by Ann Gimpel
“I’m sure I have no idea what you mean.” Juan stared his old friend down.
“Ha! You can play innocent, but the bridge reeks of sex. I’m glad you two finally stopped dancing around your attraction, though.”
Aura cleared her throat. “Reeks, huh? I was just on my way to the galley. If you’re up, it means I can tap Ketha to help me with breakfast.” Chuckling softly, she slipped out the door.
Viktor crossed to Juan and slapped him on the back. “Excellent. You let me know if you’d like a shipboard wedding.”
Juan laughed. “Ship’s captain and all that rot.”
“Right you are, mate.” Viktor strode to the wheel. “Where are we? Halfway to Bora Bora by now?”
“Very funny. The course you set is still active.”
Viktor’s expression turned serious. “We need to have a major meeting right after breakfast and determine if my choice is majority rule.”
“What if it’s not?” Juan asked, curious. Viktor had never been one to take kindly to intercession from others where decisions for one of his ships were concerned.
Viktor shrugged. “We’ll do what most of us want to. I’ll be damned if I’ll take us into another debacle like the one on Arctowski without full assent from everyone.”
Juan nodded. “I’m glad you didn’t drown yesterday, amigo.”
“You know what, mate? Me too.” Viktor made his way to the wheel and settled his hands over its polished surface. “If you’re willing to stay up for a few more minutes, grab your notebook and let’s get a list of destinations cooking.”
Chapter Twenty-One: Hijacked by the Future
Aura’s first stop was the cabin across the hall from the bridge where Viktor and Ketha slept. She knocked and then pushed the door open. “Rise and shine, sleepyhead.”
Ketha rolled over and groaned. Slitting her eyes, she said, “Really? What the fuck are you doing up so early?”
“Maybe I never went to bed,” Aura countered.
Ketha’s eyes widened, and she bolted to a sitting position, pushing tangled sheets and a duvet aside. “I sense dirt. Spill. Is it Juan? Did you—?”
“It is, and we did.” Heat rose to Aura’s face, but she didn’t look away.
“Thought so. It always smells like sex in here, but the scent got a whole lot stronger when you came into the cabin.”
Aura snorted. “Viktor commented on the same thing. Except about the bridge.”
Ketha snickered. “That man. Of course, he’d notice. He’s a fiend in bed.” She raised her brows into twin question marks. “Tell me everything, sweetie. I want details.”
“I’ll talk once we’re in the kitchen making breakfast,” Aura countered.
Ketha snorted. “You drive a hard bargain, sister, but who could resist an offer like yours?”
“I don’t know. Lots of people who weren’t perverts at heart.” Aura watched as Ketha tossed clothes on and gathered her hair into a tangled queue without bothering to brush it.
“Ready.” Ketha stuffed her feet into the sheepskin slippers that were ubiquitous. Along with thick, terrycloth robes, they’d been in every cabin.
“Have you consulted your spell book lately?” Aura asked.
“No. Why?”
“How about if we bring it along to the galley? We’ll be alone, and you can hunt for wisdom while I try to locate prophecies matching whatever you find.”
“Not a bad idea.” Ketha pulled a closet open and rummaged in the bottom, coming up with a thick book covered in cracked black leather. She tucked it under one arm. “Too bad I didn’t take the time to do this before yesterday.” Bitterness lined her words.
Aura wound her fingers around Ketha’s upper arm. “You cannot blame yourself for Rowana’s death.”
“Why not?” Ketha’s golden eyes shot darts, but anguish wasn’t far from the surface. “I’m a seer. Reading the future well enough to keep us alive is my job.”
“Prophecies are mine. I’m sure there’s one out there relating to what’s happening around us.”
“Let go.” Ketha tried to pull her arm away, but Aura held fast.
“Later this morning, we’ll decide where we’re going next. Maybe you and I will come up with something critical to push the decision in one direction or another.”
Ketha yanked free of Aura’s grip. “What exactly do you suppose we’ll find? Nothing as specific as the sorcerer who could bend protoplasm to his bidding will be in here.” She tapped the book’s cover.
Aura chewed her lower lip. “Of course not, but maybe we can tease out the long-term effect the Cataclysm had on manifestations of evil. Take those Vamps in stasis, for example. Or the priest possessed by the demon.”
“You’re thinking they’re all indicators of the same underlying problem?” Ketha frowned.
“Yes. I spent a lot of yesterday trying to work out an explanation, but every pathway had its own set of drawbacks. Nothing was a perfect fit.”
“Looking beyond glitches, what’d you come up with?”
Aura shrugged. “Not much beyond the Cataclysm feeding new life into every wicked thing in this world and others. Abominations and monstrosities not seen in our lifetimes, but that were likely more common when your book was originally written.”
“Or back when all those prophecies were conceived.”
“Exactly.” Aura took a measured breath. “We’ve had it pretty easy. Or we did before the Cataclysm. Modern life didn’t recognize magic. It made it impossible to be Shifters openly, but it offered options for us to explore other opportunities. Ones not available hundreds of years ago.”
Ketha twisted her mouth into a bitter expression. “We might have been better off with less book learning and a stronger grasp of how magic weaves into the warp and weft of the world. I’ve been trying to figure out how the hell that mage inserted his own ley lines so they appeared real.”
Aura led the way into the corridor and kept her voice low so they wouldn’t wake anyone as they moved through the ship. “It was simple illusion. In the first place, no one without magic would ever adopt a psychic view. So they’d never know the difference.”
“People without magic wouldn’t have seen either set of lines, which means he had to be expecting us.” Ketha glanced sidelong at her.
“Not necessarily. I don’t see how he could have known we’d show up. I’m less certain about the faux ley lines. Maybe what he did weakened the real ones. Or would have if they’d been in place long enough.” They trotted down one more flight of stairs to Deck Three and the galley.
Ketha pushed the swinging door to the dining room open and held it while Aura walked through. Aura did the same for the galley door. Ketha set the magical book on one of the stainless-steel food preparation tables and turned slowly. “A dynamic balance point has to exist.”
“Between good and evil?” Aura poured water into an industrial-sized coffee maker and added beans after she’d ground them.
Ketha nodded. “Right. What if the balance point is far more sensitive than we believed? We always knew good counterbalanced evil, and vice versa. What if the tipping point between the two is far less robust than we suspected?”
Aura thought about it. “Which would mean it wouldn’t take much energy to tilt the scales in one direction or the other.”
“Exactly,” Ketha went on. “Stay with me here. Removing Vamps from the equation—more or less—left a void. It wouldn’t have been hard to fill since it was already carved out.”
With coffee underway, Aura plugged two large electric kettles in for tea water. “Vampires may have been bastards, but they weren’t particularly magical,” she murmured, thinking out loud. “So whatever jumped into the breach could do a whole lot of damage—if they truly wielded dark power. I feel like an idiot.”
“Why?” Ketha trained her unnerving gaze on Aura.
“Maybe because I spent all those years, first in college and then teaching, congratulating myself because our ancestors defeated evil, drove it undergro
und.” She shook her head. “Hell, it was only taking a break, a breathing spell while it waited for an auspicious time to return. The Cataclysm provided that opportunity. Its malevolence would have been a huge drawing card. And then, I thought we’d done a good thing getting rid of Vampires. Maybe they were a necessary placeholder keeping something far worse at bay.”
“I just got a chill, which means we’re onto something.” Ketha waved her hands over the spell book, chanting in Gaelic. Moments dragged past before the book fell open, pages riffling as whatever magic powered it decided what to show Ketha.
Aura wanted to stand over the book, urge it to divulge its secrets, but one Shifter was enough. Besides, the book wouldn’t communicate with anyone but Ketha, so Aura rustled through bins and bags of powdered eggs, powdered cheese, and dried vegetables, sorting what she needed for an omelet.
Magic simmered around Ketha, a blue-white shroud partially obscuring both her and the book. The hum of her chanting was unsettling and soothing by turns. Time dribbled past. Enough for Aura to pop several pans of eggs into one of the large wall ovens. She started on cornbread to occupy herself while Ketha paid out magic.
What the hell was taking so much time?
Or maybe it wasn’t long at all. She had no clue how Ketha’s particular brand of magic worked since she’d only seen its end point, not its process—except when they fought the Cataclysm. The bread joined the eggs in the oven, and Aura washed her mixing bowls and utensils. She was drying her hands when the low hum of Ketha’s power receded.
Still clutching the dish towel, Aura turned to face the other Shifter, waiting. The shroud turned to particles of light right before it vanished. Ketha lifted her hands from the place the spell book had opened to. Her face was set in lines of grim determination, and she straightened from her hunched-over posture as if the motion cost her.
She appeared so distraught, Aura hurried to her side and drew her into a hug, dish towel and all. “It can’t be that bad.”
“Yeah it can.” Ketha hugged her back before letting go. “Evil’s on the loose, exactly as we suspected, but there’s history. Important background material I’d never have guessed on my own.” She looked askance at Aura. “You’ll appreciate this next part.”
Aura wanted to shake words out of her friend. Instead, she hung the towel back on its hook, waiting.
“Darkness was the original condition here on Earth,” Ketha said. “All the biblical crap is nonsense. God—or goodness—was not here first. Bad shit was. Over millennia, it’s ebbed and flowed. Skipping a few million years, the last time it gained a staunch toehold was during Hitler’s Reich. It was extending its reach again under the perfectly hideous president we had in the US. when the Cataclysm struck. After that, it forgot about seducing the president into piling one bad decision atop another, and went for the gusto.”
Aura swallowed hard. “What, exactly, does went for the gusto mean?”
Ketha sent a penetrating glance Aura’s way. “That, my dear, is the line of demarcation between my magic and yours. Does any of this remind you of a prophecy?”
“No, but keep talking. Maybe something will come to me. Did the book offer any insight into where we should go next?”
Ketha nodded. “Indeed it did. You know the bunch of Shifters and Vamps who spawned this mess?”
“What about them? If I ever get my hands on them, they’re dogmeat. The Shifters, anyway. This whole disaster was their idea.”
“Well, they weren’t precisely in Siberia, but on an island off the Far East Siberian coast. It’s where we need to go, if we’re to have a prayer of living in a world not ruled by darkness.”
“What do we do when we get there?” Aura sucked in a tight breath.
“Cast magic to close the gateway.”
“You’re talking in riddles,” Aura muttered. “What gateway?”
“Yeah, I suppose I am. The primary gateway. When Vampires intervened midway and blasted the Shifters’ spell to shreds, it opened a portal. An easy route from Hell and every other borderworld for demons, trolls, sorcerers, wizards, and whatever else lives in places like that. Creatures who’d yearned to sow misery finally had a free ride, a way to access Earth. Counter to our earlier hypotheses, whether Vamps were still a contender wouldn’t have mattered very much. Their nastiness is trivial compared with what’s loose in the world now.”
Aura’s stomach twisted sourly, and her appetite fled. “I’m guessing it’s why a hell horde was in the church in Grytviken. And how the dark mage ended up in residence at Arctowski.”
Ketha nodded. “I believe so. Once they breached the primary veil and entered Earth’s environment, they could travel wherever suited them.”
Aura’s thoughts pedaled in tired circles. “But we closed the gateway in the church.”
Ketha squared her shoulders. “Doesn’t matter. They’ll crop up elsewhere until we dismantle the primary gateway.”
“Are you certain that will do it?” Aura stared hard at her friend.
Muscles rippled when Ketha ground her teeth together. “No, but it’s the only direction the spell book offered.”
A shudder racked Aura, followed by one more. What hope did they have against an army of darkness?
Ketha’s gaze had never left her. “Forgive me for pilfering from your mind, but I harbor the same sense of futility.” Sadness filled her eyes. “Just because something feels impossible doesn’t excuse us from trying, though.”
“What happens if we don’t?” Aura shook her head. “Never mind. It’s a prophecy question. I need to do some hunting. At least now I have a leg up. I’ll start with end-of-the-world ones and widen my search from there. Funny thing.”
“What? None of this feels the least bit humorous to me.”
“I wasn’t fond of Raziel when he dropped out of nowhere and lent his magic to our cause, but right about now, I’d love to have ten of him.”
“Know what you mean.” Ketha snapped the book shut.
The smells of breakfast filled the galley. Aura picked up the towel and removed the omelet pans from the oven. A glance at the cornbread told her it wasn’t done yet.
“Guess that settles where we’re going,” she said.
“Some of us,” Ketha spoke cautiously. “I wouldn’t blame Boris and his crew if they opted to leave somewhere between here and Wrangel Island.”
“How do you know some of us won’t want to leave as well?”
“I don’t, but it’s not an option. We need every Shifter. Bottom line is we need as much good magic as we can lay our paws and talons on to counteract whatever we find on Wrangel. The fissure has had ten years to establish itself, and it’s not going down without a hell of a struggle.”
Juan breezed into the kitchen, whistling a merry tune Aura didn’t recognize. “Smells great in here.” He made a beeline for Aura and hugged her.
After a momentary pause, she hugged him back.
He let go and stared from her to Ketha. “Jesus. What happened? You two look like someone walked over your graves.”
Aura cut to the chase. “Can we sail to a place called Wrangel Island?”
“Sure. We’ve been there before. It’s in the Russian Arctic. But why would we want to?”
Ketha filled him in with a few well-chosen words.
“Mmph, there goes everyone’s free choice,” he muttered. “Viktor’s not going to like having to backpedal on his promise about democratic process.”
“Viktor’s preferences are the least of our problems,” Ketha said. “I’ll go talk with him, so he’s not surprised.” Scooping up the book, she plodded out of the galley.
Aura opened the oven and removed both tins of cornbread, setting them on the ledge. “Boris and them don’t have to sign on for Wrangel Island,” she said.
“I don’t see any alternative.” Juan walked close and put his arms around her. “We barely have enough manpower to run this bucket of bolts. It’s doubly true for extended, blue water stretches.”
Aura lea
ned into his embrace and threaded her arms around his waist. He smelled wonderful. Wild things, greenery, the sharp tang of the sea, and musky undernotes from their lovemaking.
“I haven’t studied a map,” she said, “but I believe we’ll sail right past McMurdo and then turn north from there. It gives us lots of places to stop. You want crew. I’m hoping for more Shifters or other magical beings on our side of the line. Good magic, not the destructive variety.”
He cradled one side of her face. “We’ll figure things out, but we will need to top out our storage tanks. McMurdo is a likely spot for that. Boris said they had barrels of biodiesel at Arctowski, but we’re not returning there. We’ll backtrack to Ushuaia first. Or Christchurch. It’s closer to McMurdo.”
Aura extricated herself from his embrace. “I could hug you forever, but I want to get breakfast out on the tables. Maybe you could run up to the bridge and get everybody moving toward the dining room.”
“No maybe about it. I can definitely spread the word about breakfast.” He plucked a cup off a hook and held it under the coffeepot’s spigot. Once it was full, he sipped appreciatively. “Mmmm. Tastes good. Nothing like my first jolt of caffeine in the morning.”
“You Argies and your coffee.” She grinned.
“Yup. Black, bitter, and thick enough to stand a spoon.”
Aura watched him. She opened her mouth but wasn’t certain how to phrase what she wanted to say, so she closed it.
“Spit it out,” he urged. “It’s easier that way.”
She rolled her eyes. “How do you know I wanted to say anything?”
“It’s written all over your face. I might be new to magic, but I’ve been reading men’s faces for twenty years. It’s helped me weed the bad apples off my ships before they did too much damage.”
“Ketha’s job is done.” Aura stood straighter. “Mine is only beginning.”
Juan drained his cup and set it on the ledge. “Explain.”
“She used her spell book to determine what we face. I need to locate which prophecy addresses our situation. It will tell us the outcome.”