It was not like being at a campfire with its cheerful crackling, playfully scorching the marshmallows dangling over it. No, this was like the summoning of a fire elemental, hundreds and hundreds of people thronged in ritual calling it forth as it rose mighty and wild from the earth itself.
The ropes that stabilized the cocoon snapped, and the layers of the cocoon began to burst and curl open into an exotic fire flower, dropping glowing bits like infernal honey dripping from the petals.
The nain rouge was curled at its center.
It took me a moment to recognize him, even to realize there was a figure huddled there. I heard others gasp as he stretched and emerged. I could make out the patterns on his skin; unlike earlier, he was completely bare from the waist up. His hair flamed and the red whorls and patterns on his flesh glowed like embers. It made the flesh between them look dark, cracked, a being of lava and obsidian.
He leaped down from the cocoon to the platform below, and people broke out of the crowd and ran toward the fire from all sides. No, not people--fae. His fae. They cast off what seemed like cloaks, but that I realized with a sick feeling were skins. They weren’t real flesh. They began to melt and dissolve as they were discarded, but they were horrific humanoid suits all the same. Unmasked, they were much more alien than our land spirit allies in their human guises, with no attempt to blend in.
One emerged from the crowd not far from me and I caught a glimpse of its arm before it shed the human skin. The dark, un-activated lines of the sigil stood out against the pale skin. Shit. How many of them had we wasted time marking today when we could have been marking actual innocent people? Had they reported it to Murmur?
Dear god, there were a lot of them. Dozens.
The nain rouge had a machete. It flashed in the firelight as he twirled it. He swung down from the top platform to the one below it, slicing through the flames that curled up around him. Everywhere he cut, a piece of the flame fell burning to the ground like a comet. When it struck the ground, it formed a ball that unfurled and lengthened, rising up from the ground and taking on a shape like a lizard.
Not a lizard, I realized. A salamander. The occult essence of fire. The nain rouge was using the burn to pull forth beings of fire to set loose on the camp.
The salamanders swung their heads back and forth, looking around with burning eyes, and slithered out from the flaming wood pile and onto the grass. They were growing. And they were headed right for the crowd.
I expected mass panic, chaos, but most people weren’t even registering it. Here and there, past the outer edge of the circle, individual people pushed their frantic way out and ran. Many more people surged in the seething mass ringed around the fire, a mass that was beginning to lose shape and spread out. The drummers beat a furious rhythm. People danced or swayed or marched in a lurching manner, their eyes glazing, some of them shouting or tunelessly singing. Was this an effect of the wild fae, to daze people like this?
It had to be. I wasn’t immune to it either. I stood in place, swaying. Everything took on a dreamlike, walking-underwater feeling, strange and slow and clumsy.
The salamanders circled close, lifting their heads and opening their mouths, bluish forked tongues flicking out. From those tongues rolled balls of neon blue energy that leaped forth and split in jagged fractals like lightning, lines of bright blue fire racing through the air and running along anything they touched.
My skin burned sharp for a moment where the electric blue fire touched and then receded into a glow, like I’d been spattered by a broken glow stick. No one around me reacted like they were in pain or even like they noticed. I shook my head, trying to clear it. I felt drunk. I needed to...It was all so bright and confusing, and there was so much noise. My mind grasped two-fisted at a vague, elusive idea that I couldn’t quite seem to get. Everything was blurring and wheeling around me. It would be so easy to plunge into this sweet oblivion.
Some tiny part of myself rallied, resisting it, though I was no longer sure why. That grain of self struggled to rise up to the surface of my mind, sounding an alarm, repeating an instruction over and over that came as though from very far away. Slowly it penetrated the fog, reaching some primal motor center. I fought to lift my arm, and slapped my own face as hard as I could.
I stood there blinking with my cheek burning as the pieces assembled and my vision cleared, only to be filled by the burning face of a salamander. I stared into the flaming maw, and my hands moved on their own, drawing and firing my dinky little water pistol.
Maybe I expected it to explode in a puff of ash, or sizzle out like a doused candle. It didn’t. But it reacted in surprise and pain, crackling in fury and darting back, and then shaking off the injury. Shit.
I cast around for anything larger I could use to fight them off. I saw some abandoned fire spinning supplies not far away and ran toward them, seizing the heavy, wet, sooty towel that’d been used to extinguish the toys. Holding one edge, I flung it with an effort over the nearest salamander, almost covering it. Steam hissed out and the creature bucked and writhed, trying to throw it off. I steeled myself and flopped belly-first onto it, reaching for the edges of the towel to hold it down and smother it.
The heat was unbearable. My belly and the front of my thighs screamed like I’d just slapped a sunburn. But a few moments later, the wriggling beneath me subsided and I lay flat upon the hot, now only damp towel. Great. A couple dozen more soaking wet towels and some third-degree burns later, and I’d be a hero.
As I staggered to my feet, I saw Tamar forcing her way through the crowd with the hose from the trough out near the pavilion. She was pulling it taut and still couldn’t get past the inner perimeter. She waved one arm wide to get my attention. “We gotta cut off their fuel!” she yelled. “Or else they get out into camp, and they get worse!”
I turned in time to see a salamander gripping the edge of a bucket near me, pushed up onto its hind legs with its face ducked down inside. It was growing larger by the second. It was drinking the fire spinners’ fuel. Tamar was right. The elementals were on the small side now, but they were expanding as they crossed the sun-baked grass, heading right for crowds of people consuming alcohol and dressed in a lot of flammable clothing.
There was a fire staff nearby, and I grabbed it, unsure what I thought I could do, but determined to face off against that behemoth of a salamander drinking from the bucket. I swung at it. “Hey you!” I shouted, as if that was going to do anything.
The staff met resistance, but still passed through the salamander. It did, however, get the thing’s attention. “That’s right,” I said, with more bravado than was perhaps justified. “Happy hour’s over, asshole.”
It charged at me. Shit. I gripped the staff in both hands and braced myself.
With a deep breath, hoping I’d gauged the right moment, I thrust one end of the staff at the creature’s face as it got close. I caught it as it was opening its mouth to spit that blue fire at me, the wick end of the staff going deep between its flaming jaws. It clamped onto the wick and swung its head back and forth, nearly wrenching the staff from my hands. I gripped harder and sank into a wide-legged stance as we wrestled. It wasn’t letting go.
I struggled with it, pressing forward. It resisted and then skittered back a few inches, still holding on. That gave me an idea. I claimed another difficult step forward, and then another, and then I circled around it so that I was between it and the fire, and began to pull. I dug my heels in and dragged it toward the flames. Over my shoulder, I could see no fae between me and the fire, and I spared only a moment to worry about why I couldn’t see where they were. I’d think about that when I didn’t have a fire elemental a stick’s length away from me.
Don’t ask me why I thought the thing I was attempting to do was the right idea; it was just a hunch. But as I got close to the fire, the salamander fought me harder. Its jaws were parting. The wick must be nearly out of fuel--the f
uel had to be the thing making the salamander hold on. Before it could open its mouth all the way, I bent at the knees, changed my grip, and heaved the end of the staff in an arc over my head.
With that motion, I lifted the salamander clear off the ground and flung it back into the fire. It couldn’t hold its grip and slipped free, shooting into the hot flames just above the embers and flaring where it landed. It turned and I saw malice in its burning eyes as it glared at me, but the flames wrapped around it in an infernal embrace and its shape melted into union with the fire. It did not emerge again.
I looked up and saw Sara and Dionne running along the perimeter of the circle with buckets, pouring out water on the grass. Tamar was spraying every inch of grass she could reach with the hose. A few tranced-out people danced in the spray, oblivious to the danger. The crowd was spreading out, at least, no longer so densely packed together.
Cherry faced off with one of the salamanders, aiming her water pistol at it and driving it back with a squirt here and there, eluding it in a dangerous tango. Joe pulled large branches out of the wood pile and used them to bait the salamanders, drawing them back from the circle of people to give Sara and Dionne more time to wet the grass. I searched the circle for Vivi and finally saw her, teamed up with one of Morph’s fire safety marshals. The marshal had on a hard hat with a clear visor, and heavy gloves that went up his arms, and a long jacket. A ring of elementals swarmed them, hissing and snapping at them as they stood back-to-back and blasted the things with fire extinguishers. It was hard to say how much they were hurting them with the foam, but they were holding them off at least.
I ran back to the fuel bucket and dunked each end of the staff in it. The nain rouge was nowhere in sight, which meant he wasn’t calling up more elementals out of the fire, but also meant I had no idea what he and his buddies were up to. There were still a number of salamanders trying to get out of the circle. And the ones that were thwarted by wet grass or the spray of the hose were getting pissed.
I ran around the fire, yelling to my friends, “Push them back into the fire!” until I was sure they’d all heard me, then charged at a few more of the salamanders. I trapped one on each end of the staff and clumsily beat off the others as I hauled them back toward the fire. This time, I swung one end of the staff into the fire until the flames devoured its form, and then the other.
There was a cracking sound above me. Looking up, I saw one platform collapse onto the one below it, and the structure listed hard to one side. I fought a few more of the salamanders, shoving them one by one into the fire with great effort, and saw with a sinking heart that more were starting to notice me and slither closer. My fuel wouldn’t hold out forever, and I wasn’t sure how I’d get clear of them if they surrounded me with the fire at my back.
Another sharp crack. My entire back side was roasting in the heat; sweat ran down my face and arms and stung my eyes. I was already tiring and the night had just begun. One of the salamanders spat blue lightning at me and I didn’t dodge fast enough. It forked around my waist and ran up my arms. The pain was brief but intense. I smelled burnt hair and saw the weird blue glow linger on my skin and clothes.
“Mari!” Vivi was there, blasting foam at the salamanders to make a path. She grabbed my arm and pulled. The structure creaked behind me. “Get clear!” she shouted over the crackle and roar of the flames.
Together we ran out, away from the fire, and saw Joe brandishing his stick in one hand, waving us toward him with urgency. He was still close to the fire. The hems of my pants soaked up water from the grass as Vivi and I got to the edge of the circle. The salamanders snapped at us, but they were a short distance away and crowding at the edge of the wet grass. Vivi and I were safe for the moment. We could stop, and breathe, and think.
But Joe was trying to tell us to come over to him. “No!” Vivi stabbed a finger toward the ground at our feet. “You need to come here!”
My adrenaline-drenched brain tried to make some sense of what was going on, to parse Joe’s reason, and then I knew what he was doing. I grabbed Vivi’s arm. “Come on!”
“Are you crazy?” She pulled away as I half-dragged her toward Joe, beating back salamanders with my staff.
“Probably,” I shouted back. “Get them to chase you!”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw the light bulb go off, so I let go of her and we moved apart, doing our best to rile every salamander we passed and get them after us.
We closed in with Joe just as Cherry and Dionne reached him from the opposite direction, luring even more of them, and then I saw Sara and Tamar reach him too.
This had to work. We were completely surrounded by salamanders. I held the staff in one hand and my water gun in the other, keeping the elementals as far from me as I could. If we misjudged, we’d run out of war water and foam and fuel and they’d overwhelm us. As it was, balls of blue flame broke open into forks of light and licked over our clothes and bodies, leaving us spattered and glowing, stinging us.
Several sharp cracks, and a long, groaning creak. Joe stood in the center of our cluster, looking up. “Now!” He waved us forward. “That way! Go, go, go!”
As if we were trained to fight together, we turned our improvised weapons in the direction Joe pointed and cleared a path, breaking out of the circle and running as fast as we could while behind us, the burning structure loomed above where we’d stood a moment before, and with a final volley of sharp sounds and a roar of whooshing hot air, collapsed. It fell past the edge of the fire, onto the bare ground, and crushed or sucked in almost all of the salamanders that had surrounded us.
We didn’t pause, but went shoulder to shoulder and turned back, redoubling our efforts and forcing the stragglers to retreat until the flames from the collapsed sculpture snared them and consumed them.
Fire marshals rushed in with tools to push the burning wood back within the fire circle. My crew staggered back and looked around. The salamanders were gone.
My arms shook, suddenly heavy and weak. I backed off from the flames. The crowd was now spread out over the field and into the darkness. I kept walking until I found a patch of grass that was cool but not wet, tossed down the staff, and sank to the ground, breathing hard and trembling all over.
The others collapsed around me. “What the fuck,” said Cherry wearily, and we all grunted in agreement.
“Now onto Round Two.” Joe voiced what we were all thinking. “Anyone see where the Heat Miser and his minions got to?”
None of us had.
“Great,” I said. “Nice plan. Send some scary but low-level critters our way to keep us busy while you get your gang out of sight and headed god knows where to wreak god knows what kind of havoc.”
Dionne rubbed at the blue glow on her arm. “Hate to say it, but this residue is gonna take a while to fade. We don’t got time to cleanse it. It’s gonna be like we got sprayed with spirit musk, so when the wards go down, be ready. Things are going to make a beeline for you and anyone else who got hit with this stuff.”
I’d been leaning back and resting on my elbows, but I jerked upright. “The wards,” I said. “Guys, we have to move. I think I know where the nain rouge and his buddies are headed.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was an impossible task. There were only seven of us, and many more of the nain rouge’s fae allies, and they had identical targets spaced out all around the perimeter of the camp. “If it were me,” I said as we speed-walked through camp, trying not to trip on rocks or holes as we went, “I’d just scatter all my guys around camp and hit as many of the wards as I could so there’d be nothing anyone could do about it. All they have to do is kick over the structures, right?”
“Not exactly.” Dionne huffed with healthy vigor as she strode beside me at a city walker’s pace. “They could do that, and it’d weaken it, sure. But they gotta have magic to counter magic if they want to tear through the protection.”
“Hoping not,” she said. “So if it’s just one or a couple of them got some magic, they best focus on a small spot. So we just gotta find it in time.”
“Near the pond,” said Tamar. “Even though we roped off the hungry grass, it’s still the source of the curse energy. It’ll be a powerful place for them all.”
I saw Vivi shudder and dropped back a step to get closer to her, lowering my voice. “You don’t have to be with us for this. You could wait here just for this part.”
“No. I’m not sitting out.” She stared forward, fierce.
“The first sign of a real fight, you get out.” Tamar fixed her with a gaze that made her falter. “Not kidding around, you got it? You die, thousands die.”
“I want to do something.” She crossed her arms. “I’m not helpless.”
“Great. Best help you can give is not fucking dying, okay? Hey Mari.” Tamar jerked her chin and I joined her. She put an arm around my shoulders and leaned in to my ear. “Be ready to get Vivi out of here, got it? Whatever you gotta do.”
I wasn’t about to fight her on it. “Got it.”
“How do we deal with the fae if we find them?” said Cherry.
“Well,” said Joe, “they’re physical beings.”
“So, what, we’re supposed to beat them up?” said Sara. My thoughts exactly--although she’d skipped the part where that meant that they could just as soon whale on us.
MetamorphosUS: Book 1 of the Mythfit Witch Mysteries Page 34