Hunting Season (The Twenty-Sided Sorceress Book 4)

by Annie Bellet

  “You cannot come with us,” Yosemite said. “Ciaran comes home tomorrow, but he will not be in time. I cannot wait. You know that. If you were to lose yourself without him there…” he trailed off.

  “You need my help. The two of you alone are not powerful enough if it is what we fear,” Brie said. “I cannot let you go into the woods alone, not again.”

  “Who will stay and protect the unicorn?” Yosemite countered.

  “The pack is here, and the sorceress can handle herself.”

  I finished rinsing my hands and poured a glass of water, taking a sip, swishing, and spitting it out. I drained the cup and turned to face them both. Yosemite’s dual-colored eyes were shadowed by dark circles and his thick shoulders were hunched. He looked more exhausted than I still felt, a tree ready to topple in the next stiff breeze.

  Brie appeared different. There was no trace of exhaustion around her. Her green eyes were bright, her curls somehow bouncier, and her lips and skin practically dewy with health and youth. She looked ten years younger. Her apron was gone, replaced by a teeshirt that read “Frag the Weak,” which I recognized as one of Harper’s.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said to Yosemite as they stopped talking and regarded me in turn. I’d already figured the second person Brie had meant was Alek, and I wasn’t letting him run off into the wilderness without me again.

  “You?” Brie snorted. “You can barely stand up.”

  “I’ll be fine by morning,” I said, mostly sure I wasn’t lying. I was tired, but the worst of the exhaustion had passed and my magic was there and strong when I reached for it.

  “Please, Brigit,” Yosemite said in Old Irish. “Stay and wait for Ciaran.”

  Brigit? The way he said the name rang a bell in my head, but whatever thought it was ran off before I could grasp it. Whatever Brie was, she was no hearth witch.

  “Fine,” she said after a moment. “You better let nothing happen to him.”

  “I believe Iollan can look after himself,” I said in Old Irish, enunciating the words. “Or perhaps you missed the fight I just witnessed.”

  “I miss very little. Something it would seem we have in common, Jade Crow,” she said, her mood changing from pissy to grinning in the blink of an eye. “I will wait and keep watch while you sleep,” she said to Yosemite. She walked out of the kitchen and toward the back door.

  “Who is she?” I asked the druid. We both knew I really meant “what is she?”

  “That is a long story, and not mine to tell,” he said. “I must rest. We will leave at dawn, before the trail goes too cold.” He moved to follow Brie, stripping his clothing as he went, his steps lumbering and pained.

  I set down my glass. Hadn’t expected a strip show. Who were these people?

  “He’s going to recharge,” Ezee said behind me. “He’ll sleep out under the sky tonight, his body in contact with the earth. Tomorrow morning when the sun rises, he will be ready to go off and be a big damn hero again.”

  I looked over at my friend. Ezee wore another borrowed shirt, this one just plain black with a power button symbol on it. His hair was pulled back from his tired face and still damp from a shower. His brown eyes closed for a moment as Yosemite, now stark naked, left through the back door and vanished into the night.

  “So,” I said. “You and the druid, eh? When did that happen?”

  “It didn’t,” Ezee said. “I mean, it does, sometimes. It isn’t serious; we just see each other when he’s in town sometimes. Rarely.”

  “Methinks you doth protest too much.”

  “Funny,” he said, waving a hand at me in a vague STFU gesture.

  “Seriously,” I said. “You two seem pretty close.”

  “A bird may love a fish, but where would they build a home together?” he quoted.

  “You know, they get together and live happily ever after at the end of that movie,” I said.

  “What? What movie? I’m quoting Fiddler on the Roof.”

  Ha, whoops. “I thought you were quoting Ever After. I’ll take ‘nerds mixing up references’ for six hundred, Alex.”

  We smiled at each other. Our smiles didn’t last. Too much had happened.

  “You know about folklore and stuff, right?” I said. “Why is Fomoire familiar to me?”

  “So you’ll actually take ‘white people’s legends’ for six hundred,” Ezee said. “The Fomorians were the original people in Ireland, I think. Irish myth isn’t exactly my area of expertise. They were bad folk, but of course the people who fought against them and destroyed them would say that.”

  We shared another, sadder smile. Try growing up Native American if you ever want a stark lesson in how the conquerors rewrite history and even myth to suit themselves.

  “Yosemite said those demon things were Fomoire hounds. They seemed pretty damn evil to me,” I said.

  “I’ll ask him tomorrow,” Ezee said. “Who is the woman that Vivian is trying to patch up? Seemed like you knew her.”

  Shit. I knew I couldn’t dodge this question forever. But maybe a little longer.

  “How is Levi?” I asked, aware of how obvious my ploy was.

  “He’ll be fine, thanks in part to that woman showing up and saving his ass, apparently. So?”

  “I’d better tell everyone at once,” I said.

  “Levi is asleep and Junebug won’t leave his side, so the rest of us will have to do,” Ezee said, following me into the living room.

  Harper and Rosie had moved from the table to the second couch, probably trying to give those of us in the kitchen some privacy. Max was awake, sipping tea.

  “Can I borrow a shirt?” I asked Harper.

  She jumped up and ran upstairs, returning with a grey long-sleeved teeshirt that had Pikachu on it. Mistake on her part, because I wasn’t sure I’d give this one back. It was one of my favorites of hers. I pulled it on and took up a spot on the couch next to Alek.

  “The woman who showed up tonight,” I said, motioning with one hand toward the room where Vivian and Tess were. “She’s a sorceress, like me. Kind of exactly like me.” I took a deep breath, searching for the words. “She ran away from Samir this week and came to me. Or so she says.”

  “Samir?” Aurelio asked.

  “Psycho sorcerer ex-boyfriend,” Harper supplied. “He’s been fucking with Jade, trying to kill her for, like, years now.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us she was in town?”

  I glanced at Alek, but he only raised his eyebrows at me. This was my mess and while his arm came around my shoulders in silent support, he wasn’t going to clean it up for me.

  “Because I sent her away, or at least I tried to. I don’t trust her. You think all this stuff is happening right when she shows up is a coincidence? This is more of Samir’s stupid games.”

  “So she’s here to kill you?” Ezee asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She said she wasn’t, and Alek says she’s telling the truth, but I just don’t know. I can’t take the chance. Things are dangerous enough.”

  “If she wanted to hurt you, she has one heck of a way of showing it,” Rosie said. “I saw her appear like that, put herself right between that demon and Levi.”

  “She saved my brother’s life,” Ezee said. “He told me. And now she’s half dead in that room, her guts everywhere, half her blood on the driveway. Pretty shit plan if she wanted to harm us, no?”

  I hated their logic. I hated that I still felt so much suspicion. I hated that I had sent her away and she had come anyway, showed up in my moment of need and done something I had failed to do. Saved my friend.

  Letting out my breath slowly, I pushed all the hate away. Maybe that was the problem. Too much hatred for Samir, too much pain, so much it was blinding me when it came to him, to anything he’d touched. Maybe it was time to try accepting Tess at her word, give her a chance.

  “I know,” I said. “I might be wrong. I’m going to talk to her, see what she knows. This isn’t a coincidence.”

 
“Maybe he’s pissed that she ran,” Harper said. “Could he be here? Summoning those things? They weren’t natural.”

  A small thrill went through me, followed by a spike of dread. If he was here, I wasn’t ready. But I didn’t know if I would ever be ready.

  “I don’t know. I’m going to talk to her, when she’s awake.”

  Vivian emerged from the room, stepping into the hallway and turning toward us as our worried gazes all fixed on her. She wiped a bloody hand over her forehead, leaving a pink smear.

  “She wants to talk to Jade,” she said. “Don’t overtax her. She’s healing, but it’ll be a while and she needs rest.”

  Be a while? I raised my eyebrows at that. Vivian didn’t know how fast sorceresses healed. Tess’s wound would already be closing after an hour. She’d have a hell of a bruise by morning and probably be tired and slow for a day or two, but by week’s end she would be right as rain with just an ugly fading mark to show for being nearly bitten in half.

  I got up, and Alek followed me. Behind me I heard Rosie offering Vivian a room and a change of clothes.

  Tess was in the bed, quilts pulled up to her chin. Her face was pale, her cheeks sunken hollows. She opened her eyes as we entered.

  “So,” I said. “We meet again.”

  I sent Alek out of the room after asking him, in Russian, to ward it off for sound. I didn’t want the details of the conversation I was hoping to have to reach my friend’s ears before I could digest whatever information Tess could give me. Alek looked as though he would protest, but in the end all he did was sigh, set the silvery ward that would soundproof the room, and then he left.

  Tess watched me with tired eyes as I sat on the edge of the bed.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Like something ugly tried to bite me in half,” she said, a ghost of a smile playing at her mouth. She was beautiful even with smeared makeup and exhausted circles under her eyes. The effect made her look delicate and ethereal.

  “You followed me,” I said, then winced. I should have said something like “thank you for saving my friend,” but the words came out way wrong.

  “I told you, I have nowhere to go. I thought maybe if I stayed I could help somehow, convince you I’m not going to kill you.” Talking looked like it hurt her and she closed her eyes.

  “Thank you,” I managed to say. “You saved Levi. How did you move so quickly?”

  “I wish I’d moved faster,” she said. “It looked like you would be okay so I hung back. I’m sorry.”

  “But how did you do it?”

  “Time,” she said. She opened her eyes, seemed to have trouble focusing on my face, and closed them again. “My powers mostly revolve around manipulating time. I can slow time down or speed it up, sort of. It is very localized, but I can make myself quick or someone else slow. It’s my specialty, like elemental magic is yours.”

  Elemental magic was my specialty? That was news to me. I was good at throwing around power, good with fire and ice, or just pure magical force. I could do a lot of other things, however, like shields, basic wards, finding things and people. Even breathing underwater now. I’d been trying lately to teach myself to fly, but it was difficult to wrap my head around the “whole defying gravity for long periods” thing, so I hadn’t managed more than a few feet of gliding so far. Samir had always encouraged me to use as much power as possible, to do the flashy, showy stuff like using fire or turning water to ice. Elemental magic, now that I thought about it.

  I had never brought up the DnD spells I’d practiced and learned to control my magic with. The book was a game for children and I had wanted Samir’s approval, had wanted so badly for him to love me and respect me and see that I wasn’t just any girl, that I was mature and worldly. I shook my head over how ignorant he had kept me. Hansel in the cage, being fed sweets until slaughter time.

  Tess’s breathing evened out as she seemed to lose consciousness. Feeling like a creep but doing it anyway, I gently pulled back the quilt and peeled up a corner of the huge gauze pad across her abdomen. The wound was ragged still, but not bleeding. The edges were pressed closed as best Vivian could manage without sutures. From the clear beads around edges of the wound, it looks like she might have used glue. I looked around the room and spied a half-used tube of Super Glue on the dresser.

  “Making sure I’m really wounded,” Tess said.

  “Sorry,” I muttered. I pressed the bandage back down as gently as I could. “Why aren’t you healing faster?”

  “I am too tired to speed up time around myself,” she answered. “I’ll start tomorrow. Even with that, it’ll be a couple weeks before I’m whole again, at least. So I guess I’m not much threat now, huh.” Her chuckle ended quickly in a grimace of pain.

  Alek wasn’t in the room to tell me if she spoke the truth or not, but I had a feeling she did. A week until she was whole. I would have healed that wound in a day or three at most. My ignorance settled on me like a cloak I hadn’t realized the weight of until just now.

  “So you can’t use magic other than the time stuff? What about what you did to the necklace?” I asked, trying to get more information without seeming as stupid as I felt.

  “I removed it by making myself be elsewhere in time for a moment and letting the necklace remain,” she said, as though it were perfectly clear what she meant.

  Okay. Yeah. Not helpful. I filed away what she’d said for later examination.

  “I can do small things. Power is power, after all, but it does not want to flow in ways we are not naturally inclined,” Tess continued. “Have you never tried to do something very different from what you are good at, and failed?” Her eyes were open again and she stared steadily at me, her gaze intense, serious.

  I thought about the time I had tried to heal Alek. Healing is apparently super hard. “Sure,” I said, trying to nod in what I hoped was a sage manner. “I can’t heal for shit.”

  “Who healed your leg?” She looked at my thigh, where my jeans still sported a bloodstained hole.

  Well, fucktoast. I couldn’t dodge that question gracefully. “I did,” I said. “I mean, it healed on its own.”

  “You left a scar on him, on his arm,” Tess said. “It never healed. He hides it with illusion and sometimes even make-up. He doesn’t know I have seen it.”

  I knew she meant Samir. “It never healed?” I asked, pushing back the tide of memory that came with her words. My last meeting with Samir. My doomed charge to try and kill him after my family had blown themselves up rather than be used to torment and trap me. I’d thrown so much power at him, but it was all a blur in my memory. Wolf had come, had bitten him, the only time I’d seen her affect the physical world like that.

  Turning my head, I looked toward where Wolf lounged on the floor. I hadn’t even realized she was here, but somehow in that moment I knew she was and that if I turned my head, she would be there. Life was getting weirder. My guardian perked up her ears and lifted her head. The slash of white down her chest where Samir had wounded her showed starkly against her pitch-black fur.

  “That is why I came to you,” Tess said. “You got away. You hurt him, hurt him so badly that even after decades it has not healed but remains puckered and red, as though freshly closed.”

  “I can’t remember what I did,” I said, which was partially true. He’d nearly killed me, and Wolf had dragged me away. I took a deep breath and got to the topic I was dreading. It had to be talked about, or I could never even start to trust her. “Do you have anything to do with what is going on? You show up in town, terrible things start happening in the woods. I don’t believe in coincidence, Tess. I can’t afford to.”

  “Not directly,” she said. “I think I know who might, though. I think it is partly my fault. I’m so sorry.” She shivered and I realized I’d left her half uncovered.

  “Samir followed you here?” I asked, helping her pull the quilt back up to her chin.

  “No, not him, I don’t think. Clyde, his other apprentice
.”

  “There’s two of you?” Samir apparently had been busy.

  She nodded. “Clyde has been with him for a while. He’s awful. All of Samir’s cruelty, none of his reserve or finesse. I would have killed him years ago if I could, but the idea of eating his heart makes me sick.”

  “You ever eaten someone’s heart?” I asked. She seemed to know what it entailed, at least, which made me think she had.

  “Only once,” she said, her eyes leaving mine and staring off into the middle distance that was memory.

  She did not elaborate, and I found myself unwilling to ask more. I knew firsthand what a weirdly intimate experience it was, having done it twice now. And I understood what she meant about not wanting to repeat it with someone she loathed. The first heart I had taken had been of a serial-killing warlock and his evil, sickening memories still gave me nightmares sometimes.

  I asked her questions about Clyde and the picture she painted was a bad one. His specialty was in raising spirits, warping them and infusing them with his own cruel and twisted desires. It made me think of Not Afraid and Tess confirmed that as far as she knew, Clyde had been involved in that, though mostly she thought it was Samir’s doing. She claimed she hadn’t been, that Samir didn’t seem to include or trust her as much as he did Clyde. Apparently she was pretending to be very young and inexperienced in the hopes that Samir would continue to believe her not worth harvesting yet. She was tiring quickly, I saw, and I decided the rest of my million questions could wait.

  “One last thing, just in case,” I said. “What does Clyde look like? What does his magic smell like?”

  “Smell like?” she asked, her face a picture next to the word confusion in the dictionary.

  “Magic has a smell, a feel, a taste. I don’t know how to describe it,” I said, waving my hands in the air. “Your’s is cool, crisp, like a frosty morning.”

  She blinked up at me and her tongue flicked over her lips. “I cannot smell or taste someone else’s magic,” she said. “I can see the effects, see the obvious things like you throwing fire. I have never heard of anyone who can sense another without taking their power first.”