Civil Seer

by C. M. Cevis

  Willow smiled sadly. “Yeah, you always were stubborn. I’m sorry that things have to end this way between us, Archie.” She’d switched to the name he’d used in childhood without even realizing it. Maybe that meant something to her battered psyche. Maybe she was just tired. And she was definitely losing blood.

  Archie’s eyes widened, the smile fading from his face as he realized she was saying goodbye.

  “You can’t just give me to the vampires. Do you know what they’ll do to me?” he said, terror seeping into his words.

  “Yes, I do.” She knew better than most. “But you really have no idea. And for that, I’m sorry as well.” Willow turned to Max. “Once the witches are dealt with, he’s yours.” Max nodded his thanks and smiled.

  As the group rallied around her to prepare to take the coven, Willow felt desperately tired. Not just because of the blood loss, or the fighting, or the energy expended. She was tired because she was losing someone that was important to her, even if they had just found each other again. Archie had been a constant in her life, someone that she loved and trusted. And now that was gone. He was going to die, eventually. And he’d broken her trust so thoroughly that even if the vampires decided to let him live, she’d never let him near her again.

  Willow sighed, weariness creeping into her every pore. She turned to face a lamppost that had been knocked loose in the fight, but her current state made it hard to concentrate, and she had to motion toward it to pull it down with her magic. It landed with a thud, pinning Archie’s legs to the pavement as he made a last-minute attempt to scamper away. He screamed. She’d intended to pin him, but to not hurt him. Well, not a lot.

  “Let’s go,” Willow said, setting her sights on the door to the house before them.

  28

  WILLOW, MAX, AND LANCE ALL seemed to know exactly where to go, and Nick seemed to trust them enough to follow. Combat makes fast friends. The other witches had chosen to remain outside because they didn’t like the way Max was talking to them, or rather, that he wasn’t talking to them. Everyone was pretty sure that they didn’t need them inside anyway. The problem was in the basement, and it was building.

  The group thundered down the stairs and into what looked to be a large, unfinished room that was currently being used as a summoning space. Three women stood inside of a spell of protection that contained them and a circle that wasn’t there physically but remained faintly visible to the eye. It was the same circle Alex had drawn from the blood of the people that he murdered. That was the faint red image that looked to be superimposed on the concrete floor at their feet. The witch’s eyes were tightly closed, and they chanted, pouring power into the summoning.

  There were three things tossed into the middle of the circle: A bottle of red wine, a bundle of four red roses, and what looked to be a small, bound Rottweiler puppy. Willow recognized the theme of the items. That wasn’t good.

  “Oh holy shit, they’re calling Ose,” Willow said.

  “Isn’t that good, since you know him?” Nick asked.

  Willow shook her head. “They aren’t summoning him to make a deal, Nick. They are summoning him with the intention of trapping him, and forcing him to do their bidding,” she explained. “That’s why the circle was so big. Ose is very powerful, and they needed that much blood to have any hope of keeping him.”

  “That’s not good,” Max said.

  “If this craziness works, he will be forced to appear here, completely under their control,” Willow said with a nod.

  “And then we will be royally fucked,” Max continued. Lance, from the stairs behind him, growled his agreement.

  “You said ‘if.’ Does that mean that this might not work?” Nick asked. Willow shrugged, wincing as the movement pulled the skin around the wound.

  “I have no idea if it will or not, but I think finding out the hard way is a bad idea.” She turned to face the women.

  They were young, both in age and power. Entirely too young to be trying something like this, but the extensive arm scarring revealed by the sleeveless robes they wore seemed to hint that they thought they were up to the task, as long as they cheated. The most recent slices were fresh scabs, telling Willow that they were very weak but had no problem attempting to supplement.

  A loud and audible snap filled the room, and Willow sighed. That was the sound of one big, badass spell closing around them. There was only one option now.

  “We have to stop the power being poured into the summoning for the spell to die,” Willow said, more to herself then to the others around her. It was Max, instead of her psyche, that responded.

  “Killing the witches will stop the magic,” he said, smiling wide enough to flash his fangs. Willow grinned.

  “Works for me,” she said.

  The witches had attempted to be smart about the process once they’d realized what was going on, and had wrapped themselves in a rather thick layer of magic, keeping everyone out, no matter what kind of being that they were.

  “We can’t get to them,” Nick said, leveling his gun. Willow put her hand on the muzzled, stopping him from firing.

  “That’s only going to cause ricochet and get someone hurt,” she said. Nick lowered his weapon, frowned, and nodded. “If I can make a hole in the circle, can you get through?” Willow posed the question to Lance. While he wasn’t small, he was the one with the feline physique, the one most likely to be able to squeeze through and grab someone by the throat. If he could incapacitate one, Willow was pretty sure she could make a hole large enough to get Max and Nick through the barrier before it slammed shut on her.

  Lance nodded his great, furry head.

  Willow closed her eyes and pushed away the chaos around her. She cleared her mind of the magic of the summoning, the chanting, the things swirling about as power stirred things up and knocked things over, the feeling of her life seeping out of the wound in her back. She found a quiet place inside of her head and searched the barrier in front of her with her magic.

  It was solid, she would give it that. Solid everywhere except for a small seam down the side, where the spell hadn’t been closed as precisely as it should have been. This was where she wormed her way inside.

  It was slight at first, just the size of a pinprick. She gently pushed herself through, making sure not to gather anyone’s attention yet. She needed to be inside the barrier before they tried to fix it. The pinprick grew to the size of an average knitting needle. No one noticed her there yet. The size of a golf ball, and still nothing, but now, she was secure enough to know that she could at least hold it open.

  Willow swelled her power to half of Lance’s height on all fours, knowing that at least one of the witches would definitely feel her now, and braced. “Now!” she yelled. Lance crouched and pushed himself through the opening. It wasn’t gentle, but it wasn’t meant to be. Lance knew that Willow was holding on with everything that she had, so he didn’t have time to be gentle. Instead, he launched himself through that hole and brought his powerful jaws crashing down on the neck of the nearest witch: a pretty dark-haired woman. She went down with a scream and a gurgle as something important was severed by tiger teeth.

  Willow ripped the barrier wider and screamed, “Shoot!”

  “Yes ma’am,” Nick said. One bullet sailed through the second witches leg, but she didn’t flinch or stop chanting. These women were fortified with something extra, and it was going to take more than the usual effort to stop them.

  Lance had a good grip on the woman dangling from his jaws, so the hand that ripped up the front of him with a silver knife was a shock. He roared, shaking the witch in his jaws and then dropping her and falling back as blood poured from him. The witch, silver knife in hand, slumped lifelessly to the floor.

  Willow felt it when the witch’s life left her body, and saw it when she ripped into Lance. She screamed inside of her head, working hard not to let it close the opening in the barrier as she watched Lance stumble from the mortal wound. Tears fought with her eyes and her wil
l, but she held her shit together. Damn it, he’d better not die.

  “Aim for the head!” Max yelled, moving faster than Nick could track as he ripped into the witch with the curly hair ferociously enough for Nick to turn away from the spray. Willow felt the trap too late and watched in horror as the witch in Max’s arms died, but not before her arm twitched and plunged the wooden stake into Max’s neck. She had probably been aiming for the head, not that it mattered. Max dropped her to the ground at his feet, stumbling as blood poured from seemingly everywhere.

  Nick’s gun roared to life, the shot hitting the final witch in the neck, and the third bullet hitting her in the head. With a physical release, the barrier Willow had been straining to keep open evaporated, and the power that had been swelling in the room vanished.

  That was the moment that Ose arrived. He stood, confused, in the middle of the room, surrounded by blood and carnage that he hadn’t caused.

  “This is new,” he said, head cocked to the side.

  “Lance? Max?! Oh holy fucking hell,” Willow said, crawling through the blood and whatever else covered the floor toward her injured friends. The world was starting to spin a bit now, but she didn’t have time to worry about herself.

  “Uh, pardon me, what the hell is going on?” Ose asked, the calmest one in the room.

  Willow reached Max and examined his neck, trying to figure out how to gently extract the giant, bloody toothpick from his neck. She wasn’t sure if he’d heal that wound, but she was at least going to give him a chance. She grasped the stake and pulled it out in one sharp tug, then put her hand over the wound to staunch the blood as Max coughed and wheezed beneath her.

  She finally processed Ose’s question and shot him a scathing glare before turning back to Max. “What’s going on is that three witches were attempting to bind you, you fallen idiot. How in the hell did you miss the city-sized summoning circle with your name tattooed across it?!” Willow screamed. Max’s wound was beginning to close, but slower than Willow was used to seeing a vampire heal. He coughed weakly, but he wasn’t dead.

  “You know, most people wouldn’t dare speak to me in that manner,” Ose started, the arrogance back on point.

  Willow stood, her clothes soaked in blood, and strode toward the fallen.

  “I had a magically altered childhood friend rip my back open tonight. I’m not quite sure that I didn’t manage to get the Suzerain of the city killed, and Lance is damn near gutted, all to keep someone from binding you and making you their little bitch. Maybe get down off of that stupid high horse of yours and realize what the people here tonight did for you, Ose,” Willow said, almost nose to nose with the Fallen now.

  He blinked in surprise. “It’s been hundreds of years since anyone had actually yelled at me,” he said, his voice soft, the bravado gone. He stopped and looked around, really seeing what had happened in that basement. “Perhaps I should pay a bit more attention to the mortals before someone else tries this and succeeds.”

  Ose walked a few steps to where Lance lay in his human form. The severity of the injury had forced him to shift back, whether he wanted to or not, and his breathing was shallow as his heart slowed gradually, each pump pushing more blood from the man’s open chest. Ose wrapped his arm around Lance’s torso, running his hand gown the angry gash and leaving a trail of smooth, perfectly healed skin behind before he stood.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood, but he should be okay now. He won’t die,” Ose said, looking at Nick.

  Nick, unsure of what to say to that, stuck with manners. “Thank you.”

  “Here,” Max rasped, scooting himself across the floor towards Lance. The hole in his neck was almost completely closed now, and Willow felt herself let out a breath of relief. Neither of them was dying—that was something to hold onto.

  “Cut me, and let him drink. It will help him heal,” Max said. Willow wasn’t entirely sure that Lance would have chosen to do that were his completely aware of his surroundings, but for now, her judgement was going to have to do.

  Willow took the silver knife and sliced gently across Max’s arm. “Lance,” she said softly, lifting his half-conscious body into a mostly upright position as Max moved closer, and held the open wound to Lance’s lips. “Drink this.” The silver kept the wound from healing immediately, but even so Willow only allowed Lance a few gulps. The last thing she needed was to get Lance addicted to vampire blood.

  “Are you sure?” Nick asked. Willow ignored him for the moment. She was covered in blood, and all she wanted was to make sure that everyone was okay. She’d answer for her sins later. Lance drank what she offered without question, and she lay him back down.

  “It will take a bit to work, but he will feel much better within the hour,” Max said, his voice finally sounding like it had before they’d entered that stupid house of horrors.

  “Good,” Ose said. “Then we are even.” He snapped his fingers and was gone.

  29

  THE DAY WAS WARM AND rather breezy, which was nice considering they had been standing there for a while. Nick was standing a few feet from Willow at a lectern facing a pulsating throng of microphones, cameras, and wide eyes. She hadn’t intended on being up there with him, but Nina had insisted that she come and stand with the other officers who had helped close the investigation. Nina had also come to the hospital to visit her, which had shocked the heck out of her.

  Nick had shown up at Willow’s condo the morning after everything happened, or rather, the afternoon, since everyone had pretty much gone home and passed out. He’d made some crack about how he could find out things about her just like she had found out things about him, and then informed her that he was there to take her to the hospital. When she’d asked why and insisted that she didn’t need to go, he’d placed his hand square in the middle of her back and gave it a little press. The pain made her stomach lurch, and suddenly a trip to the hospital hadn’t sounded so bad.

  The doctors had admitted her immediately and put her into the hospital room beside Lance, who apparently had also been forced to come get checked out. Lance looked eons better than he had the night before, partly due to the vampire blood that he’d ingested, and partly due to the accelerated healing of shifters. He’d watched while the doctor and nurses dug around in Willow’s wound to make sure it wasn’t infected, put stitches in the areas that needed it, and bandaged her up.

  Nina had arrived the second day Willow was in the hospital. She’d come into the room, sat down, and stared in silence for what felt like forever before speaking. She told Willow that she’d spoken to her father and informed him that she no longer felt the need for his approval of her accomplishments. It hadn’t gone over well, and they hadn’t spoken since, but she had never been more at peace with a decision than she was with that one. Willow told her that she was proud of her, and Nina had come to the bed and hugged her gently. Then she asked if she could come down to the club when Willow was discharged. Willow told her that she was welcome anytime, and she’d made sure to put her on the forever list for King when she’d gotten out. Something told her that she and Nina were about to be good friends.

  For now though, she sat on a small platform with several other officers, including Nina and Lance, and listened as Nick explained to the press what had happened. He told them about the witches and their summoning, and how Lance had spotted the pattern and figured out that they were drawing a summoning circle. Lance had gotten a bonus and a few other things from that one. He explained that they had recruited a man who was well-known by the police and had helped out on several cases, and that he had been asked to help with this one before they’d known that he was the murderer they were searching for. He explained about the magically induced shifting and how the murders were made to look like vampires who were trying to frame shifters. The why for the murders hadn’t been discovered, and while it bothered all of them, they tried not to dwell on it too much. The point was that their plan hadn’t worked, and both races had been cleared of any wrongdoing. A mis
sing persons report had been filed for Alex by some friends at the university, but Willow was pretty sure no one would find him.

  He finished by explaining that the case ended with the death of the culprits, saying that they had initiated combat with the officers once they were cornered. He intentionally left out the extra preternatural bits, and Willow agreed with that decision. The last thing they needed was a city on the hunt for anyone who was different. Nick finished up by saying that the case was well and truly closed, took a few questions, and then ended the press conference.

  The press seemed happy with the resolution. The national spotlight was on its way somewhere else, and Baltimore was back to being what it normally was, whatever that meant.

  “Tonight?” Nina asked, taking Willow’s hand discreetly in hers with a grin. Willow giggled and nodded her head.

  “Come at eight. There’s great band playing tonight,” she said with a wink. Nina slipped on her captain’s face and turned back to her officers. Willow found herself a bit excited at the prospect of Nina coming to the club and made herself a mental note to ask King to let her know as soon as she arrived. She’d worry about the whole brothel thing later. For now, she had a new friend, and that made her happy.

  “So,” Nick said, approaching with his hands smoothly slipped into the pocket of his slacks. “Are you truly okay with how everything turned out?”

  She knew he meant with Alex. She hadn’t talked about it yet, and she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to. Her eyes traveled to the injury Nick had sustained that night: a cut across his left cheek that had started to heal into a rather neat line of pink scar tissue. She felt like she owed him an actual answer.

  “It hurts. Alex was my oldest friend, the only one I’d ever met that didn’t freak out when he discovered what I am and what I can do. He was the first boy I’d ever loved… But I am okay with how it turned out, yes,” she said. Nick gave her a slightly confused look that made Willow laugh. “Alex knew more about my world than most humans because I made sure that he learned while I did. He knew what would happen to someone who did what he did, but he chose to become a murderer anyway. This was his choice.”