And it did. The skies opened and a torrent of freezing water fell to the earth, soaking me to the bone and smothering the fire.
I collapsed, my face in a puddle of soggy ash, and fought the urge to sleep. The sirens drew closer, and I had no desire to deal with the local authorities.
Or freeze to death. God, it was cold. I forced myself to stand up, clutching my ribs, and limped toward to the DuBois’ house. The goat bleated at me. I stopped, turned slowly, and stared at it. “What? You’re free. Go. Shoo. Try not to get sacrificed.”
I started walking again. The goat let out a mournful baaaah.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” I muttered.
***
It took me almost an hour to make it back to the bed and breakfast, limping and shivering the entire way. I was tired, sore, and ready to just lie down for a few days.
Magic takes a lot out of you. Spells are fueled by willpower, and like anyone who’s ever been on a diet can tell you, willpower is a quickly exhaustible commodity. You don’t just chant the magic words and watch your spell come to life; you have to summon the Æther and make it do what you want. Lifting a weight with magic is just as hard as lifting it with your arms and legs, you’re just using your mind instead of your muscles.
Fighting the Asatru would have been enough to wear me out, but summoning the rain storm had pushed me over the line. I felt worn out, stretched thin. The fact that I’d been hit in the face with a lightning bolt only compounded the matter. Every breath sent fire rushing through my ribs and every step sent pain shooting up my leg. The feeling was returning to my arm, which was good except for the fact that it let me realize just how bad it hurt.
This stuff isn’t fun and games, kids. Forget how it looks on television.
Fire trucks raced by, heading in the general direction of the clearing. “Too late, guys,” I said. “Party’s over.”
God my ribs hurt. There were only four steps leading to the DuBois’ front door, but I might as well have been climbing Mount Everest. My knee creaked with each step and my head was swimming by the time I made it to the top. I closed my eyes and held my breath for a second, trying to keep the pain at bay.
It took a while to convince my fingers to close around the doorknob; my hands were shaking and it was so damn cold that my muscles weren’t being particularly responsive. But I eventually managed to get enough of a grip to turn the handle, then I shouldered the door open.
I took one step inside and promptly fell on my face.
“Caden!” Miranda shouted from the living room. Damn it. I had hoped she’d gone to bed.
She hurried over and knelt beside me. “Jesus Caden, what happened?” She fingered the hole in my shirt and examined the lobster-red skin beneath.
I tried to smile at her. “I got hit by lightning.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you hear the storm?”
“God, you got caught in that?”
“Yep.” I rolled onto my side and pushed myself to sitting.
“Caden, stay down. I want to make sure you’re not hurt.”
I waved her off. “I am very definitely hurt. But I’ll live.”
“Not if you have a cardiac event due to electrical shock,” she said.
“I’ve survived worse.”
“Worse that getting hit by lightning?”
I cracked my neck. “I live a full and exciting life. You wouldn’t–”
“Baaaaah!”
Miranda stared out the door. “Caden?” Miranda asked, slowly and carefully, “why is there a goat on the porch?”
“That’s Billy,” I said. “I found him in the woods.”
“Okay. Um, why did you bring him here?”
“I didn’t bring him anywhere. He followed me.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. “Well, I’m just going to shut the door then.”
“Fine by me.”
“Baaaaah!”
“Quiet, Billy,” I said. “You’re lucky no one turned you into jerky tonight.”
Miranda swung the door closed and helped me to my feet. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get you on the couch. I’ll call the hospital and–”
“No way,” I said, stepping away from her.
“Caden, you were hit by lightning. We have no idea how badly you’re hurt. God, it’s a miracle that you’re even alive.”
“I don’t believe in miracles,” I said.
“Do you believe in heart attacks?”
“There’s more compelling evidence for them, yes.”
“Great. Because it’s amazing you aren’t having one. God, you walked all the way back here from the woods? And you’re soaking wet. You should be in hypothermic shock, too.” She shook her head. “Caden, you’re really lucky.”
“Yeah, I should have bought a lottery ticket on my way back. Everything is going my way tonight.”
“At least let me take a look at you, put a bandage on your chest.”
I sighed. “All right.”
“Thank you,” she said, then helped me to the couch. She ran upstairs and returned a couple of minutes later, carrying a big white box under her arm.
“Take off your shirt,” she said.
“Buy me dinner first,” I muttered.
She glared at me, her fists on her hips. “Caden, I’m serious. You’re hurt, maybe badly. And if you won’t let me call an ambulance, well, at least I have a little bit of training.”
“All right,” I sighed, shrugging out of my shirt. “But you should know I don’t have insurance.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “My rates are very … reasonable.”
I would like to say that it was my sculpted abs or muscular chest that stunned her into silence, but it was actually the leather cord I wore around my neck. More specifically, it was the tiny gold ring set with a tiny shard of diamond tied to the cord.
Miranda reached for it, but her hand stopped a few inches away. “That’s an engagement ring.”
I held the ring up and nodded. Firelight danced off the diamond’s surface. I was surprised that the lightning bolt hadn’t melted the gold.
“When you said you lost someone …”
“Yeah,” My voice was flat. I let the ring fall back against my chest. “So how do I look? Am I going to live?”
She wrenched her eyes away from the ring and composed her face into detached professionalism. “It doesn’t look that bad, actually. There’s no scorching, no scarring. It looks like a bad sunburn. It might blister, but yeah, I think you’re going to be okay.”
“Well that’s a relief. I’d hate for you guys to find my corpse in the morning. There’d be so many questions.”
“It’s okay,” Miranda said, “I know the sheriff pretty well. He’d help me cover it up.” She was trying for levity, but her voice was still tense.
I raised my eyebrow. “How comforting. Remind me not to piss you off.”
She smiled. “That’s always a good strategy. Hell hath no fury. Here, this will help the burn.” She smeared some kind of cream over my chest. I jumped–it was cold–but the burn felt a lot better.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Anytime.” Miranda started taping a big, wide bandage over my chest. “Can you make it upstairs?”
“Yeah. My knee’s a bit banged up, but I’ll be okay.”
“Let me help you.”
“I’m fine, really.” I stood up and put some weight on my knee, testing it. It twinged, but I’d made it all the way back here. A few more stairs wouldn’t stop me.
Miranda followed me to the second floor, her hands held out like we were doing a trust fall. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to catch you if you topple over,” she said.
“You’re going to get squished if I topple over. I weigh like twice as much as you.”
“I have leverage on my side.”
I pursed my lips. “Yep. Standing on a tiny step, trying to bench press a two hundred pound guy, spindly little arms … y
ou are definitely in an advantageous position.”
She stuck her tongue out at me and I hobbled up the stairs. “You should take a warm shower,” she said. “Warm, not hot, and try to keep the bandage dry.”
“I don’t want to wake Ethel up,” I said.
“Please. You could set off a bomb and not wake Grandma up. You’ll be fine.”
“Okay.” I was excited by the prospect of feeling my fingers and toes again. “Thanks, Miranda.”
“Sure,” she said, leaning against the doorway. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“Thanks.”
She turned to leave. “Oh, and Caden?” she asked.
“Yeah?”
“I’m really glad I didn’t go for a walk with you tonight.”
“You and me both,” I said with a sad smile.
December 20th
Chapter Eight
I didn’t sleep that night. Instead, I leaned back, closed my eyes, and entered a trance.
That isn’t as weird as it sounds. It’s not like I was sitting in Lotus and burning incense or anything. I just kind of emptied myself, let my mind go silent, and let my body heal itself.
I’m not very good at healing magic. When I was a Saint, I was the muscle and my partner was the healer. If someone gets injured, there’s not a whole lot I can do for them, magically speaking.
Our bodies are fantastic at healing themselves, though. Given enough time and the right nutrition, it’s amazing what the human body can come back from. And when you have access to magic, you can come back from damn near anything.
That’s why I didn’t sleep. I needed to be awake enough to draw on the Æther, giving my body the resources it needed to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
It was almost noon before I finally went downstairs. Miranda brought me a bacon, egg, and cheese without even asking. The woman is an angel of mercy.
“Thanks,” I said, and took a big, delicious bite.
“Any time. How’s your chest?”
“Better. Thanks, Doc.”
Miranda looked down. Her crimson hair spilled over her face, hiding it. “I was a couple of years away from earning that honorific.”
“Are your credits still good?”
She shrugged. “Well, yeah. I still have another year to earn my degree, I think.”
“Then maybe you should start next semester.”
“Yeah,” she said, the ghost of a smile still turning up her lips. “Eat your breakfast.”
I did, then went back to my books. My goal was still to shut down Warren and his followers, but if I couldn’t, if they still managed to summon Wotan, I needed to be ready.
But hey, how hard could killing the Viking god of hunting and war be, really?
Every religion has their own eschatology, a view of how all of this is going to end. There are a lot of devils in the details, but the basic theme, from Buddhists to Hindus, Muslims to Christians, is that “things are gonna suck, but in the end, we win.” Cataclysm, terror, and war, sure, but at the end, at the very end, we humans tend to be an optimistic bunch.
Except the Norse. Norse eschatology can basically be summed up “life sucks, and then everybody dies.” Even their gods are fated to die in the final battle. Thor dies from exhaustion after battling the World Serpent. Freyr is killed by Surtr. Loki and Heimdallr murder each other. Even Wotan …
Huh.
That was interesting.
That might even work.
I scrawled a name in my notebook, translated it into the Runic alphabet, and stared at it. Let it rattle around in my brain. Let it echo in my spirit.
“Fenrir,” I whispered. I felt a little chill rush through the room.
I don’t have a lot of use for the hookum and voodoo surrounding most magic. I don’t use fake Latin words or magic wands or anything like that. I know that they work for certain people, but I also know why they work: because the people expect them to. Words of power and most “magical” artifacts just help the user focus the abilities they already have. There are charms that have been imbued with certain properties–like the Thieves’ Key or Mini-Thor’s hammer–and certain books contain known, working spells, but those are few and far between.
Sigils are a different matter, at least partially. Some of them work just like any other spell: by helping the sorcerer focus. They work because they’re supposed to work, because the user expects them to.
But some sigils have real power, regardless of who’s using them. The sigils that warded my collection of Very Dangerous Things, for example, have been used to defend against demons and devils for centuries, and that constant, repeated use has strengthened them, made them more powerful. I’m not sure if it has something to do with humanity’s collective unconscious or lasting echoes in the Æther or what, but the effect is very real.
Some beings also have an affinity for certain sigils. Angels, for instance, have come to recognize their own names written in Enochian, so when you run energy through an Enochian sigil, the chances of getting a response are a lot higher than if you’d just scribbled a stick figure with wings and started bellowing in Aramaic. The same would be true of Wotan; the Asatru would almost certainly be using the old Runic Alphabet to turn Wotan’s name into a sigil, and when they poured the power of their ritual, the power of their belief, into that symbol …
Well, it would work. My visions attested to that.
I had a plan, a plan to stop Wotan if the Asatru managed to summon him to Earth. And all I had to do was create a brand new sigil, believe in it strongly enough to make it work, and control it carefully enough to prevent an entirely different marauding murder beast from attacking the good people of Mirrormont.
Easy as pie.
I went through a hundred different variations, combining runes and pictograms and squiggles in as many different ways as I could imagine. By the time the sun set the sigil was starting to look like something a respectable sorcerer would actually use. I was almost starting to feel confident, until a chill shot up my spine and a pinpoint of pain appeared between my eyes.
Someone was trying to break my wards.
The bed and breakfast was empty except for Miranda, Ethel, and me. That was good: fewer innocents in the line of fire. It was pitch black outside, and I couldn’t see anything through the windows, but I could feel the magical assault trying to batter through the defenses I had erected around the house.
I froze, like a cat that heard a scary noise.
The kitchen door swung open and Miranda walked in, carrying a steaming cup of tea. “Caden? Is everything all right?”
Ethel walked in after her granddaughter, stopping in the doorway and looking between us. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Shh.” I closed my eyes again.
The pressure between my eyes exploded into blinding pain. I grabbed my head with one hand and slammed the other down onto the table to steady myself.
Lightning struck the house. The windows shattered and shards of razor-sharp glass flew through the air. I threw up my hand and summoned a ward, protecting us. Miranda screamed. Ethel cried out.
But the wards held. The windowsills rippled with blue fire. Magical energy danced just outside, crackling and flashing against an invisible barrier.
“What the hell?” Miranda asked no one in particular. Her eyes were wide, her mouth open. Her teacup lay on the ground, shattered. Beside her, Ethel had gone ghostly white. She was frozen in place, petrified.
Lightning flashed again, striking the bed and breakfast and crashing against the wards, the house shaking under the assault. The lightning writhed against my enchanted barriers, desperately seeking entrance, then sullenly withdrew.
“What’s going on?” Ethel asked, her lips trembling.
“Get in the cellar,” I said.
“Wh, what?” Ethel asked.
“Get downstairs!” I shouted, grabbing her arm and urging her back into the kitchen.
Miranda followed her grandmother and I brought up the rear. Ethe
l unlatched the door to the cellar and started down, taking one step at a time and favoring her right leg. Miranda looked back at me. “Caden?”
“I’ll be down in a second,” I said, then pulled open the pantry. Ethel’s kitchen was really a restaurant, and she kept it stocked like one. Economy size jars of tomato sauce, enormous boxes of pasta … and giant cans of salt. I stuffed two of them under my arm, grabbed a third, and hurried downstairs.
Miranda and Ethel were crouched in the far corner. A dim, bare bulb lit the basement and both of the DuBois women clutched flashlights.
“Is it a tornado?” Ethel asked.
“We don’t get tornadoes here,” Miranda said.
“We had one two years ago.”
“That was in Vancouver. That’s like three hours from here.”
“It’s not a tornado,” I said.
“Then what is it?” Ethel asked. “What was that, that lightning? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I didn’t answer her questions. She wouldn’t believe me if I told her, and I didn’t have time for a lot of follow-up questions. Instead I ripped open the first can of salt and started pouring a circle around the DuBois.
“What are you doing?” Miranda asked.
“This will keep you safe.”
“We aren’t being attacked by snails,” Miranda said.
“Trust me.” I opened the second can and started pouring.
“It’s lightning. Some freaky, weird-ass lightning, but it’s lightning.” Miranda’s voice was tinged with exasperation.
I opened the third can and completed the circle. “It’s not lightning,” I said. “It’s magic.”
The blood drained from Ethel’s face.
“What?” Miranda asked. “Caden, I don’t know what you’re–”
I knelt down and touched my fingertips to the salt. Blue fire raced around the circle, sealing them in.
Miranda jumped back. Ethel cried out and stepped in front of Miranda. “You aren’t taking my granddaughter,” she said.
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t want your granddaughter. I’m trying to save your lives, so stay inside the circle. They won’t be able to get you inside the circle.”
The Wild Hunt Page 7