We Walk in Darkness

by Bill Hiatt

  With my arms held securely in my kidnapper’s vicelike hands, all I could do was kick, but even making a decent kick seemed unlikely. Most capoeira kicks derived their force from momentum and weren’t normally executed while standing still. Also, I couldn’t get my footing as the Encantados dragged me over wet sand, making it hard to get much force into a standing kick, and any kick I made would be slowed by the water even if it had force behind it.

  Desperate, I pretended to pass out and went completely limp. Assuming these two were friends of Bisavó and didn’t want me to come to harm, I figured they’d have to stop and check me.

  Yeah, anyone who’d seen old movies would never have fallen for this move in a million years…but apparently the Encante didn’t have ready access to the Hollywood classics. One of them took one of my arms in each hand, and I realized just how big those hands were. The other bent close to look me in the face and was, I think, about to do the old peel-back-the-eyelid-to-stare-into-the-eye routine.

  Before he could, I went from limp back to struggling and gave him the strongest head butt I could manage. There wasn’t much distance between us, hence not much force, but with my arms held and my feet slipping around, it was the best I could have hoped for.

  The Encantado fell back a little, more from surprise than anything else, but that put him out of action for a couple seconds. I needed to make those seconds count. I couldn’t beat both of them under these circumstances.

  The other Encantado continued to grip my arms, but with less force, and there was a big difference between two guys each gripping one arm and one trying to manage both. Catching my captor by surprise, I tore my right arm free before he could tighten his grip. Then, finally able to exploit my speed, I hit him with a cotovelada, an elbow strike that would be better than a punch when we were still so close together. As surprised as his friend, he let go of my other arm, and I hit him with a telefone, simultaneous slaps to both ears that caused a sudden increase in air pressure inside his ear canals and disoriented him momentarily.

  My opponents were far more used to the water than I was. Moving the fight to the beach was my best bet, but, with my first target recovered and reaching for me, I had to act fast. On land I could have outrun him easily, but I wasn’t sure how fast I could run with my legs under water, so I dove in and swam as fast as I could until the water became too shallow. At that point I stood up and ran the rest of the way clumsily, but fast enough to do the job.

  By now, the situation on shore had changed in Tal’s favor. Bisavó had stopped fighting anyway. Looking more closely, I sensed Tal and Viviane’s magic around her, preventing her from trapping them in illusions again. Shar, Gordy, and Khalid were also free. Khalid was now so alert that he aimed an arrow at the Encantados.

  Turning, I noticed my would-be kidnappers were actually not pursuing with much enthusiasm.

  Bisavó noticed their half-hearted chase as well. “What are you doing?” she asked in Portuguese.

  “Thinking twice about tangling with o diabo there,” one of them answered. “You didn’t mention how much of a warrior he was.”

  “I didn’t know it until today,” Bisavó replied without any hint of apology in her tone.

  “Wait!” I interrupted, already angry with her and realizing there might be yet another reason for that feeling. “You planned this before today…before we had even met.”

  “I knew you were in great danger.” She was still unapologetic. “I always knew the need to take you to the Encante might arise.”

  “And you just pretended to think of the idea when we were talking. You always knew you would take me there no matter what,” I said bitterly. “You always knew you would take me there by force. Bisavó, you call me a man, but you treat me like a child.”

  Instead of responding to me, she turned her attention back to Tal. “You will allow me to take Lucas with me, or my people will come through the door I have opened and overwhelm you with their power!”

  “I’m sure you have friends and family who might answer your call, but your whole people?” asked Viviane skeptically. “There was never been a mass attack by the Encantado in all of recorded history.”

  “Nor of pessoas da sombra,” Bisavó replied. “Times change.”

  Turning to her friends, still wavering in the surf, she commanded, “Wrap them in illusion!”

  “Shar!” called Tal. “Why don’t you wade out a little way and help our new friends find their way back to the Encante?”

  With an emerald flash, Shar drew his sword and headed for the waves. I felt Bisavó’s allies try to trap him in illusion, but the sword protected him. When they realized he wasn’t vulnerable to their magic, they seamlessly shifted into dolphin form and swam like hell for the doorway. Shar followed, waited until they had fled, and then slashed his sword through the doorway, causing it to collapse in an emerald flash.

  “Lovers, not fighters,” observed Gordy and snickered.

  Thinking about what Bisavó had told me of the habits of her people, I realized he was probably right.

  “Tal,” Khalid said nervously, “the girl’s gone!”

  Every eye focused on where she had been. Khalid was right.

  Tal closed his eyes for a second. “Shar, Gordy, Khalid, she’s headed for the castle. She can’t get in, but the castle obviously throws a shadow, and if she stands in it, maybe she can reconnect with her people.”

  “We’re on it,” said Gordy, and then he and Shar trotted off in the direction of the castle, with Khalid flying above them, arrows ready.

  “This is your fault,” Tal pointed out to Bisavó. “She escaped while you were keeping us busy.”

  “She wouldn’t have escaped if she’d been dead,” Bisavó retorted.

  “It really doesn’t matter, does it?” Viviane asked tiredly. “They’ll bring her back, and then we can…”

  She stopped, and I figured she was about to say, “go home,” and then realized that I still couldn’t.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” I tried not to sound too pathetic. “I’m not leaving my family,” I added firmly, “and I’m not going somewhere I can’t have a real life.”

  Tal pondered for a minute. “I doubt the shadows can track you now that the poison is out of your system, but they still know where you live. I suppose, in theory, your family could move somewhere else, but if you go back to your house to pack, they will be watching, and they can follow you after that, even in daylight, as long as they have some dark corner to watch from. Your whole family would have to be extremely cautious on the trip—difficult to arrange, since you can’t tell your dad what’s really happening.”

  “I can’t tell my dad?” I repeated stupidly.

  “I’ve mentioned this before. Why do you think I had to put him to sleep?” asked Bisavó. “All supernatural societies have one thing in common: we can’t let ordinary humans know about us. Occasionally, exceptions can be made, but they often take time to set up…time we don’t have. Months, maybe.”

  “My own dad doesn’t know about my…unusual abilities,” Tal said. I must still have looked pretty confused, because he added, “My mom knows only because she became a seer and figured it out on her own.”

  “Your own dad doesn’t know about you?” I said, still having a hard time believing what I was hearing.

  “Does yours know about you?” asked Tal. “You didn’t even know you weren’t supposed to tell, but you didn’t, right?”

  “I didn’t…because…because I…”

  “Felt like a freak?” offered Tal. “Dude, I know. But part of your not telling may also be hard-coded into your mind somehow. I can’t find many records of someone with unusual abilities connected to the supernatural world, particularly related to supernatural ancestry, who willingly told anyone. That can’t be coincidence.”

  I wanted to ask him where his abilities came from, but the trio returned with the recaptured assassin.

  “She made it to the shadow,” said Khalid before anyone else could
speak. “I…I couldn’t bring myself to shoot her.”

  Bisavó grumbled but fortunately did not say anything.

  “Well, she’s still here,” said Tal, “so perhaps her people didn’t have time to make a connection.”

  “I’m still alive,” said the assassin, so clearly she didn’t think her people had connected either.

  I was surprised at the indifference of her tone, so flat that, if it really reflected her feelings, she was already resigned to death. I shouldn’t have cared, but I felt sad about her.

  “Well, now we’ve solved every problem except the biggest one,” said Viviane. “How do we keep Lucas safe but still let him have a normal life?”

  “Let’s take him with us,” Gordy suggested.

  Shar laughed in a fairly uncomplimentary way, but Tal actually seemed to consider the idea. “We could relocate his whole family that way.”

  “What good would that do?” asked Bisavó.

  I had to admit she had a point this time. Why would moving to Santa Brígida be any different from moving anywhere else?

  Tal spent a couple seconds trying to frame an answer that wouldn’t start another argument, but Gordy jumped right in. “Lady, you have no idea who you’re dealing with, do you? Not even after what you’ve seen today? Tal isn’t some clueless teenager fumbling his way from one mess to another. He has the knowledge and skills from all of his previous lives at his fingertips. He was the original Taliesin in King Arthur’s court. If he thinks we can keep Lucas safe, we can.”

  “That’s enough, Gordy,” said Tal, a little embarrassed.

  “He was also Alexander the Great’s right-hand man. He fought with Achilles at Troy. He was friends with King David of Israel,” said Gordy, pressing on.

  “Gordy!” said Tal, but it was clear that Gordy was sick of Bisavó and determined to get her to admit she was wrong.

  “And that’s not all!” he continued even more loudly. “Three other members of our group can also draw on their pasts. Not me,” he added, almost apologetically, “but Shar has been Alexander…and Achilles. Stan and Carla, who aren’t here right now, were once King David and the sorceress Alcina, who created this island centuries ago.”

  Twenty-four hours ago I would have thought Gordy was nuts. Now his rant sounded almost normal.

  “I have heard of Alcina,” said Bisavó grudgingly, as if she hadn’t heard of all the others. “But I’m not as interested in the past as I am in the present.”

  “And in the present, there are issues to consider,” said Viviane, probably trying to redirect the conversation. “Tal, are you thinking about locking Santa Brígida down completely? You know how much energy covering an area that large takes. We can’t do it for more than a few days.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Tal replied. “What I’m thinking is maximum protection for a couple days while we work out a more specific plan to keep out the Populus Umbrae. A more narrowly defined defense could cover a large area without using nearly as much power, right?”

  “We’ve already got all of our houses pretty well covered,” pointed out Shar. “We could do the same for the house his family moves into, right? And there’s at least some protection on the school already.”

  “If we can find a defense against the Populus Umbrae and cover the whole town with it, we just might be able to pull this off,” Viviane conceded.

  “Wait!” I said quickly. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but what about all my friends?”

  “It’s not like you’ll never see them again,” said Tal. “You aren’t going to be so far away that visits are out of the question, though it will be much better if you get them to visit you in Santa Brígida.”

  “Once we have a magic that keeps the shadows away, we can probably get…one of our supernatural blacksmith friends…to make you a bracelet or something that gives the same kind of protection to you personally,” said Tal, “and then you can go visit them too, or go pretty much wherever you want.”

  “Supernatural blacksmiths?” OK, there were more important things to talk about, but I had to ask.

  “We’re tight with Hephaestus,” said Gordy, waving his sword a little, as if I had missed his point. “Oh, and Govannon, the smith for the Welsh faeries too. Between the two of them, we’ve got gear you wouldn’t believe.”

  From what I’d seen, he was not exaggerating.

  “Why would a group of humans be so favored?” Bisavó asked suspiciously. I had so hoped that she would just keep her mouth shut until this was over. Apparently, she was going to keep right on embarrassing me. I’d never seen a worse case of looking a gift horse in the mouth…or maybe I should have said gift dragon.

  “Because we’re badasses,” offered Gordy—hardly an explanation Bisavó would likely accept, and possibly not even understand.

  “He means we impressed Gwynn ap Nudd, the king of the Welsh faeries, when he tested us,” said Shar in a matter-of-fact way. “The Olympians helped us, but we helped them quite a bit as well. Actually, we prevented a major disruption of the Olympian plane.”

  I prayed that Bisavó would not question them any further. She still looked dissatisfied, but, to my enormous relief, she kept her continued doubts to herself—at least for now.

  I couldn’t visualize Gavin being five hours away; we’d grown up together. Tal and his friends were trying awfully hard to help me, so I didn’t have the nerve to gripe about leaving my best friend behind. Still, there was one problem I didn’t see any way around.

  “It sounds like a well thought-out plan,” I said, “but there’s no way my dad will move at the drop of a hat. Anyway, his work is in Merced. He’s been with the same architectural firm for twenty years…and they’re based there. He can’t very well commute from the Santa Barbara area, and he’s unlikely to find a job good enough to make him want to switch to another firm.”

  “An architect?” asked Tal. “Tell me about his work.”

  I couldn’t imagine how the details of what my dad did could possibly help, but I told Tal everything I could remember. He seemed especially pleased to learn that my dad had designed a couple of buildings in Santa Barbara.

  “I think I can solve your dad problem, but I need to leave for a few minutes,” Tal said.

  “What about our…guest?” asked Viviane, tilting her head toward Bisavó.

  “She will swear an oath not to take any hostile action, nor to try to take Lucas against his will,” said Tal as if she had already agreed.

  “There are ways to bind supernatural beings with oaths,” said Gordy for my benefit.

  Don’t be difficult; please, don’t be difficult!

  “What if I refuse such an oath?” she asked. I wondered what would happen if Tal finally got sick of dealing with her.

  Tal was evidently keeping his temper on a short leash, because his voice sounded controlled. “Santa Brígida is near the coast. You can visit Lucas there much more easily than you can in Madisonville. On the other hand, it would be relatively easy for us to ward the area against full-blooded Encantados, and you’d never see him at all.”

  Bisavó had done just fine not seeing me for the first sixteen years of my life, so I expected her to scoff at that threat. Much to my surprise, she looked shocked, and I swore I saw a tear as she and Tal worked out the specifics of the oath. She wanted him to swear that as long as she cooperated with him, he would never prevent her from seeing me. In the end, they did some kind of binding spell that Gordy told me was called a tynged in Welsh, and I felt it settle around them when they were done.

  And adults say that teenagers are unpredictable!

  It seemed like only a few minutes after Tal vanished into a portal that he reappeared the same way, with a big smile on his face.

  “Tomorrow, right at the opening of business, your dad’s firm is going to get a call from Carrie Winn.”

  “As in Winn Industries?” I asked.

  “The same,” he replied. “She’s going to offer the firm an insanely lucrative contract to
develop plans for several buildings in the Santa Barbara area. She’s going to insist, though, that she needs close communication with the architect on the project, and she will name your dad as the only one she’ll accept, based on his outstanding designs that she’s seen in Santa Barbara. That collaboration will be so close that your dad will have to move to the area, specifically, into a house in Santa Brígida that he and his family will live in rent-free. Winn will apologize for the short notice but will insist he gets down to Santa Brígida to meet with her by the next day.”

  “How can we get packed that fast?”

  “She’ll suggest that you each take only what you absolutely need. She’ll send an assistant up to Madisonville to supervise the packing and moving of all the rest.”

  I was stunned. “Tal, that sounds great, but…but…it’s too incredible to believe. Even if my dad’s partners somehow buy it, I don’t think he will.”

  “I’ve found people often believe what they want to believe,” Tal replied. “One of the wealthiest people in California turns out to be a great fan of your dad’s work—will he really stop to question that? Besides…look, I didn’t mean to pry, but I did catch some of your thoughts while I was healing you. Madisonville’s really not that great a place, is it?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, is he that big a fan of it?”

  “He really enjoys his job,” I said, “but living in Madisonville is something he does because he has to.”

  “So he gets handed a reason to move on a silver platter, and he gets to keep the same job…and his firm gets rich. Again, is he really going to question that?”

  “I guess not,” I said, still trying to absorb it all. “How did you do all that so fast?”

  “Shall we tell him?” asked Shar. “If he’s going to be one of us, he’ll need to know anyway.”

  Tal and Viviane both nodded.

  “One of you?” I asked. That part intrigued me even more than whatever revelation they had about Carrie Winn.

  “As much as you want to be,” said Tal. “You’re leaving some friends behind, I know…but if you want to hang with us, you can.”