by Peter Hartz
“Well, there was this one thing…” Michelle went on to describe the white wall of energy that raced out in all directions from the small clearing, and heading up into the sky, come to think of it, and its effect on everything it passed through.
Giltreas blinked at the description. He had no idea what that effect was, but it must have been caused by the spell, or whatever caused it to detonate. Would every spell cause the same thing to happen again? Magic was an important, significant part of his set of skills. If it did not work normally here, he needed to know, and right now. He would need to know what of his skills he could depend on. He stood. “Will you accompany me outside? I must discover if magic will work reliably here for me or not.”
Everyone else stood as well, and Dave led the way to the door and out onto the porch.
Giltreas took up the rear, and stopped in astonishment when he reached the top of the porch staircase. “What are those…things?” A huge, shiny black metal… thing sat there in the yard. And there were other… things… in the yard as well, similar, but different in forms and colors – a dark grey one similar in shape, and a smaller green one.
“Those are…” Allie stopped a moment. Should she say it? “…horseless carriages. We have several names for them, depending on…” She stopped.
He stepped down, and reached out, touching the big black one on its sleek flank. Then he turned away, and walked further into the yard. What they were could wait. He needed to find the answer to more important questions first.
Allie heard Max bark behind her, and then he whined. He wanted out, since everyone else was outside. He didn’t like being left alone away from Allison, for all his bluster. “Shhh, Maxie, its ok. I’ll be right back.”
Giltreas stopped. What to cast? Mayhap a simple illusion to start? The cantrip came easily to him, and he released the spell.
A huge horse appeared in the yard, Cailio, the charger of his swordsman mentor. It pawed the ground with a thud, and snorted. He dismissed the spell. The horse tossed its head as if to say good morrow, then disappeared.
What more complicated spell next? Shape change.
Dave, Allie, and Michelle watched in wonder as Giltreas changed into a huge black, fur-winged wolf, looking most of five feet tall at the shoulder. He took a step, flapped his wings, and glided a moment a few feet, then turned back. Dave found himself looking at the ground under the shape Giltreas had changed into. The shadow cast by the sun in the clear blue afternoon sky was the same as the form gliding in for a landing between them and the trees.
He dissipated the spell, changing from the Harrower Wolf back to his normal form, then looked around. A target?
“David, do you have a target I might abuse? I wish to cast another spell.”
◆◆◆
He paused from reading his newspaper, and looked at his watch. The last distraction from his plan should now be removed. All that was left now was cleaning up.
His wife noticed his smile as he glanced at his wrist, and smiled one of her own as she asked, “What are you thinking about, dear? Something from work?”
“Nothing, honey. Just checking the time, and it occurred to me that we haven’t gone out for a great steak recently. Up for a jaunt downtown?” He looked over at her, his smile still, and wondered not for the first time what such a beautiful, wonderful woman was doing with him.
“Hmmm. I think I can squeeze that into my busy schedule…”
Chapter 7
The late morning sunlight had moved on to early afternoon, with the warm sun slowly shifting overhead towards the west. The leaves on the trees, and the needles on the pines, rustled in the light breeze, adding a gentle undercurrent of comfort to the warmth of a September day in northern Minnesota. A sparrow landed on the porch railing, and Dave’s eyes followed it as it looked at the people sitting there. Then it flitted off, leaving the four as it had found them, alone with their thoughts.
Dave, Allie, Michelle, and Giltreas sat in the comfortable chairs on the porch that faced the main yard of the cottage and the cars parked there, and enjoying some ice cold lemonade that Michelle had made early yesterday after arriving straight from work. Each had their mind on something different, but every face shared the same distant gaze as they contemplated recent events.
Allie kept glancing at Michelle out of the corner of her eye. Wow. Whatever had changed her had really done the works. Michelle looked perfect, and part of Allie wanted to be jealous. The rational part of her brain kept intruding into her thoughts though, trying to convince her that Michelle’s life had been so very hard, and she deserved some good things to happen to her. But that didn’t stop Allie from wanting what had happened to Michelle to happen to her, and for a very personal reason.
For reasons different than Michelle, Allison and Dave were unable to have children. It was a constant sorrow in the back of her mind, a loss that she had never been able to completely come to peace over. She was from a somewhat large family, and had four brothers and sisters, two of each. The fourth child, and the last girl, her parents had stopped pestering her years ago to have kids, when they realized that it would never happen, and the whole thing caused Allie to cry herself to sleep. Not as much anymore, but it still happened from time to time. Dave was there for her, though. He held her as the storms came, and the tears fell. He shed plenty as well, not only for himself, but because he knew the depth of her pain, her loss, her grief.
But now, Michelle had been transformed, and everything that had been wrong with her had been erased as if by magic. Then Allie caught her thoughts, and snorted internally at her choice of words. ‘As if by magic’ could be replaced, and had been, by simply, ‘by magic.’
Allison had barely gotten to the cottage, and had not even been told everything that had happened to Michelle, who the grey stranger was and what his role was in things, when he had needed to go outside to test his magical skills.
She winced again internally as her deeply ingrained natural skepticism in anything to do with magic and the paranormal had been ripped out of her completely, and replaced with… something else, she didn’t know what. The mind of the pragmatic Marine she had been when she met Dave in the U.S. Marine Corps couldn’t tolerate things that weren’t grounded firmly in reality. Now, though, her thoughts were adrift, her comfortable world of what she could understand with her five senses, and her expectations for that world to follow the laws it had always adhered to, picked up like a child’s toy, and kicked across the room and out the window. Firmly grounded reality was suddenly an expanse of metaphoric sand that shifted and moved under her as she tried to find her internal balance once again. She had no fear that her mind might crack, because if that was going to happen, it would have in Iraq. No, she wanted to understand how the world had changed, and where she fit with those changes.
But most of all, she wanted what happened to Michelle to happen to her, so that she might try again to become a mother. In the end, beyond her deep enduring love for Dave, nothing much else really mattered to her. She was 34, some six years younger than David, and still in the prime of her life, but time for motherhood was moving on for her.
As she thought about it, she cataloged her physical inventory, and was not too upset over what she had. She might find five pounds to lose if she looked very hard, but she was dedicated to keeping herself in as good a condition as possible. She ran three miles, three times a week, and her times weren’t too bad. She kept up with her Aikido daily, an art she had settled on after getting out of the Corps. And she went to the range diligently, every other weekend, firing off a box of fifty shells, to keep her aim and her focus sharp.
In between that, she worked as a volunteer at a nursing home, helping care for the residents there who had a range of issues from simple old age to advanced Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, and every possible physical ailment that getting older treated everyone to eventually. All in all, she was, if not exactly happy, satisfied that she was taking good care of herself, and doing good, positive
things in the lives of others. But she wanted more. She ached, yearned, and dreamed of becoming a mother.
◆◆◆
Dave wondered how he was going to keep Michelle, and now that he thought about it, Allison safe. Someone had gotten to Michelle, and they had nearly taken her from him forever. Like everyone else around him, he never thought that violence would be directed at him or his family. They lived in a relatively quiet neighborhood with very little crime. They stayed out of certain parts of the metropolitan area of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. But if someone could get to Michelle here at a remote cottage in the middle of the woods that no one was supposed to know about, no place in the world was safe. He knew that his thoughts were getting paranoid, but he couldn’t help it in the face of a threat he couldn’t confront, and didn’t have any information about.
‘Thank God for Giltreas,’ he thought to himself again. ‘If he hadn’t come along when he did, Shelly would be dead. I owe him more than I can ever repay. But I intend to try.’ Grimly, he made a silent promise that whoever had done this would pay.
He glanced left again at Giltreas, sitting in the chair next to him. He was staring out at something only his eyes could see; his face completely unreadable. Who, or what, was he? Where did he learn how to do what he did to save Michelle, change her, heal her, so completely that she was unrecognizable, and then do what he did in the yard just a short time ago? And would he teach Dave?
‘More importantly, could he teach me? Is it something I can learn?’ Skills like that would definitely come in handy when he started on the trail of his target. The shape-change alone was incredible, but what Giltreas had done to his target board had been sheer, incredible exhilaration. Giltreas had described it as a simple spell, but that ‘simple spell’ had destroyed the entire upper target. ‘Casting a magic stone’, he called it. Whatever it was, it had hit the heavy sheet of plywood with enough force to shatter it, throwing pieces in an arc some fifteen to thirty feet in all directions from the sawhorse it was bolted to.
But all special abilities aside, he still needed to protect Michelle and Allison. And he had no idea how to do that and still track down whoever started this, and end it. Permanently. But he would figure it out. Nobody takes a run at his loved ones. Ever. He supposed he was turning ‘to the dark side’, but didn’t much care. Family mattered. Not much else really did, when it came right down to it. Only family mattered.
◆◆◆
Michelle sat and thought through what she knew. Giltreas could make magic; cast magic spells. That point had been driven home, as preposterous as it seemed on the surface. Her transformation, as miraculous as it seemed, had a simple explanation. For whatever reason, Giltreas did it.
That wasn’t the hard part. Oh no. Not at all. Huh-uhh. The hard part? That would be figuring out how to get back to her life, looking like someone else. How did she prove that she was the real McCoy? How would she make anyone believe her? Everyone knew her scarred and damaged visage. No one knew what she looked like underneath that damage. And now that it was wiped away, and this new, reborn appearance had been… thrown on her, what did she do? She had nearly fourteen hundred people depending on her to run the company she had founded and grown to its present state. She looked, and to be honest, physically felt, nineteen years old.
A laugh escaped her, and she quickly smothered it, turning it into a cough, as she contemplated her senior staff taking one look at the gorgeous teenager barely out of high school she had become in the big meeting room across from her office, and calmly walking out to call security.
But a more serious look appeared on her face as she considered what had happened to her last night.
The memories were fragmented, obviously because she had drifted in and out of consciousness, but the last thing she remembered before waking up and finding her world-view shredded, was that she warmed up at the last moment, before a deep darkness fell on her. She shuddered internally, trying to hide her distress from those around her, but it got through anyways, and she felt a hand on her shoulder.
◆◆◆
Giltreas was assured that his skills at magic were at hand, and available to him should need arise. His sight was drawn to the strange metal carriages in the yard several feet from him, and then he forced himself to look away as he tried to gather his thoughts.
Obviously, these humans had things and machines and devices he had never encountered before, nor heard of, or even contemplated could exist. ‘Horseless carriage’ was an interesting name, but without a horse, or oxen, how were they moved? And their strange appearance, right down to the wheels under them, glinted strangely in his thoughts, much more so than the building behind, below, and above him. Everything was different here. Almost like a fantastical story told to young children before the last of the day had past and sleep came upon them. The explanations to Giltreas about the horseless carriages had been confusing, but he thought he had grasped enough to understand. They were machines crafted to carry people and their things great distances, and burned something similar to swamp gas in liquid form. Strange, indeed.
He wondered again, but only briefly, why his patron had sent him here. Was his work completed? He felt more rested now than he had in recent times; his physical and magical strength had recovered completely with a speed that left him wondering many things. Was this a result of this new plane he found himself upon? Or something his patron had done? Was it permanent? Some gifts his patron laid upon him were permanent, while others were not. And all things could be changed, he knew. Angering his patron was a sure way to have those gifts turned against him quickly, with horrifying result. It was a lesson learned through pain and blood; his patron was not to be trifled with.
He heard a laugh next to him, sounding strained, as the woman he had saved tried to cover it with a cough, and he reached out to gently touch her shoulder. Her eyes were drawn to him, and he could see the emotions roiling behind, the turmoil she suffered. He knew not the source of her unrested spirit, but he recognized his hand in her present state, and his heart went out to her. Rarely was he granted chance at caring; such was the demands of his patron. Now, his caring had harmed someone, an unthinkable thought. Still, he knew he could give more, and what he had, he gave fully and readily, radiating comfort and warmth towards her.
◆◆◆
Michelle blinked as she looked into Giltreas’ eyes, feeling positive emotions flow from him at her. The turmoil insider her calmed, and she knew that whatever happened, she would figure out what to do. She always had.
She turned to David, and asked, “What now? What do you want to do?”
The conversation started up. Dave rose to the occasion.
“I am going to figure out who did this, and… resolve it,” he stated grimly, then paused in astonishment as another voice spoke softly.
“I would lend you my skills in full measure, Lord David, to aid you at your task, if you would have me. What was done to Lady Michelle was monstrous. Such who would do thusly deserves truly a response appropriate.” Giltreas spoke softly, but there was no mistaking what he was saying, and Dave smiled in response.
“I accept completely. And please, do not call me Lord. This country has no nobility. We are all commoners, I suppose. Although Michelle is just a little more noble than the rest of us.” She turned at his teasing voice, and surprised everyone, herself most of all, by sticking out her tongue, something she hadn’t done to her Davey since they were both very young.
“The only problem I have is, I have to find a way to keep Michelle and Allison safe, while you and I go after them. I don’t want anyone coming in behind me and trying to take either of them out while I am looking elsewhere. And I don’t want to have to worry about them.” David finished softly.
“I have a suggestion, if I may be so bold.” Giltreas spoke hesitantly. He wasn’t sure if it was his place to speak up, and he was still processing David’s statement that they were all commoners. Truly?
“Any help you offer would be greatly apprecia
ted.” Dave said, turning towards Giltreas, as did Michelle and Allison.
“My mother would welcome them in her house, and keep them safe.”
Chapter 8
It was decided with very little argument, because Dave wouldn’t have any, and Michelle decided that since she was on vacation, she should get well and truly away. The lone voice of dissent was Allison.
“I can take care of myself,” she declared, as if that ended the discussion.
“That’s not the point, honey,” Dave rejoined patiently. “I know you can, you know you can, Michelle knows you can, hell, even those drunken morons outside Kieran’s last month might know it pretty well by now, too. But you aren’t bullet-proof, and enough guys with a good plan would be able to get to you, and you know it. One bullet would mess up everything for me real quick. Sure, if they get close enough, or you know they’re coming, then I don’t have to worry. But if they surprise you, it’s over. And I am not going to lose you.” His voice turned grim at the last moment, and she shuddered inside. She knew it would have killed him to lose Michelle, and Allison knew it would be just as bad, if not worse, if she was killed. He had told her so before.
“I still think I could be a help here. Besides, I don’t know anyone there. Wherever it is.” One last token effort, she decided.
It was Michelle that turned the decision for Dave, by not playing fair. “I want you there. I don’t want to be alone in a strange place. I want a familiar face to talk to, that I know I can trust. No offense, Giltreas. But I don’t know anyone there. I don’t want to go by myself.” Giltreas nodded his acknowledgement that he was not offended. Then he had to hide his smile as Michelle kept talking.
“What if I talk Giltreas into doing to you what he did to me? Healing me? I know that you have always wanted to have kids, like I used to. What if he is able to make that happen?” Her voice finished softly, gently, as she turned to look more completely at Allison, her sister-in-law.