by Jim Butcher
UNEXPECTED CHOICES
DIANA PHARAOH FRANCIS
In the Horngate Witches series, the magical apocalypse has struck. Destructive wild magic has washed over the earth, unleashed by the Guardians—a group of elemental beings with extraordinary power—in order to restore the balance of magic and magical creatures in the world. Giselle is a witch who established the Horngate covenstead to help preserve those humans she can, though her methods are often brutal. Shoftiel is an angel of justice. Centuries before, he was imprisoned in the Mistlands after passing a death sentence on an innocent woman. Free again, he finds himself repeating his mistake, seeking vengeance on Max—one of Giselle’s supernatural warriors—who he mistakenly believes has imprisoned two of his angel brethren. Now he faces eternity in the bleak, unchanging Mistlands.
Both Giselle and Shoftiel are villains in their own ways. Both seek redemption. “Unexpected Choices” brings them together once again. The question is, can either of them overcome their hatred and suspicion of each other to save the world and themselves?
He felt no pain in the Mistlands, even when he tried to harm himself. The wounds gaped bloody and then healed, all without the slightest ache.
No hunger. No weight of exhaustion. No cold. Nothing. No change at all. How long would he remain this time? Five hundred years? Double that maybe, for failing a second time?
It was his own damned fault. The knowledge burned. He’d been prideful, so sure of his judgment. How could his brother angels have willingly bound themselves to a witch’s coven? The idea was ludicrous. No, it was insane, a betrayal of their race, of everything they were. Like putting themselves in service to dung beetles.
All the same, he should have known. He was better than they. He was stronger, smarter, and more powerful. Yet here he was, once again trapped in the Mistlands, brought down by an ancient curse, the very same one that had brought him here before. For all his abilities, he’d made an error, one that would cost him centuries more in this hellish place.
There was nothing in this realm but thick white mists. No sun, no moon, no landmarks. Shoftiel had no way to judge the passage of time. His mind clawed for something, anything, to do. He decided to use this time to learn perfection. He must learn so he never again made a mistake of judgment.
How had he been so wrong?
The answer repulsed him. His pride made him blind, unwilling to see what was, unwilling to question, to consider he might be wrong.
He’d been made to be perfect. An angel. He could not be fallible like the cockroaches swarming the earth. But the facts were unimpeachable. He was not perfect at all. Not even close. Now he reaped what he’d sowed.
A change.
Shoftiel instantly noticed the subtle shift in the air. A faint scent of stone, fire. A melody of magic whispering across his skin, ruffling through his gold-edged crimson covert feathers as they shifted from solid to smoke and back again.
Somewhere a door had opened.
Another impossibility. Still, his entire being riveted on the feeling of something new, something different.
The scents faded, but the melody remained. It called him. Teased him. Taunted slyly in the opaque mist.
His heart sped, his wings flaring to lift him. The blood-red feathers turned to smoke as Shoftiel flew blindly. The song grew merrier as he drew closer to the source of the siren call.
Then song and sensation died.
Shoftiel faltered, his heart splitting in two. “No!” he howled and a sword of red smoke appeared in his hand. He slashed it back and forth through the mist as if he could cut it apart. It stirred and quieted, silently obdurate as ever.
Shoftiel howled again. If he could have found a rock in the emptiness, he’d have beaten his idiot head against it.
Something hard pelted his naked chest. He snatched it from the air with preternatural speed. “Ask and you shall receive,” he muttered with mordant humor.
It was a polished oval half the size of his palm. Indigo and gold flashed within black. Labradorite. He turned it over, looking for something to tell where it had come from. He was sure it was a message of some kind, if he only had the wit to read it.
The rock stabbed his palm. He swore and dropped the labradorite cabochon. Before it could fall far, he snatched it out of the air again. Blood pooled in his hand from a puncture wound. Realizing what was wanted, he set the stone in the blood.
A cloud of blue puffed from the stone, then a streamer of blue smoke unraveled from it. It rose in the air before him, twisting and curling into a smiley face.
Shoftiel scowled. He’d used the same face to taunt the Shadowblade warrior as he brought her to her knees. What was she up to?
The mouth of the smiley face opened and more indigo smoke poured forth, forming into words:
A choice.
To serve or rot.
The term is one week
then freedom.
Say yes and you are bound.
Say no and all is nothing again.
Not exactly poetry, but succinct and to the point. What kind of service? What degradation would he be forced to endure? Was this revenge? The concept of agreeing to serve a mortal sent rage boiling through his veins.
He opened his mouth to refuse. “Yes.”
The smiley face and words vanished. The labradorite oval flared brightly. Silver filaments wriggled out of it. They lengthened and wove together into flat straps before closing around Shoftiel’s wrist, snugging tightly, though not uncomfortably. Arcane symbols glowed on the metal, then faded.
By his own hand, he was bound.
Panic exploded like a rabid porcupine inside him, sending quills of terror drilling deep into his soul. He panted as adrenaline spiked. Before he could come to terms with his sudden slavery, the bracelet grew heavy and pulled him downward. He beat his wings to stay aloft, but to no avail.
He plummeted. The white mist dissolved. The real world blurred into a kaleidoscope of blue, green, gray, and yellow.
He jerked to a halt in midair. His surroundings came into focus.
He hung a foot above a broad meadow. Green shoots pushed up between winter-dried grasses. Obsidian mountain peaks rose up from behind a turquoise forest a short distance away. The sky was cobalt and clear.
Just before him, a complicated pattern of sigils and symbols coiled within a brilliantly lit witch circle, perhaps twenty feet in diameter. It consisted of an outer circle with a five-pointed star inside, and in the center of that, a triangle, and inside that, the witch. Her hands were bandaged, indicating she’d drawn the circle in her own blood.
Shoftiel’s lip curled at the sight of Giselle, though he’d known the message could have come only from her. She was the only witch who both knew of his banishment and was strong enough to summon and bind him.
A petite woman with long chestnut hair worn in two pigtail braids that hung down below her breasts, she wore torn jeans and a long-sleeved blue plaid shirt. Her feet were bare, despite the chill. She was the lead witch of the Horngate covenstead in Montana, where his two brothers had inexplicably bound themselves in service.
It was hard to imagine this diminutive insect had the kind of power to establish and hold her own coven, much less convince two powerful angels to submit to her service. Three now, at least for a week, he corrected himself. Sitting cross-legged with a smudge of dirt on her cheek, she looked like a homeless waif, hardly more than a child.
Power crackled in the air, a purple sheen rising up in a column from the witch circle. One by one, the inner triangle, the star, and the exterior circle winked out along with the sigils and symbols. The purple sheen evaporated and the magic scattered like sparks on the wind.
Giselle stood. She dusted off her backside then turned her attention to Shoftiel, scanning him from head to toe. He slowly drifted to the ground.
“We don’t have much time,” she said, kicking at the remnants of her spell circle. When she’d destroyed any evidence of its existence, she walked away. Shoftiel burned at her si
lence and lack of deference, which fought against the feeling of unholy joy at his freedom from the Mistlands. Whatever the witch wanted of him, it was surely worth the price to escape that hellish place.
He flew to catch up with her, dropping down to match her stride.
“What do you want of me?”
“Protection.” She didn’t bother to look at him.
Shoftiel bit back hard on his annoyance. “From what?”
“Bad guys.”
The answer was entirely unsatisfactory. “Explain. You have Shadowblades and Sunspears of excellent quality.” She couldn’t argue that. The best of them was Max, the warrior he’d mistakenly punished for crimes she hadn’t committed. “And you have two other angels in service to you.”
“I don’t want to risk any of them. They’ll die.”
“And I won’t?”
She shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t really care.”
Shoftiel smiled with reluctant appreciation. Brutal honesty. He liked that. “What kind of witch worries about losing her warriors? You can make others.”
She stopped and looked at him, her gaze piercing and fierce. “I want to risk you. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get to see you die a painful, horrible death.”
“I am immortal.”
“Technicality. Everything can be destroyed if you try hard enough.” She gave him a taunting smile. “You motivate me.”
He couldn’t help his own slight smile. Sparring with her was vastly more entertaining than the Mistlands. But then, so was watching mountains erode. His standards had gone ridiculously low. He yawned. “What is this venture you need my help for?”
“A snatch and grab.”
He frowned. “What?”
“Stealing something that doesn’t belong to us.”
That sounded intriguing. “What is it?”
Without giving an answer, Giselle started walking again, following a packed-dirt animal track. Once more, Shoftiel fell in beside her.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“You don’t need to know. Your job is keeping me alive.”
They came to the lip where the land dropped twenty feet and rolled away to the mountains. Below, a Jeep was parked next to a clump of pink trees. Their limbs moved in the pair’s direction as Giselle jogged down and grabbed a pair of socks and boots off the backseat and put them on.
“You can fly if you want,” she said, getting into the driver’s seat.
Since it seemed she’d prefer not being saddled with his company, he went around to climb in the other side. Riding in vehicles wasn’t easy for an angel. Wings didn’t usually fit. He was surprised to find that Giselle had removed the front and rear passenger seats and replaced them with cushions. There was a bench that lowered and adjusted to allow him to sit or kneel, and the roof had been raised to give his folded wings space. The single extra-long door slid open to allow easier access. All in all, it was surprisingly comfortable.
He’d barely shut the door when the witch hit the accelerator. Powered by magic, the vehicle jumped forward.
She steered them southward. Any road that might once have been there was gone. The waves of wild magic released by the Guardians had transmuted the world in fantastical ways. The Jeep rode smoothly, despite the often strange and difficult terrain. Giselle skirted a sudden desert of pure red sand. It rippled and moved and Shoftiel realized that it wasn’t so much a desert as a lake.
Something rose and fell in the sands. It had a smooth green body with hook-like protrusions running down its slim length. The tip of its tail was akin to the fletching on an arrow or dart. More creatures squirmed across the surface and burrowed under. Twenty, fifty, a hundred—all of varying sizes.
All of a sudden, the sky darkened and beasts dropped out from the clouds. They were feathered and furred and looked like hyenas with talons and razor-toothed beaks. They were ridden by small figures Shoftiel couldn’t make out. They dove, driving spears, teeth, and talons through the hides of the sand serpents. As soon as they made a capture, the hunters rose into the sky, the serpents whipping and flailing. They flew off to the west with their prizes.
Shoftiel watched the event, fascinated, even as suspicion crept up his spine.
“How long was I in the Mistlands?”
“Almost three and a half years.”
So long? And yet it had seemed like a century. Before he’d been sent to the Mistlands, wild magic had already begun to twist and change the earth. Or rather, returned to a starving land. The enchanted forests of old grew back a hundred times as big. Fields of flowers became blood hungry. All the creatures of fairy tales that had left or retreated into hiding began to return. “The world has undergone more changes. A bounty of curiosities.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Giselle muttered.
“Explain.”
“You know, you have a habit of snapping out orders like I’m going to obey them. You should probably rethink that approach.”
“Or what?”
“You’ll make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” She smiled as if at some secret joke.
“I don’t like you now. As for your anger—is that supposed to be a threat? I am exponentially more powerful than you. I would crush you.”
She laughed like he’d threatened her with nothing greater than a snowball fight, saying, “Not for seven days,” when she finally collected herself.
Fury spun through him. Curls of red smoke wreathed his hands and arms. He was achingly tempted to teach her a lesson, despite the blood oath he’d taken to bind himself to her service. He did not tolerate being laughed at. “I don’t see the humor.”
“That’s because, as usual, you think you’re all that and a bag of chips. Do you ever get tired of worshipping yourself?”
“I see no reason to pretend I am less than I am.”
“You also see no reason to think you could possibly be wrong about anything or anyone. How’s that been working out for you, by the way? Been enjoying your vacation in the great white beyond?”
Shoftiel’s rage exploded the windows of the vehicle. A gust of chill wind rushed through.
“Oops, did I touch a nerve?”
Shoftiel snarled, summoning the glass back and fixing the damage. He did not lose control. “Very well. Suppose you tell me why I should fear your anger?”
“Because I’m not stupid, though you obviously think that I am.”
He did not. He’d spied on her and her coven enough to know the witch was devious. The fact that she’d created Max and earned the faith of two angels only proved her strength and capability.
“Perhaps you should enlighten me.”
“I don’t know. Might be fun to surprise you.”
She was toying with him. “Explain,” he demanded again.
“There you go, snapping orders again.” She shook her head. “I guess you and old dogs have a lot in common. All right. I’ll play. I’m not so stupid as to release you from the Mistlands without the ability to protect myself and my covenstead from you. The ‘how’ of that I’ll leave for you to find out on your own. As for what you missed in the last few years, the short answer is, a lot.
“You were here when the Guardians dumped magic into the world to cull humanity and bring magic-kin back into the world. They figured if they didn’t get rid of a lot of the human infestation, they’d be right back where they started in nothing flat, since humans have a knack for doing things that null out magic. What you missed is that it didn’t work. The cities didn’t suffer much and a lot more humans survived than expected. The Guardians hadn’t realized how much the metal infrastructures of cities and industrial areas would resist the flood of wild magic.
“ ‘If a little doesn’t work, then use a lot more’ seemed to be their motto. The Guardians let loose another deluge. That was probably a year or so after you went back into the Mistlands. When that didn’t work any better than the first time, they went another route and forced a war between magic-kin and humans. Some of us chose
the human side. Anyway, the fighting went on for a year, and then stopped cold. The Guardians stood down, the magic-kin went home. No one knows why, but now there’s a truce between magic-kin and the cities, and the Guardians have backed off. The earth is pretty much saturated with magic, and we get these storms every so often that twist things up again. When that happens, a lot of people evacuate to the cities, including a lot of magic-kin. Since we need humans and they need us, we protect each other.”
Shoftiel sat silent, absorbing the information. The miles reeled away. He stared out the window, as fascinated as a blind man newly cured. He hated the Mistlands. There was no worse hell. He should know. He was one of seven angels of punishment—the Malake Habbalah—doling out punishments to those who deserved it.
Unless they were wrong.
His lip curled at the unfamiliar doubt that knifed through him. He had twice proven fallible in his judgments. How many more mistakes could be laid at his door? Injustices he’d committed?
Unfamiliar doubt sank into him and nothing he did drove it away.
They’d driven up into a row of spongy brown and white hills. Their pebbly surfaces were slick with a yellow syrupy substance. Orange moss grew thickly in the creases between. On the other side of the hummocks, the land dropped deeply down into a vast plain. A black ocean spread as far as he could see to the west. It narrowed and thinned into a long dogleg going eastward. Small hummocks and islands broke the matte surface.
“That used to be the Great Salt Lake,” Giselle said, braking to gaze out over the vista. “It’s a tar bog now. Runs from Salt Lake City over there”—she pointed—“nearly to Nevada over there. Still stinks like an outhouse in August, too.”
As they descended, they began to see other travelers heading for what appeared to be a road bridging the tar bog. Or so he assumed. He couldn’t see the far side. Some came in wagons hauled by animals or in cars or trucks. Others came on a spectrum of pedaled bikes, or in strangely shaped floating balloons. There were also flying contraptions and winged creatures, plus the unlucky who were forced to go on foot.
“What’s on the other end?”