The Dark Witch and the Elemental

by Tabitha Scott

  “So you’ve never been to Hollywood then?” I ask.

  “Nooo. I’d love to go there, to see all the sights, and the people! They must be so different to here, but I can only watch places like that on the television. Have you been there?” Shania asks with a great deal of enthusiasm. Good.

  “Yes, we spent a couple of weeks there not too long ago, and visited some of the studios. You’d love it there, lots to see and do.”

  A phone rings from behind the bar, interrupting the interesting little conversation we are having.

  “It’s for you.” Shania hands me the phone receiver. The phone must be 80 years old, it has a rotary dial. I didn’t even think those could still operate, but apparently, they can.

  “Ah lassie, be you ready to help transfer the Unseelie King?” Jimmy asks me.

  “You bastard, you spiked my drink last night.”

  “Oh, well, lassie, you know it wouldn’t have been good if you’d gone rushing over to see Pulania, not after what you’d found out. Pulania has a wee bit of a plan, and I’m afraid you would have spoilt the surprise.” Humph, he thinks he can just charm his way past me, does he? “Now, I need an extra guard or two for the transfer of Arawan, the Unseelie King, he’s a wee bit slippery, so it would be good if someone was with me who he actually fears, just to make sure he doesn’t run off anywhere.”

  I know what Jimmy means – about the Unseelie King fearing me, that is. It's my obsidian blade. If the Unseelie King fears death, then he would fear me. The rest of what Jimmy is going on about is a bit more obscure.

  Guard detail sounds like fun. I want to meet this Unseelie King, I’m curious to know what sort of family similarities there might be between Áine and her brother. I’ll put on hold my other bit of evil doing until such time as the fates allow. Revenge against Jimmy can wait, a dish best served cold, and all that.

  “Where should we meet you?” I ask Jimmy.

  “Take the Faerie paths to the entrance of the caves of the Seelie kingdom. We’ll wait for you there.”

  “How soon do you want us?”

  “Finish your breakfast and head on over. The sooner the better, I don’t want to be hanging around in the open for too long. It be an opportunity for us to be ambushed by an Unseelie host.”

  ***

  I don’t hurry through my coffee. It’s reasonably well made and I want to enjoy it. When Gil and I do eventually come out of the Faerie paths to where Jimmy is waiting us it’s late evening in the Faerie world. Jimmy has about two score of his Seelie soldiers with him, and they are definitely in defense mode. They’re circled around Jimmy and the Unseelie King with their spears pointed outwards, they notice us approach, but their attention is elsewhere, on the shadows around them. There’s movement in those shadows.

  The Unseelie King is looking at me over the heads of the soldiers, he’s quite tall. Is that amusement on his face? Well let’s see how he feels about this.

  I smile back at him as I take my obsidian blade out from the thigh holster hidden between the slits of my skirt. I can use the blade as a wand when needs be. I watch Arawan’s face drop away in something akin to appall as he sees the dagger, and then I send the first of several bolts into the shadows. There is a brief scurrying in the darkness, but whatever part of the Unseelie host that was out there, hoping to rescue their king, has fled. Soon there’s no more sound and nothing out there is moving any more.

  “Go look and see what damage the lassie has done,” Jimmy nods to his lieutenant, who sends out a handful of soldiers to scout the area.

  Gil and I saunter over to the Seelie group, there’s a crooked smile still plastered on my face, I’m sure, and I’m waving around the obsidian blade somewhat carelessly, if expertly, near my hip. I go right up to Arawan, and blow him a kiss with a wink.

  “I don’t think we’ll need most of your soldiers for this transfer, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy is watching the soldiers return. “Find anything?” he shouts out to them.

  “There are three Unseelie bodies.” The soldier who replies has a very pale face, though I’m sure he’s seen a thing or two in his thousands of years of life. “It won’t be possible to revive any of them. They’re well and truly dead.”

  I wipe the tip of my dagger along Arawan’s cheek, just lightly, so that it doesn’t draw blood, as that would be in breach of our agreement with Áine, but I have his undivided attention. “Only one guard is needed here, Your Majesty.”

  Chapter 24: The Dark

  I’m enjoying this wallflower business, so far it’s not been without entertainment value. What is it the Seelies call me? Amura, the Dark. There is a very dour look on Arawan’s face, I guess this game the Seelie and Unseelie courts play has suddenly become much more serious for him than it ever was before. After all, the specter of death was never a real part of their past battles, not for them, anyway, just for the odd mortal, or semi-mortal, who got in the way.

  Jimmy has sent away most of the soldiers, there’s no need for them. The Unseelie host has just had an example of how the obsidian blade can be welt, and they’re unlikely to risk a real death at my hands. I wasn’t wrong about that.

  Jimmy is leading us along the Faerie paths, with four remaining soldiers flanking the King, and with Gil and I at the rear. I haven’t put away my dagger, and I’m watching the edges of our group, though I don’t really expect any trouble along the way. But then I notice something, Jimmy isn’t leading us to Pulania’s home in Edinburgh, we’re headed to Pittsburgh, of all places. That doesn’t seem right.

  I give Gil a quick look, she takes my meaning, but pinches my elbow. “Wallflowers, remember?”

  I can tell she’s as curious as I am, I would ask Jimmy, but yeah, we’re being wallflowers. Ficketty fecking Seelies, what are they up to?

  The path leads us to a familiar alley in the back streets above the Allegheny river. We’re at the Two Witches, our pub in Pittsburgh.

  Jimmy flashes a smile back at us. The bastard, he’s enjoying this little surprise far too much. Wallflowers, wallflowers, wallflowers, I purse my lips against what I really want to say to Jimmy and just follow him in.

  The side door is open, though the bar is still closed to customers. It’s the de facto employee entrance for the morning, though it will be a few hours yet before they arrive. It must be about four thirty in the morning here, judging by the faint blue on the eastern horizon. It somehow seems appropriate that you’d smuggle a powerful Unseelie King in through a side door. I guess Jimmy’s been playing with time to make this work, we’ve gone from late morning, to night, to early morning in under an hour. Though I can understand the present timing, this is the sort of thing you want to do at the quietest time of the night.

  Pulania is in the bar to greet us. She’s not surprised to see Gil and I, she barely acknowledges us, I guess she and Jimmy had teed this thing up ahead of time. She’s wearing a mask, I can tell, not a real one, her face is a mask and is providing an icy reception for Arawan.

  “Bring him down here.”

  By down here, she means the cellar, where the spare kegs are kept. It’s accessed by a narrow staircase, barely visible behind the bar. Pulania disappears down the staircase, and one by one our group follows, with myself taking up the last position, but hello, there have been some additions. Going down below the cellar, Pulania has moved to another staircase that definitely wasn’t there before, and this one looks familiar, it circles around in a stone arcway with ancient moss lined rock guiding it downward. From a distance it looks suspiciously like a staircase I know from Pulania’s mansion. As the group is silently making its way, following Pulania, I examine the walls. This is definitely from Pulania’s mansion. That’s pretty impressive magiks for it to be moved here, although maybe it’s not here at all. Wrapping space seems to be a bit of magik that Pulania does particularly well, I wonder what we’ll find below.

  It only takes me a second to find out, as we soon come to Pulania’s dungeons, albeit modified to include part of her torture
chamber in the entry, it’s usually on a separate level. Oh and look, some poor soul has been flayed on the whipping post. She’s hanging limply by her arms; she might be dead. In the flickering light that is thrown by the single torch that Pulania is carrying, I think I can make out parts of her ribs showing through where the cat-o-nine-tails has taken away the flesh of her back. I can’t help thinking that Pulania is using the torch for effect, she could so install LED lighting down here.

  “You’ll have some company while you’re down here,” Pulania addresses Arawan. “I’ve been torturing this girl to find out a little information about where I can find some of the demons who you’ve been working with to try and kill Susan. The deal with your sister is that I can’t torture you, but there’s nothing to stop me from torturing others. She’s just passed out for the moment, I’ll start up again when she comes to.”

  “And who might she be that she should have such information?” the King sneers at Pulania.

  “Well, I believe it’s your daughter, Bríghe. I’ll soon have what I want out of her. She’s not stubborn like many of the others who have spent time here, just constitutionally weak. A bit of ice water will revive her soon enough. Maybe you can watch. I’m going to peel the skin from her back now that I’ve opened it up with the whip.”

  Hmm, this is Gil and my wallflower moment, I know that now. I have a subtle grin on my face as Arawan briefly looks in my direction. He’s not a prisoner of the Seelies now, he’s a prisoner of dark witches, and there are many torments beyond the physical that we can oppress him with.

  “She doesn’t know anything,” Arawan mutters in a barely audible voice.

  “Really? I’m not so sure of that,” Pulania answers. “Anyway, I’ll soon find out. If she doesn’t, she won’t survive, but either way I’m going to be certain of what she does, or doesn’t, know.”

  Arawan stares at the broken body slumped at the post for a long time. “I’ll tell you what you need to know, but you have to release my daughter; make sure she’s okay, and promise no further harm.”

  Pulania and Arawan stare at each other for a while. Eventually, Pulania takes her measure of him, and with a nod of her head she agrees. “This is a bargain struck, then.”

  The King nods in return.

  “You can cool your heels, in one of my cells. We’ll take the girl to a White witch for ‘repair’, and then we’ll release her back in Dublin. When that’s done, `I’ll be coming back here and expecting lots of details. If I don’t get them, the girl comes back here, quick smart.”

  The King nods his head again, and Pulania directs some of the Seelie soldiers to escort him into a cell with a view of the torture floor that Pulania had waiting for him.

  I can’t help thinking that I could actually do the ‘repair’ work on the girl, after all, I have creation magic, though I hadn’t really made the leap of thinking of myself as having the powers of a White witch. That just seems a bit off.

  When the king is settled, Pulania douses the torch, relying on ambers from a low burning forge at the far end of the dungeon for the only light. She motions for Gil and I to help her, I guess it lends a little propriety that females tend to Bríghe, rather than Seelie soldiers, seeing as the girl is naked to the waist.

  Chapter 25: The Tortured

  As we’re tending to Bríghe, I start to notice a few things. The girl is out like a light, not just unconscious she’s totally out of it, what’s more, the injuries that we had seen from a distance were fake. The makeup is coming off as we wrap her up and lift her from the post. I give Pulania an accusing look, but she just puts her finger to her lips giving me a low shush sound. Well, at least now I know why she went with the medieval mood lighting, it made the illusion created by the makeup easier to buy.

  With the help of the Seelie soldiers we manually lift Bríghe and take her up the stairs. I briefly try to lift her with magik, but Pulania stops me. “The room is sealed from magiks, both Earthly and Seelie, no one is getting in or out of here unless we want them too.”

  In other words, don’t wave that dagger of yours around in here, I don’t want you breaking the seals. That would be the real risk. The magik of the dagger is likely to be a lot stronger than any of the seals that could be applied here. Even Áine’s magik wouldn’t be as strong.

  When Bríghe is brought upstairs we take her into the back room to clean her up.

  “Gil, you want to serve Jimmy and his men a beer?” Pulania asks. “We’ll sort Bríghe.”

  Humph, so we’re alone, and instead of wiping blood and grizzle, I’m peeling away some sort of silicone prosthetic material that was made to look like flayed skin and bone.

  “Who’d you get to do this?” I ask.

  “The Mouse is branching out into makeup. I think she did a pretty good job, really,” Pulania answers. The Mouse is a friend of ours in Hollywood, and it is a very good job, very good indeed.

  “She’s got talent, that kid,” I comment.

  “She has that.” Pulania stops what’s she’s doing and glares at me. “You’re annoyed with me, aren’t you?”

  I stop peeling and look up at her. “Yeah, I am.” Like what did you expect? I think rather loudly. “Did Jimmy spike my drink with the same stuff you’ve given Bríghe?”

  “No, she got something a hell of a lot stronger. She’s been out for ages, I don’t want her to know what’s happened to her. From what Jimmy says, she doesn’t know that Arawan is her dad, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for her to find out.”

  “And why would that be? Oh, you mean she might discover loyalties she never had before?”

  “Exactly. I’ll just tell her she got a bit of leftover mushroom and that we almost lost her. She’ll swallow that one, hook, line and sinker.”

  A memory twigs. “Hey that’s what you said to me about forty years back, when I was so sick I missed out on that bikie gathering!”

  “Umm, yes, but really, you were better off not going to that one, it ended up as a gang rumble, several dead, as I recall… and you bought it, hook, line and sinker.”

  “Bitch,” I mutter. “Ficketty fecking, bitch.” I rip a strip of silicone away from Bríghe’s back.

  “That guy you were with was a real dropkick too. Just as well he never came back.”

  “Huh, he did come back. But you’re right, he was a deadbeat. Not sure they’ve ever found his body,” I hiss between my teeth.

  I go to the crux of my annoyance. “So why didn’t you let me in on this little deception?”

  “Ahhh, realism?” The upward lilt of Pulania voice isn’t terribly convincing. “And… the lack thereof. You would have wanted to really flail Bríghe’s back, let’s face it, you don’t like her, but I still need her to help me with the coven’s administration, so unless you want to help out?”

  “No, you can keep Bríghe, I don’t want anything to do with coven administration,” I answer.

  “The other reason I didn’t clue you in was that I wanted a real reaction from you when you first saw Bríghe on the whipping post. That grin you gave Arawan couldn’t be acted. I’m sure it unnerved him.”

  “An evil doing dot point for this month’s report,” I reply.

  “Several dot points, I would think.”

  “Oh,” I exclaim. “Why did you bring your torture chamber and cells here? That must have been quite an effort.”

  Pulania is smiling. “Those sorts of spells are my secret, maybe I’ll share them with you in a few centuries. That aside, after we had our little argument, and you left for Dublin, I thought better of having let Bríghe into the house. I also thought it wouldn’t be terribly wise to hold one of our enemies prisoner there, even if it was in the cellar. If Arawan managed to get out, Susan would be very vulnerable. So I moved everything here. There are special sigils in the basement, and Ruby helped me weave a very tight conjuring to seal the place from both Faerie and Earthly magiks.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t thought of Ruby.”

  “She’s the most powerful of
all the Faerie peoples, there’s no way Arawan will get past her seal, but I still don’t want you waving that dagger of yours around downstairs. There’s a chance you might break even Ruby’s magiks, I don’t want to put that to the test,” Pulania asserts.

  “Humph, but I guess this was all a great con to find out about those demons that Arawan was working with? That seems to have worked.”

  “That was the game. We’ll find out if it worked in an hour or so when we go down there and question the bastard.”

  “Oh, how is it that Bríghe can leave Dublin and not age?” I ask. “Jimmy’s daughter can’t leave the Dublin city boundary.”

  “Jimmy’s daughter?!!”

  Whoops.

  Chapter 26: Faerie daughters

  “There you go, dear, you’ll feel better soon.” We’ve cleaned Bríghe up, re-clothed her and put her in the cot that we keep in the back room. Pulania has brought her around with some smelling salts.

  “Ohh, I don’t feel well,” Bríghe answers.

  “No, you’ve picked up a bit of mushroom poisoning, or something. You were quite ill, but you’ve recovered. You just rest here, dear. You’re getting better. Amura has some water for you.”

  I give Bríghe the water I had at the ready, she sips a bit of it, but she still has the knockout drugs in her system and is weak as a kitten, she only takes a couple of sips. She’ll need more water to help displace the drug, but she should be a lot better in a few hours and can probably take more then.

  “We’ll let you rest for a bit, Bríghe. Amura will leave the water for you, in case you get thirsty.”

  We go out to the bar area where Jimmy is waiting with his soldiers.

  “You can go now, Jimmy. We’ll take it from here.”

  Jimmy seems a bit surprised, Pulania would normally be flirting with him, but she’s giving him the cold shoulder. I guess it’s because I slipped up about his having a daughter, whoops, whoops, whoops. Sorry, Jimmy. Or… no, I’m not, I’m still pissed off at him for spiking my water. He deserves what he gets. I cross my arms, waiting for them to leave.