasted only as long as it took me to remember what we were doing. Then anxiety tightened its grip on my chest again. Part of me hoped we’d find absolutely nothing. As far back as I could remember, I’d always wanted to know the answer to every one of my questions. But were there some questions better left unanswered?
By the time the van came to a stop at the address I’d been given for the Final Rest Motel, I didn’t have a headache, but my nerves were as taut and hard as piano wire.
“I’m not sensing anything, but stay alert just in case,” said Tal. “Somebody using a stealth spell might be hard to detect.”
“Speaking of detection, aren’t we a little conspicuous?” I asked, looking nervously around.
“Remember, I’ve got a high-level don’t-notice-us spell working,” said Tal. “People will be aware enough of the van not to try to park in the same space, but let’s just say we want to be careful crossing the street. We aren’t exactly invisible, but we’d practically have to hold a pep rally on that lawn over there for anyone to notice us.”
Reassured, I walked with the others over to the house on the spot where I had seen the imaginary motel and met with the fake McBride. The ones who could sense magic—Tal, Magnus, Viviane, Carla, and Khalid—started poking around immediately. It didn’t take them long to find something.
“If there were any doubt, you’re not crazy,” said Tal. “I can feel the residue of magic here, though I’m not sure what kind.”
“It’s similar to hers,” said Magnus, tilting his head in my direction.
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��Yes, Egyptian,” said Carla. “Not exactly like Amy’s, though.”
“Not powered by Amun-Ra, then,” said Tal, nodding. “That makes sense. Unless he’s worsened over the centuries, he was always regarded as a positive force. We’re looking either for someone who has twisted that power to evil purposes or who is drawing power from an evil source.”
“Look what I found!” said Khalid, pointing at the ground. Someone had etched what looked like a drawing of a snake into the soil.
Carla raised an eyebrow. “Could be a hieroglyph. Amy, you might be able to tell. Amenirdis would have known. It’s possible you can access her knowledge.”
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” said Viviane quickly. “The Amendiris persona isn’t properly integrated yet. Trying to draw on her knowledge might lead to another takeover attempt.”
Stan took a quick picture of the drawing with his cell phone. “If it’s a hieroglyph, I should be able to tell from a quick image search.”
The light around us dimmed suddenly—much more suddenly than it should have. I looked toward the west. The setting sun had been covered by clouds that hadn’t been anywhere in sight two minutes ago.
“Back to the van!” said Tal, who was also looking at the sun. “There’s magic—”
Before he could finish, gigantic snakes sprouted up all around us, hissing and baring their fangs. I’d always thought of myself as cool-headed in a crisis, but I froze.
Luckily, everyone else moved with the precision of a military unit. Tal drew his sword, which burst into flames. With a flick of his wrist, he caused the fire to stream at the snake nearest him, which was burned to a crisp before it could strike. Shar’s sword glowed a brilliant green, and with one stroke he took the head off the nearest snake, whose body turned to dust. Stan’s sword had a pure white glow that made me feel less fearful despite the battle raging so near me. The light drew the eyes of the snakes and immobilized them, making the delivery of a quick death stroke easy. The pale-yellow glow from Jimmie’s sword had a similar but less intense effect. He was a good enough swordsman to compensate for the less powerful weapon, though.
Gordy’s sword had no glow, but all he had to do was raise it to invoke fear in his serpentine foes, sending them crawling away—but not fast enough to avoid his blade. Alex’s sickle-shaped weapon didn’t seem to have any particular magic, but it was sharp enough to slice four adjacent snakes with one blow. Michael’s sword, likewise without obvious magic, was still good enough to lop off snake heads, though in his case only one at a time.