Past Life Strife (Rise of the Discordant Book 1)

by McMullen, Christina

  Who Seth chose to spend his free time with was none of my business. We are agents of Order, not monks. There are no restrictions against agents within the Cycle having personal relationships, provided that fraternizing does not cloud our judgment or interfere with Order duties in any way. That being said, I had my reservations about whether or not Seth’s taste in women had an adverse effect on his judgment.

  I had expected a confrontation from the moment I sensed witches in the Five Penny and the coven did not disappoint. For all of her posturing, Louise was not a powerful witch. I knew right away that we would never be on friendly terms and dismissed her as nothing more than a jealous and possessive annoyance. Although far friendlier, Betty was just as easily dismissed. She may have had more tact than Louise, but her interest in Bogie just made me pity the poor child. Donna, on the other hand, I had my eye on. Of the three, she was the least confrontational, but this only made me more suspicious. She could see through Order magic and the Discordant power that radiated from her was enough to move her to the top of a short list of possible threats.

  I did not immediately file a request for a witch trial, but I vowed to keep an eye on these three. Yes, witch trials are something we still do and no, they are nothing like the repugnant witch trials from the history books. If a mystic overstepped their boundaries, Order simply holds a civilized trial to determine if the soul would be stripped of its sight. The mystic in question would rarely be cycled unless they really stepped out of line or they were already lost.

  But after Seth retold his tale, I couldn’t deny that Donna’s observation made perfect sense. It was clear that Amara was well aware of my presence. Surely, she had to know that I would kill her if anything was to happen to Seth. I wasn’t ready to completely put my trust in witches, but I couldn’t allow my own prejudice to cloud my reasoning. Especially once I felt the power coming off the wards they threw together when Bogie announced we had company. I knew immediately that he was telling the truth when I smelled the lingering stench of werewolf as well. Not that lying would have gotten him very far, considering he was still bound to the bar, but Bogie was a demon and Discordant are not known for ratting out their own.

  I was going to have to accept all the help I could get, even if it was from mystics, so I left the witches to deal with the pixies. Pixies were a pain in the ass, but as a threat, they were only a step or two higher than demons. All pixies did was sprinkle people with pixie dust, which has something of a psychotropic effect that makes people think they are invincible and able to defy physics. If you’ve ever heard of someone who was high enough to think they could fly, they were most likely dosed with pixie dust.

  A werewolf was a different story. I took off after the scent of wolf and cursed when I realized it was not a werewolf, but werewolves. A pack, not sure exactly how many, but they were all headed in different directions. Not knowing the layout of the town was a hindrance I didn’t have time for. Unlike some of my colleagues, I embraced modern technology. I pulled out my phone and did a search for the all-night diner Seth had mentioned. Louie’s Diner was four blocks west of downtown, in an area that was home to most of the college students and the younger transient population. Sure enough, when I got there, two wolves were hanging around right outside the place.

  Despite what popular fiction would have you believe, werewolves aren’t very high on the Discordant pecking order. Nor are they men who change into beasts on the full moon. They are full time beasts who use a glamour to appear human. The full moon? That’s just their thing. They get their thrill from the hunt and it gives them more of a thrill when their prey knows exactly what is after them. From a magical standpoint, werewolves are weak, but they more than make up for the lack with their physical strength, speed, and agility. Werewolves don’t care if a soul is lost. They aren’t recruiting. Their method of spreading Discord is purely through untimely and gruesome death.

  And I had one hell of a grudge against the flea-bitten bastards. The hunt that led to my death lasted for six days. It didn’t have to. They were toying with me for their own amusement. Had they killed me outright, I might have made it back to the plantation in time to save Sarah, which is why killing every last member of the pack became my top priority once I had ensured the eternal death of the bastard who killed her. Even now, three hundred years later, I keep a special hatred for the beasts in the coldest and darkest part of my heart.

  Getting these two somewhere that wasn’t out in the open was going to be difficult. Outside of the downtown area, there were no dark alleys or similar places to hide. Like I said, the wolves wanted their victims to know exactly what did them in. To the left of the diner was a used car lot and to the right was a brightly lit gas station that also seemed to stay open all night. As I was trying to find a convenient place to dispose of the wolves, a group of loud, obnoxious, and still drunk college age girls exited the diner and the wolves followed. I didn’t like the idea of using the girls as bait, but I didn’t really have a choice. Besides, I would be able to dispose of the wolves under the cover of their drunken chatter once we were off the main road.

  But they never turned off the main road. Instead, the wolves caught up to the girls. Glamoured to look like attractive college boys, they slid right up to their prey and wedged themselves into the group. I no longer had a clear shot of them. Words like ‘after party’ and ‘dorm room’ floated back to me. So they were headed toward the college campus. In a way, this worked in my favor.

  I reached for my blade and my fingers grazed the bottle Betty had tossed my way. Wolfsbane and silver, she had said. The slightly purplish liquid looked like neither, but I was curious. I slipped the bottle into an inside pocket in my jacket, whispering, “I need an analysis.” A moment later I felt a small vibration and I pulled the bottle back out. A small card was tied around the neck of the bottle that read, “Highly complex spell. Analyzed and replicated for future requirement. Packs a wallop. USE SPARINGLY.”

  The last line intrigued me. Betty had said the exact same thing when she gave me the potion, which was the main reason why I sent it for analysis in the first place. I still wasn’t ready to trust witch magic, but I trusted Arkady, the head analyst from Laboratory Q. In three hundred years, he and his team had never steered me wrong. They were the ones who developed the trans-cyclical pocket, which allowed me to send items for analysis and access the necessary tools and weapons for dealing with the Discordant. Without it, I would have had to carry with me all of the weapons of my trade. Aside from the logistical impossibility, being a large black man got me enough unwanted attention as it was. As a large black man, carrying an armory’s worth of magical weapons, I would have been locked up centuries ago.

  I uncorked the bottle and stuck the tip of a silver dagger into the liquid, but pulled it out almost immediately because after just a fraction of a second, the blade drank up half the bottle. I didn’t know what to make of that, but I didn’t have time to worry about it since the group I was following had made it onto campus. Reading the wolves was easy and I could smell that they were about to change. Using a small amount of influence, I sent the girls in the direction of the library, which stayed open all night.

  “Where are you going? The party’s this way?”

  “Small bladder,” one of the girls apologized. “I’ll be right back.”

  Predictably, all of the girls headed to the restroom together. I didn’t even have to use any magical influence for that to happen. One of the wolves looked like he wanted to stop them, but the second one put his hand on the first. “Dude, chill out,” he hissed. “You want them to piss themselves before the hunt even begins? Where’s the thrill of the hunt if we can smell them from a mile away?”

  “They could be going to get security,” the first one reasoned.

  “So what? Do you think college security guards carry silver bullets? Those guys don’t even carry guns. If they do get security, that’s just another course added to our meal.”

  As soon as the girls were sa
fely inside, I moved into position. With their whispered argument still going, it was easy to angle myself for a one shot kill. I let the dagger fly and held my breath as I waited to see what the potion would do, if anything. I didn’t have to wait very long.

  The tip of my blade barely grazed the first wolf before he went up in a fireball that engulfed his buddy as well. Unfortunately, the explosion, which resulted in a rain of fine ash that hung in the air like macabre snowflakes, was likely seen by the entire campus.

  “I told you that a little goes a long ways.”

  I nearly jumped at the sound of Betty’s voice. She was leaning against a security call box with her arms folded. Bits of acid green glitter clung to her hair and skin.

  “I barely touched the blade before half the liquid was gone,” I said in my defense.

  Betty’s eyes bulged. “You dunked it? Why didn’t you use the dropper?”

  “I…” I pulled the bottle back out. Sure enough, in my haste, I failed to notice that the top of the bottle held a small dropper. “Only the Creator is infallible,” I said sheepishly and tucked the blade, now a weapon of werewolf Armageddon, into my inside pocket. “Overkill. Can you attempt to siphon off some of the potion?” I asked quietly.

  “Who are you talking to?” Betty asked. I guess I wasn’t quiet enough.

  “Don’t worry about it. Here,” I said with a tight smile and held out the bottle, but pulled back again when I saw the extent to which the pixies got her. “Uh… Wait, I’m just going to toss it to you. Looks like the pixies must have put up one hell of a fight.” I knew better than to get anywhere near pixie glitter. While I was immune to the euphoric effects, pixie glitter was ten times more stubborn than pixie dust and it had a way of getting into everything.

  “Ugh, tell me about it,” she said, yanking a lock of hair in front of her face with a frown. “I did an immunity spell, but I’m gonna be finding this crap in my clothes for the next century. At least it ain’t as bad as Louise. She looks like she lost a fight with a craft store.”

  I wasn’t about to tell her that was exactly what she looked like as well. “Where is Louise?” I asked. I didn’t like the idea that the least powerful of the witches was out there on her own. She might have annoyed me, but I didn’t want to see any harm come to her.

  “She went after the wolves with Donna.”

  “What? Damn it!” I might have had trust issues, but werewolves were dangerous and I didn’t want to be responsible for what could happen to the girls. “Come on, we need to find them.” I ran off in the direction I had sensed the others in earlier. Betty stayed right beside me.

  “There’s a shortcut over the bridge,” she said, pointing toward a jogging path that went down to the river. As we crossed the bridge, I heard the sounds of laughter, shouting, water splashing, and singing. I stopped dead in my tracks as the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. That wasn’t ordinary singing.

  “Oh no. Is that what I think it is?” Betty grabbed my arm, sprinkling me with residual pixie glitter in the process. I couldn’t even be mad because the poor kid was terrified and rightly so. How a siren found its way to a landlocked place like Blackbird, I don’t know. All I knew was that I had to do something about it and Betty’s death grip was preventing me from going anywhere. I reached into my inside pocket and pulled out three silver daggers, each tipped with a reasonable amount of her Wolfsbane concoction.

  “Go, find the others, and use these,” I said, pressing the daggers into her hands. “Go quickly. Pay no attention to what you are hearing. It’s not real; you know that. Can you do this?”

  “Um…” she gulped hard and nodded her head, but her feet were still moving in the direction of the river.

  “You’re going to have to be stronger than that, Betty,” I said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out a pair of earmuffs that I placed over her head. “I’ll come find you as soon as I put a stop to this.”

  “Thank you, Desmond,” she shouted, unable to hear over the static that now blocked the siren song, and ran across the bridge. I only waited until I knew she was out of range before I followed the siren’s voice down to the edge of the river.

  Through the dense tree line that separated the jogging trail from the river, I saw a well-worn dirt path. A few yards in, the trees thinned out, opening to a packed dirt embankment where a group of teenagers sat slumped around a dying bonfire. From the crushed beer cans and red cups that littered the clearing, it looked like the local teenagers were taking full advantage of the last few warm summer nights before the school year began. But with a siren in the area, the mostly harmless delinquency was taking a deadly turn.

  In the light of the full moon, the siren sat on a tangle of dead branches several yards from the shore. A whirlpool churned where her toes touched the water’s surface, ensuring death to anyone who came close enough. Her song had already lured two boys into the water and several others were fumbling to get out of their clothing. Considering that most of the kids were drunk, I wasn’t too worried about witnesses. Still, just to be safe, I threw an herbal concoction onto the fire. The acrid smoke nearly choked me, but within seconds, everyone was out cold, including the half-dressed boys on the bank. It took some doing, but I was able to yank the two spellbound youths out of the water before they hit the current that would sweep them down and into the whirlpool.

  Of course, once the siren realized she had no victims, she focused her wrath on me. A wall of water, twenty feet tall, rose from the river and threatened to crash down on the shore, dragging everyone under. Using nearly all of my strength, I pushed back. With my free hand, I reached into my inner pocket.

  “I need a delicacy to tempt a siren, laced with a silencing draught,” I said through gritted teeth. My hands curled around the paper wrapper of a cupcake, which looked suspiciously like one I had seen in the storefront of the bakery downtown.

  “Seriously?” I asked, more to myself, but as I did, the words trust me appeared in neon pink frosting, piped out in Arkady’s scrawling handwriting. With a shrug, I tossed the cupcake. The siren snatched it out of the air, greedily biting into the delicacy before she had a chance to think about her actions.

  With her voice gone, she was powerless and the wall of water poured back into the river, washing away the remnants of the whirlpool. Wordlessly, the siren begged me to spare her life. With bits of neon pink frosting smudged along the corners of her mouth, she looked so ridiculous that I almost felt sorry for her.

  Almost.

  I hadn’t forgotten that she had tried to kill innocent children. Well, teenagers who were not so innocent, but children nonetheless. A harpoon seemed like overkill, so I pulled a small fishing spear from my pocket and dispatched the Discordant. Once I was certain that there were no other threats in the area, I surveyed the damage and decided to let the local police deal with the underage drinkers. I still had werewolves to eliminate.

  The tracking spell I had put on the daggers led me to the south side. I found the witches in the loading zone behind a supermarket. The lingering ashes and smell of burnt fur told me they had been successful, but it appeared as if they still had something cornered behind a dumpster. I could hear low chanting and there was a lot of magic in the air that formed a protective barrier around their circle.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “A casualty,” Donna said, beckoning me closer. I stepped inside the barrier and thought at first that they had cornered a banshee based on the amount of noise that assaulted my ears.

  “Watch me! Watch! I can walk through walls! Don’t believe me? Watch this!”

  A young man ran head first toward the store’s brick wall. His yellow polo shirt and red deli apron were liberally sprinkled with green pixie glitter, making him look like a deranged traffic light. He would have brained himself were it not for the magical buffer the witches were keeping in place.

  “Louise had just finished off the last wolf when the door opened and this guy tripped over her,” Betty explained. “We’
ve tried every cleansing ritual we know, but it’s not working.”

  “I’ve got this,” I said with an exasperated sigh. It was my own damned fault. I should have just sent the girls home when I saw the condition Betty was in earlier. I didn’t want to think about how much residual pixie glitter they might have left all over the city. “Get on out of here and get yourselves cleaned up.”

  “You sure?” Betty asked with a concerned glance at the affected employee.

  “He’ll be fine,” I assured her, adding with a hesitant smile, “Thanks.”

  She seemed taken aback by my gratitude. Maybe I’d been a bit harsh, but I was honestly grateful for their help.

  “No problem,” she said, giving me a shy smile before heading out after the others. I turned back to the store employee and hit him with just enough magic to temporarily knock him out.

  “I need a containment unit,” I muttered into my pocket. A moment later, I pulled out a small, but powerful handheld vacuum. When all of the glitter was gone, I got out of there. The last thing I needed was to have anyone find me hovering over a passed out skinny white boy in the middle of the night. The kid would wake up soon and have no recollection of what had happened. For his sake, I hope no one missed him enough for it to compromise his employment.

  *

  “Hey.”

  As I crossed the street and headed back towards downtown, Donna fell into step next to me.

  “Something wrong?” I asked.

  “No, the others went home like you said.” She glanced at me with a look that said she had a lot on her mind, but she wasn’t sure how to approach it. “I… I know you’re uncomfortable with what I am and I can’t blame you. I just… don’t let it cloud your judgment on the others, okay? They aren’t like me.”