by Kenny Soward
He squeezed her and was rewarded with a sigh.
They didn’t stand there long that way, just enough to ease each other’s minds, and then Bess stirred against him and they separated.
Lonnie wiped his eyes with his jacket sleeves. “I was sure you were going to put a bullet in me.”
Bess smiled crooked. “Naw. I just wanted that hug.”
“Good. You might get another one if you keep being so fucking cool.”
“Hah!” Bess backed up, appraising him with a smile. “I’m glad you’re doing better. I really am. And thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. Now, let’s talk about whatever the fuck is going on here. I need the full picture before I agree to anything. I’m assuming that’s why we’re here, right? Some mission?”
Bess adjusted her weapon and started back to the cabin. “Follow me and see.”
Chapter 16
They were burying Elsa at the foot of the Rowan tree between two huge roots.
Torri had assured them it would work. The Rowan’s power to renew life was legendary, and she’d healed a lot of folk by burying them at the base of the tree. So, they carefully tossed dirt on the blanket they’d covered Elsa with. Before covering her, Torri had applied some nasty, stinky poultice. Now the whorchal was three feet down, her eyes ticking wildly back and forth in panic.
“Settle down,” Ingrid reassured her. “You will wake up good as new, sister!”
Easy for Ingrid to say. She was standing on the edge of the shallow grave, not being buried in it.
Lonnie knelt down next to Elsa and rested his hand against her cheek. “Don’t be a scared little bitch. Buck the fuck up.”
Lonnie saw her eyes harden, her lip curl just barely, and he was glad she was currently incapacitated. He’d likely pay for that quip later. “I’m just kidding,” he said with a smile. “Look, we’re going down to Pondcliff to talk things out. Probably be boring to you anyway. Just stay here and heal. Think about…think about what we did on the swing and know that I’ll be be the first one you see when you wake up. It’s going to be good. Trust me.”
He waited for her response, but she only sighed weakly and closed her eyes.
Once she was completely buried, Torri got on with her spell. The witch moved the dirt around with her hand and spoke in whispers. Her prayer for the Earth, she’d called it.
Lonnie didn’t care what it was, as long as it helped Elsa. As for his own wound, it had it’s own layer of poultice and was wrapped in a heavy gauze bandage. His leg was stiff, but the puncture wound hadn’t hit anything vital. It would be a few days before he’d be as spry as he was before.
In the meantime, Ingrid found a good use for Jedi’s body. The whorchal took the corpse by its arms, dragged it out of the garden to the edge of the woods, and fed it to the wolves. Not exactly something Bess was comfortable with at first, but when Lonnie explained he was the one who’d axed Elsa and nearly him, Bess had shrugged and walked away.
The three fade rippers stood there and watched as the beasts fought over him like scraps of meat from a butcher. It left Lonnie feeling strangely satisfied. While the guy had shown a fraction of humanity at times, on the whole he was a little asshole Lonnie could never trust. In a way, and aside from Elsa’s injuries, he was glad it had gone down like this. He’d been undecided about his sister’s fate for a couple months, but she’d make the decision a hell of a lot easier on them by calling forth the demon. Looking back, he saw things with a much clearer perspective.
“That little shit had a crush on my sister.”
Ingrid glance over. “Huh?”
“Yeah, I’m just now realizing it. Not only was she like a goddess to him, but I think he was in love with her.”
“Aw. Poor dear. Maybe they will meet in Hell.”
“Maybe.”
They turned and went back to the camp as the wolves fought over Jedi’s bones.
Kneeling down at the pond’s edge, Lonnie dipped his hand in the water and scooped out a drink. That feeling of tremendous clarity returned, only this time he was ready for it. He closed his eyes, smiled as he was forced to face all of his mistakes again, like feeling guilty about shit he had no control over. He tried to put things in perspective, allow it teach him, allow himself to be absolved and move on. And upon opening his eyes, everything stood out vivid and detail, from the cascading waterfall to the foam where it broke into the pond, and the bright green moss covering the rocks. He was refreshed again. Alive. Ready to hear what Bess had to say. Ready to tackle whatever came next.
Bess had brought Kristanna and Alex, no surprise there, but left the rest of her fighters back at the house.
Crash and Ingrid were here with him.
Torri squatted between the two groups in her usual place at the pond’s edge, playing in the water with a stick.
While Lonnie and Bess wouldn’t have any trouble getting along, it was the dark looks passing between Crash and Alex that had them all on edge.
“Hey,” Lonnie whispered. “Let’s just listen to what they have to say, and then we’ll decide what to do. Nothing is carved in stone right now, got it?
“Yeah. Got it.”
Torri shook her head, peering into the water and looking a little doubtful. “Can’t believe one of `emgot into my pond. Cain’t figure out how she did it.”
“Yeah, I guess we could have spent a little more time questioning her.”
Torri shook her head and then raised her bright green eyes to his. “The woods don’t wait for justice, son. Ain’t no trial or judge. Ain’t no jury or stay of execution.”
“Yeah, the woods are brutal as fuck, that’s for sure.”
“All right, people, listen up.” All eyes turned to Bess as she pulled a tablet device out of the backpack. She fiddled with a button on the thing then swiped her index finger back and forth across the screen. She lifted the device and held it up, pointing its flat lens at the water. After a sputter and shake, an image shined there on the surface.
“Torri, I know you don’t have a television up here, and I know the rest of you aren’t up on current events, so some of this might come as a shock. If this is who we think it is, and if our records on the Bet-Ohman family are correct, the world could be in bigger trouble than we first thought.”
An image wavered on the water followed by a woman’s voice. As the picture and sound became clearer, it was easy to see this was a news report. An image of a middle-aged news anchor solidified. “With half the US presidential primaries over, Lindsay Walls still holds a substantial lead as an Independent in the Republican Field.”
The anchor vanished, replaced by a new feed of a striking woman getting out of a car. Lonnie’s first thought was “legs” because the navy blue skirt she wore was just tight enough, shifting and forming over her lower half as she climbed from the vehicle. She required no help from any of her staff hovering near the open door.
“Miss Walls is the only single parent who has ever run for a political office so high. While pollsters predicted her to wash out months ago, Miss Walls has only grown in strength, touching on the differences, once perceived as weaknesses, in us all.”
A dark brown mane of barely-tamed hair fell to Lindsey Wall’s shoulders, a swath of bangs sliding into her eyes. An olive-complected hand came up and pushed the lock away, revealing a stunning pair of brown eyes that seemed to leap right out of the pond at him.
Power. This woman was powerful. He could feel it radiating from her in waves. And she looked familiar, too. Something in the face. Something in the expression.
And then he had it.
While this woman, this Lindsey Walls, couldn’t have looked more different than his sister with her ample physique and healthy tone, they looked eerily the same, too. The way this Lindsey Walls scanned the people around her with an expression of barely masked contempt. It reminded him of Makare.
“That’s her all right.” Torri made a sound and threw a pebble at the image, causing it to ripple on the pond. “I knew it.
”
Lonnie’s mouth fell open. “Is that…?”
“Yeah, that’s your grandmother, Azarah.”
“How do you know for sure?”
Torri’s face was a mask of frustration. “I know because I fought her once, a long time ago. Apparently, we didn’t beat her like we thought we had.”
The reporter continued. “Only Matt Sampson has even come close to the surging front runner, but he’s already falling way behind if we can believe this week’s early polls.”
Lonnie watched the video for another moment before he tried to say something. But no words came out. His mouth just hung there. He watched this Lindsey Walls, his grandmother, captivate a crowd of people at some rally before being whisked away in a limousine. He’d not thought much about her since Makare had spoken about her in the Under River, especially after Makare had denied all ties to the woman.
“It fits the evidence we’ve been putting together.” Bess shut down her tablet and sat down on the rock.
“What evidence?”
“After we came out of the Under River, I spent some time looking up anything I could find on Turu Tukte.”
“That’s what you heard Kluga talking about. Jedi and my sister confirmed it, right?”
“Yeah, and I figured it out pretty quick, actually. Turu Tukte is ancient Akkadian. It means reprisal or vengeance. It could also mean a vengeful army.”
“An army of vengeance?”
Bess shrugged. “Maybe. Either way, it was enough to get the ECC higher-ups to put their best people on it. It took us awhile, but after doing some cross-relational searches, we discovered one name that seemed to be an abbreviated form of Turu Tukte. It was Turukte. The Turukte Corporation. But it is actually registered as Turu Corp.”
“Well, who owns Turu Corp?”
“Lindsey Walls.”
“Shit.”
“Shit is right. We’ve been in a wait and see mode on her ever since. We do have some agents stalking her rallies. Some intermingle with the crowd. Protesters like Missy Gray, all ECC operatives dressed up as normal folk.” She nodded at the pond. “May I have a drink?”
“Sure,” Torri said.
In the pause, Ingrid slapped her palm against her head. “Of course, I’d been thinking the words sounded familiar. Similar enough to Old Septune, but not quite. In Old Septune, it would have been tauru tock.”
Lonnie was nodding. “It makes sense. Damn.”
After drinking, Bess shook off the excess drops from her fingers, and sat back at the pond’s edge with her eyes closed for a minute. When she was done contemplating, she continued. “We made the connection between Azarah and Lindsey Walls by checking a few late records found in ruins across the world. Some of it, we already had. Others in the order visited tombs in Egypt and Demascus. Clues that led us to South America and eventually, yeah, to North America to confirm some of the things I remembered seeing in the Under River. The ECC had never felt the need to transcribe or catalog any of this old stuff before because we never thought we’d need to go back that far. It was good to have, but not a priority.”
“Until now.”
“Right.”
“What did you find?”
“Well, and Torri can probably confirm some of this, a majority of our earliest records point to a period around Jesus’s time when a great battle took place between two armies. An evil force let loose upon the world, a Great Queen of the Assyrian Empire who brought great prosperity to the people, and also great pain. Some called her the goddess, Ishtur. Legend says it took a handful of angels to bring her down. To stop her from whatever evil she was trying loose upon the Earth.”
Lonnie glanced at Torri, but the girl had taken off her boots and was staring at her toes.
“Hard to tell what was the truth and what was made up. Old Assyrian legends mixed with some truth, maybe?”
“That’s all your religions are,” Ingrid quipped. “Legends.”
And while Lonnie knew Ingrid was not a fan of organized religion, she sat coolly in the short grass, rapt at the tale’s telling.
Bess ignored the jibe. “Again, we had nothing concrete from that time, and no two accounts were the same. But that led us naturally to start looking toward Ancient Assyria. There were your regular depictions of Ishtur. The typical images of gods and goddesses you might find. But there were other records, too, depicting Ishtur as more involved in the day to day business of the Assyrian Empire. There were even stone carvings of Ishtur and Assyria’s first great conquerer, Tiglath-Plieser I, together.”
“When was that?” Lonnie said.
“Around one-thousand B.C.”
Lonnie shook his head. “So, what do you make of all this?”
Bess glanced at Torri, then her eyes slid to Lonnie. “Well, we think your grandmother, Azarah, came to Earth around that time and helped Plieser ascend the Assyrian throne. She did it through, you guessed it, the weaponization of Pleiser’s armies so they were unbeatable in combat. We think the people of that time loved her so much that they simply named her Ishtur and gave her a goddess-like status.”
“And she got the weapons and technology from Xester.”
“Right.”
“Why? Why would she decide to conquer Earth when she had Hell? Plenty to conquer there.”
“Your guess is as good as mine. People who crave power like that are difficult to understand.”
Lonnie thought about his sister. “You got that right.”
“Maybe Hell was just too hard for her,” Bess continued. “You said yourself there are regions filled with demons and monsters.”
“True.”
“And, of course, we wouldn’t have attempted to make any connection if it weren’t for the Turu Tukte hints, and some revenge sniffing we did after getting hacked. The conclusion? Lindsey Walls is indeed Azarah Bet-Ohman come back to visit some horror on the world.”
“The Devil come right to our doorstep.”
“Right.”
“So what now?”
“Good question. We have no idea what Azarah was doing between the time she was first defeated and now. Maybe Torri can fill in some of the blanks. ”
All eyes turned to Torri, who’d bowed her head and neck so much that it seemed like she was carrying a boulder on her back. Her hair covered her face and her fingered picked at the ground.
Clearly she knew something but wasn’t particularly thrilled to talk about it.
Lonnie nudged her with his boot. “What is it?”
“It’s a memory I haven’t visited in years. I hate it, fills me with sadness. And it reminds me of how I used to be.”
“Well, we can’t understand if you don’t tell.”
“It don’t make no difference what happened. Don’t tie off what’s going on today.”
“I disagree,” Bess said. “It’s important we all know what happened back then. To be able to put the pieces together and understand what we’re dealing with.”
Torri nodded, seeming to understand. She lifted her face, hair parting like a waterfall around her freckled face. “You know why I settled here? It was because when I was looking for a new home, I came upon this place, these hills, and fell in love with them right away. There’s a certain way the mist settles in the valleys. There are secret places, places been here long before me. This place has roots, and a witch always goes where she can put her roots down deep.
“I fell in love with the natives, who were good to me. Hell, later I tried to stop what happened when the rest of the people come over from the Old World, the fighting and butchering. But I couldn’t. Not all of it. Those folks, the Europeans, brought too much darkness to what had been a place of light. Well, I guess I should say they brought a different sort of light. Centuries passed and I guess I fell in love with them, too. And that’s why I protect them and these hills.
“Now, I can’t rightly place the year I was born. I just woke up in a field of green one day. There were others like me. We danced a lot. Skipped across the old country
side as wildlings. Well, they had a lot of names for us then; fae, fairies, and fawns. We didn’t care much what they called us. Summers were much shorter back then so we spent a lot of time underground. I remember the pools in Skye and the Highlands of Scotland. All of it.
“I was freer then.”
“You don’t like it here?”
“I love it here. I’ll probably stay here forever. Hell, I cain’t leave anyhow. This place reminds me of home, just in a different sort of way. The beauty is the same, anyway.”
“Why did you leave?”
“That’s another story. Just know that I was forced to go, and it happened at a much later time than Mr. Jesus was alive.”
“Oh,” Ingrid said with a snide smile. “You’ll probably tell us you knew him. That he actually existed.”
Torri’s eyes slid to the whorchal but she didn’t say a word.
Lonnie could feel Bess’s tense excitement. To be this close to someone who’d might have actually talked to your god had to be maddening. She had to be full of questions.
The red head shook. “He had his own kind of trouble to deal with. The kind of trouble we fairies got into was entirely different. And it was a good bit before your Jesus, so Bess, your timing’s a little off.”
“This is where my grandmother comes in?”
“Yeah.”
Torrie gave them an uncomfortable pause, like she didn’t know where to start the story.
Crash stood up and went to the pond, partaking in its deliciousness.
Lonnie stood and stretched, gazing up at the waterfall where it split and reconnected before hitting the pond in a dance of foam. Made him wonder where the water went. Must be some kind of crack or gash down there where the water passed through to some underground stream or something. He needed to piss, and thought about walking off to do his business, but then Torri dove back into her story.
“One day, I guess about two or three hundred years before Mr. Jesus, me and the rest of the Mull Witches sat atop the cliffs of Scotland over looking the ocean. It was windy up there, as usual, and we were watching a ship come in from sea. Let’s see, it was me, the Dag, Blue, and maybe Yellow Claws, if I remember right. One of us was wondering out loud, I can’t remember who, if she could put that ship under and drown those men. Another was asking how many of them she could bewitch in the form of a mermaid.”