by Ben Reeder
“You doing okay?” I asked, when I got closer.
“Yeah, kinda. Spent the night tossing and turning, wanting to go hunt,” she replied. Her eyes went wide for a moment. I smiled as I sat down beside her. “How about you? Your face looks a lot better than it did last night.”
“I’ve gotten better looking since last night? Damn, that whole beauty sleep thing works,” I joked. She swatted my shoulder, making me wince.
“Sorry!” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean to hit you too hard!”
“No, pretty much everything hurts after yesterday. I got hit a lot.”
“Well, you looked good doing it,” she confided as she leaned closer. She didn’t lean back after she stopped. Instead, she laid her head against my right shoulder and wrapped her arm around my biceps.
“Thanks,” I said, more than a little confused. I looked down at her, and she gave me a guileless smile in return, looking up at me through her eyelashes with soulful green eyes. I tried not to squirm with her so close to me. Yeah, part of me really loved the attention, but I wasn’t used to it, so it also made me pretty uncomfortable. Of course, for the last eight years, the only time anyone had tried to touch me was when they were either beating the crap out of me, or trying to molest me. She rubbed her cheek against my shoulder a couple of times before she settled her head back against me.
The cinnamon scent of her hit my nose about the time Dr. C walked in. Shade straightened as his eyes swept over us, then stiffened as another man followed him in a step behind.
“What the hell is this? The Conclave’s version of Sesame Street?” the man asked in a raspy voice as he looked around the room. Dr. C gave him a dark look.
“Kids, this cheery soul is Sinbad, the alpha of the Springfield pack,” Dr. C said, as he set his briefcase down on his desk, then slid a backpack off his shoulder and set it alongside the briefcase. “Sinbad, this is Lucas Kale and Wanda Romanov, and the rather disreputable young man over there is Chance Fortunato. The young lady with him is Alexis Cooper…Shade, the alpha I told you about.”
Sinbad wore a beat-up brown leather jacket; a black t-shirt; worn, almost-white jeans; and a pair of heavy black boots. He wore his white hair down to his shoulders, and a white Van Dyke beard, cropped close. Three Futhark runes were tattooed on each temple. Somehow, he pulled off a weathered look without coming off as old. Gray eyes bored into me for a moment, then fixed on Shade. He crossed the room in almost total silence and offered Shade a hand. I felt Shade’s hand tighten around my arm, and her own hand stayed in her lap. His eyes narrowed before he lowered his hand.
“I can smell the fear coming off you, girl,” he said softly. “That ain’t right for an alpha. You were right, TJ,” he said over his shoulder. “She needs my help. Girl’s plenty screwed up.”
“Chance is the one fighting,” Shade said. “He’s the one who needs the help.”
“TJ will help your gothi get ready to fight your alpha. I’m here to give you the help you’ll need if he wins,” Sinbad said with a feral gleam in his eyes.
“What’s a gothi?” I asked. Sinbad’s attention fell on me almost like a physical thing.
“The Norse priests, the keepers of their lore, and their rune-masters. An alpha’s adviser: the one he trusts most to have his back. My gothi is one of my pack, but that ain’t always how it is. It’s an honor that has to be earned, warlock. For now, it’s enough that she trusts you.” He turned back to Shade, and I felt the weight of his focus slide off of me. “You and I have a lot to do, Shade,” he said.
She turned to me, and I gave her a nod. Dr. Corwin didn’t trust people without a good reason. She pulled herself away from me, leaving a cold feeling down my left side, and followed the older alpha out of the room. I could hear Sinbad’s voice fade as they walked down the hall.
“Okay, first things first,” Dr. C said after the door closed. “We need to figure out how to keep you alive in a hand-to-hand fight with a werewolf. Then, we have to figure out how to make sure you win.”
“You make it sound so easy when you put it like that,” Lucas quipped.
“It’s not easy: just simple. Two different things,” Dr. C told him. “We have to figure that King is going to try to weight the fight as far in his favor as he can from the start…and then, he’s going to cheat.”
“Paranoid much?” Wanda snorted.
“It’s only paranoia if you’re wrong.”
“What is it if you’re right?” Lucas asked, worry in his voice.
“Good planning. Now, what does King know about you?”
“He knows about the TK spell, and he’s seen Hellfire up close and personal, too. I figure he’s gotta know about the augment charm I had if he’s talked to the guys at all since last night.”
“He saw the paintball gun at work, too,” Wanda added.
“And you said that he used sorcery of his own, without a focus. So, he’s probably going to try to play to his own strengths and limit yours. He’s seen you use a focus, so he knows you’re a cookbook mage.”
“What is that?” Lucas demanded. “You said that last night.”
“It’s one of the most basic methods of using magick without a circle. It’s someone who has to use tools and trigger words to cast spells. Half of the work is done by the tool, half by the person wielding it. That’s a vast oversimplification, but it’s the basic way it works. The mage provides the power and the intent, and the focus channels the spell. At the next level, the mage’s mind becomes the transmitter and his body becomes the focus, or it creates it through gestures. It takes a lot of discipline and practice to cast a spell with only words and gestures. That’s about as far as most mages get.”
“And King is at least there with the mind control he uses on the pack,” I said, thinking along the lines where Dr. C was pointing me.
“Or he might be using a trigger implanted in the spell itself, like a post-hypnotic command. Gods, I hope that’s the case. It would sure make all this less scary if it was. However, we’ll win this thing by assuming it isn’t.”
“So, safe bet is that King is gonna say no to foci, but yes to magick. That’ll give him a huge advantage.”
“What about the augment charm you mentioned?” Dr. C asked.
“It crapped out after school yesterday, when Brad and the rest of the pack jumped me the first time. Right before someone shot me with a knockout round.”
“Well, I think I already paid for that little faux pas in spades. Can you recast it?” He had a point, but I wasn’t going to admit it yet.
I rummaged in my bag and pulled out my notebooks, tossing them on the table. “Yeah, if I have the right ingredients and supplies, I can bake that cake. And a few more.” He flipped through my notes for a few moments, then looked at me with one eyebrow raised. Lucas picked one up and flipped it open.
“You managed to keep all of these from Dulka?” Dr. C asked.
“No, I’ve been writing things down in those since I got away, before I forget anything.”
“You wrote all of this down from memory?” Lucas asked as his head popped up from the notebook he was looking through.
I nodded.
“Wow,” Wanda whispered. “So, like, pop quizzes don’t scare you at all, do they?”
“Not really.”
“You have a very good memory,” Dr. C said as he flipped through the notebooks. “Not surprising, given the conditions you had to learn under. So, let’s see here… love spell, love spell, another love spell, curse, hex, curse, curse. Boy, you must have been a real hit at parties.”
“I was. All the other demons were jealous,” I answered as I flipped through the first notebook, looking for the physical augment charm. A moment of dead silence answered, and I looked up to see a trio of shocked faces. Everyone looked like I’d just told a Jewish joke at a bar mitzvah. “What? I can’t joke about it?”
“I’m sorry, Chance, I should never have…” Dr. C started to say, but I held up a hand and cut him off.
“Yes, you should, sir. The less of a deal you make of it, the easier I can forget how bad it sucked. Laughing at it makes it…suck less. So, yeah, I have a lot of fun tricks in my spell book, mostly charms, but they’re all based on foci: amulets, rings, potions. All things King will try to say I can’t use.”
“Yes, he will. I have an idea. First, we have to recast the augment. Lucas, Wanda, I need you two to leave while we do the preparations. Technically, I’m not supposed to even acknowledge the Conclave exists to outsiders. I’m not about to show you the nuts and bolts of magick unless you’re my students, which you aren’t. So, away with you until we’re finished.”
“Party pooper,” Lucas said, as he herded Wanda toward the door. “C’mon, we’ll go hang out at the bookstore until Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde here finish playing mad scientist.”
“When can we come back?” Wanda asked at the door.
“After the game. Chance, give them your jacket,” he said. He tucked a little charm into the jacket pocket. “It suggests the presence of a person. People’s minds will fill in the blanks.”
“You were pretty harsh with them,” I said, as the door closed on their dejected looks.
“I was honest. There’s a difference.” He went back into the store room and began setting up a Bunsen burner and a distillation system. “If I didn’t trust them, I would have tried to sugar-coat it, or give them some kind of bogus errand to run, or a meaningless task to do. They’re both too smart for that, Chance. I may have offended them, but I didn’t lie to them, or insult their intelligence. Remember what I told you about lying. It weakens you, distorts your magick. You can’t afford that, especially not now.” The sound of glass and metal against each other was familiar, and almost comforting.
“I think it was King who killed Mr. Chomsky,” I said a few minutes later. From behind me, silence fell.
“Why?” Dr. C asked a moment later.
“It’s a bunch of things, really. First, the person who killed Mr. Chomsky had claws, and I sensed dark sorcery in the room. King’s a werewolf and a sorcerer, so he fits that bill. Duncan also told King that the pack had never killed anyone before, so that eliminates them.”
“Are you sure he was telling the truth about that?”
“He didn’t have a reason to lie. King was pretty pissed off about them taking so long to get that stupid case anyway, and it would have been easier to just keep his mouth shut.”
“Case?” Dr. C was suddenly at my side. “What did it look like?”
“It was black, with red symbols on it. About four feet long, a foot wide, and about six inches deep, maybe less.”
“Did you see any of the symbols?”
“Not up close. They were across the room, and I was looking at an angle, through a dirty window. It was kinda hard to make out details. So this case…it was from Mr. Chomsky’s house or something?”
Dr. C nodded and gave me a sad look. “It’s the why of Sydney’s death. I knew someone was going to be after it, I just didn’t expect it to be a two-bit werewolf thug. It was missing when I got home last night.”
“What’s in it that’s so damn important?” I asked. A sudden heat washed through my blood as I thought of Mr. Chomsky being killed over some stupid trinket or something.
“It’s an ancient artifact, and it’s very powerful. That’s all I can tell you. Sydney was charged with its care almost thirty years ago, and when he died, that burden passed to me. He reported an attempted break-in last Sunday, and on Tuesday, he found the person who’d set off his wards and called Draeden at the Conclave to report it. It was your girl Shade; the wards left a mark on her aura. He wrote that in his journal, even though he never got a chance to tell Draeden that. I figure King sent Shade in to find it and take it if she could. She set off the wards and left. King came here Tuesday night and killed Sydney to weaken the wards, since a lot of them were tied to him, then sent his boys in afterwards to get the…artifact. Last night was the first night I wasn’t in the house until after dark.”
“Sir, I know you can’t tell me what he was guarding, but I think I know. We ran into a necromancer today who was looking for a sword called the Maxilla. He said the spells concealing it had failed a few days ago. The case I saw would be about big enough to hold a sword.”
“Good guess, Chance. The Maxilla is very powerful, and in the wrong hands, it can do a lot of damage. And believe me, Chance, it’s been in the wrong hands more than once.”
“King still has what he wanted, though, and Mr. Chomsky died for nothing, unless I beat that son of a bitch, and take it back.”
“Sydney didn’t die in vain,” he told me with a wicked smile. “Though kicking King’s ass is still on the agenda.”
We worked in silence for a couple of hours to redo the augment charm. Instead of using an amulet, though, Dr. C had me take my shirt off, and he painted a series of glyphs between my shoulder blades in a black, smelly ink.
“Do I have to be a dick to my friends if I’m going to be a mage?” I asked as he drew the glyphs.
“No. There are going to be a lot of things you can’t tell anyone else, though. Concealing information is a way of life for a mage. Don’t think that being direct with them is more insulting than not trusting them.” He paused for a moment and I heard the clink of wood against glass.
“How do you get away with not lying to people?” It had been bothering me since he’d told me about the problems it caused, since I hated not telling my mom the truth about what happened to me.
“By being mysterious and cryptic.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “That’s the first spell done.”
The sun set as we worked on the spells, and in the distance, I heard the band start playing the school fight song. Cheers and brassy music drifted our way from time to time, and I found myself resenting Brad and the rest of the Wolf Pack for being out on the football field and getting all the glory, while I was stuck in the lab getting ready to fight their alpha.
Once the spell glyphs were done, I hopped up on one of the lab tables and watched Dr. C cast his circle. He etched it into the linoleum with a boline, a single-edged working knife, then worked through the incense for fire and air, and covered every inch of the edge with salted water to represent earth and water. With all four earthly elements in place, he used an empty glass bowl as his Void, then he added two pieces that I had never seen before: a bone talisman and a bowl of nightshade leaves. Once those were in place, he began placing the candles in their positions just like I’d been taught, going clockwise, or as he referred to it, deosil, the direction of increase and growth. As he placed the candles, he intoned a single word for each one. I started to feel like my hard-won education under Dulka was really, really incomplete.
Finally, he stood in the center with his athame, a double-edged ritual blade, and pointed at the yellow eastern candle. The circle’s power hit my senses like a solid wall as he turned clockwise, growing like a tide of static in my head. When he closed the circle, the static buzz turned into a clear, beautiful tone in my head, almost bringing me to tears with its simple beauty and clarity. My magick had never felt like this, had never felt so…pure. Dr. C went to the edge of the circle and used his athame to create an open place in the circle.
“You are invited to enter this circle in peace, apprentice,” he said.
I hopped down and stepped across the boundary. He led me to the center of the circle, and I sat down and crossed my legs. The next two hours was a blur of magick and chanting as Dr. C retraced each spell across my back, and charged the glyphs. The charms tingled across my back by the time he was done.
Finally, he laid his hand on my left shoulder. “What was here?”
“Dulka’s mark,” I said softly.
“Did you know it was gone?”
I looked over my left shoulder at the blank patch of skin that used to hold Dulka’s symbol, three red lines through a half circle. “Cool. I don’t know how, but I’m glad it’s gone. He left plenty of other marks, though.”
>
“You get to choose if they’re the wounds you bear as a victim, or the marks of a hammer, left in the forging of a weapon.”
“Dulka isn’t some kind of blacksmith. Don’t try to make what he did right, somehow,” I growled.
“No, he was just the hammer, the tool. You are the one who forged yourself, Chance. Even your pain can be a weapon. I can help you put the edge on that blade, too.”
“We only have a few hours.”
“What I can teach you will take a lifetime to master, but you’ve already had your feet set upon that path. The real question becomes if you want to continue to walk it or not.”
“I’m not sure I have much of a choice,” I said, unable to look at him.
“There are always choices, Chance,” he said with a smile. “People tend to make decisions based on consequences, though.”
“Not a lot of those that I like.”
“I guess there aren’t. Well, it’s not as altruistic a reason as I would prefer, but you’re right. You don’t have many options open to you right now. Maybe…I can open some doors for you. Starting tonight.”
“Yeah, seeing tomorrow morning would be good.”
“You can see an aura, right?” he asked.
“Yeah. Dulka made me learn that way early.”
“Good. I’m going to teach you how to use that to your advantage.” He started by having me open my aura sight, and watching him as he went through a training kata. As he began each movement, he had me watch his hand or his foot. I could see his aura begin to move just a little in the direction he was going to move it in right before he started moving. It wasn’t much, but it could give me a split second’s warning before someone was going to throw a punch or make a kick. I told him I could see it, and he stopped.
“Good. Now, I’m going to teach you the baby steps of how to extend that to an attack. A person’s aura is affected by his thoughts. Aggression usually shows red. When it’s aimed at you, there is a connection that you can exploit. Watch closely.”