I looked each one of them in the eye, glaring at them. “Well now you do. So why don’t you put your damn clothes on and get the hell out of here? And I swear to god, if I so much as hear about you doing a card trick–”
“We’re done,” Jersey Shore said. He wrapped his arm around Swedish Bikini’s waist. “Cross my heart.”
I stared at them for another moment, fuming. “Get out of here. And put your clothes on. Jesus.”
The Asatru dressed. Italian Princess helped Ashlyn back into her clothes. Mini-Thor had to help Ashlyn walk. She looked daggers at me, but I was beyond caring. I watched them slink out of the forest, waited around for another ten minutes just to see if anyone did something stupid, then headed back to the bed and breakfast.
Miranda was waiting for me, and she jumped out of her chair as soon as I opened the door. “You’re okay!” she said.
I gave her a half-grin. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Shut up,” she said. “So Wotan …?”
“Never showed up. But his girlfriend did.”
“Gods have girlfriends?”
“Yeah, it’s more common that you’d think.”
“So how did you get rid of her?”
“Well, I demonstrated my physical durability by flying through the air and smashing into a tree, then I laid on the ground and glared at her until she got scared and ran off.”
“So she just … left?”
“Not exactly. She was pissed that the Asatru had even bothered her.” I was quiet for a moment. “She killed Warren.”
“Oh my God.”
“Yeah. But at least the world didn’t end. Which is … weird, actually. My visions are pretty accurate. Kind of symbolic sometimes, but never this off. Holda is an entirely different entity. I should have seen her, not Wotan.”
“Well,” Miranda said, “maybe you changed things enough to keep Wotan away. Like, maybe he would have shown up, but you rattled them enough that their spell or ritual or whatever didn’t work.”
“Maybe,” I said. I sat down in an arm chair across from Miranda. I was really looking forward to taking a nap.
“I mean–”
***
Lightning split the sky and the old man stood transformed, wrapped in swirling black cloth and crowned with a helm of antlers. A brilliant ruby flashed and flared, reflecting the tempest’s light as a thousand crimson daggers. He lifted his spear, a great shaft of oak tipped with a blade of gold, high into the air, as if defying the power of the storm.
Snarls escaped from the wolves crouched at his feet, smoke rising from their nostrils, their eyes reflecting the same wicked light as their master’s gemstone. Twin ravens leapt from his shoulder, searching for prey.
A gray steed came from the darkness and the Hunter took mount, his cry echoing in the night. His fell company responded to his call, riding forth on fierce black stallions and trailed by the hounds of hell.
The Wild Hunt rushed forward, raising a tumult that echoed in the halls of the dead.
Miranda DuBois ran through the night. Wotan, the Lord of the Hunt, followed after her.
***
“–knowing you were around definitely spooked them. They wouldn’t have attacked you if they … Caden? Caden, what’s wrong?”
“God damn it,” I said, rubbing my temple and grinding my teeth. “This isn’t over.”
December 22nd
Chapter Twelve
Matthew Warren was dead and the Asatru were demoralized, but my visions told me that Wotan was still going to decimate Mirrormont and Miranda DuBois was still going to die. The Norse cult must have, beyond all reason, been planning to attempt the ritual again, and that meant I needed to find them. The only lead I had was the information I had collected at Warren’s office, particularly his home address, so that’s where I headed.
Warren’s house was an old Victorian, big and looming. I opened myself to the Æther and scanned the property, but couldn’t detect any kind of wards, barriers, or traps. That was odd. Warren obviously knew how to cast them–he’d done so the night before–but he hadn’t bothered to secure his own house. There were no cars in the driveway, and a quick peek through the windows showed nothing in the garage, either.
The place was deserted, so I used the Thieves’ Key to open the back door. The decor wasn’t what I expected, less “I heart human sacrifice” and more “I love doilies.” I assumed that he had inherited the place from his grandmother and never gotten around to redecorating. There were a few modern touches here and there, though, artwork on the wall and a new couch, which I assumed were Ashlyn’s doing.
I looked around the house, but again there were no wards of any kind. Nothing magical at all, in fact, at least on the first floor, and the basement was just a cramped home for the furnace. But one of the bedrooms on the second floor had been turned into a library, and that was where I hit the jackpot. Most of the books were perfectly ordinary. Some were old and rare enough to give a bibliophile heart palpitations, but they were still just leather and paper. One of the books, however, sat in its own glass display case, and it glowed with Ætheric energy.
Lots of things can hold a magical charge. The Thieves’ Key and Mini-Thor’s replica Mjolnir were both artifacts designed to make casting particular spells easier. Ritual sites gained an atmosphere from the magic performed there. Salt could hold up a ward. That same principle applied to grimoires. Magic books were a dime a dozen; well, they were more like thirty dollars apiece, if you can believe that. Kids will spend a lot of money to make their daddy sorry they never got that pony. Anyway, virtually all of the spell books in the world are total crap, made up by some bored housewife who fantasizes about being one of the Dark Sisters.
The tricky thing is, even a book that contains real, working spells might not help someone learn magic. The sigils and chants were important for focusing the caster’s mind and energies, but they weren’t enough. Unless they knew what the spell would make the Æther do, they could draw emblems until their hand cramped and shout until they were blue in the face, and still have nothing to show for it.
The only time a book of spells was actually dangerous (or useful, depending on how you look at it) was when it was written by someone with the magical talent. When an actual magician writes down a spell, a little bit of his intention, a little bit of the Æther, goes along for the ride. That charge builds up every time the text is used, and over the years (or decades or centuries), the spell book itself can become a powerful artifact.
I unlocked the case with the Thieves’ Key. The book hummed in my hands. This was how Warren learned magic. Most religions never get any closer to their gods than McDonald’s gets to real food, but Warren’s quest to uncover the “true” religion of his ancestors had led him to a genuine Book of Shadows. The hours he had spent pouring over this text had changed him, molded him into a sorcerer, and granted him the ability to make his will manifest.
And it had gotten him killed.
Without the book, I doubted that the Asatru would be able to complete their plan. Their initial ritual had been a complete disaster, and it would have taken days to figure out what went wrong and how to correct it. Without the book they would be fumbling in the dark, no more powerful or dangerous than a kid drawing pentagrams on his notebook in math class. Wotan would remain dormant, Mirrormont would remain standing, Miranda would remain alive, and I’d have another item for my collection. The Asatru could still do magic–dangerous magic–but the biggest threat would be gone. With Wotan off the field, my chances of success were astronomically higher.
I was pretty sure this was the only item worth caring about in the house–the odds of a guy finding two grimoires were about a bajillion to one–but I still wanted to perform due diligence, so I started going through the rest of the house.
The bedroom across from the library was empty and neat, unused. I grabbed the doorknob of the final bedroom–
And Ashlyn walked out of the bathroom, wearing a t-shirt and pantie
s, a toothbrush sticking out of her mouth. Her navel was exposed and completely healed. One of her friends must have performed a spell.
We stared at each other for a beat, then I broke into a wide grin. “Morning! I brought doughnuts, but the dog ate them all on the way over.”
“You have a dog?” she asked, except the toothbrush was still in her mouth, so it sounded more like “yuh hab a dob?”
“Well, no, and I didn’t bring doughnuts, either. But good morning anyway!”
The bedroom door creaked open and I jerked my hand away like the knob had bitten me. Sandra looked at me with bleary eyes. Her hair was a tousled mess, her Goth makeup was still caked to her face, and she was dressed similarly to Ashlyn. Inside I could see three more girls laying on a king sized bed, just starting to wake up.
“Aw, a sleepover!” I said. “Did you guys have a pillow fight? Your hair looks like you had a pillow fight.” Sandra blinked, then looked at Ashlyn, then looked at me. She shrieked like a Gorgon with a belt sander down its shorts and leapt at me like a howler monkey on speed.
Stupid. I was so damn stupid. I had assumed that I was alone and hadn’t bothered to set up any kind of defensive spells. I was lucky that Sandra’s rage overrode the part of her brain that could make me choke on a phantasmal death cloud. She slammed into me with all of her weight, but all of her weight was about ninety-seven pounds, so she barely even knocked me back a step.
But I did step back, pivoting on my rear leg and using her momentum to push her past me. She smacked into the wall, putting a crack in the sheet rock, and turned to snarl at me.
Ashlyn spat the toothbrush out and shouted, “He has the book!” Swedish Bikini Girl sat bolt upright and jumped out of bed. Italian Princess and Strawberry Shortcake just rolled over, looking confused. Sandra growled and black mist began to form around her hands. Ashlyn glared at me and flames began to dance around her fingers.
I started to pour energy into a makeshift ward. “I don’t suppose you want to sit down and talk about this?” I needed to stall, needed time to get my defenses in order.
Ashlyn thrust her hand forward and a column of fire shot toward my face. I yelped and ducked, and the fire passed right over my head. It blasted a hole in the wall behind me … and right through the outside wall of the house. I looked through the perforation and into the library. A handful of old, rare books were burning, and a few loose pages were blowing around in the wind.
“So that’s a no?” I asked.
Sandra turned her palms toward me. Black fog fell from her hands, pooled on the floor, and snaked across the hallway. It built up into a wall between me and the stairway, cutting off my exit, and rolled toward me. Ice ran down my spine, but I didn’t let the fear stop me. If you let fear stop you from doing what needs to be done you end up dead.
I shouted something incoherent and blasted Sandra with blue-white energy. She was thrown back into the wall again. The fog began to dissipate, but something was different this time. My spell hadn’t shaken her the way it had before. She shrugged the effects off almost instantly and stared at me with hate-filled eyes.
Eyes that shimmered with an eerie green glow.
I quickly opened my vision and saw a spectral woman, dressed in gossamer and armor, with cat’s eyes and a mouth full of needle teeth. The creature hovered over Sandra, her hands on the human’s shoulders, and supernatural energy flowed from the spirit into the Littlest Goth. Sandra wasn’t possessed, but she was definitely getting assistance. I glanced at the girls in Warren’s bed, who were now standing in the doorway, and saw the same thing. Only Ashlyn lacked an apparition, but she had an aura of that same teal energy.
Damn it, they’d already started trying to summon other entities. It was lucky I grabbed the book when I did, before they were actually able to invoke the spirits. Evocation, summoning a familiar spirit to assist you, was dangerous, but invocation, inviting the spirit to actually possess you, was deadly.
The Asatru stalked toward me like a pack of murderous sorority sisters. It would have been funny if their shimmering eyes weren’t so damn creepy. I held up the book. “Look, this has been fun and all, but I really need to get this back to the library. The late fees going to be a bitch.”
Strawberry Shortcake raised a sword–where the hell did she get a goddamned sword?–and rushed me. I focused the Æther around my forearm and blocked the blade, then turned and threw an elbow into her jaw. She stumbled backwards but didn’t go down.
I ran into the library and slammed the door. It wouldn’t stop them, but it would keep them out for–
A tiny fist smashed through the door. Shit. I poured more willpower into my ward, hoping to be ready for whatever they threw at me next. The door started to shake, then a blast of fire crashed through it like a runaway train, vaporizing the door and carving a seven-foot hole in the outside wall. Ashlyn stormed through, her feet unharmed by the flames licking the floor, and turned her murderous gaze toward me. “Give me the book, you son of a bitch.”
“This?” I asked, holding it up. “But it was just getting good! I have to know how it ends!”
“It ends with Lady Holda standing over your corpse,” Sandra said. Black smoke rushed from her hands and began to fill the room.
“Look, I’d love to stay and chat,” I said, “but I’ve got to take the kids to soccer practice, so …” I dropped to one knee and slammed my fist into the floor, releasing Æther along with the punch. The old boards groaned and bowed, cracked and splintered. I threw another punch, this one strong enough to shake the whole house, and the floor gave way. I fell to into the kitchen in a shower of dust and wood.
Black smoke poured down through the hole. I ran out of the kitchen, through the living room, and smashed through the front door. My car was parked about a block away, and I … ran smack into Mini-Thor. He stumbled backwards, dumbfounded, and just kind of stared at me. His eyes were perfectly normal, and no Oogey Boogie hovered over him. “What the …?” he began.
Ashlyn came scampering down the main stairway. “Stop him! He’s got the book!” Electricity started to crackle around Mini-Thor’s hands, but Ashlyn shouted at him, “No you idiot! You’ll damage the grimoire!” Heh. That was actually very unlikely. A book that had absorbed enough energy to become useful would also be damn near indestructible. That’s why I had created the Vault; I needed a place to store all of the artifacts that I couldn’t dispose of any other way.
Mini-Thor swore, got back to his feet, and balled his hands into fists. He was a big guy and he moved like he knew what he was doing. Not a boxer, but maybe a football player. Either way, I wasn’t in the mood to get pancaked by him. I threw a blast of light, knocking him back on his ass and carving a groove in the lawn.
The windows overhead shattered. Swedish Bikini Girl and Strawberry Shortcake hung in the air for a moment, legs bent and hands curled into claws, then fell toward me in a shower of glass. I threw up a ward. Glass slid off and littered the ground around me, but the girls slammed into my shield like falling pianos. The air around me shimmered as the ward absorbed the impact.
Sandra rushed out of the house, her deadly fog swirling around her like a cloak. Ashlyn followed, murder in her eyes and flames licking her fingertips. Italian Princess trailed behind them, clutching a fireplace poker. The girls who had leapt through the window crouched, ready to pounce on me. Mini-Thor had pushed himself up to his knees and electricity crackled around him.
“The hell with this,” I muttered. I gathered the Æther around my fist and drove it into the ground, sending a shock wave tearing out across the lawn. The mystical force struck the Asatru and scattered them like bowling pins. I stuffed Warren’s grimoire into my coat and ran for the Jeep.
Ashlyn shrieked, jumped to her feet, and ran after me. If the cold bothered her she didn’t show it, and since she had just literally walked through fire, I was guessing that temperatures weren’t exactly an issue for her. I darted across the road and fumbled for the Thieves’ Key.
Ashlyn r
an across the road, too–and right into the path of an oncoming pickup truck. The driver laid on his horn and slammed on his brakes. The big red Silverado skidded sideways, slowing down but not stopping. Ashlyn looked back at it and lowered her shoulder, taking the impact full on.
I winced, expecting to see her turn into a red spray. Instead, the truck’s engine compartment wrapped around her like she was a telephone pole, and the truck’s back end jacked up into the air. It hung perpendicular to the ground for a moment, then crashed back to earth. The guy driving it looked like he’d soiled himself.
Ashlyn brushed some steel and glass off her shoulder, then started walking slowly toward me, doing a frighteningly good impression of the Terminator. She started walking faster when I got into the Jeep, and started running when I gunned the engine.
I floored it, tearing down the road at about thirty miles an hour over the speed limit. Ashlyn broke off her chase and stood in the middle of the road, her tiny frame coiled with rage, becoming smaller and smaller in my rear view mirror.
***
I parked the Jeep outside the DuBois’ bed and breakfast and hurried inside. Miranda and Ethel were in the kitchen, cleaning up after breakfast. Ethel looked over at me nervously. Miranda looked up from scrubbing a giant steel pot. “Caden, are you all–”
“No.” I yanked open the pantry and grabbed a can of salt. I hoped they bought the stuff in bulk, because we were going through it by the pound. “Where do you keep the oil? Olive, canola, doesn’t matter.”
“Over here,” Miranda said, handing me a big plastic bottle. “What’s wrong?”
“Warren’s teenage lover summoned a bunch of what I think are Valkyries. I stole their grimoire, so they can’t learn any new magic, but they’re also really pissed. Also also, Ashlyn and a pickup truck got into a fight, and the truck lost. Oh, and they’re probably following me, and I want this place fortified before they get here.”
The Wild Hunt Page 11