by John Conroe
I poked it with one of the pencils. It still didn’t move. Pulling a multi-tool from the bag, I used the fold-out pliers to grab the spider, which I was now pretty certain was dead. Dead but friggin’ huge. Maybe one of those bird-eating things from South America.
The black feather of a crow was bound to its belly, the desiccated spider legs clutching the feather like prey. Under the bright light, I studied the thing. A Crafted working. Tarantulas have irritant hairs on their abdomens, and, like all spiders, can produce webbing. The crow is a medium-sized bird with a giant-sized ability to annoy people. The feather was bound to the spider with two strands of human hair—one platinum blonde, the other dark brown. A brown that matched the husband.
I wrapped the crafting in a silk kerchief, storing it carefully in my bag. When I turned back to the werewolf family bound to the wall, the wife was calm and the husband had a semblance of reason in his eyes.
“I’m leaving. I think your husband will return to normal in a few days,” I said.
“I will kill you for this,” the man said, earning himself another deadly glare from the missus.
“Listen, Charlie is it? If you come near Stacia or myself, I’m going to crush every bone in your body,” I said, motioning at the chair. It rose off the ground and when I clenched my right fist, it started to snap and crack, breaking in on itself, compacting into splintered wood, bent metal, and compressed foam and fabric. “Then I’m going to burn you from the inside out,” I said. The chair bundle gave off a wave of heat, then disappeared in a white hot ball of flame. I pulled heat from their house and the houses on either side, focusing it and stirring my spell with Air. Then I sent the whole flaming bundle of burning plasma and gases up the stairs and out the back door. A flash of light flared through the basement windows and was gone. I left a few seconds behind it, leaving two silent, pale werewolves behind.
Chapter 39
The witch who cast the irritating crafting that focused unreasoning anger on my Stacia had done a good job covering her magical tracks. But she sucked at hiding the paper trail of the chair itself. Omega found it in seconds, unweaving a string of purchase and delivery instructions, and the end result left me standing outside a Bronx bar an hour later. Forty minutes of waiting rewarded me with an Uber ride pulling up outside and a leather-clad witch in goth makeup stepping out. I followed her into the bar.
Inside was nicer than I expected. Decent ambiance with wood floors, nice art on the walls, and a rather extensive liquor collection behind the bar. A few after-work office types sat at the bar, a normal-looking woman making a drink behind it, and in the far corner, a table of four mismatched women, including my goth. Besides her, there was a middle-aged PTA president type, a younger administrative assistant sort, and a Social Security collector with honest-to-god blue hair. I walked over and pulled out a chair, sitting smoothly between the secretary and PTA, staring at my old… friend, no, acquaintance, nah, captor, yeah that’s the one.
Someone had ordered a mixed plate of appetizers and I helped myself to a piece of Gouda while the witches at the table took me in and Krista’s eyes got really big.
“Hi. This looks fun,” I said around my piece of cheese. “Kick back after a rough day of filing, bake sales, collecting pension checks and—trying to get my girlfriend killed,” I said, my eyes locking onto Krista.
The old lady went for an amulet and the mousy secretary lifted a hand while opening her mouth. I froze them all. The well of magic in my core was so full, I was having a hard time keeping my hands from shaking. Holding four surprised witches in a mental grip of steel was almost not enough. Krista had her hands flat on the tabletop and she tried to open her mouth but couldn’t.
“Tell you what: I’ll relax things a bit and you all try not to do anything stupid. Or go ahead and be stupid. I kinda of feel like blowing this place up,” I said, mentally letting up.
All three sucked in air but Krista’s eyes looked at each of them fast and really serious. Whatever they would have done, I guess I’ll never know because they each let their breath out slowly.
After one last set of hard looks at her co-witches, Krista turned back to me. I was chewing on a stuffed mushroom, watching her.
“Ah, hey there, Declan,” she said.
“Krista. How’s the magic-crafting-for-hire business going? Spelled bullets for the feds, Crown-of-Thorns spiders for the werewolves,” I said, dumping the silk-wrapped spider out on the table.
There was a sharp shriek behind me and the sound of a bottle thunking into wood without breaking. Krista’s eyes shot over my shoulder and winced. I kept my attention on the witches.
“That’s disgusting!” a female voice said behind me.
“Yeah, I agree,” I said, turning slowly to take in the outraged mid-twenties waitress.
“You can’t put that on our table,” she said.
“It’s dead… like the mushrooms.”
“I don’t care. Get it off the table or I’ll call my manager,” she said. I stared at her for a moment, weighing whether it might be fun to really just let out my frustrations. She must have read something in my expression because she took a step back.
I sighed. “I’m just returning it to Krista here. She rather carelessly left it lying around. Pretty rude, really.”
“I should say so,” she huffed.
I flicked a finger. The spider crafting flared up in a flash of flame and was gone. “There, all gone.”
She backed away, pretty close to panicking.
“That was reckless,” the oldest witch said.
“Oh, I haven’t even begun to get reckless yet. Ask Krista. Krista, have I revved up yet?”
She shook her head, eyes locked on me.
“Not that Krista has seen me revved up. I’ve been practicing, Krista. You won’t even recognize me now.”
“It was just business,” Krista said, licking her dark-glossed lips nervously.
“Business? That’s great. Let’s talk business because I’m all up in the business world these days.”
“What do you want?” she asked.
“That hard to guess? Why? Or maybe who?” I asked.
“We don’t divulge our clients,” PTA said, jumping bravely into the fray.
I nodded. “Probably wise. Good for your street cred. Hey, do you think if I burned all four of you alive right here in this fine establishment, your client might hear about it? Your corporate brand will soar. Not that you’ll see it.”
“You wouldn’t do that. You’re not that hard,” office pool said.
“What’s all this here?” a new voice said from behind me.
I turned to take in the middle-aged manager type who was approaching aggressively.
“This? This is me having a chat with these businesswomen. You know, talking things through,” I said.
“You need to leave,” he said. “Now!”
I flicked my left index finger. The two flatscreens went dead, the music stopped, and half the lights went out.
“I’ll, I’ll call the police,” manager-man said.
“Your phones don’t work,” I said. “In fact, your cell phones probably won’t work for about two blocks. You might want to start walking now,” I said, turning back to the women. I saw Krista shake her head at the manager. Probably looked like he was going to get tough.
“Ladies, what are the odds that I can burn you all to cinders, then create a portal, travel five hundred miles, and have a squeaky clean alibi?”
“If we give you their names, will you let us live?” Krista asked.
PTA protested, but Krista hushed her. “He can likely do it. Actually, he can absolutely do it.”
“It’ll start a war with the other cir—ah, clients,” secretary said.
“Ah, so it is other witches,” I said. “Well, I’m going to have a chat with them after I get done here. It’s fifty-fifty if they’ll live through it. Maybe forty-sixty. War won’t likely be top of their mind.”
“It’s a Midwestern circle,�
�� Krista said.
The bulb went off in my head. “Missouri?” I asked.
Surprised, she nodded. I said a name. Her surprise got bigger. “Okay, listen. I’m done here. Going to jump out to Kansas City now. If you warn them, I’ll be pissed. Well, more pissed. I’m freaking raging right now but somehow, I’m keeping a lid on it. Warn them and I’ll lose the lid. Go near my girlfriend in any way and I’ll scrub your circle from the planet. Oh, and if you have any more mental time bombs ticking, get rid of them. Immediately. If another werewolf challenges Stacia in the next month, I’m coming back, only you’ll never see me coming.”
Standing, I leaned over and grabbed a bacon-wrapped scallop. “This was fun. Let’s never do it again.”
Twenty minutes later, I was in Kansas City, Missouri, specifically in Westwood, standing in the driveway of a tawny yellow Tudor-style house, holding a pizza box. I knocked on the door.
High heels pounded on hardwood on the other side of the door. It opened and a middle-aged blonde looked at the pizza in my hand. “Wrong address. We didn’t order one.”
I lifted my head and met her eyes, smiling. “Oh, it’s not for you. Magic makes me hungry and I’m about to lay a whole mess of power on this place… Mrs. Morloft.”
Her eyes widened and she was fast enough to touch the doorframe, activating a lock-out ward. Pretty good one, too. It snapped a field of force across the open door, making it all but impossible to get in. Impossible really is an overused word, especially around witches.
I smashed the ward, ripping the whole door frame free and flinging Marcia Morloft down the hall and into the open floor plan living area. A thickset man with gray temples looked up from his open tablet. I flattened him to the floor with one hand while slamming Marcia onto her black granite-topped island.
“Mr and Mrs. Morloft, we need to talk.” Behind me, the broken door floated back into place and roughly sealed the doorway.
Twenty minutes later, I walked out, tossing the empty pizza box into the neighbor’s street-side garbage can. I was pretty sure the Morloft circle would leave things well enough alone. The crying sobbing mess that was Marcia Morloft seemed to have gotten my message.
My phone buzzed. It was a text from Stacia.
-Hey, I’m coming up to Burlington. You free from class?
-My evening just cleared up. Had some counseling to do. Went faster than expected. Wanna eat at Rowan West?
-Sure. Can you pick me up at the airport?
-Or I can just gate to you and bring you by O’Carroll Transport?
-You’d do that?
-I’ll do whatever it takes.
Chapter 40
Deep in the middle of the southern portion of the planet’s major landmass, inside the largest living thing on the planet, Eirwen, Princess of Summer, stood in Heartwood Hall, next to her mother’s throne in the queen’s secondary reception hall. She was on the queen’s right side, the most honored position in the Court. And she was perhaps more worried than she’d ever been in her life.
“Put down another layer,” her mother, Zinnia, Queen of Summer, instructed her seneschal, who in turn, supervised a group of elves laying thick sheets of chiton on the glowing wood floor of the Home Tree. The sheets, already an inch deep, covered a circle in the center of the hall.
The translucent sheets also created a path from the circle to a space twenty feet in front of the throne. The room was lined with green-clad Hunters, all armed to the teeth. Ten blue-armored guards, the entire surviving cadre of her mother’s royal guards, circled the circle.
“Your Majesty, the appointed time is here,” the Senior Watcher of the Veil said, approaching from behind the throne.
“Very well. Open the Way,” Zinnia said, leaning back, legs crossed at knee. She looked utterly relaxed. Eirwen felt like she, on the other hand, might throw up.
Four Watchers, including the Senior, moved to the cardinal points of the circle, folding themselves into a kneeling position, legs under them. In perfect unison, they began to chant while simultaneously drawing intricate glyphs on the outside arc of the circle. It was like watching one organism with four separate parts engaged in some kind of seated dance.
The inside of the circle dropped away, becoming a pit of utter blackness, a void like deep space, and a wind picked up from outside the circle, blowing air toward the newly formed hole.
In the center of the circle, something, some twisted shape, warped and writhed, the very space twisting and churning in a manner that made Eirwen’s superhumanly sharp vision blur and come unfocused.
A deep sound, bass on a level so far below normal range that it was felt rather than heard, began a rhythmic pounding as if a gigantic cosmic machine had somehow taken up immense space inside the trunk of the Home tree.
The twisted, warped space inside the circle came together and then apart. It did it again, shades of the same oily blackness pulling together and apart, leaving impressions on Eirwen’s retinas that touched and activated the primitive centers of her highly evolved brain.
It seemed like a shape was forming; changing and becoming with each cycle of the process, until the impression was of a gigantic humanoid shape, a towering construct whose rough head-shaped top scraped the very ceiling of the queen’s audience hall.
Suddenly and simultaneously, the four Watchers rose smoothly to their feet and moved gracefully back from the circle till they each disappeared into the shadows the lined the hall.
The black of space drained away, leaving the dim luminescence exuded by the tree itself, light that seemed as bright as the sun after the utter absence of light that had owned the circle before. The sharp stench of sulfur found Eirwen’s sensitive nose, making it hard to breathe.
She blinked eyes that were sharper than any human’s, eyes that still wanted to water despite her finer acuity.
The thing that stood facing her mother, and therefore her, was monstrous. A deep, dark color that took her a second to realize was a red. A red so far down the spectrum it bordered on black. Plates of thick, armored skin flexed as the giant took a step, more of its shape becoming clear as it moved. An asymmetrical mini forest of spikes extruded from both shoulders and the back of the short, squat appendage that would be the neck on any other being. Heavily muscled arms hung past its knees, each armed with long, glittering black, razor-sharp claws. The head looked like the overdeveloped shell of some mutant crab, the armored forehead ridge jutting out over cavernous dark eye sockets. The legs were almost horse like, if horses had red, scaled skin and clawed feet. The thing was obviously male, excruciatingly, obviously male. Eirwen shuddered and caught herself about to look away. It would not do for the Princess of Summer to flinch before this visitor.
The tree shook as the thing stepped out of its circle and moved down the chiton pathway. Each time one of the immense feet lifted, Eirwen could see the blackened outline of the appendage burnt into the seriously hard armor plating on the floor behind it. Smoke curled from each charred footprint as it approached the queen of the realm with unhurried menace.
“Lord Belphagor,” Zinnia greeted the thing.
“Prince. Prince Belphagor,” the thing rumbled back, more earthquake than voice.
“Apologies, Prince Belphagor,” her mother said smoothly. Eirwen knew that Zinnia was absolutely and thoroughly versed in the demon’s rank.
“I would have expected this call from your sister, not you,” the demon said.
“Unusual times call for unusual solutions,” her mother said.
“You will provide passage?” the demon prince asked, skipping over any further attempt at niceties.
“In exchange for services rendered,” the queen said.
“Yes, you want the witchling. The boy.”
“A small price to pay for an access to Earth that lies completely outside of your Accords,” her mother said.
“Not that small a price. The boy is a great prize. Many in the legions dream of possessing that one. He is well guarded.”
“Are
you not a demon prince of Hell? How can any guard against you?”
“Ah, flattery. My bread and butter. It has no effect on me, Realm Witch. Do you have a Way to the planet?”
“We have built a new one, at great expense,” her mother said. Great expense indeed. Zinnia had used her second remaining magic reservoir, leaving just one more in her arsenal. “A previously uncut path to the world you seek. You’ll be able to arrive in your natural form, not some meat shell of a human. You would be among the first to achieve such.”
“Another attempted it not so long ago. The Hand of God struck him down, even in his natural form.”