by Annie Bellet
“You want out of the cage?” he asked.
“Is that a trick question?” she asked back.
“No, but I suppose it is an obvious one. I could let you go. I don’t think you’d get very far though.” His eyes were a shade lighter brown than his hair; his smell was clean and woodsy, tinged with the scent of wolf. A hint of weariness in his gaze made Harper guess that he was a lot older than he looked.
“You could let me worry about that,” Harper said. Her heart sped up. He was fucking with her. She tried to remember that.
“Of course, if I let you go, I’ll be held responsible. The boss isn’t a very forgiving man, nor, I think, is our employer.” He sat back on his heels, his tone still conversational, but that sly look was getting more obvious by the second.
“Escape with me?” Harper suggested. This bastard was a real sadist, she decided. He was hurting her with the only thing she really wanted, damaging her with hope.
“No. I like my job, and I like living. You fuck up in this business, you get retired with flowers and an unmarked grave.” He shook his head. “But maybe I can get someone else to let you out. After that, whatever happens isn’t my problem. We catch you, we kill you, understand?”
It’s a trap, it’s a fucking trap, stop even thinking about this, her brain screamed at her. She shoved away the voice of reason. None of her choices were good, so she was going to choose the one that dangled freedom.
Harper licked her lips again. “Why would you help me?”
“I know who you are,” he said. “You’re XHarperX, right? I watched you win the StormMasters Cup. When you transfused a baneling?”
StarCraft. He was talking about a live stage tournament she’d won at the big Master Gamer’s League convention what felt like an entire lifetime ago. Before she’d known her friend Jade was running for her life. Before Samir.
“You’re a gamer?” she whispered, starting to believe, starting to really hope.
“We are legion,” he said with a solemn nod. “I’d hate to see you die here without at least a fighting chance.”
He glanced at the door and added, “And maybe being killed escaping is better. A better death than what that sorcerer plans for you.”
“What do I have to do?” Harper said.
“Play along,” he said. He rose and went to the door.
She heard him call out for someone, and another man, this one slightly shorter, only an inch or two taller than Harper herself, entered. The new man was packing a big, obvious gun on his hip and had a big knife sticking out of his combat boots. He looked like he wished he were Rambo. Harper sniffed the air, trying to determine his animal, but his scent was human through and through.
Fighting chance, that was what the gamer guard had promised. Human was better than shifter. Injured as she was, she’d have a hard time overpowering a flea, but damned if she wouldn’t rather tackle a human rather than a wolf or bear any day.
“Girl has to shit,” Gamer Guy said with a disinterested shrug. “I want coffee. She’s your problem for the moment.”
“What you want me to do? Get her a bucket?” Human Guy whined, glaring over at Harper.
Gamer Guy handed him a key. “Take her to the bathroom, let her shit, lock her back up.”
“Why me?”
“Because I said so,” Gamer Guy said. He put a little growl into his voice, standing up taller and Harper sensed the wolf in him.
Human Guy apparently did also. “What if she tries something? We’re not supposed to let her out.”
“You scared of an injured little girl?”
“I really gotta go, please,” Harper chimed in.
“I ain’t scared. Just let her shit in her cage. Who cares?” Human Guy took the key and made a face.
“You’ll care when it stinks up everything and you have to spend the next twelve hours locked in here with her.” Gamer Guy went to the door.
Human Guy had already thought of that, apparently, because he was moving to the cage. “Least stand at the stairs in case she does something stupid?”
“No problem,” Gamer Guy said. He gave a slight nod to Harper behind Human guy’s back. His message was clear. Up to her now.
She faked being weak and hurt, which wasn’t that difficult or faked, as she unfolded herself from the cage and staggered to her feet. She clutched her gut and groaned, hoping she wasn’t hamming it up too hard.
Human Guy grabbed her upper arm, making her hiss in pain as his fingers dug into bruised flesh. He dragged her out the door and toward the bathroom she’d escaped from who knew how many hours before. She staggered some more, leaning heavily, and managed to spit up a little blood, letting it run down her chin.
“Jesus,” Human Guy muttered. He shoved her into the bathroom.
“Door?” she asked.
“Fat chance,” he said, and waved an arm at the toilet. “Go.”
“At least turn around?” She made big eyes at him, trying to look as weak and waifish as possible.
He looked around the sparsely decorated bathroom as though checking to see if she had a giant sword hidden in the wallpaper or something, and then turned around with a sigh, his body blocking the doorway.
Harper put the toilet seat down and took quick stock of her options. The toilet was as old as the cabin, heavy porcelain stained with time and use. It had chipped in some parts, showing what looked like iron underneath.
One chance. That was all she’d have.
Time’s up, let’s do this, she told herself.
She pulled the top of the toilet tank off and sprang at Human Guy, swinging the heavy porcelain and iron lid into the back of his head. He went down with a sickening thud.
The hallway beyond him was clear. No sign of Gamer Guy. She figured he was downstairs getting his alibi cup of coffee.
Ignoring the intense protest of her body, Harper dragged the human into the bathroom and closed the door. She took a risk and ran a little water in the sink, ignoring her reflection as she shoveled a handful into her mouth. The water was the best she’d ever tasted.
She bent and felt a thready pulse in Human Guy’s throat. Harper hesitated for a moment. She thought about using his knife, but realized all that blood would tip off the shifters in the house, giving things away too soon. She picked up the heavy lid again instead, and this time pushed it down onto his neck. He never woke up and barely even twitched. In the back of her mind, she knew Max would be frowning, but he was dead and not here. Things would never be the same and she couldn’t afford to be weak. Not ever again.
Besides, as she’d once told Jade, some people needed killing. This meant one less asshole coming after her and her friends.
Harper hit the light and went back to her old friend the window. It wasn’t quite dark outside; the horizon had the grayish tinge of false dawn about it. Dark enough that she might get away, she thought. She shoved the window open and had seriously painful déjà vu as she pushed herself out and landed on her old friend the snowy bush.
With another prayer to whatever benevolent forces might be listening, Harper shifted. Agony tore through her ass and hip. Bullet wounds took longer than a few hours to heal, apparently. She compartmentalized the shit out of this pain, too. Her human form would be too damned slow and too damned cold.
No wolves moved in the trees that she could see. Time to go.
Harper bolted through the faint path she saw toward where the sentries had been patrolling earlier, taking the faster route instead of the stealthier one. She wasn’t sure her hip was up to wading in untouched snow. She was almost to the trees, their dark branches reaching out like old friends, when she heard yelling behind her and then the howl of a wolf.
No looking back. Harper went for the trees. She left the snow with a leap, darting into bare brush at the edge of the woods. She had no idea where she was going and once in the darkness of the forest she could see almost nothing more than a few feet from her face. She ran on instinct, desperation, and adrenaline.
The f
irst wolf caught her in the side with a leap she saw just in time to roll away from. Blinding agony ripped through her hip and back as her wounds reopened. She spun and snarled at the circling wolf. A second joined it, its form a darker shadow, circling away from the first, surrounding her.
Harper resolved to go down fighting. Gamer Guy was right, she figured. Better to die this way than be used as bait. She also had the fleeting but satisfying thought that if she died in fox form, Samir’s stupid ruby vial, whatever it was, would be lost to the Veil inside her human jeans pocket forever.
I’d like to live, she thought, even as she resigned herself to being ripped apart. I wanted to see him die. I’m sorry, Max. I’ll explain when I see you. Soon.
She crouched, eyes watering from the pain, and snarled a final time.
The dark wolf sprang at her but never made it. Soft white light filled the woods around them and a blur of silver hit the wolf, throwing it into a tree where it collapsed and didn’t rise. The blur resolved itself into a unicorn.
Lir. Harper recognized this one. Jade had saved its life after the evil sorcerer Clyde tried to kill off the unicorns with Fomorian hounds. She knew as sure as gravity it was the same one.
The first wolf snarled and tried to go for a hamstring. He took a horn in his ribs as the unicorn spun, again a blur of speed and deadly power. The wolf limped back, side gushing blood, and howled. Answering howls filled the woods, echoing.
Lir turned to Harper and bent his foreleg, dropping into a kind of strange bow. Harper took the hint and shifted to human, stumbling toward him. His mane was strong under her bruised and acid-burned fingers, his fur thicker and softer than a chinchilla’s. She climbed onto his back with the grace of a sack of onions and he sprang away through the woods as the howling grew nearer.
Harper clung on as they ran. Branches that should have slapped her silly seemed to pull away from her at the last second, and she swore the trees were shifting out of the way. Glancing back, the woods were thick and dark behind them, looking impassable for something as large as a unicorn.
“I love magic,” Harper murmured. Her grip was failing her, her mind trying to run away to a nice dark place where there wasn’t so much pain. The unicorn had the smoothest gait of anything she’d ever ridden, but there was still enough up and down movement to make her want to vomit as she felt every bruise, every bullet hole, and every cut she’d ever gotten in her life, in either body.
Lir seemed to know where he was going, so Harper turned her entire waning attention to staying on his back. She was riding a unicorn. Max would have shit himself with jealousy. They crossed a stream as daylight turned the woods from black to grey and white. They reached a clearing where a massive oak stretched welcoming branches toward the weak winter sun, and the unicorn stopped abruptly. Harper lost her grip and slid from his back. She lay where she’d fallen, unsure she’d ever be able to rise again. The snow felt soothing on her skin.
A huge white tiger emerged from the woods and turned into a tall blond Viking-looking dude as he ran toward her.
Alek. Harper was sure she’d never been so excited to see anyone in her life. He was alive. Then the druid, Yosemite, his flame-red hair curling around his face and his eyes bright with green flame, emerged from the woods behind Alek and bowed to the unicorn.
“Wolves. Samir,” she said, trying to get her brain and her mouth to coordinate into a proper warning. “Chasing us.”
“Harper, shh,” Alek said, pulling her into his arms as carefully as he could. “You are safe now. I have you.”
She looked up at him, his eyes pale as the winter sky, his cheeks lined with worry and white-blond stubble. He was absolutely the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in her life.
“Now I know how Jade always feels,” she murmured as she passed the fuck out.
Noah brought me three books and a bonafide scroll. He also gave me a notepad and a box of pens and pencils.
“These are reproductions, so don’t worry about touching the pages, no matter how old they seem,” Noah said.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the books and putting them onto the desk.
“Good luck,” he said. Then he left with a half-smile playing around his lips.
I tried not to think about what that meant. Either he approved of what I was trying to do, or he thought I was crazy and was just handing over things to keep me from picking more fights with Kira. Like giving the rowdy kid a coloring book and some crayons to distract her.
Only my crayons could maybe do magic. I shrugged off worrying about the vampire’s motivations and got to work at the small desk.
One of the books was a thick tome bound with red leather and closed with three brass clasps. It looked like a proper spell book, so I started with it first. It was written in Latin, with some of the spells in older languages, variants of Coptic and Greek. I turned the pages carefully, almost wishing I had gloves, despite what the Archivist had said. The spells in this book were complex, rituals for harvest or dealing with spirits, though I found two that might help us see the invisible. Both required a full moon and specially prepared garments. I set that book aside.
My wizarding was off to grand start. Sorcery was so much easier. This material components and casting time stuff was bullshit.
The next book I picked up was a slender volume with the title Triewe Lacnunga. A grammatically suspect Anglo-Saxon title that meant roughly “True Remedies.” I was guessing the title had come after the book itself, though the text was mostly in Anglo-Saxon, with a few of the spells in Latin. I paged through the book quickly. These spells were far simpler, mostly based in herbs with basic invocations. Tearing up a piece of notepaper, I made bookmarks and marked off a couple promising spells. One was very simple, dealing with making light, and I figured I could use it as a practice spell. I had no clue if I could make magic work even with real spells, after all. Going from zero to seeing invisibility was probably a mistake.
Not that I had time to give myself a true crash course in working this kind of magic. Even with spells and ingredients and everything else right, I was pretty sure it took witches and other human magic users years or more to be able to master gathering power and executing these spells. It had taken a full coven just to flood my shop with bugs, for example. My only hope was that since I was used to bending power to my will, and totally comfortable with the idea of magic itself, that I could skip the whole “years of study” thing.
I didn’t have years. My friends didn’t have years. We might not even have days.
The third book had a stitched binding and carved wood panels for its case, painted with blue and red knot work. It was in this book I found a seeing-invisible-things spell that wasn’t too complex. I started writing down a wish list of ingredients and components. The spell wouldn’t last long; it would go for the length of time a candle burned or be broken at full sunset, whichever came first. The candle part was super unspecific. What candle? There wasn’t one involved in the spell. Fan-fucking-tastic.
I opened the ivory scroll case just because. I was pretty sure I was going to use the Celtic invisibility-seeing spell, but come on. Scroll case. Had to be opened just to satisfy my curiosity.
The scroll inside was made of white leather, scraped thin but still soft and flexible. It was beautifully illuminated with bright patterns in red, purple, and gold around the edges. The incantation was simple enough, and in more or less modern English. I murmured the words aloud, not quite saying all of them. There was a rhythm in the phrases, a cadence that I could feel forming an arcane pattern. Definitely real magic here.
I wrote down the ingredients listed on the scroll in the short paragraph of instruction before the spell proper. This one also would be broken at sunset and had to be cast in daylight under an open sky, and would apparently only work under said sky. I was pretty sure open sky meant just not indoors, but the scroll wasn’t exactly super specific.
“Noah,” I said aloud. “I have a shopping list for you.”
&nbs
p; He opened the door less than a minute later.
“What time is it?” I asked him.
“Just past ten,” he said, taking the list I handed him.
“Can you get this stuff for me? And I need somewhere to try out the practice spell.” I put on my best “don’t kill me” smile.
Noah’s silver eyes narrowed as he glanced over my list and he sighed, the hush of air leaving his mouth totally incongruous with the whole not-breathing thing.
“Come with me,” he said.
I ended up in the large loading dock and garage area, with an audience. Noah brought me the things I needed to try the simple light spell. He was followed by Kira, the twins, Jaq, and Salazar.
The ingredients, I wanted. The others I could have lived without. I was too stubborn to order them to leave, so I took my things and the spell book and set up away from the RV.
“What is she doing?” Cora asked as I drew a rough circle with a piece of natural chalk.
“Casting a spell?” Alma answered, her voice pitching up at the end into a question.
“She’s figuring out if she can do magic, so that I can maybe find a way for us to see invisible shit,” I said. I was proud of myself. I’d only sounded annoyed, not homicidal.
“Could be useful,” Kira said, grudgingly. She ruined it by adding, “If you can actually do it.”
“Stand back,” I said, glaring at the peanut gallery. Odds were the worst that could happen was nothing at all, but if I had to deal with an audience, they could at least not be crowding me.
I finished the circle and got the four red candles, placing them at compass points. The spell didn’t specify if the points had to be actual compass points, so I just tried to make them equidistant. I lit the candles with a strike-anywhere match after stepping into the circle. In the middle of the circle were a gourd and three bowls of herbs and spices. Cinnamon, clove, and dried basil.
“She casting a spell or making pie?” Kira muttered.
I continued ignoring her and picked up the wooden Athame, a ceremonial kind of knife that had a thin maple blade and ebony handle. Then I sat cross-legged in the center and started murmuring the incantation. Going clockwise, or sunward as the spell called it, I sprinkled the dull blade with cinnamon, then clove, then basil. Uttering the words of the spell, focusing all my will and not just a little desperate hope into it, I plunged the knife into the gourd. I lifted the blade out in a smooth motion and gripped it in my left hand, saying the final word of the spell.