A Familiar Problem

by Sam Cheever

  “They’ll meet us in the forest. We’ll only have a small window of time to get into the passage. It opens when the moon hits the face of the portal and closes when it moves above it.”

  I nodded. “That should give us plenty of time. I hope they were able to get the things I asked for.”

  He shrugged as we stepped out into a cooling night that was moist with a gently falling rain. “Mabel didn’t say and I didn’t quiz her about it. I’ll let you do that.”

  He lifted dark brows when I threw him a look and I laughed. “Coward.”

  “Hey, this is your rodeo. I’m not throwing myself onto a bucking bronco unless I absolutely have to.”

  We started jogging, keeping to the shadows beyond the reproduction style street lights lining my road. The rain pelted us with a gentle relentlessness. The quickly cooling streets gave off the nostril puckering scent of ozone mixed with warm asphalt and exhaust fumes.

  I glanced toward the homes on either side of my street as we ran past, noting the warm glow of lights behind some of the windows, and the occasional happy scene of people gathered together around a dinner table, laughing and enjoying each other’s company.

  I had a sudden nostalgia for the days when my little family had enjoyed sharing meals together. Those times felt a million miles away as I ran through the wet night, rain dripping down my neck and spinning off into the night in silvery streaks as I shook my head to clear my vision.

  Beside me, Deg wasn’t even breathing hard. I wondered if he’d used magic as I had to give himself stamina for the trip ahead. Or if it came naturally to him. Judging by the graceful, athletic way he moved, I guessed it was probably the latter.

  Since being a clod came natural to me, I let myself enjoy watching him run for a moment. I was pretty sure I looked like a drowned penguin sloughing along behind him through the night.

  We reached Illusory Park about twenty minutes later and headed directly for the forest. The magical barrier snapped against my skin as we approached, and I saw Mandy and Brock standing just inside the line of energy, under a tree whose dense, overarching branches no doubt kept at least some of the rain off their heads.

  Mandy’s head snapped up as we approached. “It’s about time! We were thinking about going home.”

  I glanced at the golden orb of the moon hanging in the sky and frowned, realizing for the first time how difficult it was going to be to judge our window. The portal wasn’t visible from the forest side, so there was no way to visually judge when it was going to close.

  The face of the moon hung behind the dense wall of trees that made up about seventy percent of the primordial forest. And the rocky wall we’d climbed out of when we’d arrived back on the human realm earlier that day didn’t really exist from this side.

  “How are we going to find this opening?” I asked Brock.

  He shrugged. “No clue. But we’d better figure it out quick because that moon is getting pretty high in the sky.”

  “Freakin’ fantastic,” I muttered.

  The tree behind Brock and Mandy burst into flames, sending chunks of fiery debris flying. Brock and Mandy were flung forward, smashing into Deg and me and sending us all to the ground.

  Pain slammed through my shoulder and smoke stung my nostrils. Brock quickly jumped to his feet and, in a flash, morphed into his demonic form and hit the sky.

  I would have screamed from the excruciating pain in my shoulder, but Brock had punched me in the stomach when he slammed into me and I was struggling to draw breath.

  A delicate hand slapped onto my shoulder, emitting a bright orange glow that squelched the burning ember frying my flesh. Mandy shoved to her feet and started weaving spells on the air as the sound of combat filled the area behind me.

  My lungs screeching with every attempt to breathe, I finally managed to pull air into my chest. Nausea filled my mouth with saliva as I pushed to my feet and turned.

  The air was dark with demons.

  After my first, panicked assessment, I realized there were only a half dozen of the things, but they were enormous and seemed to fill the sky.

  I fired energy toward the first flying cockroach and his glowing red eyes focused on me as he easily avoided it. I leaped to the side as the demon lifted its clawed, black hand. The monster’s grin was coldly evil as it shot black, focused energy in my direction.

  The power arrow hit the ground where I’d been standing, sending dirt and rock six feet into the air.

  I fired again and again with similar effects. The things easily avoided my magic.

  Above our heads, Brock was doing battle with two of the monsters, barely holding his own. Mandy helped him by distracting the demons with energy arrows, but he still wasn’t making any headway that I could see.

  We need to work together, I told Deg.

  I agree. We need some kind of retaining net. They’re avoiding our attacks too easily.

  Mandy’s fingers had been dancing on the air, her protective bubble spreading to include us all.

  The protection spell shivered violently as it was pelted by successive demonic fire.

  Deg looked at her. “With us, Witch.”

  I reached into my core of shared energy with Deg and, as we’d been practicing, allowed his magic to fuse with mine before drawing it out. His warm, silvery energy reached hungrily for mine, accustomed to the mating that strengthened our individual abilities fourfold and gave us a wider array of powers to work with.

  The sphere of silvery energy morphed from a ball into an octopus, its legs sliding into the protrusions of my own energy and closing down, creating an impermeable connection.

  With a jolt, I felt a third energy inserting itself into ours and I turned an astonished gaze toward Mandy.

  Her smile was slightly embarrassed. She shrugged. “Childhood experiment. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  The heck it didn’t. If Deg and I were a matched Witch and Familiar pair, how was another Witch able to insert herself into our shared energy?

  That wasn’t supposed to be possible.

  Deg saw my look and shook his head. “Not the time, LA.”

  I glared back at him. “Lucy, you have some ‘splainin’ ta do.”

  He just shook his head, glancing at Mandy. “On three…”

  She nodded. We all lifted our hands.

  In my mind, the twirling ball of shimmering silver energy, turned copper by the insertion of Mandy’s power, throbbed expectantly for us to pull it forward.

  “Spell?” I asked the Witches.

  Mandy gave a jerk of her head, wincing as another demon volley hit the face of her protective bubble. “Take too long.” Her voice sounded strained, her words clipped. She was fighting to hold the bubble.

  I nodded. “Power word it is then.”

  Our combined magic began to spin, faster and faster until it broke apart, pieces of it spraying out and cavorting separately in space. A razor thin barrier of energy tied the pieces together and to each of us, but the chunks that had been created with the explosion began to form into letters, dancing and circling on the air until a single word was formed.

  All that was left was for the three of us to utter the word. At the exact same time.

  I felt Deg and Mandy’s concentration and met it with my own.

  The magic pulsed in perfect beats, counting down from an internal clock that was mirrored in our brains. As it neared three, I held my breath, giving the magic my full attention.

  I felt the moment Mandy’s protective bubble slipped away. Its loss left behind a whisper of icy electricity against my skin.

  The demons seemed to realize it was gone at the same time. All four of the monsters on the ground turned to us, claws lifted and eyes glowing hotly against terrifying black faces.

  Brock screamed in pain and our magic twitched, faltered, and nearly failed as our attention was pulled from the business before us.

  But then one of the demons he’d been fighting slammed to the ground in front of the four we’d targeted
.

  My internal clock shouted, “Go!” And we opened our mouths. Quiese!

  The word flew away from us like an enormous, copper-colored net, shimmering on the air as it hit the five demons and wrapped tightly around them, tugging them all into a giant wad of monster.

  They stood completely still, eyes flashing with mute rage and bodies caught in perfect suspended animation.

  While his adversary was distracted by its friends’ fate, Brock grabbed him around the throat and, muscles bulging, squeezed until the thing went slack. With a roar, he swung the demon around and released it, sending it toward the tree line where the passage waited.

  The air split apart in a silver flash and the demon slipped into the resulting void, disappearing with a giant sucking sound.

  Brock dropped wearily to the ground, his enormous wings folding behind him. I looked into his black, still handsome face and smiled. “Nice work. You think you could do the same with this giant magic baggie of boogeys too?”

  He looked down at me from his ten foot height and his teeth flashed white in his dark face. “It would be my pleasure.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The moon rose close to the treetops as Brock dispatched the bag o’ demons into the breach. I noted that the shimmering split in the atmosphere shut with a more determined snap than the first time and realized we were running out of time. If we didn’t hurry, the passage would close for the night and we’d lose a day before we could begin our journey.

  I took off running, unsure how to reach a passage that appeared to be sitting in the sky, with nothing to climb to get to it except a bunch of smooth-trunked trees.

  The trees were hundreds of years old, with trunks whose circumferences measured in yards rather than feet and branches that were easily fifteen feet off the ground.

  We weren’t climbing those babies.

  But the Illusory Forest, its roots set in a past that was multi-millennia old, was a trickster beyond understanding. As such, I prayed the way would be shown to us as we got closer.

  We’d gone a half mile, the moon hovering just above the treetops, before we stopped, panting and disgruntled.

  “We had to have missed it,” Mandy grumbled. She glared at me as if I should have known where the stupid thing was. In that moment I forgot, just for a beat, how sad I’d been when I thought she was gone.

  Which reminded me. “You never told us how you came to be here instead of dead.”

  “We don’t have time for that,” Brock said, after skimming Mandy a look filled with meaning.

  “Unfortunately, it looks like we have twenty-four hours,” Deg told them on a frown.

  Brock shook his head. “We need to use the time finding out how to get to this passage or we’re going to find ourselves in the exact same spot tomorrow night.”

  I tilted my head back and stared at the thick wall of trees surrounding us. Though I was unwilling to give up, I realized it clearly wasn’t up to me. The magic just didn’t seem to be with us at the moment.

  Still, something was bothering me. “I wonder…”

  “What is it, LA?” Deg asked.

  I shook my head, narrowing my gaze on the tree tops. “I don’t know. It’s just…”

  Then it hit me and I had a face-palm moment. “Of course!” Lifting my hands, I crafted a spell on the air, the golden notes of it dancing and swirling around my hands as I created the pieces and then dragged them into coherent forms to shape the magic.

  Mandy and Deg watched me carefully, making sounds of recognition as the spell finally rested on the air in front of us. I looked at them and they nodded, finally realizing what I’d figured out.

  “What?” Brock asked, completely lost.

  “It’s the web,” I told him. “Everything we do is tied to and controlled by the web.” I swung my arm and sent the spell through the air. It exploded before us, the shapes I’d created flaring outward to form what looked like the insides of a computer hard drive. Slowly, the x’s and o’s formed into a map that highlighted a thousand points of light, each one a distinct shape and color. The size and opacity of each specific point was determined by the magical creature’s age and power.

  Deg, Mandy and I studied the map carefully, trying to find ourselves on it. After a moment I saw the progressive line of magic surrounding a large, green-tinged area off to one side.

  The Park.

  “There!” Mandy said, pointing toward four points clustered near the southern park barrier.

  I nodded. “Now we need to look for the passage.”

  “But we have no idea what it looks like,” Brock grumbled.

  “It’s built into the original barrier. Like a small gate.” Deg said. “It should be a slightly altered spot on that barrier…” He lifted a finger and pointed to a place where the barrier became less distinct, its edges fuzzy. “Like that.”

  We all turned toward the spot that corresponded to the gate on the map. There was a large rectangular area in the dirt between two enormous trees where the ground seemed to sparkle. Like a hundred tiny fireflies all resting together on the root-bound soil.

  “That’s it. Hurry!” Even as I said the words, the rectangle shrunk a few inches and the specks of light dimmed. “It’s closing.”

  I hurried over and stepped into the quickly shrinking space. Immediately, the forest dropped away and I was back inside the rocky passage. The sounds of the forest were a distant chorus, the chirp and scream of nocturnal creatures dulled behind the barrier between Axismundi and the human realm.

  Mandy and Deg came through right after me and Brock stepped into the passageway last. The magical blockade snapped closed behind him with a hiss, the sounds of the primordial forest slicing off behind it.

  We stood in unnatural darkness for a beat, only the sound of our breathing breaking the stark silence. A ball of yellow light suddenly appeared, casting a sickly hue over Mandy’s face. The orb hovered over her palm for a beat and then she lifted her arm and flung it into the passageway ahead of us.

  Without a word, Deg and I started off, following the quickly moving light through the twisting passage.

  We emerged from the passage a couple of hours later. As before, the area we entered was dark, the earth scorched and filled with dead vegetation. I was starting to wonder if Axismundi just gave us what we expected to see, or if it was perpetual midnight there.

  It didn’t take us long to realize that one thing had changed. The horizon was dotted with pulsing blue and orange arcs set equidistantly apart in a semi-circle. The jewel-like skyline encompassed two-thirds of a circle and I had no idea what it meant.

  We stopped just outside the opening to the passageway and rested, pulling out bottles of water and energy bars to give us stamina for the next phase of our mission. It would probably be our last chance to rest and eat for a while.

  If all went according to plan, things were likely to get squiggy fast. The unpredictable quality of the place would make it necessary for us to stay constantly on our guard.

  I had no idea how much time we had before everything exploded around us.

  Back in his non-demon form, Brock stood a few feet away from the passage, staring at the pulsing arcs of light in the sky. He’d been uncharacteristically quiet since we’d arrived to find the changes in Axismundi. I wondered if he knew the significance and wasn’t telling us.

  I stood up and went to him, my gaze narrowing in an attempt to see beyond the cloak of darkness smothering the area. “What is it?”

  He didn’t respond for a long moment. I noted the stiff way he held himself and the clenching of his hands at his sides.

  The demon was tense. A fact that increased my own nervousness by a few notches. “Brock?”

  He finally glanced down at me, his expression grim. “There’s something in the air. I can’t describe it. But whatever it is, it has my hackles up. I’m having to fight taking my demonic form.”

  I frowned. “Describe the emotion. Besides tension. Do you feel fear? Anger?”
r />   “More like expectation. But there’s no positive feeling tied to it.” He expelled air. “As I said, I can’t describe it.”

  I nodded. Staring off into space, I concentrated on my sensing magic and cast it around us, trying to get a taste of what he was feeling for myself.

  I got nothing. “Maybe it’s coming from the demonic realm. We are close to the barrier, right?”

  He nodded. “Very close.” He glanced toward Mandy and Deg, his expression softening slightly. “The Witches did good work leading us here.”

  I nodded. “How long will it take to get to the border?”

  “On foot, half a day. But if I fly…”

  I shook my head. Though I hated the sound of several hours marching across that forbidding place, I wanted us to stay together. “I’m not comfortable with you going off on your own again.”

  His handsome face split in a grin that reminded me of his old, cocky self. I realized as my chest tightened at the sight that I’d missed cocky Brock.

  Imagine that.

  “Aw, you’re worried about me? You do care.”

  I shook my head. “Not in the least. I just don’t want to have to explain to the council that I lost their demon.”

  He chuckled darkly. “That’s touching. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to trust me on this one.” He turned abruptly and headed toward Deg. “Have you located the Nephilim yet?”

  Deg looked up from the spell they were weaving on the air. The magic looked like a thousand spiders clambering over each other in the darkness. But, judging by the relaxed expressions on their faces, it appeared to be successful. “We have. She’s south of here, just inside the border of the demonic realm. I’m afraid it will take us most of a day to get there.”

  “On foot, yes. It will only take me a few hours though. I’ll go get her and bring her back here. You three deal with Trudy and Reginald.”

  I opened my mouth to argue but Mandy had already gathered up the spell and collected it into a slightly larger ball of light than the one we’d followed through the passage. She threw it above her head and wiped her hands against her shirt as if they were soiled.