by Mark Henwick
Yesterday, having a couple of days off had seemed like a gift. Now, waiting until evening to visit Haven and talk to Kaothos was a frustration.
I called Bian several times and got her voicemail.
I tried to put it aside and join in with another pajama and bathrobe morning. Then I got dressed up for lunch, including one of my Christmas presents, a pair of kick-ass combat boots from David and Yelena. They were designed to the general specification of Ops 4-10 combat footwear, except these were handmade by my favorite shoemaker, Werner, just like my cowboy boots. That meant they fit perfectly as soon as I put them on, and felt like I’d worn them for years. I could see them getting a lot of use. And as Yelena pointed out, my cowboy boots weren’t the best for some of the action I got involved in.
We made it all the way past lunch before the outside world intruded again.
A call came for Alex. Felix and Cameron wanted him to meet them, and when the alpha pair who commanded the League of Southern Packs asked for your presence, you shrugged and went. So much for the werewolves being too busy to intrude on our vacation, but if it were important, I reasoned, Alex would have known more about it.
Something in my gut didn’t like this. Why Alex alone? Why not both of us?
Still, I got the sense that a second day sitting around Manassah wasn’t his idea of fun and he wasn’t too unhappy to be called away, so I didn’t voice my concerns.
At the front door, we shared a lingering kiss that lit the gold fires in his eyes and then he was gone.
I made sure everyone else was otherwise occupied and then I took over the sunroom and interrogated Nick, Flint and Kane on magic.
I wasn’t expecting a simple fix, but the more we spoke, the more difficult it sounded to rescue Tullah.
If she needs it. The girl is good. Think positive.
Neither did it seem we could take on the Hecate or the Denver Adept community head to head. What we might have on our side was unexpected ways to create workings, like we had by spirit jumping into trees.
“Shamanic Adepts are regarded as outlaws,” Kane said. “Our methods are forbidden, which means covens don’t use the energy the way we do.”
“Because, although the way we use the energy makes us potentially stronger, it makes the results less predictable,” Flint took it up.
Kane completed: “Or safe. Get it badly wrong and a shamanic Adept could hurt a lot of people. Do that enough times and people will start to take notice.”
“But it also makes us unpredictable.”
“Go back to ‘stronger’. The new, structured Adept methods with the whole coven...” I prompted.
“Each member works only on one element or thread of a working. One person to weave it all together.”
“It can only be used as well as the Weaver who uses it. But each element is simpler, so there’s less chance of getting it wrong. The other problem is, the whole is only as strong as the weakest member of the coven.”
“That’s how we broke Wendy’s casting,” Flint said.
“The Hecate’s coven’s casting?” They nodded. The Hecate was the coven’s ‘weaver’, the front woman for a spell that was a joint effort by the rest of the coven, and the Denver community leader was their ‘weaver’, who used his title as his name.
“What did you actually do to break the casting?” I asked.
“They’d chosen a summer day. I breathed in pollen and kinda shared the sensation with the coven,” Kane said. “It was consistent with their working, so they didn’t pay attention to what I was doing.”
“And one of them has allergies?”
“Yeah. Not that she actually inhaled any pollen, but it totally seemed like she did, to her. It messed with her concentration. They hadn’t thought of protecting themselves against that. She sneezed and the whole structure weakened just enough.”
“Tricky.” I liked the way they’d done that. “But you said the Hecate is strong. Couldn’t she have overcome that?”
“She is strong, but she limits herself using this process. All she does is design the working and control it. The real power comes from the weave of the coven. Any part fails, even a little, and the whole structure is weaker.”
“So how strong is she alone? And what’s her spirit guide? Why can’t I see?”
“Wendy’s strong,” Kane said, shrugging. “If she didn’t play by her own rules which limit her, we wouldn’t want to go against her.”
“We don’t know what her spirit guide is,” Flint said, shaking his head. “Feels crazy different, but never got too close, obviously.”
“Sometimes you can’t see,” Nick interrupted. “No matter how close. But it makes me wonder why she hides.”
There was an embarrassed silence.
“Okay,” I said. “You want to know about the elephant in the room. Ask.”
The boys ducked their heads and let Nick speak. “What happened to your spirit guide?”
Even though I’d invited it, the question hurt.
“Plain answer is I don’t know.” I took a deep breath. “I can tell you about it, and see if you have ideas.”
Nick knew most of what had happened in New Mexico when we rescued Diana; he’d been at the ritual just before. But even he didn’t know the details of what had happened when Kaothos and I had broken the lock that the Taos Adepts had used to imprison Diana. Flint and Kane knew nothing about any of it.
So I talked through the pain, and the boys became wide-eyed.
Right up to that night, I’d had a wolf spirit guide, Hana. And she hadn’t been alone in my head. There’d been Tara, my twin sister, stillborn and yet somehow alive inside me. The one whose wisecracks and simple presence had grounded me as far back as I could remember.
Hana and Tara had been there when I performed the first halfy ritual for a werewolf that was dying because she was unable to change. That was Olivia, and the ritual had been down in Carson Park, on the border between New Mexico and Colorado, with Were armies poised on either side.
It provided the boys with background, so I told them about the halfy ritual—the sacred places, dancing in the firelight, dancing through clouds of smoke, catching glimpses of spirit figures. The confusion. The pain. The blood. The way everything seemed part of the ritual.
Talking about that loosened me up and I managed to continue on into the rescue of Diana and the loss of my spirit guide.
My throat went dry, my voice quiet. My heart raced and my body ached with remembered pain.
The Taos Adepts had been maintaining the spell on Diana. They’d made a circle around her, and stood at their points, feeling secure in the knowledge that the spell had been set up so that physically attacking them would discharge the force of the spell through Diana.
And not just Diana. The spell’s power was drawn from the life force of captive children. I’d been told all of them would die if I attacked the Adepts.
I tried to disarm the spell by channeling that power through my body. It felt like every vein caught fire, every bone was broken, every muscle torn. Pain on pain.
Then Kaothos came, blotting out the sky.
She’d broken the spell, and reflected the backlash away from the children and through the Adepts who’d created it. I thought I’d known pain before, but Kaothos blazed through my mind. I felt as if I was falling into the sun, and the whole night was aflame. When I came to my senses, the lock was gone, and Taos Adepts were still standing rigidly in their positions, their heads actually burning, a stench coming off them as the skin of their faces melted.
And my mind had been torn open, allowing madness to flood in. I’d gone rogue.
I needed to prove to myself I could tell this story, even though I could see horror growing on the boys’ faces, grimness on Nick’s.
I’d killed the leader of the Taos Adepts, Taggart. I’d ripped his throat out and thrown him at Diana’s feet like an offering before some bloodthirsty, ancient goddess.
Then I’d chased down and tortured Amaral, the man respons
ible for the kidnapping of Diana. I kept him alive, in pain, feeding on his suffering, as if I was a Basilikos Athanate.
I remembered that unthinking hunger of being rogue. I remembered it in my jaws and belly.
But from the moment Kaothos had burned herself through my mind, there had been no Tara. No twin sister. No Hana. No spirit guide.
Diana and my House had repaired me, brought me back, but I had a hole in my chest that nothing else could fill.
My whispering pattered away into silence.
I blinked and took more note of the looks on Flint and Kane’s faces. More than horror at my story.
“What is it?” I asked them.
They exchanged looks in the way that they did.
Flint spoke first. “It’s not about going rogue or that stuff. Don’t think you’re rogue anymore. It’s about the rituals and what you and the dragon did when you saved Diana.”
“What?”
“You know how myths have a basis in fact?”
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Yeah, okay, sometimes. Thing is, there’s a sort of understanding that magic takes a lot of forms, and dark magic is dangerous stuff. Evil.”
“I think I got that, from what happened to the Taos Adepts.” But as I said it, I realized that wasn’t exactly what they were talking about. “Wait. You’re saying that the halfy rituals are dark magic? Diana’s rescue was dark magic?”
It was Kane who answered. “The way you described them, they’re all focused on pain and fear and blood. And death—for the rescue, you and the dragon killed the Taos Adepts.”
“Like human sacrifices. That’s pretty much the definition of dark magic, or blood magic, right there,” Flint said.
Blood magic. I felt the echo of their horror through my eukori. It chilled me, radiating cold out from the pit of my stomach, silent freezing fingers reaching, wrapping my heart and lungs.
“That’s not the way it was,” I said.
Wasn’t it? How much did I know about what I was doing? I was insane at the time.
I stopped myself from saying that the Taos Adepts deserved what they got.
Who am I to judge?
That magic hadn’t really come from me. I wasn’t that powerful. It had come from Kaothos.
Nick hadn’t said anything. His head was down.
With a sinking sensation I remembered that Nick had actually spoken to me of his concerns about Kaothos. Down in New Mexico he’d told me that his people feared the Thunderbird, and those that had chosen it as their totem had died out because it was too powerful a spirit.
Too powerful, or too evil?
In my head, echoes of the Hecate’s voice mocked me. Dracul means dragon, and it comes from drac, meaning devil.
Chapter 14
Kane opened his mouth to say something else, and Nick’s head came up quickly.
“Stop,” he said, his eyes glinting.
We were all silent for a long minute.
“All very well being self-taught until you teach yourselves ignorance.” Nick glared at them. The two younger men sat back, looking embarrassed. “Does the seed in the heart not mean anything to you?” Nick went on.
It was obviously a saying from some teaching that they shared, and Kane lowered his head. “Intent,” he mumbled.
“Evil intent, evil magic,” Nick said. He turned to me. “Yes, your way is dangerous. Your powers seem to come from your anger, fueled by pain, channeled through Blood. This is strong, violent magic. Deceptive magic. It can turn in your hand.”
He paused, but neither of the younger Adepts argued the point.
Neither of them openly agreed either.
“It’s because of this, the shamanic tradition is wary of these elements,” Nick said. “It’s also part of the reason why the modern, structured methods were developed, restrictive laws were made and whole covens encouraged to participate in all spells. But the fish can still rot from the head, like the Taos Adepts.”
I could see the boys weren’t buying into this completely, but Kane had a harder time hiding his opinions than Flint.
Still, they didn’t interrupt as the skinwalker spoke on: “If your purpose is evil, and your consideration is focused only on you at the expense of others, then you could describe it as dark magic. If your purpose is to break an evil working and the energy rebounds on the Adepts who created it, then that’s not.”
“A human sacrifice,” Kane responded, as if he’d forgotten I was right here. “A circle of Adepts paralyzed where they stood and being burned alive. The leader’s throat torn out.”
“The Adepts got hit by the rebound of their own spell,” Nick replied. “Karma, the Asians say. Threefold thy acts return to thee, the old Celts said. Your intentions come back to you.”
“No one was being burned,” Kane said stubbornly, “until Amber and the dragon got involved.”
“Burned? No. Tormented? Yes. The fact that the rebound took the form of fire was probably because that’s what Amber visualized as the pain. Her own pain.” Nick turned to me. “You didn’t actually visualize anyone else being on fire?”
“No,” I replied. “And as for ‘sacrificing’ the leader—he attacked me. I killed him. I didn’t have any intention for it to be part of some ritual. But if we’ve eliminated evil intentions on my part...” They didn’t so much nod as drop their eyes, reluctantly. “Why’s it so dangerous? And how dangerous?”
If blood magic is the basis of the halfy ritual, what will I do? I can’t refuse to help them.
It was Nick who responded. “Look, all magic is addictive, even to Athanate and Were, and they only use it in passing. Much more for Adepts. Magic, pure magic itself, is power. The feeling of summoning and using it is pleasure, and when you add on the pleasure of being powerful, being able to do these things, even the weakest of magic can be addictive. Adepts start off knowing they shouldn’t use magic casually. They should only use it when it’s essential. Never for themselves. But as they go on, they always find there are more reasons to use it. Reasons become excuses. Then justifications. They start to believe they’re okay, because they control it. It doesn’t control them. They could stop anytime, but why should they? It’s at that point the world begins to look different. Soon, everyone else is wrong, and the use of magic is right.”
“That applies to all Adepts then,” I said. “Even shamanic. Any type of magic.”
Nick nodded.
“It does, but more for dark magic. The darker the magic, the closer between the thought and the deed, the shorter the time between the effort and the reward, the more powerful the magic is. And the more powerful the magic is, the more rewarding it is, and the quicker it drives out doubts.”
I laughed, the sound a little shaky. “I can’t light a candle with magic of any shade, so I don’t think that’s what’s happening to me. It seems all I can do is channel something for the halfies. That’s not for me, and it’s essential for the Were.”
On the other hand, the ritual was some kind of magic. And I had broken the lock that the Denver community had put on Tullah’s powers. With Kaothos’ help. Where did things that seemed natural for Athanate and Were stop, and magic take over?
Kane and Nick argued the point while I fell into thought.
But what about Kaothos?
What about the legends that said an Adept would lose control of the dragon?
Were dragons automatically dark magic?
Kaothos? Evil? A devil?
But then I thought back to the Basilikos team that had hidden out in the high plains at Bow Creek Ranch after the last Assembly at Haven. I thought of the layered, Aztec-style mini-pyramid they’d built in the barn. The children they were sacrificing. They were Athanate, not Adepts, but they’d definitely been performing some kind of magic rituals.
That was dark magic. I felt it. I couldn’t define it, but I knew it.
Not the same as Kaothos. Not at all.
“I’m getting short of time,” I said. “There’s a lot more here to
get back to, but I need to wrap this up now and get out to Haven.”
I rubbed my face. So many unknowns. I had to deal with the immediate first.
“So this thing with crows yesterday,” I said. “If we assume it’s the Denver Adepts, is it just because they’ve got a problem with me?”
Nick shook his head.
“They’ve had a problem with you for a while. If they’d tried this before, I’d have noticed it. It’s new.”
“And it’s not the Hecate, you think. So it’s either caused by the Hecate’s arrival here, or they have the same reason she has—they know Tullah is heading for home?”
He nodded. “The Denver Adepts want that dragon and they think she’ll come here at some point. Or you’ll lead them to her.”
Damn. Three groups of Adepts facing me. The Northern Adept League, who know Kaothos is here with Diana and that Tullah is coming. The Denver community, who only know Kaothos is Tullah’s spirit guide and think they’ll catch both of them coming home. And the Empire of Heaven, who secretly don’t believe Kaothos is dead and are looking for Tullah.
And in the meantime, if Flint and Kane’s reactions are anything to go by, all of these Adept communities will regard me as some kind of blood magic witch.
Chapter 15
I left Nick talking to Flint and Kane. Jen wasn’t in the living room. I found her in the bedroom, packing her business suits into a case on the bed.
“What’s happened?” I said, my heart sinking even further. We were supposed to be enjoying ourselves together. First Alex, and now Jen.
“Skylur happened.” Jen’s mouth twisted. “He needs me in New York. Business never rests.”
“No!”
She sighed and folded a couple of scarves into the case. “I’ve already complained. Much good it did.” She glanced at me hesitantly, looked away. “It gets worse.”
“How?”
“Skylur’s ordered Yelena to fly me there in the Pilatus. We’ll be staying a couple of days.”
“He can’t do this!” Why was he going back on his word? “You’re my wife and kin. She’s my Diakon. You’re needed here. And it breaks his rules.”