Dear God! A fully realized Host. But Zerena didn’t marvel at the spectacle, because the bitch was going straight for Andula. Her Andula.
Terzian broke off, and began an incantation to carbonize the interloper’s flesh. It was up to Zerena alone to bring the ritual to a successful conclusion while he defended her and the Host.
She wavered, struggling to keep a lid on the titanic magical currents. She found herself floundering in the grip of a vicious riptide, pulled toward rocky shoals that would shred her ego. A tortured groan escaped her. But somewhere, somehow, she tapped a final reserve of strength, and fought the tide.
And then Alestair Winthrop emerged from the stairwell.
• • •
Josh followed Alestair into a waking nightmare.
Oh. I get it now. Of course there’s no such thing as magic. I’ve simply gone insane, that’s all.
The Soviet ambassador’s wife stood at the center of a ransacked storage room, chanting in a language that sounded like Latin’s evil cousin.
A man who looked old enough to be Josh’s grandfather spoke quickly in a similar language. Wisps of smoke, or possibly fog, swirled around him, snaking tendrils up his nose and into his mouth.
It didn’t seem to bother him, though. He was focused on Nadia’s friend—the bruiser from the boxing club—who was chatting to a woman with bones of fire.
Josh glanced over his shoulder. Dormouse and the March Hare must be around here somewhere.
• • •
Alestair heard the footsteps behind him, the gasp of horror as Joshua entered the cellar.
You stupid boy. I tried to protect you from all of this. Your fate is your own burden. I wash my hands of it.
Then he put the young CIA case officer forever from his mind, and focused on the Flame acolyte. Her struggle was already evident, but the rising tide of panic limned her eyes with white when she saw him.
He gave her a genial nod. “Good evening, Mrs. Pulnoc.”
With two fingers he fished a pocket watch from his waistcoat. Still struggling to maintain the chant, Zerena locked her worried gaze on the gleaming silver chain. She stuttered, faltered, but caught herself and kept the chant going. He started swinging the watch, first in a pendulum arc and then in full circles.
“I wonder,” he said. “Are you by any chance familiar with the parable of the camel and the straw?”
A moment later she dropped the chant in favor of screaming.
• • •
The fluttering ley lines hit Nadia like a double whip-crack. It slammed her against the wall, then sent her tumbling down the stairs. The charms in her pockets instantly turned red-hot; she smelled smoke and a sickening hint of charred pork as the overheated charms made her flesh sizzle.
She hit bottom and bowled over the CIA officer, Joshua. She disentangled herself just in time to see an elderly man winding up to unleash a truly ugly curse at Van and the burning Host with whom she spoke. A frisson of guilt hit Nadia as she recognized Andula Zlata. The jagged edges of the incantation raked Nadia’s skin like a wire brush, raised her hackles. The old man (That must be Terzian!) pounded his cane on the floor. The sigils carved into the handle seemed to move in ways that hurt her eyes; Nadia flinched away before the pain blinded her.
He spoke a single word in a voice like thunder. The room shook. Her ears popped.
“Van!” she cried.
• • •
The hitchhiker howled. And then it howled.
Gabe, struggling with Tanya to drag Jordan to safety, flinched, dropped his corner of the makeshift stretcher, and clutched his head, weeping. Then he realized.
Oh, shit.
Pushing through the migraine, he bent down to lift Jordan from the cobbles. Tanya watched him through narrowed eyes, clearly wondering what secret communication he’d just received from his intangible friend.
“Get back! We have to get back!” he yelled. “The whole thing is going up!”
She threw an arm around him, another under Jordan, and together they limped toward the meager shelter of the alley.
• • •
When Nadia dared look again, Van was still there, looking slightly annoyed as her clothes smoldered. A single stamp of her foot sent a crack shooting through the stone floor to the spot where Terzian stood. He looked older than he had a moment earlier.
The curse barely touched you. Bozhe moi. It should have incinerated you. Nadia began to tremble. I … I was intimate with you.
Van took Andula by the blazing hand and gently led her toward the stairs. Nadia caught only a snippet of their conversation as they passed her: “I’ll teach you everything I know,” said Van, “and then you’ll be nobody’s tool but your own.”
They went upstairs. Neither looked back.
• • •
Alestair stepped over Zerena, who writhed on the floor, clawing at the slim silver watch chain tangled around her throat. She might have been a bit of newsprint fluttering in a gutter, for all the concern he showed.
Josh trembled. I was intimate with you. Vulnerable to you.
Alestair approached the gray-hair, who was leaning on his cane and panting.
“You look a bit winded, old boy.”
The other man sneered. But before he could say anything, Alestair spun his umbrella around, hooked the intricately carved cane with the handle, and yanked it from the other man’s grasp. He caught the cane, lifted it overhead, and brought it down on his knee. At the same moment, he spoke a single word similar to the one he’d spoken on the Charles Bridge, the word that had knocked chips of stone from the statues and made bystanders bleed from the eyes. But that had been a mere whisper, whereas this … this was a thunderous bellow. The cane shattered.
The old man fell to his knees and unleashed an inhuman wail. But the monster called Alestair wasn’t finished.
“Deuced weather we’re having,” he said.
Then he reared back and plunged the ferrule of his umbrella straight into the old man’s eye.
• • •
Nadia looked away, lest she accidentally catch Alestair’s attention. He wasn’t the person she’d thought he was. Sometimes there was no choice except to kill an adversary. But there was never any reason to do what Alestair had done to Terzian.
I argued with you, goaded you, never realizing I’d been prodding a sleeping dragon. She broke out in a cold sweat, as if a bullet had just parted her hair.
Terzian’s death removed the last damper on the flailing ley lines. The conclusion of the interrupted ritual became inevitable, irreversible.
Zerena struggled to her feet. Bleeding from a deep gash in her neck, she clambered up the stairs, away from the ruins of her ambition.
Meanwhile, Joshua Toms gaped at the smoking puddle that had been Terzian. He was American, an enemy.
And yet he’d come to her for help.
Oh, hell.
“Get down, you fool!”
Nadia leapt on him, tackled him to the floor, and pulled them both into a fetal ball while fumbling for her last and most powerful charm.
• • •
Gabe let Tanya guide him as they stumbled across the street under Jordan’s weight. The screaming, thrashing hitchhiker left him blind and deaf to everything but the catastrophe unfolding across the street.
The uncontrolled elementals had gorged themselves on wild energies. Gorged so greedily that the local nexus faded. But only for an instant. For even the elementals were minuscule compared to the measure of the world.
The global ley line network shuddered, shivered, realigned itself. A magical shockwave ricocheted around the globe, traversing continents and oceans at the speed of thought.
It converged on Bar Vodnář.
The elementals were immortal, eternal, intangible.
The building was not.
The blast flattened Gabe, Tanya, and the woman they carried. Flaming wreckage rained on them as they helped each other up. A chorus of sirens approached the blazing ruins where a great l
ittle bar had stood.
“She needs an ambulance,” Tanya said. “Stay with her while I flag one down.”
“Hurry.” Jordan’s face was very pale. Gabe didn’t like it.
He knelt beside his unconscious friend, wishing Tanya would limp faster as she emerged from the alley. Beyond her, the conflagration silhouetted two figures, one wreathed in flames of green, the other in flames of scarlet. But then Jordan moaned, and he checked her tourniquet.
When he looked up again, the fiery silhouettes were gone.
…and that’s a wrap on
The Witch Who Came in From The Cold Season 2.
Thanks for reading, we hope you enjoyed it!
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold
will return Winter 2018
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False Idols stars a female FBI agent going undercover in the glamorous art world to stop the flow of black market money that funds terrorism. This current day drama of crime, politics, and subterfuge will draw heavily from real-life as Bob Wittman, the man who founded the FBI’s Art Crimes Unit, serves as story advisor to the writer team.
Written by Lisa Klink, Patrick Lohier, and Diana Renn. Presented in 10 episodes.
The season begins September 13, 2017.
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Magic is real, and hungry—trapped in ancient texts and artifacts, only a few who discover it survive to fight back. Detective Sal Brooks is a survivor. Freshly awake to just what dangers are lurking, she joins a Vatican-backed black-ops anti-magic squad: Team Three of the Societas Librorum Occultorum. Together they stand between humanity and magical apocalypse. Some call them the Bookburners. They don’t like the label.
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Writer Team
Lindsay Smith is the author of the YA espionage thrillers Sekret, Skandal, and Dreamstrider, all from Macmillan Children’s. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband and dog, where she writes on international issues in cyber security. LindsaySmith.net. @LindsaySmithDC.
Max Gladstone has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia, drank almond milk with monks on Wudang Shan, and wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. Max is also the author of the Craft Sequence of books about undead gods and skeletal law wizards—Full Fathom Five, Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise, and Last First Snow. Max fools everyone by actually writing novels in the coffee shops of Davis Square in Somerville, MA. His dreams are much nicer than you’d expect. MaxGladstone.com. @maxgladstone.
Cassandra Rose Clarke grew up in south Texas and currently lives in a suburb of Houston, where she writes and teaches composition at a pair of local colleges. She holds an M.A. in creative writing from The University of Texas at Austin, and in 2010 she attended the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in Seattle. Her work has been nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her latest novel is Our Lady of the Ice, out now from Saga Press. CassandraRoseClark.com. @mitochondrial.
Ian Tregillis is the son of a bearded mountebank and a discredited tarot card reader. He is the author of the Milkweed Triptych, Something More than Night, and the Alchemy Wars trilogy. His most current novel is The Rising (Alchemy Wars #2). His short fiction has appeared at numerous venues including Tor.com, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Popular Science. He lives in New Mexico, where he consorts with writers, scientists, and other disreputable types. IanTregillis.com. @ITregillis.
Fran Wilde’s work includes the Andre Norton-, and Compton Crook Award-winning and Nebula-nominated novel Updraft (Tor, 2015) and its sequels, Cloudbound and Horizon, as well as the novella The Jewel and Her Lapidary (Tor.com 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Nature. She writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, and iO9.com. franwilde.net. @fran_wilde.
Table of Contents
Cover
Copyright Page
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2, Episode 1: Awakening by Lindsay Smith
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2, Episode 2: Complicating Factors by Max Gladstone
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2, Episode 3: Old Game, New Players by Ian Tregillis
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2, Episode 4: Earth and Salt, Fire and Mercury by Cassandra Rose Clarke
The Witch Who Came in From The Cold Season 2, Episode 5: Trust, But Verify by Lindsay Smith
The Witch Who Came in From The Cold Season 2, Episode 6: Talisman by Fran Wilde
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2, Episode 7: Bishop Takes Queen by Cassandra Rose Clarke
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2, Episode 8: What’s Gone, What’s Left Behind by Max Gladstone
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2, Episode 9: Aftermath by Ian Tregillis
The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2, Episode 10: The Mirror Cracked by Cassandra Rose Clarke
The Witch Who Came in From The Cold Season 2, Episode 11: Absent Friends by Max Gladstone
The Witch Who Came In From the Cold Season 2, Episode 12: Zügzwang by Lindsay Smith
The Witch Who Came in From The Cold Season 2, Episode 13: We All Fall Down by Ian Tregillis
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The Witch Who Came In From The Cold: The Complete Season 2: The Complete Season 2 (The Witch Who Came In From The Cold Season 2) Page 50