by Mark Henwick
“Enkeliekki. Hecate of the Northern Adept League. I’m pleased to meet you all.” She stepped to one side, allowing me to see her colleague for the first time. “This is my colleague, Gabrielle Desmarais, from Quebec.”
“Hi!” Gabrielle said with a wave at everyone.
She was wearing gray snowboarding pants, riding low on her hips and a size too big for her, the ends scrunched over her no-nonsense work-boots. Her chunky maroon hoodie was similarly loose. The grunge snowboarder effect was completed by a black neck warmer which she’d used to tie up her flaming red hair in a ponytail, right on the top of her head. I had to bite my lip to keep from smiling; that hairstyle somehow made me think of a firecracker going off.
Completely different. She and the Hecate might have come from different planets.
“Hello,” I replied. “I’m Amber.”
“Yeah, I know!” She stuck out her hand to shake. “Rad place you got!”
Our hands touched and gray eyes widened abruptly as she registered something from the contact.
Yes. Beneath that noisy exuberance was an intelligent, curious young woman.
And a witch. A powerful one.
I had to remember that, too. My instinct was to like Gabrielle, but I couldn’t trust my instincts at the moment. Even if they were good people, these two weren’t necessarily on my side.
I felt lightheaded. Something about allies. I had to keep in mind that I should be evaluating others and not basing it on instinctively liking them.
I needed to call Weaver as soon as this was over.
He’d be a better bet. Why was I talking to the Hecate at all?
Whatever mistakes had happened, Weaver and the Denver community would be better for Tullah than the Hecate and her northern coven.
I had to get Tullah back here in Denver. Soon. Tullah. Whichever way it took.
I blinked.
Concentrate! Focus!
I was under intense scrutiny by the Hecate. She was crowding me so much that I sensed Julie tensing up.
I got chills.
Something’s wrong. Something bad just happened.
“We need an urgent, private talk with you,” the Hecate said, her voice even more clipped than usual. “Right now.”
“What a coincidence,” Bian called out, coming down the stairs. “So do I.”
“Your video conference...” I said.
“Finished.”
The one word was delivered with bite.
Wow. Something had really twisted her tail. Or someone.
“This is really urgent,” the Hecate said. She and Gabrielle exchanged looks.
Something very, very wrong here.
Sinking feeling in my stomach. Legs weak.
Bian looked coolly at her. “Well, we might as well have our private conversation in Jen’s study then.”
She turned back.
“You two,” the Hecate said, pointing at Flint and Kane. “Come.”
She followed Bian. I reminded myself again how much she moved like a predator. Like Rita did when her cougar surfaced. That killing focus.
Gabrielle trotted to catch up. Flint and Kane waited for me to nod, then they went.
Julie stepped forward. We had discussed how to handle security and she was supposed to be with me at all times while the Hecate was here, but I had Bian for the moment.
Julie wasn’t taking no, and she was staring at me.
She knew something was wrong.
I went up the stairs and felt dizzy.
Jen’s study with all the conferencing equipment was a few steps down the corridor. Somehow I got inside.
“Tell me what happened last night,” the Hecate demanded, before I’d even closed the door. “Every detail. Especially—”
A surge of adrenaline seemed to clear my head.
“If this is about my aura being polluted because I pulled some power of dubious origin for a shapeshifting trick,” I said, “my House has already dealt with that, and I consider the matter is internal.”
“It’s not about that.” She sat down abruptly at Jen’s conference table. “Sit here.” She indicated the seat next to her.
I didn’t see Bian move, and I hadn’t even registered she had a knife, but before anyone could twitch, it was at the Hecate’s throat.
“Bian, no!” I didn’t dare make any sudden moves. Gabrielle had frozen. As had my two Adepts.
Julie had her Sig out.
“Let’s slow down a bit,” I said carefully.
“What a good idea,” Bian replied. “Starting with you, Enkeliekki. Why do you so suddenly, so urgently need to talk to Amber all alone?”
“Hardly alone, is it?” The Hecate stared ahead, inhumanly motionless. She hadn’t flinched, for all that her heart was racing. “I’m going to take a wild guess you’re House Trang. Your reputation precedes you.”
“How nice. So you’ll know I’m not bluffing then. If you like your head balanced prettily on your neck, I suggest you answer my question. What’s so suddenly urgent?”
I felt the prickle of a working, but it died away before I could call out a warning. I couldn’t even tell who’d started to cast.
The Hecate sighed.
“As you wish. Someone has invested hidden workings in Amber,” she replied. “Cast a spell over her, if you prefer the old terminology. It has the same form of subtle workings that most Adepts would not even be able to sense. Gabrielle and I can because we’ve seen this recently. It’s intended to attack below the level of awareness. Unfortunately, in Amber’s case, it’s even more complicated. These workings are feeding off something powerful. And they’re accelerating.”
Chapter 36
The shouting stopped relatively quickly after the Hecate’s bombshell.
I sat at the conference table feeling oddly disconnected, like I’d been pumped full of drugs or something. Yes, the last day had been weird, but my life was like that sometimes. I couldn’t sense anything eating away at me.
Could I?
Except...
Nothing like being told something’s wrong with you, for you to start thinking there’s something wrong. That incident with Zane last night? Pulling that power during the fight? The dark magic itself? The bursts of anger and adrenaline this morning?
Flint and Kane looked as if they were becoming convinced. Apparently, they’d thought the oddness they’d seen in my aura had something to do with using blood magic.
Too out of it to join the discussion, I went on autopilot. While they were arguing about what constituted blood magic, I managed to connect the video conferencing system to Haven, and a few seconds later, Alice appeared on screen.
“No, not yet,” the Hecate said, looking up at the interruption. “We have to nullify that working first, Amber. We can talk later.”
“What working?” Alice leaned forward. “What’s going on?”
Diana appeared on the screen, and a second later, Kaothos, in the shape of a lizard.
“Can I have a moment’s quiet, please?” I said.
Everyone subsided.
“Thank you.” I pointed as I made introductions. “Diana Ionache, Alice Emerson, Kaothos. This is the Hecate of the Northern Adept League, Gwendolyn Enkeliekki, and her colleague Gabrielle Desmarais.” My voice sounded strange in my ears. Blurred. “The original purpose of this call was for me to pass the whole problem of communicating between the League and the Assembly on to wiser heads—”
“Our primary request was to talk to the dragon,” Gwendolyn interrupted, her eyes fixed on the screen.
I ignored her, ignored the flaring irrational anger, concentrated only on speaking slowly and clearly. “All of which has just been derailed because apparently someone has hit me with a secret working that only the Northern Adept League is trained to spot, and it has to be fixed right now for some reason.”
“Why is the League so familiar with this working?” Bian asked.
Her knife was back in whatever hidden sheath it came from, but the suspicion wasn�
�t.
“We’ve been seeing it in Adepts from the Denver community.” It was Gabrielle who spoke. Her voice was much quieter now. “All of them had workings like this. It’s so good at hiding itself, none of them realized it. Part of the disguise is achieved because the working moves so slowly. But Amber’s is more complex and faster. Much faster.”
My body was flooded with adrenaline. My legs felt so weak I slumped back down in a chair. Sounds began to fade into each other.
“Who made it? What does it do?” Diana.
“The questions should be the other way around,” the Hecate. “If we know what it does, as a whole, then we would know who made it.”
Those icy blue eyes drew mine to them. “What does it do?” she said. “From what I can sense, it’s a twisted bundle of compulsions, each wound tightly around the other. We recognize them from the Denver community Adepts we’ve tracked down. These workings attack the inhibitory systems of the brain. The problem is...”
Adrenaline never made me feel like this before.
Something was really wrong.
...trapdoor spell...
...doesn’t like being discovered...
...she’s losing consciousness...
...don’t touch her...
Why was I looking at the ceiling? Why was it so dark?
Shouting.
Bian wouldn’t let the Hecate near me. Flint arguing. Diana’s shouts came from the conferencing speakers.
It feels like I’m drowning. Like those old nightmares while I was in crusis.
I’m terrified.
I can fight anything in front of me. Anything I can see.
But I can’t fight what I can’t see or touch or feel.
Everything seemed to be rushing past me in a flicker of movements. Every flicker was another thing happening to me. I had to slow down.
Slow down.
Flint.
I could feel his aura. The Raven. Urging me. Pulling me downward.
This way.
My eukori opened, mingled with his aura. The Coyote joined us. No holding back. No hesitation.
Sinking together into a darkness described only by textures.
Great sacred shapes holding us within their stillness.
No heartbeat. No breath. No movement.
Yet I could sense it wasn’t enough.
In some other place, my hand reached out into the gathering darkness, past Bian.
I was beyond other options.
I could feel the Hecate take my hand. I needed to speak a word. It was difficult. Something else wanted me to be silent, wanted to crush the air from my lungs, but the word needed to come out. It was a word that jumbled itself in my head. It hung there, like rocks in the silent earth, like the deepness of roots, the solidity of tree trunks.
“Trust,” I breathed finally, forcing the word out into the world.
Bian stood back.
For a second it seemed I could see the Hecate, really see her. Not just physically, but a greater shape, a terrifying phantom form that seemed more solid than her body, surrounding her, holding her up with huge shadowy wings that enfolded me in them.
A shape holding a strange, flaming torch that blazed in the darkness so fiercely it blinded me.
Chapter 37
It’d been too dark to see, and now it was too bright.
It was important. I had to be able to see clearly.
Sweat was pouring off me. I was panting in the thin air. My heart labored and my limbs felt like jelly.
The wind froze the sweat on my forehead and brought to me the distant calls, harsh as screaming crows, from lower down the mountain paths.
I tripped, fell. One hand to break the fall, the other to protect the M-14 rifle.
Shit!
Voices behind were too close. I had to buy time for the extraction.
Rested the rifle on a handy rock and squinted back down the way I’d come.
Why the hell was it so bright?
And who was that sitting beside me in the flare of sunlight?
Not to mention, why was I back here?
I’m in Denver now.
“What’s happening?” I said.
“First, you’re going to be okay.”
Gabrielle, by her voice. Standard rehearsed words, not her usual way of speaking at all.
I knew the routine. Patient in shock. Reassure them first. Next thing...
“I’m here to help you, and we’re—”
“Cut the crap, Gabrielle. What’s happening?”
“You’re under attack from a malicious working. We need you to fight back, but your brain doesn’t have the right references. You need something more physical, and the concept of a tree didn’t work well, so I sort of made a suggestion and your memory came up with this.”
Fight. Okay. Understand that.
I eased up, caught a glimpse of movement back down the track and squeezed off a shot.
Ducked.
Listened to the wheep of bullets fired back. Overhead, but far too close. Still, the pursuit had slowed down.
“Shit, you used to do this for a living?” Gabrielle asked.
“Yeah.”
I came up at a different point, picked something that didn’t look right and fired again.
There was a scream, quickly stopped.
More firing at my position. Three, maybe four people firing. That probably meant two or three sneaking forward while they kept my head down. Bad odds.
“You know, I think I preferred being a tree,” I said.
“We could visualize the working as a fungus eating its way into you. Or insects burrowing. The trouble is visualizing how you fight that.”
I snorted.
Up, pick target, shoot, drop back.
Miss. Eyesight still a bit blurred.
“Where’s the Hecate?” I said.
“Gwen’s on the other side, unpicking the working.”
I laughed out loud.
“I’m here and she gets to visualize sewing?”
“The working has no obvious physical manifestation, but that’s the way she visualizes it. Like a sort of series of links with knots that weaves in and out of your aura.”
Up. Shoot. Drop.
Immediately popped up in a different place.
One of them had stood up to shoot at where I had been. Dumb mistake.
He made no sound as he collapsed. Lucky hit, 7.62 round right through the head. A scream from one of his friends. An order, harsh and abrupt. Then silence.
“I can die here, can’t I?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
“What about you?”
“I’m not physically interacting with your spirit world, but I’m linked by aura.”
“That means it’s dangerous for you? And the Hecate?”
“Possibly. Much less than for you.”
“Thank you anyway.” I put my head up, saw nothing and dropped back again in one movement. No shots, no sound.
Meant the creepers were creeping up on me.
Pretty much the way it played out when this actually happened. What was it? Five years ago?
“Julie warned me not to tell you what to do, but I have to say, it doesn’t feel like it’s working well enough at the moment.”
“Everyone’s a critic,” I muttered. I hurled a stone at where I guessed most of them were, and managed to time it so I looked just as it bounced off a rock.
One head raised to see what made the noise. One round that way and two more on either side for effect.
Cursing and then silence again.
“Any genuine help you can give me?” I stopped. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound so bitchy.”
“Don’t blame you one bit. You’re one tough bitch.” I could hear the smile in her voice.
There was no shortage of rocks to hide behind, so I ran up the track, darting erratically from cover to cover, until my lungs were burning again.
Then I found a good spot and rested the light M-14 pointing down the tra
ck. I pulled my dusty brown keffiyeh up over my head until only my eyes were showing, and draped the tail over the rifle barrel. Hardly good camouflage, but the best I could manage in a hurry.
Gabrielle had come with me. I was annoyed that she’d had to put no effort in while I was trembling and panting.
“Talk to me quietly,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”
“Okay, here’s how it went,” she said. “You got invested with a multi-part working, sometime between when we took you on a little spirit walk down in RiNo and this morning. It’s still this morning, by the way. Just. The working had a trap which activated when we discovered it. Would have killed you if you hadn’t acted. You’re still a bit dazed and confused, but it looks like you are going to be okay, all other things being equal.”
She gave me an opportunity to react, but I guessed it’d be quicker if I let her speak. I watched the dusty track. I didn’t understand how fighting old memories here manifested as useful assistance in the real world, but I understood I had to fight. I understood all other things being equal meant not dying here.
“I had to pull your aura out of the trees, into a spirit world, but your body’s been kinda frozen at the point you did the dive with your two Adepts, and that’s reflected in your aura. That’s why your eyes were adjusted to darkness when you woke up here.”
I could hear things she wasn’t saying, but I stayed quiet.
“The other side, back in the study, you’re still unconscious. That was a real smart move, projecting your aura into the trees. They tell me you’re untrained, but I swear, I’ve never seen someone spirit jump so quickly. And you kept enough awareness that side to say you trusted Gwen. Those were the two moves that saved your life.”
“The working was supposed to kill me?”
“Not obviously. That kind of working, Flint and Kane would have seen.” She moved. I could now see the shapes of her features and the hair pulled up on her head. My sight was coming back, as she’d said it would.
“It’s difficult to describe without getting into Northern Adept League jargon, but here’s the short form. Think of it as starting with multiple, unrelated workings. The first, a very careful working with a specific design to—”