Witch-Blood

by Ash Fitzsimmons

  “Flowers and body armor,” Joey muttered. “And Georgie?”

  “Anxious. She’s been suggesting for a month that all of our problems would be solved if only Toula would take the spell off her,” he replied, and pressed on.

  Our team—Toula, Hel, Rick, Vivi, Hal, and Stuart—only hid out with the Stowes until the last week of October. By the time Rufus slunk home with Georgie to face my sister’s wrath, the Fringe tech specialists had finally broken through the last of the Arcanum’s security protocols and accessed the cameras around the silo. What they found was, to be mild, worrisome. “We estimate between one hundred and two hundred of them,” said Rufus, sketching out a campsite on his map. “There’s no way of knowing if that’s really all that remains of Mab’s court, but it’s enough to stop the Arcanum. Here’s the silo entrance,” he said, tapping one of the Xs on the map, “and here’s the back entrance, per Toula and Helen. Now, they’re within a relatively small distance of each other…and here’s Moyna’s perimeter.” Rufus made a dotted circle around the two entrances and grimaced. “She’s not stupid enough to attack directly—the entrances are narrow, and a solid Arcanum defense could hold them at bay. The communiqués we’ve intercepted suggest that she’s trying to break their wards instead.”

  He didn’t need to spell it out for me. The silo’s defensive wards kept nosy neighbors, census takers, and the occasional Jehovah’s Witness away, but they also protected the silo against, for instance, tunneling. Anyone who tried to break in from the surface would quickly encounter concrete and steel, but with enough experienced faeries working in tandem, even steel would fail eventually.

  “Why don’t they evacuate?” I asked.

  Ned pointed to the dotted line. “Moyna’s people have two major enchantments working at the moment. The first is to break through the defenses, as Rufus said, but the other placed a barrier around the complex. It interferes with gates—one cannot get in or out by magical means.”

  “So it’s the door or nothing,” Rufus added. “And here,” he said, producing a photograph from memory. “See for yourself.”

  The shot was black and white and grainy—I could expect no better from the Arcanum’s tech—but I saw a line of tents and pavilions a short distance beyond the decoy trailer park’s fence.

  Joey looked over my shoulder and grunted. “Got a Ren Faire vibe going on, don’t they?”

  Ned’s eyebrow rose as he regarded Joey. “Ah, yes. I was told about you.”

  “Me?”

  “The quasi-knight. Helen says you’re relatively skilled with a blade.”

  Joey gave Ned a once-over and sniffed. “Relatively. You?”

  “Relatively,” he echoed, “but something tells me we’re not using the same standard of measurement.”

  At that, Joey began to bristle. “I ride, I joust, and I fight. Without enchantment. I won my first tournament at twenty.”

  “But what was the field like?” asked Ned. “Amateurs fighting amateurs—not the stiffest competition, I’d wager.”

  “Want a demo?”

  My shoulders clenched as the two of them postured. All of the painful work I’d done with Val had only taught me to leash my newfound temper—it had done nothing to dull it. “Guys,” I muttered, not looking up from the security photo, “cool it.”

  Joey had sense enough to shut up, but Ned had to get the last word in, and he snorted his derision. “Saved by the babe. How convenient for you.”

  Under other circumstances, I might have been more tactful, but the little booze in my system was doing nothing to smooth over the jagged edges of my psyche. I’d killed a dozen faeries. I’d beheaded fucking Oberon. I was supposed to run the court, but Ned was looking at me like I was a useless child…

  “Shut up,” I snapped, then created a decent fireball and began tossing it up and down as I stared him in the face. He blinked first, but I held his gaze, wrestling with the internal impulse to incinerate the annoyance. “I like your brother and sister,” I finally said. “And I’d hate to upset them. But I swear, if you don’t sit down and stop provoking Joey, I will toss your sorry ass out the window and see if you bounce. Got it?”

  Maybe it was because I’d started glowing a little by then, but Ned took the hint, held up his hands in placation, and let Rufus continue filling us in.

  “And that’s the front line,” said Rufus, returning to the map as if nothing had happened. “Now, here’s the interesting part: the other Arcanum installations sent reinforcements, who have set up like so.” He drew another dotted line about a quarter-mile from the first, forming concentric rings. “What this means is that Moyna’s forces are fractured—a third of them on each major enchantment, and the last third defending against the wizards at their backs. She’s locked them into a stalemate.”

  “What about you?” Joey asked.

  Rufus smirked. “You know, crises are such interesting things. Here, you’ve got the vast majority of the most powerful wizards in the world stuck inside the bunker—grand magus, councilors, et cetera. You’ve got a bunch of lesser wizards on the outside, unable to communicate with the mother ship and, quite frankly, outclassed by the fae horde. And then, who should show up but Helen?”

  “And that minor matter of the warrant?” I pressed.

  “They seem to have forgotten all about it. Toula’s, too. Once the Fringe offered to share their connections and run messages, the Arcanum crowd reconsidered. Oh, we don’t have much to do with them,” he clarified, thumbing his hand at his brother, “but the powers that be on the field are well aware that we’re around.”

  “The two of us and Harry,” said Ned. “The rest of our kin are in Alaska.”

  “The fewer of us there are that run around here,” said Rufus, “the smaller the chance that Oberon will get wind of it. Would get wind of it, I suppose,” he amended. “Who’s the new king?”

  I could only shrug. “As far as I can tell, it’s no one in Faerie right now. But Oberon had enough kids…”

  “He could be anywhere,” Ned concluded. “Well, he’ll show himself eventually. For the moment—”

  “We go to Montana,” I interrupted. “We have a chat with the Arcanum heads. And then we end this.” I stood again and waited while Rufus rolled up his map. “Are you with me?”

  “I am,” said Rufus, “but you didn’t let me finish. There’s one minor complication you’re overlooking, Aiden—remember your history?”

  He waited, watching me expectantly, and I imagined I was getting a taste of what his poor students went through. “Can you be more specific?”

  Rufus steepled his fingers, falling easily into professorial mode. “The Great War. The big wizard tiff. You’ve heard of it, I trust?”

  “Sure, but what does…oh, shit,” I groaned as the missing piece fell into place.

  Having grown up in the silo, of course I’d learned about the Great War—well, half of it was self-taught, but I had the basics down. The Arcanum had won in the end only because Simon Magus or one of his underlings had figured out how to store and transport magic. On the battlefield, when the big spells were flying and the magic supply was being depleted faster than it could flow in from Faerie, the Arcanum had their backup batteries to draw upon, allowing them to cast spells once their opponents were out of ammo.

  “How bad is it on the scene?” I muttered.

  Ned grimaced. “Everything is weak. Equally weak, but weak. And the deficit is being worsened by the glamour Toula threw around the area. She’s hidden the tents from view, but the added construction is taxing the reserves.” He drummed his fingers on the arm of the couch. “This is an estimate, naturally, but I’d say we don’t have more than another three or four days’ worth of magic in the area. Not unless someone opens extra gates and strengthens the local flow.”

  “And no one’s done that yet because Oberon held the other side,” said Joey. “Okay, so we get over there and someone punches a few gates open…how long would it take to get you up and running?”

 
“Too long,” I said, considering the experiments I’d done the year before. “The flow’s strong, but dispersal takes time. Anyone right in front of the gate could tap the magic, but get more than a few feet away…”

  “And we’re back in the Gray Lands again,” Joey finished, glowering at the map. “Damn. But…wait a sec,” he said, perking up as he looked at me, “you can pump it, right? Like you did last time? You can move it, spread it out—”

  “Not anymore,” I mumbled. “I tried pushing it around like before, and it just activated. If we’ve depleted our resources…” I sighed and rubbed my face. “Okay. So what I’m hearing right now is that my merry band of faeries is going to be useless unless we open a hundred gates or they opt for more conventional weaponry. Assume magic’s out. That leaves us with—”

  “Dark magic.”

  The three of us stared at Joey. “Well, yes,” said Ned, “but unless you’re hiding something from us, no one involved in this debacle can use dark magic.”

  Joey’s grin revealed more than a hint of smugness. “Maybe you chumps can’t, but Georgie can.”

  Five minutes and a few thrown-back drinks later, we were standing under a sputtering streetlight in the icy predawn wind and a foot of hard-packed snow outside of the Fringe’s appropriated house in Wright’s Mill, which was now masquerading as a pit and a pile of rebar. “I like what you’ve done with the place,” I muttered, picking out the telltale lines of enchantment around the site. “Couldn’t have gotten much worse, at any rate.”

  Rufus gestured toward the lot. “Shall we—”

  Before he could finish, Georgie sprinted out from behind the enchantment, barefoot and coatless. “Joey!” she shouted, racing across the empty street. “Joey, Joey, Joey!”

  He braced himself for impact, but the force of Georgie’s embrace almost sent him flying. “Told you I’d be back,” he wheezed. “And when did you learn to speak?”

  She loosened her grip just enough to allow him to breathe and grinned. “Three weeks. Rufus help. Not so hard. Not easy, but not hard hard. It…” She paused, looking for the word, then finished, “It is slower. But it makes them happy, so—”

  “Joey! Aiden!”

  I looked up in time to see Hel appear on the sidewalk, properly dressed for the weather but running as quickly as Georgie had. Joey, who was standing closer to her than I was, took the initial brunt of her greeting, and Georgie wisely slipped out from between them before Hel grabbed him and again tried to squeeze the air from his lungs. “Oh, my God, you’re alive!” she cried, standing on tiptoe to cling to his neck. “You’re alive! You stupid, idiotic, dumbass…”

  Toula stepped out from the site and waved at us before stuffing her bare hands into her coat pockets. “This has been building for a while,” she said when she got close, nodding to Hel, who was still in the middle of her harangue. “Let her get it out of her system, eh? And what the hell happened to you, Aiden?”

  I remembered too late my bandage and the enchantment working around my hand to slowly heal the burn. “Sword,” I muttered, trying to casually ease my injured hand into my pocket, but Toula grabbed my wrist and inspected the setup.

  “Enchantment’s sloppy,” she said after a moment’s study. “This is beginner’s work—fine for Faerie, but once you get over here, there’s not enough ambient magic to keep it at full power. See these connections?” she said, pointing to half a dozen lines of light that crossed my palm. “Redundant and power-sucking. May I?”

  I nodded and waited while she tweaked the enchantment until it brightened. “Whose work was that?” she asked. “I’m going to guess it wasn’t Val. Rufus?”

  “Not mine,” he muttered.

  I said nothing, and a flicker of understanding crossed Toula’s face. “Sword, you said?” she murmured, then carefully unwrapped my hand until the burn was tingling in the cold wind. She tossed a little orb into the air between us for better light, then inspected the wound and nodded to herself. “How?”

  “Realm took care of it,” I said quietly, leaning closer to her to be heard over Hel’s impassioned rant.

  “All the perks?”

  “And then some. I’ve pretty much got Coileán’s power for now,” I replied, then hesitated. “And I’m heading up the court while he recuperates.”

  “So he’s alive?”

  “Yeah. And Val’s fine.”

  Toula sighed with relief. “Oberon?”

  “Dead.”

  “Yeah?”

  I nodded. “Got the burn when I used Joey’s sword on his neck.”

  She made a face, then patted the uninjured back of my hand and stepped away. “Hey, Carver? Come up for air.”

  Hel paused, red-faced in the orb’s light. “What? Tell Aid to wait his turn. I’ve got plenty to say to him when I’m finished with—”

  “Aiden,” she interrupted, “is now functionally a faerie king, and he and Joey are alive. Can we take this inside, please? I’m freezing my ass off out here.”

  That caught my sister off guard, and she released Joey as she stared at me in confusion. “What are you—”

  “Please don’t hate me,” I said in a rush, cringing as the words tumbled out. “I did it to save Coileán, and it’s just a temporary gig, no one in the Arcanum has to know, I’m not going to screw up your job…”

  Hel shook her head and blinked rapidly, then held up her gloved hands to stop my spewing apology. “Wait. Hold it,” she ordered. “You did what, exactly?”

  I took a deep breath to slow down. “The realm…she told me that she could, uh…suppress the wizard bits. I mean, I’m still a witch-blood, technically, but for practical purposes—”

  “You’re fae?”

  I nodded miserably. “I’m so sorry, Hel, I—”

  That was as far as I got before she had transferred her boa constrictor squeeze to me. “I don’t care what you are,” she mumbled into my jacket. “You’re my baby brother, Aid. You will always be my baby brother. Got it?”

  “Thanks,” I managed to gasp.

  She stepped back and glared up at me. “And what were you thinking, imbecile? Sneaking off without me? You know that place is dangerous! What the hell kind of stupid plan was that, you dummy?” she demanded, reaching up to smack me in the head. “Come on, Aid, I thought you were smarter than that!”

  I tucked my burned hand into my pocket to shield it from my sister’s blows. “I’ve got an army waiting to come over and help!” I protested.

  “You’re still an idiot! Shit, do you have any idea how worried I’ve been? Honest to God, why don’t you ever listen?”

  “Come on, Carver,” Toula interrupted, pulling me toward the house, “you can chew him out inside. Georgie, honey,” she said, beckoning to the dragon, “let go of Joey so he can walk, okay? Just until we get indoors.”

  Having grown up around Wright’s Mill, I expected to see the familiar shack once we were past the glamour. What greeted me instead inside the bubble of illusion was a sleek, windowless marble building, three stories tall and topped with a copper roof, an almost monolithic white vault rising from the prairie.

  I stopped in my tracks and gaped. “What…”

  “The old one leaked,” said Ned. “And smelled like marijuana and cheap beer. And there were vermin.”

  “It was a little lacking in terms of basic amenities,” Rufus added with a note of apology in his voice. “Ned, uh…he had some ideas.”

  “You’d prefer the condemned ruin?” Ned asked me, cocking an eyebrow.

  “No,” I said, “but this is, uh…well…uh…”

  “Completely out of keeping with the architectural aesthetic of the area, but no one listens to me,” said Stuart, who was waiting for us just inside the ten-foot-tall copper doors with his arms folded across the front of a knit sweater festooned with leaping reindeer. “Welcome back. Helen decided to let you live?”

  “For now,” Hel muttered, pulling Joey past Stuart as Georgie raced behind them, trying to breathlessly fill him in on ever
ything he’d missed.

  I watched them go and sighed. “He’s in for it.”

  “He’s the one dating her—he assumed that risk,” said Toula, leading me inside. “Now, while they’re making up, come with me. You’ll like this bit.”

  She steered us through candlelit marble corridors, over rugs plush enough to cover the tops of my shoes. “Neddy’s been kind of a prima donna,” she whispered when we were alone, “but he does good work, and he’s the oldest faerie we’ve got on hand. This place is a little grandiose for me, but whatever, he’s happy. Here, this way,” she said, pushing another door open. “And be quiet.”

  I stepped past her into a well-lit room, another marble-walled, heavily carpeted chamber. This one was dominated by a heavy wooden table covered with computer components and notepads, however, around which a scattering of matching chairs formed a broken ring. There was no sound but the whirring of fans, both the tiny ones cooling the machines from the inside and the larger pair that pivoted in the corners of the room, and the soft clacking of fingers on a keyboard. Across the table and behind a bank of monitors sat Vivi, earphones on and eyes focused on the screen in front of her as her fingers danced. Rick waved when he saw us but said nothing until he walked around the table, and even then, he whispered. “She just went on shift, but she said to tell you hello if it was really you,” he relayed. “I trust you didn’t trash my place. And we’ll get word to Harrison momentarily.”

  “Good,” said Toula. Seeing my bemusement, she whispered, “Hacking into the Arcanum’s network allowed us to open communication lines with the silo. We use Morse,” she explained, “hence the earphones. Vivi’s getting a morning report.”