by C. T. Phipps
“I thought you said the Brotherhood as absorbed into my people,” I said, wondering if Kim Su had been there.
“The Brotherhood of the Tree, at least according to your mother, eventually split on religious lines. The shapechangers wanted to hide from the encroaching settlers after the War of 1812. The fairy-blooded-but-still-human wizards wanted to protect their Odawa allies and use their magic to fight the White Man.”
“We know how that fight went,” I muttered.
Kim Su had made references to the attempts to help the First Nations survive the encroachment of quote-unquote “civilization” but hadn’t mentioned she’d been to Bright Falls before. It would explain why she was sworn to secrecy, though, if a sect had been hiding out here. Those oaths would bind her even centuries later.
Lucien nodded. “The White Man had wizards too. Many made pacts with demons and spread pestilence as well as famine among the locals. In the end the Brotherhood of the Tree was destroyed and the shapechangers were all that was left.”
“And what, we just forgot about the goddess in our woods?” I asked.
“No,” Lucien said, frowning. “I can’t tell you more. Maybe you should call your mother, though.”
“Maybe I should,” I said, taking a deep breath. “It’s sounding more and more like this is just a horrible accident.”
“Perhaps,” Lucien said, frowning. “There are still some serious questions. Questions which need to be answered.”
“Yeah, who was siring the kids across the past century and a half and also why no one seemed to notice there was a goddess in our backyard.”
“Also what John Jones wants with his very own incarnate goddess.”
I hadn’t even thought of that.
Then I cursed myself. “Oh, fuck.”
“What?” Lucien said.
I felt my face. “I’ve promised to help Robyn kill the Earthmother.”
Chapter Eleven
“You…what?” Lucien said, staring at me with genuine astonishment on his face.
“I thought Robin’s mom was a baby-killing murderer!” I said, pausing. “So of course I promised to kill her!”
Just because it is a god does not make it immune to justice, Raguel said.
“Hush you!” I snapped at the gun.
Lucien took a deep breath. “Jane, you can’t kill the Earthmother’s avatar.”
The Earthmother, Danu, Gaia, Jord, and many other names existed as the spiritual embodiment of the world. She was a figure who, as Lucien pointed out, wasn’t really good but she wasn’t really evil either. The Earthmother gave life and took it in equal measure.
It was difficult to say if the spirit of our planet existed before sentient life had awoken her spirit or because of it, but hating her for apathy was like hating a storm. If there was an avatar in Bright Falls, it went a long way as to explaining why there were so many supernaturals drawn to the area.
“I know!” I snapped, panicking. “Wait, what would happen?”
“I have no idea, and it would be a very bad idea to find out,” Lucien said. “You’ve already killed the avatar’s child with the Sky.”
Right, the Big Bad Wolf was supposedly the daughter of the Earth. It made more sense now that I knew his mother had been living a few miles down the road. It also explained why there were things like the White Stag and other powerful spirits living in the region. Not only was the Dryad sleeping with local mortals, but also similarly powerful spirits of nature. We had a whole Bright Falls pantheon and mythology here.
I felt my face. “What happens if I break my promise?”
Lucien grimaced. “You’ll be branded an oathbreaker among the spirits as well as your fellow mages.”
“How bad is that?” I asked.
“Bad,” Lucien said. “Regular people can get away with breaking a promise, but supernaturals and especially wizards are creatures of their word. There’s some leeway if it was made in haste but it sounds like you made a binding contract.”
“Son of a hind,” I hissed. “I feel like Cú Chulainn. He was sworn never to refuse hospitality or eat dog meat then had a roast dog offered to him by his enemies.”
“What happened to him?” Lucien asked.
“He died,” I said. I slapped my forehead and muttered several curses. “Lucien, you didn’t really honor your promise to avenge your family.”
Lucien stood up.
Oh right, he took his honor seriously. I mean, even more seriously than the fact that a promise was a promise among supernaturals. “I mean, you didn’t kill my mother and she was involved in killing your family.”
“My promise was to avenge my family,” Lucien said, speaking very carefully. “I killed the Darkwater PMC mercenaries who were involved in the purge of the Dragon Clan, exposed your mother’s crimes, and have Marcus O’Henry set up to spend the rest of his life behind bars. I think that’s fulfilling the entirety of my oath.”
He sounded like he was trying to justify it to himself. Truth be told, I knew Lucien wanted my mother dead, so it made me curious how they’d started chatting about local folklore. I wasn’t about to debate the issue with him, though. “Yeah, you are the oath-fulfilling guy who glows with honor. Worf and Ned Stark bow before you.”
“Thank you,” Lucien said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “In any case, I may have a plan.”
“You do?” I said, hopeful.
“Nope,” Lucien said, putting his arm around me. “You’re going to have to kill Mother Nature.”
I slapped him again across the abs then shook my hand to numb the pain. “Well, maybe my visions will provide an answer.”
I half-jokingly closed my eyes and tried to use my powers for a vision of the future. As much as my ability to read objects had improved over the past year, my power to perform divinations was still almost completely random. Except this time I saw something terrible.
The first part of my vision saw Lucien shot to death by a sniper in the very room I was standing in now. He lay on the ground, bleeding from a massive hole in his chest from an Anti-Material Rifle—the kind used to blow holes in tanks. I saw the magic run wild in the Lyons Den, tearing apart the place as a tough-looking orange-haired woman in tactical gear stood over his corpse. She then shot herself in the head.
I saw Alex standing over a group of dead Ultralogists, some of who were shapechangers and others vampires while he was covered in sweat as well as wounded. The corpse of a dragon, not Lucien, was behind him even as he fell to his knees. That was when a twelve-year-old girl walked up to him and pulled out a gun, aiming at his head. Alex was unwilling to defend himself and she gunned him down.
Finally, I saw the sight of Robyn wearing a beautiful incandescent blue dress that was almost see-through with a cleavage-exposing v down her front. It was entirely not her style, nor was the fact she was wearing her hair up in a stylized beehive. I saw her speak with a voice of pure music before a great tree to audiences of millions. In the shadows behind her, I saw fish hooks and strings used to puppeteer her every move by Dr. Jones. I saw the Ultralogists spread to Congress, the US Senate, and beyond until shapechangers and vampires were outlawed. A million and a half people died in the resulting purge and civil war.
I saw Bright Falls rebuilt as the Mecca or Jerusalem of the Ultralogist faith only to be hit by an EF5 tornado that killed a third of the town. The Earthmother had grown tired of their blasphemies against her children and chose to end the civilization like she’d done with Pompei and the Minoans.
Then nothing.
“Whoa,” I said, collapsing on my knees.
“Are you all right?” Lucien said, leaning down beside me.
“Total Dead Zone moment,” I said, blinking rapidly. “The book, not the TV show.”
“I stopped reading Stephen King after The Dark Tower finished,” Lucien said, helping me up.
I looked up toward the skylight and saw the slightest outline of a woman aiming a rifle down at Lucien. She was standing up and holding the modified we
apon in her hands rather than on a tripod, which from my little knowledge of guns marked her as a supernatural since normal people could handle that kind of recoil.
“Get down!” I said, shouting and pushing Lucien to one side.
If I’d been a normal person, I would have just gotten us both killed since the unusually close sniper tore a hole in the concrete behind us, but I was just fast enough with my enhanced deer-like reflexes to move us both out of the way.
“Stone, bring her to me!” Lucien shouted.
I didn’t know who he was talking about until the ceiling underneath our attacker collapsed and the sniper proceeded to fall about twenty feet onto the conference table. Lucien stretched out his hand and, like a Jedi Knight, summoned her rifle toward him, breaking it across his knee. The thing looked like someone had carved a bunch of runes into the side as well as summoned a spirit into it like an inverse Merlin Gun. It burned with hatred for Lucien but I could feel its magic fade away with its shattering.
I turned my head to look at the attacker, seeing the woman from my dreams. She was wearing body armor, gray-and-white camouflage pants, plus a pair of nightvision goggles that made no sense in the daytime but glowed with mystical power. There were a number of weapons across her armor, including a long sheath attached to her belt. The woman underneath had a claw-shaped scar on her cheek, and a resemblance to Clara O’Henry that momentarily put me off. Then she drew a katana and charged at us. What the hell?
“Deus Vult!” The woman shouted with a thick Michigan accent that, well, everyone in Bright Falls spoke with.
Lucien wasn’t about to let his assassin stab him to death, so he transformed. Unlike what you saw in movies, it wasn’t a case of arms stretching or skin shedding, but more like slides in a film reel. One second, Lucien Lyons was a hot man in his mid-twenties, the next he was a twenty-foot-long fire-breathing crocodile.
I pulled back as Lucien unleashed a hell storm of flame the woman cut through with her sword. The weapon caused the flames to part around her and it was just luck that prevented me from being incinerated by the redirected flames. Transforming into a deer, I loped away from the fight to get a better look at what was going on.
The woman has killed the innocent. You have my permission to slay her. The Merlin Gun’s voice was oddly ambivalent. Usually he was all about slaughtering whomever I pointed him at.
“I decide who pulls the trigger!” I snapped.
As you wish.
Lucien being, you know, a frigging dragon did not normally need my help in fighting. However, the woman slashed at him and forced him back even as she managed to avoid his claws as well as tail. When he failed to bite her head clean off, the woman pulled out a small chain bracelet from her pocket then hurled it at Lucien. The chain expanded and wrapped around him until he was trapped. Lucien tried changing back into his human form but the chain shrank around him. That was when the woman walked over with her katana and lifted it above her head.
Right before I smashed into her in deer form and sent her flying through the air. “EPIC SUPER DEER ATTACK!”
The woman on the ground pulled out a handgun and aimed it at me. “This isn’t any of your business, Doe!”
She knew who I was? I would have thought about that more, but I was too focused on not getting shot. Looking at the woman, I clutched the Merlin Gun and remembered how that had given me a vision of the War in Heaven. Or a war in Heaven. I’m not quite sure what was true and what was metaphor in that. Either way, it was some of the most messed-up stuff I’d ever seen in my life. I’d learned how to share that sort of imagery with others.
“Ah!” the woman screamed, dropping her gun and clutching the sides of her head.
That allowed me to run up to her and pull out my enchanted Taser, another gift from Alex, and give her three electrical shocks that put her down.
You used images of the fight with Hell.
Yeah, I said, sighing. Sorry.
No, I approve.
Of course he did. I pulled out every weapon the woman had, grabbed a pair of zip ties she had on her person, and put them on her wrists as well as legs before going to Lucien’s side. I didn’t know much about breaking curses, but it turned out I just had pull on the chain in order to get it to return to its original tiny form.
“I’m going to kill that bitch,” Lucien growled, climbing to his feet and walking over to my prisoner.
“Hold on, we need to know who she is first!” I said, looking up to the broken skylight. “Lady Boba Fett just attacked you with a sword!”
“I know who she is,” Lucien said, picking up her pistol off the ground and aiming it at her head.
“Well, she’s my prisoner and I just saved your life, so don’t kill her unless I say so,” I said, despite the argument not really making any sense.
To my surprise, Lucien seemed to accept it. “She’s Sergeant Anne O’Henry, a.k.a Preacher. The former head of Darkwater PMC.”
“Anne O’Henry?” I asked, having never heard of her. “Is she another of Marcus’s daughters?”
“Marcus took advantage of the old laws that allowed him to have sex with any female werewolf or their human relatives,” Lucien said, his voice disgusted. “He has a lot of sons and daughters other than the ones in the main line.”
Yikes.
I looked between the two. “Wait, I thought you killed all of the Darkwater PMC. I mean, except for Deana.”
“I thought I did,” Lucien muttered. “It seems I was mistaken.”
“You killed my friends and comrades,” Anne said, growling. “You’re a sick piece of work and you deserve to die.”
Lucien stared at her, his eyes reptilian as his mouth belched fire between each word. “You murdered my family, you murdered my clan, and you murdered my people. You are the monster!”
Anne’s eyes widened as she stared at him. “You’re a Dragon Clan member.”
“I am the last.” Lucien spat fire on the ground where it sizzled before going out. His mouth basically worked like napalm when he was furious. “I spent a decade thinking about the Nazis who hunted down and exterminated my kind. I trained, studied, and prepared for the day I’d destroy you. My only regret when I found your drunken band of psychopaths? That I made it too fucking quick.”
Anne didn’t respond but I could tell there was more to the story.
“Don’t you think you should wait until Deana is told about this to kill her?” I asked. “I mean, she is your friend.”
“Deana is not my friend,” Lucien said, sighing. “She’s my vassal. There’s a big difference.”
“Deana is alive,” Anne said, staring. “Why?”
Lucien gave her a disgusted look. “Not that it’s any of your damned business but I killed the people involved in the murder of my family. You recruited Deana after their deaths. She begged for her life and I was tempted to kill her but I said she’d have a chance to make amends for what she’d done as a soldier.”
“You’re a drug lord,” Anne said, growling. “What do you know about making amends?”
“More than you could possibly imagine,” Lucien said, his voice almost a hiss. “I came to this town and saw its poverty, its addictions, its gun running, its sex trafficking, and worse. I took it over by killing the irredeemable while giving the others a second chance. I used the illegal businesses in this town to build a chance for the people dying out because they’d been forced into a position of no hope. I think for them because they couldn’t resist the temptations and am building them a kingdom here. Once this damned land deal is done, Bright Falls will be saved.”
“Is that what you tell yourself to justify all this?” Anne said, apparently unconcerned that she was at our mercy. “I can feel the black magic permeating the walls.”
“Lady, you’re the one who broke in here to murder Lucien. Yeah, he’s kind of an antihero, but he’s helping us solve the murder of those children discovered today. He’s also trying to help us stop an evil cult,” I said, pulling out the Merlin Gun a
nd aiming it at her. “While that speech may sound way too much like he’s the kingpin, he’s also my friend. So this is going to tell me whether you deserve to die or not.”
She has not killed anyone for five years.
Why? I asked.
Regret. Lucien’s rampage caused her to feel the fear that she had inflicted upon others. That led to her asking questions she did not want to ask. Questions that led her to want to find some other way to live than killing.
“So she found Jesus?” I asked aloud.
Something like that.
“What is that thing?” Anne said, looking at it. “Why did it show me…that?”
I shrugged. “Your curiosity is not my problem. The gun says you haven’t been killing people for a while. Why did you come after Lucien?”
Anne looked at him then me. “Someone sent me his information a week ago. It was a chance to avenge my soldiers. I thought he was hired by our latest employers to take us down. I didn’t know he was involved in the…incident here.”
“The incident!?” Lucien snapped. “Is that what you call killing—”
“Dragons,” Anne snapped. “Dragons heavily involved in organized crime that killed a lot of my men. Thirty-six people died during that attack, six of them noncombatants. We didn’t know civilians would be there. My father misled us. Even so, a lot of died. We were unprepared for what we faced.”
Lucien’s stare was contemptuous, but this wasn’t the first time he’d been confronted with the fact his clan hadn’t exactly been innocent victims.
“You don’t know who sent you this info?” I asked, thinking of the griffon who’d attacked earlier.
“No,” Anne said. “All I remembered is meeting with an intermediary. He was sickly smelling, rotting even, with oil on his hands as well as his face.”
That didn’t describe Dr. Jones at all.
“I see,” I said, thinking we might have a new player in the game. “Thank you.”