by Jayne Hawke
“I’m game,” Jess said with a grin.
What choice did we have? The fate of the Isles was on the line.
Forty-Seven
This had to be the last trip to the sewers for a while. If Seth escaped to try his ritual again, someone would have to convince him to set his shit up topside or I was going to just let it happen.
That said, his odds didn’t look good. The jaguar guardians might speak of him in reverent tones, but with the pack at my back and two of three guardians in the fight on my side, I felt confident that this was going to be a one-sided engagement. There was no doubt he’d have some tricks up his sleeves, self-sacrificing sacrificial lambs, and lots of god artifacts, but the final balance showed one jaguar guardian trying to perform a ritual in a closed space with two jaguar guardians and a pack of mercenaries trying to kill him before he could. Adding to the balance was a spellbreaker the jaguars had hired. They turned down my suggestion, bandying about the word ‘nepotism’ in a way that gave me the impression they didn’t entirely know what it meant, and hired a cait sidhe by the name of Two-Piece Sam. I didn’t ask what made him Two-Piece Sam instead of one or three, but I had a feeling there was no story there beyond ‘wanted to sound like an underground legend without having to earn it’.
The planning process for the engagement had been lively, to say the least. Neither I nor the pack was used to this final boss fight shit, and after the fight with Zach the finfolk mix had been such a seat-of-the-pants playground everyone had an idea. The problem came down to the sacrifices. If it had just been Seth, we could have cleansed the entire sewer system without losing much sleep, but whether his students were god wannabes or just born followers they weren’t the kind of evil that deserved the death it would take to end Seth indirectly.
We’d adapted what we could. Liam’s chlorine gas idea had been scrapped entirely, and flooding the place was more difficult than it sounded, but Rex’s idea to bring a couple 50-gallon drums of petrol down and drop some wildfire in it was being set up even as Elijah, Two-Piece, and I made our final preparations. Jess’ idea was... well, there was no getting between Jess and a shiny plan.
The pack all had communication disks that tied into a larger network, allowing for direct one-on-one communication as well as mass radio. They even had spares for the guardians and me. I didn’t need to ask how much it was. Custom fae magic ranged from the price of a small house to the price of a small island. Still, it let us know that the barrels were in place, as were Rex and Jess.
It was show time. I peaked into the vault Seth was using for his ritual just as Jess entered and drew on sun, moon, star, and flame to clothe her in light. Sunbeams exploded in every direction as Jess danced with polished blades and sang a fae opera in her best soprano. The scent of petroleum and the glow of the shield Seth had set up to protect his ritual were altogether overshadowed by Jess and her one-woman show. I watched Seth’s concentration go from easy to forced to broken as the show went on behind him, and finally he turned to see what was happening just in time for a pair of variegated jars to slip in and explode in a whirlwind of glitter.
The rest of the group rushed in as his attention slipped further. Elijah and Rex began attempting to penetrate his barrier with their weapons as Two-Piece, Castor, and I set to the task of countering his magic. I would have forfeited my entire cut to have Tobias, the spellbreaking prodigy who introduced himself as my Secret Gay Best Friend™ despite our interacting maybe twice a year, with me in place of the smooth-talking wannabe who’d somehow made it past the jaguar guardian’s screening where Tobias hadn’t. His technique was alien, his methods sloppy. Given a month, I could have worked out his patterns and made something of the partnership, but with hours of acquaintance behind us we were useless to each other.
The spell Seth had created wasn’t a ward or an energy field. With full control over his god magic, he could’ve made a ward so powerful Tobias and I couldn’t have done anything but stare, but what he had was an intermittent stream of power he didn’t fully understand. I’d hoped that what he’d create would be a haphazard, unkempt thing more hope than execution, but as the guardians had warned me, he had been planning for this since the Isles were a Viking training ground. He’d made an intricately spinning dome of impossibly dense transparent prisms, each the remnant of a god relic made into a crass hunk of impenetrable matter. It was at once the most stupefyingly inelegant application of magic I’d ever seen and an example of advanced coordination matched only by the overminds.
It hadn’t stopped the glitter bombs, but Jess might have been the only being in the Isles with the reflexes to make that kind of throw. As with most examples of unmatched talent, it had been expended on silliness. Looking back, I can’t help but admire it, but at the time all I could think about was the weapon that had killed Cameron and the damage it could’ve done inside there.
The guardians were standing between me and the dome, still in the way only cats can be even in the midst of Jess’ antics. Where Elijah and Rex, true to canine form, were trying every tack and trick to push through the barrier, the jaguars were in steadfast contemplation. I’d seen them work, knew their backstory, and it didn’t occur to me for a second that they were struck by inaction, but part of me still wanted to scream at them. Somehow, having them sit there and stare while my pack, my pack scried and scrabbled rubbed me the wrong way.
I pushed them away, closed my eyes and reached out to the god magic, and found that Sam the spellbreaker was hard at work, grinding down the divine barriers in his way with a clean and honest assiduity that made me rethink him altogether. We’d given him a toffee hammer and a basilica, and he’d picked out his line of bricks and started tapping. I felt Castor doing something I didn’t understand with magic that seemed similar to the magic shifters used to change between forms and chose not to care what it was. If it worked, it wouldn’t matter, and if he wanted my help then he would have shown it. He had never been my familiar, not really.
Seth had recovered from the shock of Jess’ entrance. Where we had expected a counterattack, he simply went back to his ritual, draining his lackeys one by one as he shattered artifact after artifact, the magic within building ever higher. I pulled and pushed, tucked and tweaked, but the magic he surrounded himself with was nothing short of perfect. The gaps were only visible for fractions of a second at a time, and since they weren’t gaps in the spells themselves they were useless to me.
I’d wracked my brain for a spell, a magical loophole, but what reminded me of the obvious was Liam’s poison gas idea. Apart from a reminder that nothing is too horrific to find on the internet, it was also the way around an impassible barrier. We didn’t have the materials on hand to poison his air, but I could do the next best thing. I took one last look at the sacrifices and saw the eager acceptance in their eyes. I didn’t let myself debate the moral computation of it. They were dead with or without me. With the practiced indifference of an experienced assassin, I used the magic in the air of the vault to pull outwards on every inch of the dome in front of us.
I watched as Seth stiffened, bending his attention to his task with greater fervor as he saw what I was doing and felt the cosmic stopwatch start to count down. Three, three, three. Three weeks without food. Three days without water. Three minutes without air. 2:59 without air. 2:58 without air. 2:57 without air.
The task of creating a vacuum was infinitely harder than I imagined it would be, the sheer force exerted against my spell staggering. More difficult was to watch the eyes of the sacrifices. They never registered surprise. Death was what they’d come for, to find it in one form was no more or less likely than another as far as they were concerned. The panic set in, the natural response of a body to its end, but their minds never accepted the body’s signals. They would die more content than I could ever live.
As their blood went to fuel the ritual, the pile of priceless artifacts in front of Seth began to shrink. He was working fast, scavenging god magic at a prodigious rate, and that meant h
e had power to spare. I expected him to start creating his own air, but he didn’t. He cast the god magic over his shoulder in a spray, each brilliantly glimmering orb finding its own way out of his barrier and into the world and turning into a different creature. The magic was choosing its own path, his only directive that it interfere with our workings. By not forcing it into a spell of his own, he had freed himself up to continue his ritual. I had no idea god magic even had that sort of mind behind it. Maybe it was a remnant of some Panties of Artemis that just wanted to seek its destiny as beasts of the hunt, or maybe god magic all aspired to greatness. Either way, things had just gotten complicated.
I watched a bat with wings nearly the width of the vault itself come to life with a twinkle of magic, only to be torn from the sky by Rex’s lengthy bagh nakh claw weapons. A small but impossibly vicious-looking boar managed a snorting, snarling war cry before Elijah’s blade swept down and cleaved its head from its body. Jess’ gleaming starlight-infused xiphos short swords swept down towards a two-headed lion, the remnants of her dancing entrance still evident in her style, only to have the kill stolen from under her nose by a javelin from somewhere behind me. The pack was tearing apart the god-magic animals, putting down the offspring of divine artifacts like zoo escapees, and Seth was running out of time.
An invisible serpent sprang into visibility millimeters from my nose as Henri caught it by the tale and eviscerated it with the claws of one hand, his eyes never leaving the swirling geometry of Seth’s barrier. I’d almost forgotten they were there, their complete, indifferent stillness a testament to the alien extremity of their training. It was alluring, somehow, sensual in its feline focus, the complete control and discipline even as everything went haywire. The effect was quickly broken as I looked around and saw that the jaguars were the only ones not fighting the battle to protect our city from their fuckup. They were moving art, but art doesn’t protect cities.
To my right, I heard a high-pitched scream of triumph as a long block of the barrier sprayed opalescent white light in all directions and an open window to Seth’s sanctum opened up. The jaguar guardians leapt towards it in unison, gripping onto the opening as if to pry it apart with sheer bodily strength. The next block in line slapped into them right on schedule, but before they could be dragged away I heard Seth’s voice rise over the din of dying animals and swirling magic to bellow a string of what could only be curses in a hundred long-forgotten dialects as if trying to emboss them onto the souls of all present with sheer caterwauling force of will.
The shapes sprang out in all directions and Seth himself leapt to his feet, blades of golden sunlight bisecting the line of sacrifices as they extended from his hands. Thrown back by the sudden outpouring of magic, the jaguar guardians were leaping back into the fray so quickly that they can scarcely have had time to land. Rex gripped both Elijah and Jess by whatever he could and threw them clear of a pair of oncoming tetrahedrons. Jess landed gently against a wall and hissed at him before drawing a glaive out of nowhere and lowering herself to the ground, her face turning mostly cougar as she stalked Seth, waiting for a moment of weakness. Elijah grabbed onto Rex’s hand before he could be entirely let go and used the big wolfman’s body to check his momentum. The two stood side by side as if posing for a statue embodying shifter camaraderie. Two-Piece caught the biggest piece of the barrier to the jaw and, blood spraying behind him along with an inarticulate jawless chatter, continued to ride the vindictive scrap of god magic, all the while chipping away at every piece of magic except the one threatening him personally.
As the world spun out of control, the contingency I had no plan for coming true, Castor and I sat side by side in serenity, the flying prisms and deadly monsters somehow slipping past us on other errands as if in deference to our task. I felt him press into my mind the way the shadows did and forced myself not to throw him back. If he wanted to know what I was thinking, he only had to ask. If he was reaching into my mind, it was for something more immediate than whatever goddess-born horseshit had taken my only friend away from me. He pushed an idea to me, clearer than the usual shadows but a flashlight with Morse code compared to the overminds. I saw an image of Seth changing into a plain sphere and sent back an image of a unicorn being buggered by a cell phone. If he couldn’t communicate any better than that, we were fucking doomed.
A flash of anger splashed across my senses followed by a more coherent image of Seth with his edges blunted, magic bouncing off him as he tried to grab it with deformed hands. That was what he had been working on shifter magic for – turning Seth into something that couldn’t touch magic. I was ready to press approval back when he pressed the quantity of magic needed into my mind and I realized his plan. He wanted to eat the pack. He wanted to eat my pack.
I knew that if I gave any sign of disapproval, he’d be ready for a fight. Any response at all, and he might catch a hint of the truth. I cleared my mind, drove every thought into absolute dormancy, and then turned to the side and, drawing on the magic in one of my charms, threw a punch at the side of Castor’s head while a crude blade formed along my knuckles. He didn’t have time to flinch before I felt the blade impact his temple, and then he was gone. No body, no magical signature, nothing. He was just gone. I had only seen one being that could disappear like that, but right then the only thing I could think about was the fact that I had lost him just like I lost Cameron.
Anger would have been reasonable. Outrage, disappointment, fear, sadness. What I felt was grief, the empty, lukewarm nothing of grief, and into it poured Seth and his stupid, childish, needless quest to become something he could never be at the expense of everyone that mattered to me. I needed this to be over, needed him to be over. I watched the pack fighting back to back against an everchanging throng of beasts, monsters, and shapes, watched the jaguar guardians fighting their own, and all I felt was the need to put this to bed.
I grasped onto the earth and latent fire of the petrol that had pooled beneath our feet and tugged, another brute-force grappling exercise employing the surfeit of witch magic that the shadow goddess had given me, making me powerful in the most mundane and ludicrous of ways. I swept it up into my grasp and added a generous helping of air magic from my charms, crafting a tornado spell into which it could be thrust and supported through the force of the whirlwind itself. I built and built until the tornado was as big as me, bigger than me, bigger than anyone in the room, and then I pressed it towards the fighting jaguars. As it approached, I pulled the entire wildfire from its charm and wove it into the whirlwind, not merely giving it into the care of the physical laws of oxygen and oxidization but melding the fire and the wind into a mystical firestorm. It engulfed the jaguars, and Henri and Alexander threw themselves clear as it pursued Seth with the absolute focus of a witch with power, volition, and the sluggish devotion of indifference. I felt him within it, drawing on his god magic to protect himself and counter the wind and fire, and I knew that I should try and bolster the spell, protect it from him, but it simply didn’t seem like it was worth it. Instead, I drew up storm magic and pressed it into the whirlwind, watching it fly free and create a weather system of its own in the high-ceilinged space. I felt the physical processes begin, the storm system begin to support the tornado I had made, and wondered if it would make a difference. It was a distant wondering, a dragging sort of curiosity, but it was something.
I could still feel him trapped in there, the electrical energy spreading through his nerves even as the flame scorched his skin. He was running out of blood to draw magic from, was running out of god magic to clutch at, and my spell was feeding on the world around it, sucking up petrol and pulling at the ill-formed weather systems spreading throughout the sewers as the storm magic poured from my charms. I had never used this much energy, had never needed to, probably still didn’t need to, but this had to stop, and I just didn’t have the wherewithal to be subtle. I pulled at sidhe magic I had stored and tweaked the fire to make it burn hotter while using less oxygen. I brought out what
little poison I’d restored since Cameron and threw it into the whirlwind, not caring what became of it. I cast and I cast, my impetus a simple desire to make Seth stop. Stop existing, stop threatening the Isles, stop imposing himself on my life. Stop standing between me and my grieving.
It took hours for the spell to finally stop, for the system maintaining it to run out of energy. It was a work of art, in its way, a storm worthy of Huracan himself. The strongest emotion I felt, the thing I fixated on, was the idea of that apropos outcome.
Forty-Eight
The pack came together to help, the jaguars said all the right things and paid us with a bonus, and the entire time Cameron and Castor were both gone. It had happened so fast. There hadn’t been time to weigh things up. It came down to Castor or the pack, and the pack won. My pack. And now they were all that I had left. I didn’t know whether to hope that Castor would recover or not. Had I made an enemy of the goddess with my actions? Would my pack suffer the consequences of my actions?
Jess plied me with brownies and ice cream, and Elijah held me close. I reminded myself that we’d done a good thing. The god artifacts had been destroyed, admittedly not by us, but they could no longer be used to bring about pain and destruction. Seth was gone, another plus in the grand scheme of things.
Henri and Alexander had chosen to remain in the city for another couple of weeks, just to be sure that Seth hadn’t left any contingency plans or nasty surprises behind.
On the surface, everything was back to normal. Rex was grumbling because the sun was too bright, Liam was doing something complicated with code on his laptop, Jess was eating her third glittery cookie while plotting an acquisitions job, and I was curled up with Elijah watching the small feathery clouds scud across the sky.
There would always be a gap left behind where Castor should have been. He’d been my friend, my mentor, my rock, during the most difficult and formative years of my life. But now it was time to look forward and prepare for the goddess shaped storm on the horizon.