by P. R. Frost
You murdered my mate, an almost feminine voice snarled into my mind. I will have retribution. A little fire won’t keep me away for long.
“Scrap, get your sorry ass back here,” I screamed into the night. If he’d just come back, he could transform into the Celestial Blade and I could defend myself.
Ordinary blades might slow down a Windago. All my mundane weapons were locked in a special closet in the cellar. Only the Celestial Blade could kill a monster.
The lights flickered, faded, then came back on. I bit my lip, waiting.
A crashing boom outside.
Dark silence. Not even the comforting hum of the refrigerator.
The wind kicked up three notches into a hysterical laugh.
I dashed from room to room replenishing every fireplace. In the parlor I used the very last piece of pine in the stack. Soft evergreen. It wouldn’t burn long. I didn’t dare close the damper or I’d smother in the smoke.
Ruefully I looked around, assessing the burnability of every bit of furniture in the house. The dining room table would last all night if I could break it up, along with the twelve chairs. Fortunately, I had a hatchet beside the big hearth in the office, to splinter kindling if I needed.
I double-checked every window and door. Prowling the house all night. Never once relaxing my vigil.
Neither did the Windago.
Chapter 2
DAWN FOUND ME still wandering the house, testing window latches, keeping the fires roaring, starting at every noise and shadow. Somehow, I managed to stretch the last of the firewood in the house and didn’t have to start on the dining table. I kept the hatchet or butcher knife in my hands at all times.
As a sullen gray light crept across the land, the wind faded. The temperatures plummeted. A new depth of cold descended upon Cape Cod.
My yard looked like a hurricane had hit. Broken tree limbs, roof shingles, and the neighbor’s garbage lay strewn about.
A magnificent patriarchal oak tree leaned drunkenly against the power lines, pushing the supporting pole to a dangerous angle across my driveway. I could still get my car out if I had to. I didn’t dare leave the house.
Windago weren’t supposed to come out in daylight. The sky was so leaden it made the entire day one huge shadow. Lots of places for a Windago to hide.
Why hadn’t I headed south with Mom?
“It’s the friggin’ vernal equinox,” I moaned. “Where are the sunshine and spring temperatures?”
My cell phone chirped the theme from “Night On Bald Mountain.” I jumped and trembled a moment before it registered. “I think I need to change that ring tone.”
No power. No telephone. Cell phones only working communication.
“H . . . Hello,” I answered, half expecting that whispery voice born of the north wind.
“Tess, you’ve got to come. Right now,” Allie Engstrom pleaded desperately.
Not much fazed Allie. She stood nearly six feet tall, and had the breadth of shoulder of her Valkyrie ancestors. She was also our local cop and packed weapons comfortably.
“Calm down, Allie. What’s wrong? And why can’t you just call for backup? An entire squad of constables should be on duty.”
“I can’t call them. They wouldn’t understand. You’ve got to come. And bring MoonFeather.” Anxiety drove her voice up an octave.
"MoonFeather? What can my aunt do that you can’t?”
“She’s a witch. They’re both witches. You’ve got to hurry. Before they attack!”
“Witches. Plural. Who’s attacking?”
“Sh . . . she just came out of nowhere. Right in the middle of the street. I crashed my cruiser swerving to avoid her. And she’s naked.” Allie gulped air. I heard the boom of a fired gun. “My God. The bullets bounced off them!”
“Off of what?” Not who. What. They weren’t human.
“Garden gnomes with teeth!”
I skid to an abrupt halt inside the chat room. This is the place that opens the doors to every universe. A big white room that stretches so far into infinity normal eyes can’t perceive the dimensions and curves.
Each species calls the chat room something else. The Waiting Room, Limbo, Purgatory, Avalon, Oblivion. A rose by any other name . . . You know what I mean. Call it what you will, it’s the same place of transition.
Easy to get lost here. Any being can get into the chat room. Getting out again is a different matter indeed.
Late March and still two feet of snow on the ground with a subzero wind chill in Cape Cod. I may be the imp companion to the greatest Warrior of the Celestial Blade ever born, but I’m just a scrap of an imp. I don’t like having my tootsies frozen to popsicles. My barbed tail is so frizzed it feels like it will fall off my cute little bum.
And I’ve got five beee-u-tee-ful warts adorning my backside. Another one dead center on my chestie. Hard-earned beauty marks they are. Can’t afford to have them fall off.
Even my favorite perch on the cast iron spider hanging over the fire in the fireplace can’t keep me warm. So, I make tracks for Imp Haven. To get there I have to cross the chat room.
My warrior companion, Tess Noncoiré, is just finishing a manuscript and is looking for some downtime. She won’t need me for a few days. She can handle just about any crisis that isn’t demon inspired if she keeps her head on straight.
But when she’s deep in a book, I keep her inspired and on her toes. I clean up after her and make sure she eats. Without me, she’d be a total wreck instead of only half a wreck.
Her fashion sense is . . . well let’s just call her challenged and be polite about it.
Our bond goes deeper than that. She is my warrior, I her blade. Neither of us can exist without the other now.
The Powers That Be dictated long ago that only demons should guard the chat room. They are nasty enough to keep everybody in their home dimensions unless they have a special pass from the all-powerful PTB. Hard to get a pass. Harder to slip through the chat room to someplace else, somewhen else.
Unless you are an imp. Even imps don’t have carte blanche.
On this day Windago guard the chat room. The howling wind you hear in the middle of the night when storms rage is just their chatter. The misty black shadows swirling up to greet me feel familiar. I’ve fought these shadow demons before. I’d rather not have to do it again without Tess. Only when I’m with her and in the presence of a demon or tremendous evil can I transform into the Celestial Blade.
Damn, I wore my feather boa as a disguise, hoping to run into Bcartlin demons. Think a cerulean Michelin Man with a hot-pink ostrich draped around its neck. Such a passé color scheme. I mean bright blue and pink went out with . . . well I don’t know for sure that they ever were in fashion.
Now if they’d go with the country blue with hints of gray and maybe a touch of yellow accent, I could do something with them.
I digress.
Two human larpers—that’s live action role playing gamers to the uninitiated—in search of magical artifacts have wandered into the chat room, unaware of what they’re doing or how they got there. These guys are trying to engage the Windago in conversation, asking directions to The Comb.
Give me a break. If you need to ask directions you have no business in the chat room. You have no business talking to a Windago, let alone six Windago, at all. The poor saps are doomed—I don’t mean just their garish costumes—unless I do something.
But maybe I should let them meet the fate of the foolish.
Ever since I liberated a particular magical hair comb from freeze-dried storage—aka my home in Imp Haven—for my Tess, the Powers That Be have put a bounty on it. Word gets out, especially among wanna-be witches and sorcerers, and the search goes far and wide. One of these days Tess and I will have to fight off all kinds of nasties—some of them human—to retain possession of The Comb.
The Comb allows her to see through magical glamour when she wears it. But she can’t wear it all the time because it turns her hair translucent and brittle.
She’ll go bald in a month if she wears it too often or too long. We can’t allow her distinctive springy sandy-blonde curls to thin, straighten, and break off.
Six Windago—they always hunt in pairs—reach out with spectral shadow hands that can freeze-dry the larpers.
At least the humans have the sense to hunker down and cover their vulnerable heads and necks with their arms.
I whistle sharply between my two outer rows of teeth.
The bad guys hardly notice. They have a job to do, keeping beings in their home dimensions.
I wave my pink feather boa at them. Full-blooded demons— Midori as opposed to Kajiri half-breed—aren’t real bright. It takes them a few moments to figure out I’m in their territory. These guys obviously don’t have any human blood in their family shrubs to give them any smarts.
I’m on my own with six shadowy black whirlwinds, each the size of an industrial refrigerator. One of them turns away from the whimpering humans to see me full on. Most demons have no neck and have to turn their entire body to see beyond the end of their nose. This particular beastie has no shoulders either. Just an amorphous mass of black wind swirling ever faster into a tornado.
Demons may be dumb. But they are always hungry. Bloodthirsty. They’ll eat anyone. Simply anyone. Even imps wearing perfectly wonderful pink feather boas.
The other shadowy masses spiral to their left and pin me with malevolent gazes. Glowing red coals burn through the dust storms.
The larpers make a judicious retreat through the nearest doorway. Fortunately for them, it’s their home dimension. They never really got far enough away from it for it to close properly and seal their fates.
Meanwhile, I have six Windago to dupe into letting me back into my home dimension before they bite me and turn me into an antisocial cannibal. Mum would never forgive me.
Not that she approves of me much anyway.
“Get him. No imps allowed out of impland,” screams one pair of the ravening horde.
“We must kill all imps on the loose,” chimes in a second pair.
“Imps are dangerous to the dimensions,” adds the third pair.
I flit above their heads. “I love my wings!” I crow to them. They’d grown enough to actually be useful—though still not up to snuff, just like the rest of my body. There’s a reason Mum named me Scrap.
Blood-red talons at the end of a misty black fist reach higher than I guess possible.
“Yeow! That hurts.” I yank my tail up and out of the way. But I now have gouge marks its full length to the arrowhead tip. And worse! They left red nail polish embedded in the furrows. Not quite the fashion statement I’d hoped for.
And then my stunted wings give out. I drop into the middle of the cold black crush.
Six churning storms of frigid air steal my breath and crumple my precious wings.
I gasp and nearly swallow half my weight in black dust and fur. It tastes of . . . you don’t want to know how stale cigars sweetened with licorice and a touch of sulfur taste.
Black stars blossom before my eyes. “Oh, Tess, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have deserted you just because of a little frostbite on my tummy. Can you ever forgive me? For when I die, so will you.”
Maybe Cape Cod isn’t so bad after all. Tess does keep lovely fires in the hearths of her two-hundred-fifty-year-old home. And her mom might come home and burn some cookies for me.
Chapter 3
PLEASE HURRY, TESS. I don’t know what to do,” Allie whispered. Two more shots sounding too loud across the airwaves.
A naked woman who stepped out of nowhere. The Windago in human form come to plague me?
What about garden gnomes with teeth? Where did they come in?
“Great, just great.” I couldn’t ignore Allie’s call for help. She was my best friend. I knew her crushes and the color of her footed jammies. When we first met, at the age of five, she’d been too tall, and I too fat and bookish for either of us to be popular. So we’d bonded and found we had more in common with each other than we did with our families or anyone else at school.
She’d been an important part of my life for twenty-three of our twenty-eight years.
I pulled on heavy boots, sweaters, a coat, hat and gloves. Some things were more important than avoiding trouble. Then I dashed for the basement armory. I kept a key around my neck for emergencies like this. Without Scrap I needed a mundane weapon. A very sharp mundane weapon.
On my way, babe. This may take a few moments, Scrap reassured me.
But he wasn’t here right this minute. No way to know if he’d make it back in time to help. I grabbed a broadsword off the rack though the replica of the Celestial Blade beckoned me. Made of imp wood, I knew it was sharp. Effective against monsters?
I stuck with the broadsword. The door closed on its own, and the padlock snicked shut. “Thanks, Godfrey,” I called to the ghost who haunted the basement. He’d stashed runaway slaves in that closet and guarded it more zealously in death than in life. And that was as good a guard as I could get. No one knew he ran the local Underground Railroad until his memoir was published ten years after his death in 1893.
With fresh snow on the roads and no plows out yet, I decided to drive my mom’s black baby SUV rather than my cute, midnight-blue hybrid. Mom’s car had a better niche for stashing the broadsword under the driver’s seat.
In four-wheel drive, with studded tires, I inched the car beneath the listing oak tree. Low dragging branches grabbed at the car, scratching paint off the roof. Mom was going to kill me. Each scrape had me wincing and imagining the Windago opening the metal with her talons.
As I turned left onto the road, my rear tires slid on the icy surface. No new snow here. Just the arctic cold. Strange. I had almost a foot of white fluffy stuff around my house.
I steered into the skid until I had traction again, then crawled forward toward the Old King Highway. Reluctantly, I stopped at the intersection to check for traffic.
“Go ahead, gun it,” my husband’s ghost said from the passenger seat. He wore a western-cut plaid shirt, sleeves rolled up, blue jeans, hiking boots, and a white Stetson pulled low over his hazel eyes and sleek black hair. Like he always did. Before and after he died.
I sat back and closed my eyes. “Now what do you want, Dill? Where were you last night when I could have used some company while monsters raged?” As much as I missed the man, he had a strange habit of showing up when I finally thought I could move on. Weird things happened when he was around. I wanted done with weird.
Maybe all I needed was a vacation in sunny Mexico.
“Take a chance, lovey. Why freeze our fucking asses off trying to stay safe. Your imp isn’t around to tattle on you.”
“You shouldn’t use that kind of language, Dillwyn Bailey Cooper,” I reprimanded him in death as I hadn’t dared to in life.
After three years on my own, I wasn’t sure I’d fall for him again. Wouldn’t let myself become dependent on him.
But, oh, how I missed him. I longed for the mental intimacy we’d shared as well as the physical. He shared my love of science fiction/fantasy. His fascination with geology satisfied a lot of my curiosity. We even agreed politically. I’d never met another man I bonded with so quickly or so well.
Fighting demons with a Celestial Blade had given me confidence and self-assurance I didn’t know I was missing when I married a handsome man who looked past the fifty extra pounds I carried then to the woman I was inside.