Winterfall

by John Conroe

  “You’re not a witch. How would you know what he needs?” Isabelle asked, more curious than accusatory.

  “Just because I can’t actually perform the Craft doesn't mean I don’t know a lot about it. I’ve had some really good teachers,” Mack said.

  “Like who?” a new voice asked. Ryanne had approached from behind him.

  “Please… I room with Declan. We practically live at his aunt’s most weekends, and I’ve had lots of conversations with your fellow witches. Anyway, you asked, I told,” Mack said, directing his final sentence to Lydia, Chris, and Tanya.

  “And we hear. Anything else?” Tanya asked.

  “Yeah, you need to let the Water witches use that seed solution. They can get it on the zombie things without wasting a drop,” Mack said, nodding at Ryanne and Leah.

  “Hell yeah!” Leah said. She shoved her pendulum at Isabelle and rubbed her hands together. “Let’s melt these bitches.”

  Chris and Tanya looked at her, bemused, then turned back to Mack.

  “We had a similar thought. Okay, let’s do this,” Tanya said, taking the seed solution and pouring a portion into a coffee cup, which she handed to Ryanne. She poured another amount into a red plastic party cup and handed it to Leah.

  “Okay, you two head into position. Ryanne—west, Leah—east,” Tanya said. “We’ll go when the rest of the witches get here. Mack, you want to go with Ryanne?”

  He nodded and took the old-school walkie talkie that Chris handed him. Then, with a glance at the Irish Water witch, he turned and began walking toward the west flank.

  She caught up to him in a couple of steps and they were both silent for a time. “So. You were on Fairie, were you?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “What’s it like?” she asked.

  “It’s very earth-like in some ways and very not in others. The sun is reddish. Gravity is similar. More than one moon. Trees look a little different but there are some familiar kinds, like pine and spruce. And lots of weird Fairie shit, like clouds of tinks and pucks, those nasty ape-like goblins, and some animals that died out on this planet a long time ago. Velociraptors. Can you believe it? We saw a pack of velociraptors,” he said.

  “Yer damned lucky to have experienced that,” she said.

  “I guess. Part of the time it didn’t feel very lucky. But I was pretty sure Declan would come and find us,” Mack said.

  “Kid’s been busy since I left Arcane,” she said.

  “Yeah, no shit. But stuff just kind of happens around him. Like he’s a foci for the universe or something,” Mack said.

  “And he was even more powerful over there, was he?” she asked, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear. She really was extremely pretty.

  “Yes. It hit him as soon as we landed on the planet. He had to be really, really careful,” he said.

  “Careful? Of what? He could spend power like it was water. What did he have to be careful of?” she asked.

  “Let’s say you got bit by a radioactive spider and got super strong. Wouldn’t you have to learn how to do day-to-day things all over again? Open doors without breaking the knob or tearing the door off? You know, not standing up too fast or you put your head right through the ceiling?” he asked. “It was like that.”

  “So he had to be careful with spells. Big deal,” she said.

  “Okay, let’s try this. You drink half a bottle of Jameson’s then try and handle all the crystal in a china shop with your new superhuman strength.”

  “First of all, I’m Irish. We all drink half a bottle of Jameson’s for breakfast,” she smirked, obviously joking. “But you’re saying it made him drunk, did it?”

  “In a very real way, yes. It also made him kind of a little crazy. And he couldn’t get away from it. You get drunk, you put the liquor down and sleep it off. This doesn’t sleep off. There is no sobering up. You’re sloshed, twenty-four-seven. For the whole trip.”

  “And then he laid claim to some land or some rot?” she asked, eyes bright.

  “Not some land. A third of the continent,” he said. “It was some kind of bonding thing. Like the land itself is aware. Like it was looking for a powerful witch to make a deal with,” he said.

  “What kind of deal are ye talking about?” she asked.

  “I don’t really know. He made it to get the juice to fight the queens, but then we jumped the hell outta there,” he said.

  “Seems like the land got a bit of the sharp end of the stick on that one,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’ve been wondering about that as well,” he said. She looked at him like she wanted him to keep talking. Instead, he waved around them. “Looks like we’re here.”

  She looked where he was indicating, seeing the row of tanks and armored personnel carriers. There were gun nests dug in between every third tank, but the troops had automatic grenade launchers instead of machine guns. The soldiers were all looking at them. Mack suddenly felt awkward, but Ryanne just marched up to the most obvious-looking officer.

  “We’re here if any of those things break out this way,” she said, holding up the mug like it was the biggest gun on the line. Knowing men, and soldiers in particular, he expected them to laugh them off, ignore her or order them off the line, or make some stupid comment in Chinese about how pretty she was. Instead, the officer gave her a bow and then turned and tore into his men, sending a couple scurrying up and down the line. “We take your direction,” the officer said slowly.

  “Brilliant. Hopefully those things will just stay inside the forest and die when Chris and Tanya kick their bloody fecking asses,” she said.

  “They’re pretty nasty? The zombie things?” Mack asked.

  “You can’t freaking kill them ya dummy. Have to burn them to ash, ya do. Bullets either bounce off or just pass through them. They heal all wounds, like even a decapitated head, and they’re fast and super strong, ya know. Before you blokes showed up with those fierce seeds, we had to burn the lot of them. They killed a lot of soldiers and some witches too,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, seeing she was truly horrified by the things.

  That’s when one of the monsters rushed out of the jungle and jumped the crater. The soldiers started yelling and Mack turned to see a massive dark thing splash down into the burning oil three quarters of the way across.

  Faster than he would have believed possible, it rushed out of the pit, covered in oil and still burning. Two soldiers stepped up out of their foxhole and fired a round each from their grenade launchers. One missed his shot completely, the other one landing a grenade at the thing’s feet. The explosion blew out the fire on it but did nothing to slow it down. It chopped a backhanded blow that cut one soldier’s head right off his body and then brought its arm down on the other one’s soldier, slicing his arm clean off.

  Machine gun fire started but the bullets just bounced off it, the stray rounds pinging off tank armor and blasting dirt off the ground. Mack grabbed Ryanne by the back of her jeans and pulled the witch behind the fender of an armored personnel carrier. Two rounds spanged off the carrier’s steel hide right where they had been standing.

  “Can you get the water on it?” Mack asked, popping his head out to keep track of the thing. She didn’t respond. He glanced her way, saw the shock in her eyes, and snapped his fingers in her face. “Ryanne! The solution—you have to use it,” he said, getting right up in her face.

  She shoved him away in reflex, but he’d achieved his effect. She focused on him, then the mug. He looked out again. The zombie had a soldier over its head with both arms, then it pulled the man down, splitting him on its diamond-sharp head.

  He reached over and pulled her out next to him. She was breathing fast and shaking, but she’d started to mumble under her breath. Reaching into his shirt, he pulled out an amulet that wasn’t one of Declan’s. It was something he’d traded Erika’s sister, Britta, for. Made of twigs and bound with grape vines, it was shaped like a star. Snapping its cord, he jammed it against Ryanne�
�s bare left arm.

  She jolted with shock, but her words firmed up and her finger made a flicker gesture with authority. A ball of solution shot from the mug and rocketed at the monster. The thing turned, somehow sensing the liquid missile, but even its greater-than-human speed couldn’t save it. Ryanne’s water bomb went where her finger pointed and her finger was locked on the crystal creature’s body like a radar. The sphere of fluid splashed the thing and that was all she wrote. It screeched once, the sound cut off as the head, neck, and chest turned to black oil, collapsing and running down the torso. Mack had seen Declan melt down a wax figure once with a gesture. This was similar, but faster, the reaction unbelievably quick.

  In seconds it was gone, just a puddle of midnight goo on the ground.

  “You have any left?” Mack asked, watching the jungle across the crater.

  “A couple of drops, that’s all,” Ryanne said. She was touching the personnel carrier’s front, her fingers dancing over the copper smear where a bullet had bounced off.

  She looked up at him. “I’m thinking you’ve saved me a perforation or two,” she said.

  “Might of hit either of us… or both,” he said, still watching the woods, aware that she was watching him.

  “We always wondered about you and your sister, we did. Not witches, not weres, no magic at all. Why did he hang around you so? But you’re good at this, aren’t you?”she asked.

  “This?” he asked.

  “Fighting these fecking shite gobs,” she said, empty hand waving around for emphasis. “Yer savagely sound about it too.”

  “Not sure what that is but yeah, we have some experience with big bad nasties,” he said. “No magic though.”

  “But what was that thing? Looks like something the Boklund girls would wrap together,” she said, pointing at the wooden star.

  “I paid Britta to make it. It gathers energy and stores it. I thought you might need a boost,” he said.

  “A boost? A boost, he says,” she said, turning to a Chinese soldier who definitely didn’t understand her words. “Ye about blasted me out of my knickers.”

  He couldn’t stop the smile that formed all on its own. “Now that would be a sight,” he said.

  She waved him off, but he caught a smile flickering across her face. His radio crackled and Lydia’s voice came through. “Watch out, Mack. One was headed your way. Over.”

  “Now you tell us?” he questioned, making his eyes widen in disbelief for his partner’s benefit. She snorted.

  “Did you see it? Over.”

  “Ryanne melted it into pudding,” he said into the radio. “Over.”

  “Well good on ya then,” the little vampire said in a perfect Irish accent. “Over.”

  It wasn’t that funny, and there were dead soldiers lying within yards of them, but they both laughed, at least a little. Then they saw a group of witches running toward them.

  “We’ve got more zombicide,” Erika said as the group got closer. “Michele and a couple of Earth witches got the seeds to grow and that girl from Fairie said the new leaves would work as well. What happened here?”

  They pointed at the bodies and the puddle of goop, watching the witches figure out the story for themselves.

  After that, it was about four hours of total boredom while they listened to the chatter on the radios as the God Hammer and Night Angel visited their wrath on the last holdouts. Then it was done and every single witch took a try at zombie detection, but they were all gone.

  Chapter 30

  Chris

  Rome, Italy

  Twenty-one hours after the battle ended, we were back in Italy. Declan had woken up after about five hours of bed coma and started trying to contact his AI. When he got nowhere, he flipped out a bit, getting up in my face till Stacia and Mack pulled him back. I didn’t blame him. He was still exhausted and he looked like hell; like he’d just broken a fever or something. He almost immediately apologized and then listened as Mack and Chet gave him their collective ideas for contacting Omega.

  The main point that caught his attention was getting into the same room with one of Omega’s quantum processors. They had made dozens of them, salting them around the planet for safety and redundancy. Turns out there was one in downtown Rome, stored under a family-owned sandwich shop in Trastevere.

  So an entire convoy of cars descended on this little hip neighborhood and took over the whole deli. Mack, his sister, nine of the original Arcane witches, Declan, Stacia, myself, Tanya, Chet, and a smattering of Deckert’s people, escorted by Italian authorities and military.

  People stopped, pointed, and filmed with their cell phones. Declan was so crazed with worry, he never even noticed. He went straight to the counter, handed the older mama behind the register a little plastic card from his wallet, and watched her face go white. Then she was leading the whole posse downstairs and through a door marked employees only, down a hall, and then down more stairs into yet another sub-basement. There she stopped at a very modern steel door with a set of extremely high-tech biometric scanners in the place I would have expected a keypad to be.

  The door opened as soon as Declan approached it.

  “Behavior ID?” Chet asked.

  “Yeah, self-contained microcomputer. It runs its own algorithm,” Declan said.

  “Set to just you?” Chet asked.

  “Hmmm,” Declan said, not really answering. Chet shot me a look, then glanced meaningfully at Stacia and Mack, who were watching as Declan ducked around the still-opening door.

  “Makes sense,” Tanya said, voice normal. Stacia would hear even a whisper, but she didn’t know what my vampire was telling me outside of her words. Omega’s doors would likely open only to a very select few people, and all of them were probably right here and most of them probably didn’t know it.

  We followed Chet through the door and found an ancient room with a very modern industrial steel table, heavy duty backup batteries, and some heavy duty power cables running to a stainless steel cube on the table. The cube was two feet to a side.

  Declan had both hands on the cube and his eyes were closed in concentration.

  After fifteen seconds, he opened his eyes, blew out his breath, and shifted his hands around.

  Mack was watching his roommate with his head slightly tilted. “He’s there but you can’t talk to him?” he asked.

  “I should be able to reach him,” Declan said.

  “He’s fighting for his life. You’re gonna need a way to boost into him,” Mack said, waving at the nine wide-eyed witches.

  “I don’t know, Mack. I just don’t know,” Declan said, glancing at the girls then back at Omega’s cube.

  Mack turned and looked us meaningfully.

  Tanya cleared her throat and, when all eyes were on her, she smile apologetically at Stacia and then spoke. “Caeco will be arriving in Fiumicino airport in about an hour. I took the liberty of bringing her over.”

  “Why?” Stacia asked, head snapping around, eyes already starting to yellow.

  “Because I told them about the nanos,” Mack said.

  “Say what?” Stacia asked.

  “Caeco has nanites. Declan got some in him one time, right D?” Mack asked.

  “Back when we were in the silo with Toni,” Declan said, looking thoughtful.

  “And they helped you connect with computers and shit before they died out, right?” Mack pressed.