I decided to take my old Honda instead of one of the business’s pickups. Maybe I could be a little less conspicuous.
I swung by my house on the way. My old workshop behind the cottage could still be used to mix spells, but I had moved all my ingredients to the new shop in my Georgetown house. My grimoires were also there.
A wrecker was in the process of towing the Mercedes away when I drove up to my house. The interior of the car was a lovely shade of pink that really didn’t go with the black exterior.
Once I got into my workshop, I pulled out both my grimoire and Carolyn’s. I had inherited the book along with the house when she died. The problem with her book was that my magic wouldn’t execute some of the Human witch spells. But all of the potions, tonics, tinctures, poultices, and poisons did work.
Carolyn had been my one real friend in the Earth realm. We met about the time I bought the land for the nursery. Twenty years later, she invited me to share her house in Georgetown. She left me the house and a small trust fund to take care of the place when she died. Human lives were so short.
Quickly searching for something that could break wards, I came across a very nasty and loud spell that worked in conjunction with a potion. I had to mix two different solutions, then combine them at the ward while chanting the spell. The only problem was, I couldn’t figure out from the description if the potion would simply dissolve the ward or take out a city block in an explosion.
Moving along, I found an elven rune-based spell. I wasn’t sure if my magic was strong enough to take out the ward. When I said I wasn’t a mage, I was telling the truth. I was a witch, with the magic any Elf had, plus a little more in some areas. I was a good alchemist, and I was strong in setting wards. I didn’t have any experience at all in breaking them.
It might be a stretch to say Isabella had saved my life in that alley. I was fairly confident I could have escaped the Weres, but the fact remained that she had put herself on the line for me. I called Isabella back. To my relief, she answered.
“Where is the wizard who trapped you?” I asked. “Have you seen him?”
“Oh, yes. He’s standing right outside the garden. He said that all I have to do is give him the artifact and he’ll let me go.”
“Do you have it?”
“No. I told him that, but he doesn’t believe me. He thinks I know where it is.”
“Would you be upset if I killed him?” I asked. I knew the wards would dissolve if the mage who cast them died.
“Not at all. I planned to do that at my earliest opportunity, but if you take care of the issue, I won’t object. I’ve been here all night, and I’m starting to get hungry.”
Stuffing my bow and quiver into my bag, I ran out to my car. I normally didn’t carry the bow, since the DC authorities frowned on hunting in the city. But I didn’t want to get in a magic battle with a real mage, and I expected an objection if I tried to get within sword range.
It took me some time to find a parking place near the Smithsonian Castle. Searching for a parking space was the city’s most popular participation sport.
There were only three outside entrances to the garden, plus the one from inside the building. All three had wooden barricades erected across the sidewalk with “Garden Closed” signs on them. I circled around until I saw a man standing by one of them, then I called Isabella. I was a hundred yards away, and he didn’t even notice me.
“Describe this mage who has you trapped,” I said.
“Young, mid-thirties, dark hair. He’s wearing blue jeans and a lighter blue shirt.”
“Hazel eyes? Small scar over his left eyebrow?”
“I have no idea. I never got that close. He has a pistol.”
I always forgot how poor Human eyesight was. Assuming Isabella was some kind of Human.
I walked up to the man and asked, “Are you holding someone against their will?” That close, I could feel his magic. He was a mage, and there was little chance I could break his ward, especially if he decided to stop me.
He whirled about, keeping one hand in the pocket of his light jacket. It was almost ninety degrees. No one needed a jacket.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I understand that you’re holding someone prisoner in there.”
Pulling a pistol out of his pocket, he said, “You should mind your own business. Get the hell out of here.”
That didn’t sound very friendly, but I figured I had tried. That was the second time someone had pulled a gun on me that morning, and it irritated the hell out of me.
I did what he told me, walking away and crossing the mall to the other side. About two-thirds of the way to the street, I turned and looked back. There wasn’t anyone close either to me or to the wizard. I knelt down next to my bag and slid the bow and an arrow out onto the ground. Taking a deep breath, I snatched them up, nocked the arrow, drew and loosed.
He jerked, arched his back, and fell forward.
“Isabella,” I said into the phone, “run. Use the Independence Avenue exit and turn left.”
I shoved the bow back into my bag, slung it over my shoulder, and walked away. I wondered if Agent Torbert would recognize an Elven arrow.
Circling around to Independence Avenue, I called Isabella again. We met on the street and hurried the three blocks to my car.
Isabella looked tired, and I remembered her saying she was hungry. “So,” I asked as we drove away, “how did that happen?”
“He left a message at my hotel asking me to meet him. I got there, and didn’t find anyone, but I couldn’t leave. I tried all night, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get out. He showed up this morning at dawn and tried to get me to tell him where the statue is.”
“Statue? You said you were looking for an artifact.”
“It’s a small statue.”
A thought occurred to me. “Was that Abner Wilcox?”
She shook her head. “No, why? Where did you hear that name?”
“Who was it?”
“He said his name was Georges Tremblay. He said he was partners with Carleton Weber, the man who brought the artifact to DC.”
More names, disconnected to anything. I had all kinds of questions running around my head. Who was Abner Wilcox, and why did he leave his card at my house? How did he and the Werewolves know where I lived? How did Isabella, or any of them, find me in the first place? Why were the Werewolves following me around? Who was the woman sitting next to me?
Danu merde, I had just killed a man. One question bubbled out of my mouth. “How did you know I’m an Elf?”
“I smelled you at the nightclub. I have met Elves before. There’s a community of them in Colorado. Humans don’t smell like flowers, no matter how much perfume they wear.”
I stopped the car at a grocery store and we both went in. I bought fresh fruit, vegetables, and fish. She bought beef.
When we got to the nursery, I found my hibachi and started a fire in it. Cortez built the fire up and threw a huge steak on the grill. A minute later, she flipped it, and as soon as that side seared, she pulled it off onto a platter, sat down at my table, and demolished it. I cooked my small fish longer than she cooked a steak two inches thick. Cats are obligate carnivores, so I decided I shouldn’t have been surprised.
She accepted a cup of coffee and watched me as I ate my meal.
“I killed a man for you this morning. I think you owe me an explanation about this whole affair,” I said.
Cortez regarded me in silence, then gave a deep sigh. “I asked you to trust me, and you did. I guess the least I can do is return the favor.”
She proceeded to tell me a tale that most Humans on Earth would never believe, but it wasn’t the most fantastic story I’d ever heard. I personally had seen more incredible things during my trip through one hundred eighty realms with Alaric.
Over a thousand years before, the god Acan attempted to seduce Ixchel, goddess of midwifery and war, called the Rainbow Goddess and the Jaguar Goddess. When she rejected him,
he crafted a statue of a jaguar, cast with magic out of pure gold, and gave it to a great Mayan mage named Yash Kook Mo. The mage installed the statue in a secret room in the great temple at Tikal in Yucatan, and through an elaborate ritual involving human sacrifice summoned Ixchel. Acan knew that Ixchel couldn’t refuse to bed one who summoned her, and that was his revenge. But there was a glitch. Magic always seeks a balance. When Ixchel appeared, so did the archdemon Camazotz, the death bat. Legend told that the Mayan practice of human sacrifice started as payment for Camazotz giving fire to the Maya.
In a battle that lasted for days, Yash Kook Mo defeated the demon and banished him. As a reward, Ixchel mated with him and bore him a son, then parted the veils and returned to her home. When the son grew up and became king, he carried out the ritual and called Ixchel as his father had commanded. Again, Camazotz was also called, and when the mage king defeated the demon, Ixchel mated with him and bore him a son.
“She mated with her son,” I said.
“Yes,” Isabella said, disgust showing on her face. “There’s a certain ick factor to the whole story. Incest, Human sacrifice, murder—all the good stuff. I’ve studied tales of the gods, and they don’t seem to have the same sense of morality as mortals.”
For hundreds of years, this pattern continued, and the Mayans prospered under the rule of strong mage kings. Then Tikal was defeated in battle by the rival city-state of Palenque. The great mage king Janaab Pakal took the jaguar statue back to Palenque along with the secret of the ritual and the head of the Tikal king.
But when Janaab performed the ritual and called Ixchel and Camazotz, Ixchel was displeased that Janaab had killed her son and lover. She refused to help Janaab battle Camazotz, the demon was victorious, and Janaab was slain. Ixchel then mated with Camazotz but spited him by producing a daughter instead of a son.
Without the blessings of a great mage king, Mayan civilization declined. Camazotz demanded more and more sacrifices, and then called a drought upon Yucatan. The Aztecs and other barbarians soon reduced the Mayans to a subjugated people.
“Carleton Weber found the secret room beneath the Palenque temple and smuggled the statue out of Mexico,” Isabella said. “I knew something had happened there, but I arrived too late. I followed him here to DC, where he had put the statue up for auction on the internet. When I finally tracked him down, he was dead, his home ransacked, and there was no sign of the statue.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t feel the statue. That’s why you needed an Elf.”
Isabella blushed and ducked her head. When she looked back up at me, she said, “I can’t feel the statue. What I can feel is that room in Palenque. It hasn’t changed in twelve hundred years. I didn’t even know I could feel it until Weber opened the room and took the statue.”
My mind sort of fogged as I tried to sort that out. Elves are exceptionally long-lived, commonly living a thousand years, so a being living that long wasn’t what stunned me.
“You’re the daughter,” I blurted out.
“Yes, I’m Ixchel’s daughter.”
“The daughter of a Goddess and an Archdemon. A shape shifter. But you say you have no magic? You are magic.”
“Well, yes, I guess you might say so. I have abilities beyond shifting, but they aren’t magic, at least not in the way magic is usually defined. Do you consider your connection to plants and the earth magical?”
“No, of course not. But I use what some call Elven magic to shape plants and manipulate them.”
“And I have certain powers, but they don’t involve magic. I channel the Goddess’s will and power.”
“Ah, I see.” And I did. Isabella asked the Goddess to lend her power, but the Goddess could say no. That was different than magic, which bent the natural world to the magician’s will. But there was something Isabella didn’t say.
“You said that Ixchel is the Goddess of midwifery and war. What are your powers?”
She licked her lips, then said, “You don’t want to see them. I’ll just say that for the most part, shifting to my jaguar form allows me to handle most problems.”
I didn’t want to push on something she didn’t want to tell me, so I changed my line of questioning. If she didn’t want to talk about her inheritance from her mother, I couldn’t even imagine what she’d inherited from her father.
“You don’t shift like a Werecat,” I said.
Isabella shook her head. “No, I don’t have to go through all that. Weres tell me that changing is painful. I know that watching them change is painful. It takes two or three minutes, stretching and pulling, their bones and muscles rearranging into a completely different animal. But I don’t shift the way Weres do. It’s almost instantaneous, a morphing that takes less than thirty seconds. I don’t change mass, and my cat is far sleeker than my Human form.”
“In the alley that night,” I said, “I got the impression that your cat is larger than the Werecats I’ve known.”
“The only cats larger than a jaguar are lions and tigers,” Isabella said, without elaboration. Another dead-end line of questioning.
“So, you’re afraid some mage will use the statue to lift the veils and bring this Camazotz into our world?”
She shook her head. “Not really. I suppose it’s possible, but I’m the only one who knows the ritual to call Ixchel and Camazotz. And since I’m not a mage, performing the ritual would serve no purpose. Besides, eating human hearts isn’t my thing. A mage might use the statue’s power to summon other demons, I suppose, or create a portal to another realm. I don’t know enough about that type of magic to understand what’s involved.”
Isabella gazed out over the park next to the nursery. We could see a band of Pixies hunting a beetle through the flowers on the other side of the fence.
“No,” she finally said, “the problem is that the statue stores magic. Enough magic to breach the veils and reach all the way into the upper realms of the gods and archdemons, and its use involves blood magic. What I’m afraid of is giving that much power to someone who would spill blood. A novice mistake might blow a hole a mile deep and as wide as half of Maryland and Virginia. An experienced and canny mage could probably set himself up as a king. The fact is, it’s an artifact of the gods, and doesn’t belong in this reality.”
Chapter 4
While I had my reservations about working with Isabella, it was obvious that simply being associated with her, however tenuously, had made me a target. That being the case, having her to watch my back made sense.
On the other hand, I wasn’t crazy about having her in my house and making it a target, too. My Georgetown neighborhood was much too quiet and full of snoops and gossips to abide any more scenes such as the one with the Werewolves. But the cottage at the nursery had only one bedroom. I hadn’t built it to entertain guests.
“Are you planning on going back to your hotel?” I asked.
“That doesn’t sound like a very good idea, does it?” she replied. She surveyed the nursery, turning in her chair to look around. “This place is protected, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I have wards set, and a Fairy nest is established here. I was curious as to why they didn’t react to you. Normally they throw a fit when a paranormal attempts to enter the grounds.”
“I guess I’m not a paranormal,” Isabella said with a chuckle. “Would you mind if I stay here?”
“Well, I’m really not set up for company—” I started.
A smile spread on her face. “It’s summer, and I’d be quite comfortable sleeping in one of your oak trees, if you don’t mind. I’ll be discreet.”
An image of a jaguar lying on a tree branch came to mind. I wasn’t sure if the image came from a picture or maybe a TV show, or if it was something Isabella did.
“Yeah, sure. That will work.” I pointed to the tree closest to us, behind the cottage. “This one is probably the best. That’s a public park on the other side of the fence, and there are a lot of Pixies over there. Between the Pixies outside and the Fai
ries inside, I don’t worry about anyone sneaking up on me.”
“Thank you. Do you suppose I could talk you into a ride to the hotel so that I can get my things and check out?”
We drove down to the Willard, which was a stone’s throw from the White House. Obviously, Dr. Cortez wasn’t hurting for money, but it seemed a little strange to move from a five-star hotel into a tree.
I had never actually been inside the hotel before. The ornate lobby and plush carpeting covering the floors in the hallway leading to Isabella’s room were far beyond anything I had ever seen except in a movie. When I traveled, it was always a low-budget affair.
Her room was equally impressive, but her luggage—a duffle bag and two backpacks—showed hard use. I helped her carry them down to the lobby and stood gawking at my surroundings as she checked out.
Outside, while we waited for the valet to retrieve my car, I felt magic. Once that had been a rare occurrence in the Earth realm. Glancing around, I saw a large man standing on the portico above us. He had gray hair, a long gray beard, and he wore a dark suit. It didn’t take long to figure out that he was the source of the magic.
As soon as he noticed me looking at him, he moved toward us while raising his arms. I sketched a rune and spoke a Word. Isabella turned to face me, a frown on her face, then pivoted toward the object of my attention.
The mage’s power lashed out, lighting the air around Isabella and me in a glow anyone could see. Very showy and very sloppy. Humans near us gasped and backed away.
“What the hell?” Isabella gasped, then her eyes narrowed as she focused on the mage. She started to step in his direction, but I reached out and grabbed her arm.
“Stay here,” I said. “As long as you stay inside my ward, he can’t hurt us.”
The mage threw a second spell at us with a crash of thunder. People ran screaming in all directions.
“Are you sure?” Isabella shouted in my ear.
“Absolutely,” I said in a normal, conversational-level voice. Her eyes widened.
“I thought you said you aren’t a mage,” she said, her voice much softer.
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