by DM Fike
The library is about as plain a wooden building as you can get. If it wasn’t for the intricately carved door, which Sipho had etched with so many charms that it took a specific combination of pith to open, you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking it some farmer’s backyard shed. The interior had the same stark feel: a half dozen shelves filled to the brim with worn books and a plain wooden table with matching chairs.
The library only had a few air vents to minimize sun damage to the books, so I grabbed a half-melted wax candle from the table and lit it with fire pith. I pulled down every book I could find on aquatic vaetturs, not finding much info on our specific enemy but homing in on techniques that generally worked against similar creatures. I matched the old stories with our encounters with the mishipeshu. By all accounts, Baot’s water banishment should have sent the mishipeshu packing. It had obviously sucker punched the panther hard enough to force it to retreat.
Why hadn’t Baot’s attack succeeded? If just a taste of one new dryant’s vitae could give the mishipeshu that much extra defense, it might very well be invincible. I shivered.
A scratching at the door made me nearly jump out of my skin. I whipped around as the door squeaked open. Blinded by the incoming noon daylight, it took my pupils a few seconds to adjust and recognize the shepherd that strode into the library.
“Guntram,” I said as way of greeting.
Guntram flicked his wrist and the door slammed shut like a steel trap behind him. “Cut the act, Ina. I know everything.”
I prepped myself for the worst lecture of my life. I did not expect Guntram to cross the room in three strides and loom over me so quickly that I had to bend back over the table just to breathe. I held up in my hands in surrender.
“You’re right,” I croaked. “It’s bad.”
“‘Bad?’” Guntram repeated. “‘Bad’ is when a vaettur sucks the life out of an innocent creature or two. ‘Bad,’ however, doesn’t begin to describe what happens when a vaettur ingests vitae from a new dryant.”
“Okay. It’s horrific. Atrocious. Terrifying.”
“How about unacceptable?” Guntram found a few centimeters of space left between our faces and leaned so close to me, his beard disappeared out of my range of vision. “You were given specific instructions. Do not leave the homestead. Stay away from Vincent Garcia. And what did you do? Both!”
I’d never seen Guntram so mad before. I rarely succeeded in talking him down on a good day, but I still rolled the dice. “I felt the mishipeshu’s lightning pith. What did you want me to do?”
“Anything but what you did!” Guntram slapped his palms down on the table on either side of me, rattling a stack of books. “Wait until morning. Tell the others. For the love of Nasci, Ina, you could have sent a raven for me. But you knew not to leave the homestead!”
I just didn’t have it in me to cower. I’d been through too much in the last few days to let Guntram dribble spit all over me. Putting my hands on his chest, I pushed him backward so I could stand. He skipped over to the side as I pointed a finger at him.
“I told you that lightning would hurt it!” I yelled back. “And I was right! I got in a wounding shot at Hills Creek.”
Guntram pressed back toward me. “But you didn’t banish it, did you?”
“No,” I admitted. “But I was caught off guard. Maybe with more lightning pith I could…”
“Oh no, Ina,” he said. “There is no ‘you’ in this anymore.”
“Are you even listening to me?” I yelled. “We need a new way of attacking this thing. Leaving me behind will only get someone killed.”
Guntram’s eyes pierced right into my soul. “You mean like Jortur?”
A lump formed in my throat, preventing me from replying. Images of the dead deer swirled in my brain, intermixed with Darby’s cries of grief. I hiccupped instead, turning to the side.
Guntram softened at my reaction, but his voice held its angry undertones. “At least some common sense still gives you pause.”
I gritted my teeth. “I didn’t kill him.” I hated that my voice shook.
“No, but you did the next best thing. You put him in danger.”
The knot in my gut ballooned to full size, filling up every square inch of my body. I tried one last half-hearted argument. “He should have stayed on the homestead.”
Guntram narrowed his eyes. “You should have too.”
I could no longer look at my augur. Shaking in the knees, I leaned my hip against the table for support.
A heavy silence fell between us. Guntram glanced over at the tomes I’d been studying. “Put these away, Ina. You need to reflect not on the mishipeshu, but on yourself.”
As he made his way back to the door, I whispered, “What will you do?”
Guntram paused at the threshold. “About the mishipeshu or about you?”
I shrugged. Either would work.
“Tabitha, Baot, and I will follow the mishipeshu’s latest tracks. A combined water banishment is our only hope. As for you—” He heaved a sigh. “—I don’t know, Ina. We will get to that when we can, but Tabitha is asking for you to be bound.”
Guntram’s words hung heavy long after he left. I shouldn’t be surprised. Tabitha had been trying to have me bound since the day she met me.
But this was the first time I thought she might get her way.
CHAPTER 20
AFTER GUNTRAM LEFT, I tried to do more research, but my heart just wasn’t in it. Somewhere in the distance, the stirrings of a storm whispered in my pithways. The mishipeshu was close by, at least no farther than Hills Creek.
But I couldn’t do anything about it. Not only did my emotions feel like someone had hammered them with a meat tenderizer, but so did my body. Being batted around like a cat toy and tossing around lightning like confetti had wreaked havoc on me. For once, I ignored the lingering lightning pith and instead decided to take a dip in the hot spring.
I half expected Zibel to be there but thankfully found the pools empty. I walked a few steps down to the first pool and continued down the slope to the second. If the marten lover did show up, he might not spot me. I didn’t particularly care to deal with his awkwardness at the moment.
I kicked off my boots, then stripped down naked, not bothering to fold my clothes. I felt like a grimy, unwashed potato, but as I sunk up to my neck, I relaxed. Soaking eased all the rawness out of my pithways.
Fifteen minutes of glorious hot spring revived me. It cleansed not only the soreness, but also my foul mood. I could focus again on the problem with a clear mind. Guntram hoped that a combined water banishment with three powerful shepherds would take down the mishipeshu. We both knew that wouldn’t work. Baot had fish in his DNA, and if his direct hit couldn’t take out the vaettur, I doubted two additional shepherds would make a difference.
But then, what could? I’d hit it with lightning, and while it stung, the lightning still hadn’t kept the damn thing from following me back to the homestead.
What if the mishipeshu had become too powerful to banish?
That couldn’t be right. Nasci is huge on balance. For every action, there is a reaction. For every darkness, a light. For every life, a death. Even the goddess herself has a counterpart in Letum, her brother god who sends vaetturs to torment her dryants in a never-ending chain of good versus evil.
What would take this thing out?
My mind wandered to all the vaetturs I’d ever banished with Guntram, going over the tips and tricks he taught me. Unfortunately, I was so low on the totem pole, I’d mostly been partnered with Guntram to get rid of the easy pickings that would crumble under any elemental type. The kappa was one key exception. Guntram had sent me after it knowing that lightning wouldn’t hurt it. He wanted to teach me that sometimes a vaettur is vulnerable only to its own element, which is why the kappa dissipated under a water-based attack.
I sighed and leaned back into the water. The mishipeshu clearly had aquatic tendencies, and water did affect it, but it was never enough.
>
Never enough.
My heart pounded as I continued to compare the kappa to the mishipeshu. The kappa was a completely water-based vaettur. I thought of the storms that followed the mishipeshu around. Storms bring rain, true, but the panther never appeared with just a drizzle. A full-blown thunderstorm always accompanied it. That meant the mishipeshu had two close elemental associations.
Water and lightning.
Did dual elemental vaetturs even exist? I hadn’t read anything like that in the literature, but if they did, they’d need a double dose of magic to banish them. For the mishipeshu, that meant one shepherd needed to cast a water-based banishment sigil while another tossed lightning.
As excited as I was about this new theory, I had no way to test it. And given my recent track record, I couldn’t guarantee it would work. Jortur’s dead eyes flashed across my memory.
A non-physical ache that the hot spring couldn’t heal blanketed my body. Maybe I should bury my sleuthing for a while before someone else got hurt.
Before I could mope further, a shuffling in the woods drifted into my ears. I popped my head over the pool’s edge, finding a grove of younger firs swaying as something crunched its way toward the creek just on the other side of the homestead’s property line. I tensed. Given how much the brush swayed, it had to be something of a decent size, at least five feet tall. Still, glancing up at the cloudless sky, it couldn’t be the mishipeshu.
I expected a wild mountain lion or a bear at most, so I nearly fell forward when none other than Vincent Garcia, game warden extraordinaire, popped out of the trees.
I gasped, then flung two hands over my mouth. Fortunately, Vincent couldn’t hear anything from within the homestead boundaries, not when he sat on the other side. Like the mishipeshu before, Vincent only perceived a sheer mountain wall, an impenetrable object that he couldn’t just walk through. To prove this point, Vincent suddenly put up both palms, mime-style, and scooted around the property line, frowning.
Despite Vincent’s inability to view the homestead property, I marveled at his arrival. In all the years I’ve been a shepherd, I’d never heard of any person just stumbling on the homestead. Sipho had etched some serious defensive sigils into the rocks and trees that discouraged people from approaching for miles around. They’d get within a few miles and be overcome with dread, encouraging them to go back. Vincent rubbed his temples as if fighting a headache, so they definitely affected him. Yet instead of retreating, he withdrew his cell phone from his pocket and held it close to his chest so he could read it in the daylight.
Before I could decide what to do, a voice floated down from the top of the hot spring. “Hey,” a nasally voice said. “Someone in the pools?”
I froze. Zibel. If he saw a random human wandering at around the homestead’s border, he would freak out and alert the others.
“Ina,” I called back, forcing my voice to sound as bored as possible as I scrambled out of the pool. “But don’t come down here.”
The approaching footsteps stopped. “Why not?” he whined. “I was just going to soak for a while.”
My mind scrambled for a reasonable reply. “Because I’m almost done.”
Zibel apparently didn’t appreciate that response because I heard him plod down the stone steps away. “So what? More than one person can use the pools, you know.”
I had to think fast, and the only thing that came to mind was Zibel’s complete lack of social skills. I ran up the stairs two at a time to meet him before he had a chance to spot Vincent.
We nearly collided in the middle. Me, naked and dripping wet in all my female glory, and Zibel, wearing a robe. His face scrunched up in horror as he realized my bare breasts were only about a foot away. He jumped backward.
“Where are your clothes?” he demanded.
I knew it. Even though Guntram and I had a professional ignorance policy when we happened to catch each other nude, Zibel couldn’t handle intimate moments of any kind.
I shrugged as if I always strutted around nude. “I took them off at the lodge. Figured I’d absorb air pith au naturel on my way over.”
Zibel turned away from me, refusing to face me as he replied, “You don’t have any clothes with you? Not even a robe?”
“Not a stitch,” I lied. “It’s very liberating, Zibel. You should try it. The ancient shepherds used to perform their duties naked all the time.” My fingertips brushed his fully clothed shoulder.
I might as well have set him on fire. “No thank you!” he squeaked. He practically fled back up the steps. “Just finish with your soak in ten minutes, ok?”
“Sure thing!” I called cheerfully as he scurried out of view.
I waited several beats until I couldn’t hear Zibel anymore, then rushed back down to get dressed. I’d barely slipped on my hoodie and shorts when Vincent began to pound the “wall” with his fists. He grumbled low under his breath, pausing to glare at his misbehaving phone, then continued slapping at the invisible barrier in front of him again.
That’s when, for an instant, his fist went through to the other side.
Startled, Vincent stumbled backward into the brush. I ran down to meet him, keeping my boots in my hands so I could splash through the creek without getting them wet. Something on Vincent’s phone went nuts with a beeping noise. He glanced back at the wall in utter confusion.
I decided to give this idiot a taste of his own medicine. I yelled as I leaped through the boundary, hoping to scare the snot out of him as I materialized out of thin air. Vincent flinched all right but seemed relieved to see me.
He held up the phone in triumph. “This isn’t busted!”
“The only thing I’m going to bust around here is your face,” I said through gritted teeth. “How the hell did you find me, Garcia? You said at the hospital you wouldn’t bug my phone.”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I used your boots instead.”
“What?” I examined the boots. They looked normal.
“I had no intention of tracking you ever,” Vincent explained as I scrutinized them. “But you continue to put yourself in danger with this vaettur thing, so I got a wildlife tracker and laced them into your boots. That way, if you ever ran off again, I’d be able to find you on my phone.”
That’s when I saw the small plastic tab wedged near the front of the boots. Vincent must have unlaced the entire boot to insert it in there like that. No wonder this foot had felt funny when I put it on.
He smiled, satisfied with the results of his little trickery.
I wanted to punch that cocky grin off his face. “I bet you think you’re really clever, but the others will kill you if they find you here. They’re not very sympathetic to random human visitors.”
“’Others?’” Vincent repeated. “Is this where you live or something?”
I just kept digging myself into a deeper hole. I grabbed him by the arm. “You need to leave, now.”
Vincent wasn’t bothered by my grip. “But don’t you want to know what I found out?”
I paused at his smug tone. “What?”
“You told me that the storms concentrate around lakes. I did even more digging into some weather databases. There’s only one other lake in the entire area that’s experienced more lightning storms than Hills Creek, and that’s Waldo Lake.”
Waldo Lake was within ten miles of the homestead. “That can’t be right,” I said. “I would have sensed the lightning storms if they were that close.”
“Data doesn’t lie. There were a ton of lightning storms around Waldo Lake up until the afternoon that you finally decided to answer my calls.”
This gave me pause. I’d been away from the homestead for a while, tracking down the disgusting kappa up in Olympic National Park.
“How many days before they stopped?”
“Four, maybe five. They spread out from the lake in a pattern similar to how mountain lions stake out new territory. Several of the storms came almost right up to this place, actually, including one early thi
s morning.”
“Yeah, I know all about that one,” I muttered, but hope stirred inside me. Sipho had mentioned that bad weather had ruined some defensive sigils earlier in the week. If the mishipeshu had already been stalking our homestead, my scent might not have brought it here. He could have caught any number of shepherd scents—Tabitha’s for instance—as they came and went from the homestead.
Maybe I hadn’t inadvertently doomed Jortur.
As that warmth expanded in my chest, Vincent continued, “And a storm’s been blinking off and on around Waldo Lake now for the past hour. I thought for sure I’d find you in the thick of it again.” He shifted his feet forward, and one of his hands brushed against mine. “I’m glad you’re safe and okay.”
Fire pith danced along the spot where our bare skin had touched. To cover my embarrassment, I plopped on a fallen tree trunk and laced my boots back on.
“I’m better than okay,” I said, not daring to look at him. “I’m great.”
Vincent sat down beside me, his voice lowering a few notches. “And why is that?”
I couldn’t tie a knot to save my life. Vincent’s and my face were too close together. Electricity tingled in the air, and I honestly couldn’t have told you in that moment whether it was because of the nearby storm or our proximity.
“Ina!” Zibel’s ridiculous voice floated from the upper pool just outside our vision. “Ina, are you done yet?”
I jumped to my feet, deciding to tie my boots later. Vincent stared at me as if I’d gone mad. “What are you doing?” he asked.
Of course, Vincent wouldn’t be able to hear Zibel’s voice through Sipho’s defensive sigils. “We’ve got to go before you’re spotted.”
That goal didn’t last long. As I nearly tripped over my untied shoes, leading Vincent back into the trees, I heard the distinct caw of a raven overhead. Fechin snapped at me, bouncing around from branch to branch. I tried to shoo him away, but he squawked up a storm.