The Book of the Claw

by Eric Asher

  “It’s part of me.” Vicky felt shaky as she stepped away from the demon. “I see it now, thanks to you. I can hold it back. I can fight it, fight me.” Vicky let the soulsword snap out of existence.

  The demon cocked its head to the side. The curiosity on its face turned to something else. Turned to anger, with a fleck of the demon’s own fear. “Strike me down as you were meant to do!”

  “No.” Vicky stood in the silent darkness, the hiss from the demon the only sound in the world. “I see you.”

  And with those words, Vicky’s twisted reflection and the field of dead vanished, leaving her in darkness. The shadows around her brightened into a dim golden glow, as if the Abyss itself was waiting just outside that room.

  “I don’t understand,” the demon wailed. “You, of all creatures…”

  “Where is your Heart?” Vicky asked.

  There was a hesitation in the dim light before the voice spoke again, and Vicky could hear the resignation behind it. “The Heart is not here. It is buried beneath the old tree in the cemetery. The one they call the Signal Tree. Now go. Leave me to rot in this prison.”

  “Who are you?”

  The demon, now diminutive, fragile-looking, turned away on his goat-like legs. “I have had many names. Some would rot your tongue from your mouth. The commoners called me Agramon.”

  For a moment, Vicky wondered how she could get back out of the altar. Then Agramon traced a symbol in the air. A twisted rune that looked something like Uruz. Fire erupted across her body. The darkness vanished, and the circle of stone smoked beneath her feet.

  Vicky looked up to Hugh and said, “We have to get to the Signal Tree.”

  “You’re alive,” Hugh said.

  “Geez, give me some credit,” Vicky muttered, giving Hugh a shaky grin.

  “We could hear you talking in the altar,” Hugh said, a crease forming in his brow.

  “It was more like mumbling,” Luna said. “We couldn’t actually hear any words.”

  Vicky tried not to make it too obvious how much relief she felt at Luna’s words. She didn’t want them to know about those secret fears. No one need ever know.

  “Then I guess we better be off to the Signal Tree,” Elizabeth said, prodding at the gauze on her wrist.

  “Are you sure you don’t wish to stay with Ashley?” Hugh asked.

  Elizabeth closed her eyes for a moment before answering. “No. Better safe than sorry. You could use a hand if you run into any more of those Unseelie Fae.”

  Jasper trilled on Luna’s shoulder.

  “That’s right,” Vicky said. “You can have more crunchy snacks.”

  “What did you see?” Hugh asked.

  “I think it was the demon,” Vicky said as Hugh started down the path that would take them toward the old cemetery. It twisted around, until he reached a hill. “But at the end, when he lost, he looked small. Like he knew he was defeated.”

  Hugh nodded. “The stories say you face your own demons inside the Heart.”

  Vicky didn’t respond.

  “You don’t have to tell me what you saw, but know that it was both true, and not. You have the strength to change your fate. Everyone does, but some do not realize it. As for the demon himself, he fell long ago, and his purpose inside the Heart failed as well.”

  Hugh’s words rang true, but Vicky didn’t want to tell him about what she’d seen. She’d looked into the face of the Destroyer once more, and it had been her own.

  They crossed out of the woods and onto the gravel close to the river before turning back toward the hills. “Sometimes I forget how beautiful it is here,” Elizabeth said.

  “Only because you are insensitive to the dead,” Luna said, rubbing her arms as if she was freezing.

  “What are you, some kind of bat necromancer?” Elizabeth asked.

  Luna laughed. “I’ve never heard it put like that before. The death bats are just sensitive to ghosts. And there are a lot around here.”

  “This is a place of much loss.” Hugh glanced back at them before turning his attention to the woods. He crossed the path, and they started up hill once more. “The river crossing behind us is where many slaves escaped Missouri.”

  “Why so many ghosts then?” Luna asked.

  “Because many of those slaves died here,” Hugh said. “Slave catchers and disease caught up with some of them. Others were too weak, too malnourished to survive the trip across the frozen rivers. Many of them are buried here. It is a solemn place, and one that has its fair share of ghosts.”

  “Why did the town die?” Vicky asked.

  Hugh frowned. “It did not die, exactly. Many moved on as Kansas City grew up around it. The Heart’s misguided influence could only reach so far. In time, men not under the power of the Heart set this town on a path to what you see today.” Hugh glanced back toward the more modern parts of Quindaro. “I am glad something of it remains.”

  They climbed in silence for a time, until the group crested the hill, and the cemetery lay sprawled out in front of them. Modest tombstones peppered the area with grass flattened by more traffic than Vicky would have expected to see there.

  She didn’t have to ask which tree was the Signal Tree. There was no doubt in her mind when she saw the bare branches, forked and reaching to the heavens. A massive trunk split into three huge arms, all nearly vertical.

  “That’s it?” Elizabeth asked.

  “It is,” Hugh said.

  Vicky walked around the trunk, frowning at the earth. There weren’t any obvious sunken areas, nothing like the disc that had led to the altar. “I don’t see anything.”

  “How much has that tree grown since it was buried here?” Elizabeth asked. “It could’ve been swallowed by the root ball.”

  “It may have been swallowed,” Hugh said, a small smile edging its way across his lips. “And all the times I visited this place, I never realized what was here. Tell the Signal Tree who you met.”

  “What do you mean?” Vicky asked.

  Luna’s ears perked up, and the snow-white death bat almost bounced on the balls of her feet. “Stump, or Dirge, or Appalachia!”

  Vicky’s gaze snapped back to Hugh and slowly focused on the Signal Tree. She laid her hand on one of the branches and said simply, “Appalachia sent me. By way of Dirge, and their friend the green man known as Stump. I’ve journeyed far, and spoke to the demon in the altar. I seek the Heart.”

  The bark split beneath her fingers but Vicky didn’t pull away. She watched as a thin line of sap dripped from the wound, the wound widening as the trunk cracked and the ground roiled at her feet. A lump shifted beneath the bark, as if a knot on the tree was traveling from the roots into the wound in the old branch. And there, as Vicky watched, a small stone not much larger than a quarter oozed its way out of the tree. She plucked it from the sap, and realized with a start it was a fragment of a horn. A fragment of the demon’s horn, imbued with a power that had become the Heart of Quindaro.

  Luna ran her hand across the old tree. “Thank you.”

  Vicky knew it wasn’t just a tree, but it didn’t seem to be a green man either. “What is this tree?”

  “An old Forest God,” Hugh said. “Many of the trees here are gone now. I suppose there are yet enough she still stands sentinel. And for that we must thank her.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Elizabeth hurried ahead while Hugh led the group back to the lair beneath the old brewery. It was an odd thing to see the Heart retrieved. It was artifact he knew existed, but he had been mistaken about its location for many years. He wondered if it had been moved, or if it had simply never been placed in the altar. But the stories around the Heart were many, and he wasn’t entirely surprised some parts of the stories were wrong.

  One story told of a necromancer working with what would become the Confederacy who planted the Heart. Missouri had always been a battleground in those times, and there were men, and fouler things, who would not have hesitated to stoop to sabotage. Zola and Philip wer
en’t the only necromancers who stained their hands with blood in that war.

  The grounds around the lair weren’t as damaged as Hugh had feared. The flying heads had certainly toppled a few stones, and created deep divots in the earth, but the structure was sound. He hunched over, leading the way through the tunnel until he could open the steel door at the end. They’d been lucky today. None of them had succumbed to the leviathan, and Vicky had been successful entering the altar. But the arrival of the Unseelie Fae made Hugh uneasy. It was a new variable he hadn’t seen coming.

  Inside the lair, Hugh breathed a sigh of relief. Elizabeth and Ashley were curled up on the couch beneath an old blanket. Ashley still looked pale, but Elizabeth greeted them with a smile, carefully edging away from Ashley so as to not wake her up.

  “How is she?” Hugh asked.

  “Good,” Elizabeth said. “Alexandra is better at these things than she’d ever admit to.”

  “Many of the water witches are,” Hugh said. “But you’ve been friends with her longer than most.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “I was practically a kid.”

  “The undines have been formidable enemies over the years, but I am happy they have become stalwart allies.”

  “Leave it to Damian,” Vicky said as she shuffled past Hugh and plopped down on the couch beside Ashley. Her fingers blurred across her phone as she muttered to herself.

  Luna stretched her wings before she settled in next to Vicky, pulling out her own phone and squinting at the screen. “That’s not good. Cizin texted me.”

  “Your overly paranoid babysitter?” Vicky asked. “I’m sure he’ll recover.”

  Luna huffed. “If you hadn’t ignored him last time, this wouldn’t be an issue.”

  “Look, you wanted me to play your gym battle. I did. I never would’ve heard the end of it if your Blastoise had gotten knocked out. I’m not a pokémancer.”

  Luna pounded out a message back to Cizin and grinned at Vicky. “Like you said, he’ll get over it.”

  “Have you heard from anyone else?” Hugh asked.

  Elizabeth shook her head. “Twitter’s on fire with Eldritch sightings. It’s not good.”

  “Where else have they hit?”

  “Everywhere,” Elizabeth said, her voice quiet. “Some of them make perfect sense. One not far from Antietam. I suspect his target was the Irish Brigade. Others are in major cities.”

  Hugh let out a slow breath. “Then we may need Camazotz sooner than we thought. I hope he’ll be well-rested by nightfall.”

  “Splitlog, Alan, and Haka?” Luna asked.

  “They’re resting,” Elizabeth said. “Alan tells me they transformed more than once. Exhausting in itself, and with those injuries, I’m not surprised they’re done.”

  “They deserve the rest.” Hugh’s own wounds nagged at him. He could heal fast, but some of the deeper damage took more time. It was easy to put on a strong presentation, present a strong face to the world, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t hurt. A day’s rest and he might be ready to fight again. But bone-deep exhaustion settled over him like a weight.

  “I have to get to Coldwater,” Vicky said, looking up from her phone. “Zola just texted to say she got the trunk out of Death’s Door.” She paused and frowned.

  Vicky cursed under her breath. “She says we might need more relics than we thought. Apparently, she found something in one of Damian’s manuscripts.”

  “You best be on your way to Coldwater. Don’t want to keep Zola waiting.”

  Vicky stared at the Heart of Quindaro in her hand. “What will you do now?”

  “I’ll need to hunt down those flying heads. They need to be imprisoned before they can do more harm.” Hugh wrung his hands together and frowned. “Be cautious while the Heart is with you. If you feel rage and anger that is unusual, remember the Heart can have influence over you. Its purpose may have failed here in Quindaro, but it is still a potent artifact. And you would do best to be cautious.”

  Vicky nodded. “We will.” She turned to Luna. “You’re coming with me, right?”

  Jasper chittered on Luna’s shoulder.

  “Doesn’t sound like he’s giving me much of a choice,” Luna said, scratching the dragon between its furball eyes.

  Hugh thought it would be best if they checked in with Camazotz before Luna left once more with Vicky, but on the same token, Camazotz was going to need as much rest as he could get. So instead he gave each of the girls a hug in turn, remembering how small Vicky had been when he first met her ghost. And now this young woman of flesh and bone might be one of their greatest hopes without Damian. But that was a fact she need not know. The weight of such knowledge could do more damage than the trials that came with it.

  * * *

  Once the other wolves were sleeping in one room, while Ashley and Elizabeth took the other, Hugh found himself staring at his phone, sitting on the wide sectional couch in the main room of the lair. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes for a moment, and called the other side of the world.

  It rang four times, and he was about to hang up and send a text when static cracked across the line, and a familiar voice said “Hugh?”

  “Euphemia,” Hugh said. “How is Nixie?”

  Euphemia let out a humorless laugh. “How is our queen?” Her voice was barely a whisper. “The presentations to Parliament in the UK went relatively well, and they were appreciative of us telling them how to murder our kind.”

  “Euphemia …” Hugh started.

  “I get it,” Euphemia said. “I understand why it had to be done. It doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “But she’s okay?” Hugh asked. “The ceremony is done? She’s been given the artifacts that come with her station?”

  “Yes,” Euphemia said. “I’m not entirely sure if that’s actually helped anything.”

  Euphemia paused for a moment. “But to the core of your question, no, she’s not okay. She’s shown a level of coldness I’ve not seen from her in a very long time. She’s ready to kill, Hugh, and everyone knows it. Some of her own people have shown some reticence around her. People who should have nothing to fear from her.”

  “And what of Lewena’s people?”

  “Some have joined us. Others fled, but the witches fear her. That is one good thing to come of this business. They are certainly not what concerns me at the moment.”

  Hugh nodded to himself. “Tell Nixie that Vicky came for the Heart of Quindaro. She has it now, and I expect she’s going to need much more in her gambit. And Euphemia?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you remember the story I once told you of the evil spirits who live in waterfalls and wait to drown people? It is said Flint himself placed them in the waters even as he forced the rivers to always flow in one direction.”

  “It’s a hard story to forget, Hugh. Even after all these years.”

  “The story isn’t about any of you. It never was. Please tell Nixie that. Remind her she is better than the darker spirits.”

  Euphemia was silent for a time. “She’s powerful, Hugh. And now … what can she do with that kind of power?”

  “The only thing I hope she can do is save herself,” Hugh said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Euphemia hung up the phone and pinched the bridge of her nose. One more complication. There was always another complication. And that wasn’t something she, or any of their allies needed.

  She paced the stone hallway. She didn’t like that Nixie had gone alone to speak with an auditorium of politicians. The commoners could be as deceitful as Nudd himself, and worse than that, tactless and ignorant. And if Euphemia’s patience with the commoners was thinning, she knew Nixie’s was gone.

  * * *

  “And how Miss … Nixie is it?” the diminutive man in a finely cut suit asked. He didn’t wait for her to answer, instead tapping his pen on a legal pad and continuing. “How can we trust anything your people have to say? You’ve promised peace, but now one of your own kind has nuclear weapo
ns at their disposal.”

  “Minister,” Nixie said, reining in her irritation. “I have given you my truth. Do with it what you will. I do not believe you are at risk of having those weapons turned on you because the Fae in question wish to live in your world. It would do them no good to implement a ‘scorched earth’ policy as there are no assurances while Nudd still holds your weapons.”

  “My colleagues from the UK seem to agree with you,” the man said, “but I see little to no reason for that. It seems this man, this self-proclaimed king, has weapons we can scarcely comprehend. And you ask us to simply trust you?”

  “Gwynn Ap Nudd represents only a fraction of the people from our lands, from Faerie. Most wish only to live in peace with the commoners, though in peace with less pollution would be appreciated.” She almost bit her tongue at the slip. “But yes, most of us wish for peace, but as your own alliances are, we are also prepared for war.”

  “With us?” the minister asked.

  “No, Minister. As I said before, we have no desire for a war with the commoners, with humanity. Gwynn Ap Nudd has been a thorn in the side of the Faerie communities for far too long. We wish to bring his reign to an end. It is with that in mind I ask you to let us end this war on our own terms. Your forces are not equipped to face Nudd in open battle, and we cannot let our focus stray.”

  “There are creatures walking the earth the likes of which we’ve never seen,” said a translator in a bright blue jacket. “If these leviathans, as you’ve called them, appear near cities, we will have no choice but to engage them.”

  Another speaker picked up. “And is it such a bad thing that we won’t have nuclear capabilities to drop on our own soil? I think not. Conventional weapons can clearly damage those creatures.”

  “Silence, please,” the minister said, tapping his pen on the legal pad once more. “You’ve given us valuable information here today, and it won’t be forgotten. But you understand why we can’t trust in all you say?”