by Hazel Hunter
With a low roar that reminded Hailey more of a wolf than a man, he lunged towards Vancleave, ice forming around his hand and shaping it into a blade of ice.
Everything felt as if it was moving in slow motion. Hailey saw Piers throwing himself up into the air to get out of the reach of the general’s weapon. She saw Kieran lunging forward. Then out of the corner of her eye, she saw something that made her heart stop.
The demon in chains roared hoarsely, and it took advantage of the distraction to throw itself into the fray. Somehow, it had worked an arm loose, and she saw four diamond sharp, twisted nails flash through the air. Hailey’s breath caught in her lungs as it slashed towards Kieran’s unprotected back. She saw that brutal hand come down, she saw it made contact.
All she could think was no.
Hailey reached out for the power that she knew was there. It was waiting for her, both Kieran’s and Piers’s. Without touching them, she had to pull harder, but she did it. The power pulsed inside her, all hers. What she wanted to do most right then was to protect the men dear to her.
Instead of freezing the demon in its tracks or setting it alight, she reached forward with invisible hands and found the thing’s mind. What she discovered shocked her. There was an alien consciousness there, one that was made of nothing but heat and anger and fury. Connected to it, however, was a fibrous silvery strand, and on the other end was a human voice chanting something over and over again.
Hailey made out the words “let me go let me go let me go.”
Without thinking, she reached out and took the silvery connecting cord in her grasp. She pulled as hard as she could. For a moment, there was absolutely no give at all. She was convinced that she couldn’t do it, but with her last bit of strength, she tore it apart.
There was a brilliant flash of light that felt like it wanted to burn out everything she was. She screamed. She could hear it echo off the walls. She thought she was falling forever, but when she struck the pounded dirt of the training field, she realized that she had only fallen to her knees.
She could taste blood in her mouth. Then she was being turned over. Hailey smiled hazily when she recognized Piers’s worried face over her.
“What happened?” she asked fuzzily.
“We could ask you the same thing,” he retorted. “Look.”
He turned her so that she could see the tableau just a short distance away. Vancleave, Kieran and Stephan all stood over the twisting demon on the ground. Vancleave had his sword drawn, Kieran spun razor sharp ice shards around his hands, and Stephan had a small silvery box that Hailey knew was at least as dangerous as the weapons carried by the other men.
The demon was no longer trying to capture or kill anyone. Instead, it writhed and moaned, clawing at its own face. As Hailey watched, however, she could see that its monstrous features were changing. They were twisting and shrinking. The process was a slow and painful one. None of the people watching it moved.
It soon became clear that it was changing what the demon was. After a few minutes, Hailey saw a face underneath the folds of flesh and what looked like protrusions of horn. The man’s mouth was constantly stretched open in a howl of agony, but slowly, so slowly, the man was winning.
“Gods above,” Piers whispered. “What did you do?”
The demonic features melted away from him. His body shrunk down. Soon, a man with brown hair lay stretched on the ground, panting hard and staring up at the sky. His eyes were a pale blue. Even Hailey could see them from where she sat. They were round with panic and fear.
It was Stephan who spoke first.
“Easy soldier. We’re your friends here. We’re with the Magus Corps. We want to help you.”
The man struggled to a sitting position. Stephan had put away his weapon, but Vancleave and Kieran still held theirs warily.
“I’m Captain Jude Warwick of the Magus Corps,” he said, panting softly.
It reminded Hailey eerily of the men they had found in the Alps. For a brief moment, they had been able to break free of the demons that held them, and when they did, they told Kieran their name and their rank before asking for death.
“I’m Major Stephan Martel of the Magus Corps,” Stephan said quietly. “You’re safe here.”
The man looked up at him, clearly disbelieving. As Hailey watched, his face crumpled into tears. She could see the moment when he truly believed it. Unashamed, he wept into his hands.
“What have you done?” Piers repeated, dazed.
Hailey wished she could answer him.
• • • • •
They took the formerly possessed man to the infirmary where the infirmary keeper immediately put him on a liquid diet and shooed everyone else out of the room.
The lot of them milled in the corridor for a moment. Vancleave looked like he was ready to speak, but Kieran interrupted him.
“It is time for you to leave now, General,” he said.
He was calm but there was a real menace in his voice.
“You do not command me, Major.”
“I don’t, but I have my own reports to make. What you are doing here verges dangerously close to sabotage.”
Vancleave’s face went brick-red. He looked like he was going to start bellowing, infirmary be damned, but then another voice cut through the air.
“He’s right, General.”
They all turned to Stephan, who was perfectly calm and self-possessed. Hailey knew that he must have been as shaken as the rest of them, but though he was a bit pale, he forged onward.
“What we have seen here is exactly what General Aroqua told us we would see. Major McCallen is working on developing a resource that we may very well need in the months to come. In my professional opinion as a weapons developer, to pull him away from his work would be disastrous. In addition to that, to try to force him to come along with us would be tantamount to destroying all of the work that he has put in.”
“You don’t know that,” Vancleave began, but Stephan smiled, a narrow white thing.
Hailey realized that he was enraged.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice low. “What matters is what General Aroqua will think of it. What matters is how it will look when the others hear that you might have lost the war right here.”
Vancleave stared at Stephan for a very long moment. Hailey could hear the tension in the air crackle. Kieran was quiet, watching the interplay warily, while Piers simply looked furious at not being able to run Vancleave out of his Castle.
Finally Vancleave cursed, spun around and walked out.
“I don’t think he’ll give you any more problems after this,” Stephan said with a sigh. He shook his head. “What you are doing here is important. I truly believe that. You deserve the best chance you have, and that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Magus Corps is on your side.”
His words made Kieran flinch, but he nodded.
“Thank you. That could have gone very differently if you weren’t there to step in.”
Stephan smiled a little.
“There may be a very long war ahead of us, Major. I’d like to see you back to it sooner rather than later, but if you can come back with some real firepower, I’d like that even more. We can hold the line until you return.”
After that, Stephan had to leave with Vancleave. Hailey wondered what was going to happen to him. He was the only Magus Corps officer that she had ever had much contact with beyond Kieran.
“Hailey, are you quite well?”
She turned her curious gaze to Piers.
“I am, why do you ask?”
“Your eyes.”
In her bathroom mirror, she gasped to see that her eyes were darker than they ever had been before. The purple looked even darker, the green even more vivid. It had its own sort of beauty, but the sight of it made her stomach turn.
“I think you need to tell us exactly what happened,” said Kieran.
She came and sat between Piers and Kieran on her couch, taking a deep breath.
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br /> “He was going to hurt you,” she remembered. “I didn’t know what to do. I remember thinking that if I used fire or ice that I would hurt someone. I couldn’t bear that. I…I guess I reached into his brain instead. It was like when I froze that Templar’s blood, a little. I reached into his brain, and I found a…a cord…or something. It stretched from his mind to someone who just kept saying let me out over and over again. I didn’t think about it. I acted completely on instinct. I broke the cord with my hands. Then you saw what happened. I was lucky. If it had turned out differently, I would have killed that man.”
“The way I killed those men in the Alps,” Kieran said, and she could hear the guilt thick in his voice.
“We could never have known that there was a way to heal them,” she said. “At that point, there literally wasn’t. The only reason that I could do this today was because of what happened between the three of us last night. Let that grief go, Kieran, it doesn’t belong to you either.”
Kieran nodded. She knew that at least he would try.
“But this does change things,” said Piers slowly. “Those demons that the Magus Corps are going to go fight. They’re not just demons any more.”
“No,” Hailey agreed. “They’re people. They are people who have a chance of coming back, and of being healed.”
“Could we do it?” Piers asked. “Would you have the power to do so?”
Hailey wanted to be able to say yes with everything that she had inside her. She wanted to be able to tell him that there was a way back for every demon-possessed man or woman. She thought of the intense will and power that it had taken her to do so, and she hesitated.
“It took so much,” she said softly. “Not only from me, but from both of you.”
“Not to mention what it did to her connection to the Shadow Walk Prison,” Kieran growled. “You may not remember what happened, Hailey, but I do. It only took you a few seconds to sever the shackle between the demon and the man, but if you tried that with a horde? With fifty demons? With a hundred? You might win a handful free, but after that, they would overwhelm you.”
“She wouldn’t be alone,” Piers pointed out. “The ones she healed would be there as well.”
“They’re not fit for duty,” Kieran retorted. “Captain Warwick hasn’t been missing all that long. I don’t know the man, but I know of him. He wasn’t fit for combat when Hailey brought him back.”
Hailey laid her hands on theirs, bringing a halt to their discussion.
“I want to find a way,” she said firmly. “This is my power and my choice. You can tell me that you will not help me, and I will understand, but I need to see this through to the end.”
“I would never hold anything back from you,” said Kieran, and Piers nodded as well.
“The Castle is protected,” Hailey said. “Or at least, we believe it to be so. We should test it. We should learn more about what I can do. However, when we’re not doing that, I need to find a way to help those people.”
Piers looked concerned.
“Do you remember what you told Kieran?” he asked gently. “It is not your fault that they are trapped. It is only the demons that are to blame.”
Hailey shivered.
“You didn’t hear him,” she murmured. “You didn’t hear him saying let me out over and over and over again. If it had gone on long enough, if the demon had stayed seated in his body and kept him from it, it would have been all that he was able to say. He would have been a ghost haunting his own body with only those words left to guide him.” She straightened up. “I will find out how to help those people.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HAILEY WANTED TO help the demon-possessed men and women that the Templars were using as a shock force more than anything. However, even she knew that it was easier said than done. In the days that followed, she was busy enough herself. The spell she had cast over the Castle seemed to be stable. It took them a few days to get the word out that the Castle itself was shielded, and some returning patrols still had problems.
She still worked with Piers and with Kieran on fine-tuning the powers that she possessed, but she spent an increasing amount of time with Liona as well. Some things she had to learn on her own, but there were other topics where Liona simply had years of knowledge.
Finally though, Liona had to shake her head.
“I want to give you the answers that you are looking for, but at the bottom of all of it, I just don’t have them.”
“Well, who does?” Hailey exclaimed in frustration. “Who do I need to talk to find out more about the Shadow Walk Prison?”
Liona’s smile was rueful.
“If you wish me to be perfectly, brutally honest with you? No one. Witches and warlocks have never liked spending time in the Shadow Walk Prison. Some rare ones fall into it, and only a few fall out. Some go in seeking it, and you can imagine how few of those come back.”
“Surely there are some people who can find their way in and out. Surely some have explored it.”
Liona shook her head.
“As far as I can tell and as far as I know, you are the witch who has spent the most time in the Shadow Walk Prison in the last two hundred years. I wandered it a little, but then I realized that I very much preferred my heart and soul as mine rather than as demon food.”
Hailey’s frustration must have shown on her face, because Liona took her hand.
“Take heart, dear one,” she said softly. “After all, I’m still here. I’m still waiting to see how it all turns out.”
Hailey had almost forgotten how Liona’s own gift had brought her away from her beloved Rome. Liona was a seer, a witch skilled in the art of seeing the future. For the first time in hundreds of years, she had found her vision clouded. After time and study, she realized that the source of the disruption lay with Hailey in Wyoming. Something that Hailey did or was about to do could change the future in an enormous way. The fact that it hadn’t been the creation of the shield spell was troubling.
“I don’t want any part in prophecies,” Hailey muttered. “I just want to help those people.”
Liona was quiet for a long time.
“I’m not Piers or Kieran,” she said finally. “You’re lovely, and perhaps one day we will love each other, but right now, I am at least capable of some objectivity. If you want to learn more about the Shadow Walk Prison, I think we both know that there is only one way that you are going to be able to do that.”
Hailey was silent for a long time.
“You mean that I’ll have to go back in again,” she whispered.
“Yes. There are some things that can only be experienced. There are reasons why witches and warlocks have steered clear of that realm for long centuries. The risk to you is very real. Right now, there are three choices available to you. You can ignore those possessed by the demons and allow the dice to fall where they may–”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can keep on searching for a solution in the books and in the experiences of those who have come before you.”
“You just told me that there was no hope of that.”
“Nevertheless, there may be some profit in it. There may be some forgotten tome or obscure witch who knows more than we ever dreamed. Or…”
“Or I can go back into the Shadow Walk Prison,” Hailey said.
She felt a peculiar weight in her belly. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling right then. Dread, certainly, and definitely fear, but she wondered if there was some kind of complicated longing there as well. The Shadow Walk Prison was a terrible place, but it had brought her, Piers and Kieran closer together than she had ever dreamed possible.
In many ways, she had learned to control that realm, to make it do the thing that she had needed. It was terrifying to think that it could be a place where she felt at home, but still she couldn’t shake the feeling.
Liona leaned over to give her a hug.
“Your fate is your own,” Liona said. “At the end of the day, it is always yo
ur choice. No one is going to force you or to take your choice away from you. No one is going to fault you. But Hailey? Right now I will tell you a secret, one that has kept me going for a very long time.”
Hailey looked up, surprised. Liona leaned close to whisper in her ear.
“No one is going to be able to stop you either, brilliant girl.”
Liona’s words stayed with Hailey for the rest of the day. After dinner, she came to Piers’s quarters, where she practically lived now. Kieran was often up and about, training when he wasn’t working with her or Piers, but he had given up his own guest quarters as well.
She found them going over a map when she got in.
“What’s this all about.”
Piers spun the map towards her so that she could see that it was a map of the western United States. Locations marked in blue ink indicated the locations of the other large covens. Someone had traced a path that connected all of them.
“If you are willing, we thought that we could offer the protection of the camouflage spell to the other covens,” said Piers. “It would be a thing that allowed the covens to be more independent and much safer.”
Hailey traced her finger along the path, thoughtful.
“I do want to do that, but there are the Templars to consider. The demon-possessed are on the move.”
“All the more reason to get started as soon as we can,” said Kieran seriously. “The best offense is a good defense sometimes. This will save lives.”
Hailey looked at him curiously.
“I had thought that you would be more invested in stopping the Templars in their tracks.”
“I am, but I also know what battles need to be fought. The Magus Corps will engage with the demons directly. Our place should be one of defense.”
Hailey smiled crookedly at her lover.
“I am glad that you are playing it safe. It just figures that right now, I don’t want to agree with you.”
Piers and Kieran regarded her warily.
“I want to take on the demon-possessed,” she said quietly. “Liona seems to think that means entering the Shadow Walk Prison again. I…am beginning to agree with her.”