by DM Fike
“What’s with the bird?” Vincent asked.
“Ina?” Zibel’s voice grew louder. “You down there?”
So much for stealth. I grabbed Vincent by the hand and ran headfirst into the bush. Vincent stumbled at first, but quickly followed, helping me once or twice when my own loose boots threatened to do me in. Zibel’s voice thankfully faded, but Fechin chased us into the woods, continuing to scream bird threats at me with each passing step outside of the homestead boundaries.
When I felt one thousand percent sure that Zibel wasn’t coming, I stopped in my tracks and glared up at Fechin. “Go on!” I told him. “Tell Guntram I’m heading for Waldo Lake.”
Fechin gave one final caw of defiance, then flung himself upward, heading east.
Vincent watched me in awe. “You talk to ravens now?”
“No,” I said, stooping over to tie my stupid boots. “But he understands me, and that’s important.”
“Why?”
“Because he’ll bring backup.” I gave him a sly smile. “Isn’t that the first rule of law enforcement?”
Vincent grinned. “Yes, it is.”
CHAPTER 21
VINCENT INSISTED WE take his car, parked several miles away on a forest service road. I agreed, figuring that if Zibel, Darby, or Sipho came after me, they’d stake out the wisp channels. Still, that meant navigating curvy mountain roads, not always paved. It took us much longer than expected to get back on the main highway, only to veer off on another awfully maintained set of gravel roads. Coupled with pouring rain, the car could only inch along. As thunder rumbled seconds after lightning strikes, the building intensity of the storm sizzled up and down my pithways.
I grumbled as Vincent’s car bounced along. “We’ll never get there.”
“Just relax.” He adjusted a tight grip on the steering wheel. “We’ll get there soon enough, and this gives us some time to discuss strategy.”
“That’s easy,” I informed him. “I’m blasting this thing with lightning.”
Vincent frowned. “You tried that at Hills Creek. It didn’t get rid of the thing.”
“I just need one of the other shepherds to attack it with water at the same time.”
“You guarantee that will work?”
“Well, no,” I admitted. “I mean, no one’s ever gotten rid of a mishipeshu before. But it’s the only thing we haven’t tried.”
To my dismay, Vincent took his foot off the accelerator, slowing the car. “Ina, that sounds too risky. Aren’t you some sort of rookie in all this?”
My face burned. “What does that have to do with anything?”
Vincent answered by throwing the car in reverse, attempting to execute a 17-point turnaround on the narrow road. “You’re in over your head, Ina. You told the bird where to go. Assuming the others are more experienced than you, let them handle it.”
“They can’t!” I grabbed his wrist on the wheel and yanked. The car slid dangerously out of control. If Vincent hadn’t slammed on the brakes, we might have slipped off the road. As it was, we whiplashed like bobblehead dolls.
As the world stopped spinning, Vincent grabbed me by the arm. “Are you crazy?”
“No!” I tried to twist the door handle to let myself out, but Vincent noticed a split second before and deployed the locks first. “Let me out, you bastard!”
“Why? So you can kill yourself?”
I gathered air pith, preparing to blow the door off its hinges. “Because I’m the only shepherd that can wield lightning!”
Vincent’s face paled. “What?”
“You heard me!” I screamed. “I’m the weirdo! The lightning shepherd! No one knows why, and some of them think I should be bound because of it.” I knew I wasn’t making any sense to Vincent, but I kept going anyway. “I don’t care if Tabitha makes her case to the Oracle after this or not. I refuse to sit by like a scared child when I can banish this thing!”
With nothing left to rant about, I heaved, in and out, rain dropping like bullets on the hood. Vincent said nothing for a beat, then threw the car back into drive. I thought for sure he would drive us away, but instead, he headed deeper into the forest.
Toward Waldo Lake.
Air pith straining at my fingertips, I grabbed onto my air charm, releasing most of it harmlessly for later use. A stray breeze did escape, though, and whistled through Vincent’s ebony locks.
Vincent wore an unreadable expression as he scanned the few feet ahead of the vehicle. I wanted to be smooth, ask him nicely what changed his mind, but as usual, my words didn’t take the delicate approach.
“What? You okay with me dying now?”
“Of course not,” Vincent snapped. “Unlike you, I respond to reason.”
I folded my arms. “Oh, so I was unreasonable before?”
Vincent snorted. “‘Unreasonable’ doesn’t begin to describe you. You’re cranky, inflexible, reckless—”
“Is this how you pick up chicks? How’s your track record with that, by the way?”
A smile tugged at Vincent’s lips. “I guess I suck at flattering beautiful nature wizards.”
I hated how his grin caused me to blush. “Yeah, well,” I muttered, “tell me when you meet one.”
A silence fell over us. Well, silence was a relative term given the weather. The storm raged so violently, it shook the very trees around us. Vincent had to swerve to avoid branches falling in our path. I didn’t think the car would climb over one that we hit, but Vincent somehow got us through, jouncing all the way.
A sign for a day-use recreation area for the lake came up ahead. We bumped into the parking lot. There was only one other car in the otherwise empty lot, still too early in the season for many weekday visitors. Vincent killed the engine, and we both exited his car. Harnessing water pith, I drew a triangle with waves to keep me dry. Vincent produced a plastic poncho from his car and threw it over himself before walking with me down to the shore.
Despite the intensity of the storm, we couldn’t actually view its full fury until we broke out of the pines. There, in the sky above the open lake, charcoal clouds swirled. Thick like smoke, they threatened to envelope everything, only the lightning strikes from their depths providing any illumination.
In between flashes, a tidal wave rose in the middle of the lake, heading in the opposite direction from us. Vincent sucked in a hard breath at the unnatural phenomenon, but my heart soared. The others had beaten me here.
We were witnessing the beginnings of a water banishment by three shepherds.
Vincent’s next words prevented me from rushing out to them, though. He gasped. “Is that a boat?”
I followed his extended finger. A tandem canoe with a single rider in an orange hunting jacket frantically rowed away from the sprouting wall of water. The wave suddenly shot out of the lake like a geyser. The motion tipped the canoe over, spilling the man overboard.
“Dammit.” I kicked off my boots, drew a triangle over waves, and ran out on top of the water.
“Where are you going?” Vincent called after me.
I didn’t reply. He’d see soon enough. My bare feet bounced across the squishy surface. I sprinted as fast as I could toward that orange splotch, a difficult task given the torrent of water crashing back down into the lake. Huge arcs rippled outward, forcing me to execute some tipsy limb-waving to keep my own balance. The capsized boater couldn’t keep his head above water, and I watched in horror as he sank under the waves.
So much for the dry rescue. Holding my breath, I cut off pith flow to my soles and crashed with a flurry of bubbles into the water below. Needles of icy cold stabbed me from all sides. I drew a quick inner heat sigil to keep from cramping, then lit up my finger to search for my target. He may not have had the brains to wear a lifejacket, but at least I pinpointed his orange jacket sinking in the murky depths. He tried to swim upwards, but the dramatic shift of water pressure weighed him down. As it was, even I had to channel pith to force the water to move in tandem with my strokes so I c
ould reach him.
I tried wrapping my arms around the boater to lift him upward, but he fought me. I recognized the hysteria in his wide eyes and knew he’d never let me help him. I changed tactics, focusing my pith on the water directly beneath him. After drawing a series of Vs with a slash through it, he blasted upwards like a rocket. I swam behind in his wake.
Heads now above water, we both gasped, a dizzying series of lightning strikes flashing around us. I’d hoped fresh air would clear his brain, but he continued screaming like a cornered possum. At least the shepherds’ wall of water had disappeared, sending out strong concurrent circles of waves back to the lake’s banks. I used that energy to guide us back to dry land.
Vincent found me struggling to pull the ungrateful crybaby to shore. We both took him by an arm and drug him out of the waves. He whimpered in the wet sand as I stopped to catch my breath.
Vincent looked both relieved and outraged. “Dammit, Ina!” he shouted in my ear. “You know I hate it when you run off like that.”
But I already had my gaze back on the lake, and what I saw made me feel sick to my stomach. With the water geyser gone, the lightning clearly illuminated the roaring panther. It hissed and swept its claws, obviously chasing prey somewhere toward the opposite side. I couldn’t identify the others from this distance, but given the burst of water and fire here and there, I recognized a pattern of defensive maneuvers. Guntram and I had practiced something similar many times before; both of us would stay at different ends of a vaettur to distract it with smaller sigils. The idea was to keep the vaettur occupied until another shepherd could launch an attack. Two of them distracted the mishipeshu so the third one could execute a banishment sigil.
But that wouldn’t work. They’d already lifted up half the damn lake and brought it down on the mishipeshu’s head, and yet there it was, snarling like a housewife in a minivan who’d just been cut off in traffic. They could stab it with water all they wanted. They would fail.
They needed lightning.
I shrugged toward the sniveling boater. “Get Captain Ahab out of here. I’m joining the others.”
Vincent looked like he might try to stop me but settled on a deep sigh instead. In a quiet voice, he said, “Please be careful.”
I flashed what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “Of course. I’m the poster child for careful.”
Then I refocused water pith on my feet and dashed back across the water.
With a much calmer lake’s surface, I managed to run at near top speed toward the mishipeshu. The lightning sizzling in the environment made my whole body sing. I wished I could absorb it, but I couldn’t hold it for very long in my pithways. I needed to coordinate with a water banishment, and given his skill set, I bet they put Baot in charge of that.
So, naturally, I first came across a drenched Tabitha. She walked on the water like me, raising muck from the bottom of the lake and flinging it at the vaettur’s eyes to temporarily blind it. She nearly lobbed a refrigerator-sized blob at me before she recognized who it was.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded as she held the glob floating at her side, hands a flurry of earth sigils I couldn’t dream of drawing.
I ignored her righteous indignation. “Where’s Baot?”
She opened her mouth to reply, but then suddenly shifted her legs apart, looking like a slender sumo wrestler as she flung the muck up at the vaettur. The panther tore half of it apart with its claws, but the rest hit its yellow eye. It yowled in pain.
“You want to die, haggard, go right ahead.” Tabitha paused to drudge up even more lake sediment. “But don’t take any of us down with you.”
I dodged left, tracing a circular path toward the shepherd on the other side. A crushing wind gust came barreling at the mishipeshu, so the vaettur raised a barrier of water around itself as a shield. The water displacement nearly took me down as the lake dropped several feet, but I managed to stay upright and reach the second shepherd.
I knew I’d find Guntram, but still felt awful as he caught sight of me. His face echoed Vincent’s concern for just a second, but then settled on something more along the lines of “if this vaettur doesn’t kill you, I will.” He let loose a funnel of wind on top of the mishipeshu, causing it to stumble and slip partway into the lake, before rounding on me.
“Of all the foolhardy stunts you have pulled,” he began.
We didn’t have time for this. “Where’s Baot?”
“Get out of here, Ina!” He raised his hands to blow me away.
I shocked him by grabbing him by the shoulders. “It’s like the kappa lesson you taught me. We have to beat this thing with its own elements.”
He pushed my hands aside. “We’re executing a water banishment!”
“C’mon, Guntram! Not just water.” I pointed at the churning clouds above us, prickling with lightning. “The mishipeshu is both water and lightning based.”
Guntram snorted. “That’s ridiculous. Vaetturs are always mono-elemental. And lightning isn’t one of the true elements.”
My shoulders shook with barely controlled anger. “Then why does that stupid storm follow it around?”
Guntram sputtered into his beard but continued. “If it did control lightning, it would electrify us. It hasn’t ever even attempted such a maneuver.”
Before I could remind him how tough it was to absorb lightning pith from personal experience, the mishipeshu rounded on Guntram. The panther meant to take a swipe at my augur, but when it caught sight of me, it changed course, letting out a shriek that pierced the sky. It’s the kind of cry someone gives when confronted with their worst fears, a PTSD reflex. It charged forward, a mass of furred muscle, bent on destruction.
And it all came for me.
Guntram began drawing a sigil before me, but lightning manifests faster than any other element (because physics). Therefore, a hastily scribbled lightning banishment sigil struck the mishipeshu first.
If its screams before were on the loud side, nothing compared to the metallic scraping noise the panther made after that attack. The sound pierced straight through my eardrums and down my spine so that I could feel every nerve in my body. Guntram and I both hunched over, hands over our ears, as the panther collapsed into the water, bits of electricity sparking above it.
Once the vaettur had completely sunk underneath, Guntram turned to me, bemused. “That seemed effective.”
I threw my hands out in frustration. “You think? The problem is that lightning isn’t enough. The only other thing that affects it is water.”
Guntram’s bearded chin tucked into his neck as he processed this information. “Could a dual banishment really work?”
“Do you have a better plan?”
Still, Guntram resisted. “I don’t like it, Ina. I saw how the mishipeshu homed in on you. It’s been fighting with the rest of us, but it truly wants you dead.”
I mulled over that bit of information. “It’s the lightning,” I realized. “It knows I can really hurt it, even more than the rest of you. I’m the biggest threat.”
Across the distance, Tabitha cupped her hands around her mouth, using an air sigil to project her voice. “Incoming!”
Above us in the clouds, the storm whipped up into a higher frenzy, winds whistling as they intensified. The mishipeshu struggled to return to the water’s surface, its ebony head jutting upward.
Guntram gripped my arm so tightly, I thought it might snap off. “Baot’s somewhere below us in the lake. Find him and coordinate. We’ll keep it above the surface. But hurry!” He released me to draw an intricate air sigil, and a small wind funnel appeared at his side, growing larger with each rotation. “We won’t be able to hold it forever!”
Then the jerk pushed me over so that I plunged into the water back first.
It took me a few seconds to orient myself, but I created a finger flashlight and dove deeper into the water. Baot would likely be at the bottom of the lake, far away from the vaettur and absorbing an insane amount of water pit
h. He’d need to replenish his entire pithways’ supply after creating that first tidal wave, and then some, if he had a chance of taking out the cat.
I swam downward about a hundred feet. I wasn’t quite at the bottom of the lake, but hovering just above. No sign of Baot. Steering away from the flashes of light above, I searched for Baot until my lungs begged for air. I couldn’t hold out any longer. I rose to the surface for more oxygen.
I barely poked my head and inhaled before the mishipeshu caught a whiff of my scent. In slow-motion horror, it charged above the water toward me. If Guntram hadn’t smacked it down with a wind funnel twice its size, it probably would have reached me.
“STAY DOWN!” I heard Guntram scream at me before I dipped under again.
Completely resubmerged, I focused on the impossible: an underwater breathing sigil. If I didn’t figure out how to execute one, I’d be kitty kibble.
My mind desperately clung to Baot’s former tips. Let the water pith wash through you, wherever it flows, as if you’re part of the current.
I repeated this mantra over and over. I absorbed water into every capillary, shoving out all the other elements. My fire light fizzled out on my fingertip. That weird wobbly sensation covered everything, except my lungs. When it tried to seep in there, my body buckled, screaming for air. I would drown.
My logical mind fought back. Drown then! You either figure this out, or the mishipeshu kills you. What’s one type of death over another?
So I did the unnatural. I let the water in. I can’t say it burned because that would indicate fire pith, but more like someone had squeezed me full of an unholy substance. It coated my lungs all the way up into my brain, blurring my vision. The world blinked in and out of focus.
The underwater breathing sigil. I needed to draw it. But how? Was it Vs or Ss first? Where did I begin?
It didn’t matter. I was dying. My hands float in front of me.
Draw with the water.
I let my fingers meander, not overthinking my actions. My digits just flowed, controlled by that murky spot in my brain. I imagined myself as a doorway, water crashing through me. It eased my straining lungs, the extra water pith gathering in pithway spaces that I didn’t even know existed.