by DM Fike
Guntram’s kidama. So that had been his raven yesterday. I cupped my hands over my mouth to be heard over the din. “Here I am! You found me!”
Ebony feathers took to the air, a coordinated flock as they swooped high above me. Vincent grabbed my arm, intending to pull me back into the apartment, but I shook him off.
“Go on!” I screamed. “Tell Guntram I’m here!”
A few cackles later, and they did just that, bolting as one horrifying unit up into the sky. The sound of hundreds of wings flapping caused its own wind gust, no pith required. They flew like a biblical locust swarm as they took off toward the east, their caws slowly fading.
I turned back to a stunned Vincent. “Still think I’m safe here?”
Vincent adjusted the brim of his hat, which had fallen askance. “C’mon,” he grumbled, waving a few of his neighbors away as they peeked out their windows to investigate the commotion. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Despite an ominous start, a beautiful Oregon day had already begun to blossom. Half the sky was lit up in brilliant pinks as a chilly, yet refreshing, humidity lingered. As we drove through town, a handful of RVs bumbled around the roads, heading toward adventure in remote areas. Once outside Florence, buildings gave way to the Siuslaw river on one side and a thick forest on the other. A magical summer morning.
I wished I could revel in it like I normally would.
Instead, I sat next to a tense Vincent as he drove away from the ocean. He gave me an extensive list of instructions. Things like, I’ll drop you off a half mile away but keep your distance. Call me on the cell phone if you need to contact me. Don’t get spotted by the other officers.
Meanwhile, my mind worried about what would happen after we inspected the wreck. I kept glancing upward for a feathery snitch, but no ravens trailed us. That didn’t mean they weren’t around.
Their arrival meant I couldn’t stay at Vincent’s apartment anymore. Guntram knew I’d be there. Shepherds hated traveling inside towns because it cut them off from their normal pith sources, but Guntram would make an exception in my case. I’d caused too much trouble, and he probably assumed I was working with Rafe again.
But I wasn’t. I had to settle things with that bastard once and for all.
Vincent pulled off the side of the road next to an abandoned pier on the river. He pointed toward the rising sun. Squinting against the glare, I could just make out flashing lights, though not much else.
“That’s Foster’s BMW up there.”
“Okay.” I opened the passenger side door and scooted to hop out.
Vincent surprised me by grabbing me by the wrist. “You sure you’ll be safe by yourself?”
“Of course.” I flashed him my most confident smile. I almost added ‘like always,’ but then realized that would freak him out even more.
Vincent gave me one last squeeze. “I’ll call for your location and pick you up when I’m done. I’ll try to be as quick as possible.”
Instead of agreeing, I simply slammed the door shut. I didn’t have the heart to confess that I might not be able to go back with him. I wished that I could tell him how much I appreciated everything he’d done for me, but that would tip him off. I swallowed a lump in my throat as he drove off into the sunrise.
Shaking my limbs of excess emotion, I assessed my surroundings. I’d traveled this way hundreds of times before, although usually not so close to the road. The river, unfortunately, had little brush coverage. If I approached from that side of the road, the cops would see me coming from a mile away. That left me with climbing the steep hills on the other side. Covered in blackberry bushes, mature birches, and Douglas firs, it afforded ample coverage for a better view of the accident.
My pulse calmed as I entered the relative safety of the woods. The shadows under the canopy took some of the sting out of the sun’s rays. I absorbed earth, air, and water pith as I trudged up the incline, converting some of it into fire. My pithways felt full of sludge, which I hated, but at least I could pull some water out of the air to drink with a basic sigil. Making it halfway up the hill, I forged a path through the brush that paralleled the road. Even through the dense foliage, I caught glimpses of cars rushing past on the highway every now and again.
I made it to a spot overlooking the wreckage, although trees partially obstructed the view. I eventually had to shimmy partway up a fir, wedging my butt between a branch and a trunk. I grumbled at the discomfort as I took full inventory of the awful scene.
The BMW’s roof had caved into a terrible U-shape, marking where the pole had struck. Steel jutted over the driver’s seat and slashed toward the back end of the car. A dark stain glistened near where they’d used the Jaws of Life to retrieve the body. I honestly couldn’t tell if it was oil or blood. Glass lay shattered like confetti, accented by the strobing lights of police lights, a grim party of death to mark that pancake of a vehicle.
They really thought a freak wind did this? I licked my finger and raised my hand into the sky. Not a breeze rustled by. The leaves barely moved. It couldn’t have been more hushed if we’d been sitting inside a dusty snow globe.
“Rafe,” I had to get into this psychopath’s head if I wanted to find him. I imagined his last 24 hours. First, he’d beaten me to Foster’s house and lit the place on fire. Then he might have found out via the news that his assassination attempt had failed. From there, he could have waited outside the hospital until Foster was discharged and followed him until he had an opportunity to kill him.
Where would he go now? The wind gust that broke the power line required a decent amount of air pith to knock over. But between it and the fire, he probably needed to recharge. I grabbed the cell phone from my kangaroo pouch and flipped it open to the USGS website Vincent had bookmarked for me.
The map jumped out at me with all its measle-like dots spreading across Oregon. I played around with the parameters until I found a way to search all the earthquakes by date, then sorted them by most recent.
Just 25 miles down the road, not far from the Whittaker Creek Recreation Site, a 4.0 level earthquake had occurred within the last fifteen minutes.
I blanched. I really should have felt that quake, but perhaps Vincent’s car had muted it from me. More important than that, though, I had a lead on Rafe.
Pushing Vincent’s number, I scanned for him among the handful of emergency personnel milling about the accident. I found him in a heated debate with another officer near the wreckage. Vincent excused himself and answered on the third ring.
“Yeah?” He did not sound thrilled.
I forged ahead anyway. “There’s been an earthquake down the road. How much you wanna bet it’s Rafe?”
“That’s great,” he said in a flat tone.
Great? I frowned at him through the trees. “Don’t you think we should check it out?”
“Sorry, I got called unexpectedly into work.” He glanced over at the officer he’d been talking to, who had his arms folded impatiently as he waited for Vincent to get off the phone. “Maybe we could make plans for tonight?”
Wonderful. Vincent had been suckered into the classic “you’re here, you might as well work” boss maneuver. I didn’t have time to wait for his superiors to give him permission to leave. Rafe could be long gone by then.
“I’ll check it out myself.”
Vincent straightened, scanning across the road for me, although he never quite looked in my direction. “I’d rather we went together,” he said with a strained face.
Neither of us could afford this argument. “I’ll be careful,” I promised. Then I hung up the phone.
Vincent’s face scrunched up in frustration, but with a fellow officer watching his back, he mouthed “bye,” then shoved the phone back into his pocket.
“Sorry,” I whispered to him. Then my feet flew toward the nearest wisp channel.
CHAPTER 12
IT TOOK ME two wisp channels and ten minutes of sprinting to reach Whittaker Creek. It dawned on me as I ran
that Rafe could have taken the same path to get there. I wished I had one of Sipho’s defensive charms to protect me from an ambush, but I settled on redirecting pith toward rounded trapezoids over my torso and face. The defensive sigils tied up some of my already limited pith stores, but it was better than nothing.
The earthquake’s epicenter lay south of the campground, far away from the service road. Most of the rolling hills held densely packed forests, until suddenly they did not. I found a bulldozed patch of woods, completely flat for yards around. A jagged crack of earth ran right down the center, a fiery glow emitting from within.
I inhaled a breath. Everything looked eerily similar to the crevasse at Noti. This had to be where Rafe had gone.
I stayed within the tree line, waiting for him to appear. Nothing. I almost expected another shepherd or at least one of Guntram’s ravens to make an entrance but still nothing. In fact, besides the occasional gurgle of lava, the place stayed unnaturally quiet, not even animals scurrying under the sunshine.
Vulnerable like Bambi’s mother, I tiptoed out into the open. Crossing the distance to peer down into the chasm, I shivered as I contemplated the taffy-like ropes boiling below. Tabitha had jumped into that flesh-dissolving goo to seal Nasci away from Rafe. She gave her life. And yet, it hadn’t worked.
“How can I do this if she couldn’t?” I asked the lava.
As if in response, Rafe’s face seemed to float underneath the lava. He appeared peaceful, eyes closed, mouth relaxed. At first, I thought it a trick of my overactive imagination, but then his head bobbed up above the surface, thin sheets of red-hot magma falling off him like jelly. He exhaled a gulping gasp, eyes bursting open. A sudden biting wind was my only warning of the upcoming explosion, but it convinced me to scramble backward just before the lava shot skyward like a geyser. The earth trembled beneath my boots as I crab-walked away from the resulting splatter.
As graceful (and naked) as Aphrodite waltzing from the sea, Rafe strode forward, planting both feet on the ground before me. I refused to look down at his junk, focusing on his face. Not a hair on his head stood out of place. An angry scowl formed on his lips.
“You,” he sneered, executing a rapid-fire set of air sigils. Hurricane gusts swirled around me, rocking me back and forth until they lifted me up off the ground. My cries became lost to the wind as I flailed to find any solid thing to grab but found none.
Rafe held me aloft effortlessly, an astounding feat given that I’d only ever seen Guntram execute this sigil, and he’s an expert at air pith. My fingers wriggled about desperately to come up with a counter wind, but my pitiful pithways didn’t have the energy to counteract that level of magic.
Rafe noticed my failure and smirked. “Having trouble, legendary lightning shepherd?”
“You murdering coward!” I yelled back at him.
Rafe cocked his head. “Have you been following me? Is that why Foster survived the fire?”
I wanted to slap his smarmy little face. “Someone has to stop you!”
“It won’t be you, not after what you did to your pithways absorbing all that vaettur energy.” Rafe made a tsking noise. “You really should be more selective about whom you trust, Ina.”
I pooled every last ounce of pith I could into my fingertips. “If not me, the other shepherds will find you. They won’t let you absorb Nasci’s lifeblood and continue your little crime spree.”
“What can they do?” Rafe barked back. “Even the high and mighty Tabitha believed she could close the lava dome, but she failed. I managed to not only survive my fall into the earth but to locate a magma vein and claw my way out.” He threw out his hands, and flames leaped from his palms with barely a sigil stroke. “And now I can feel Nasci’s lifeblood everywhere. I can hear her whispers underneath the surface of the earth and create my own wounds directly into her flesh.”
I stiffened with dread as I realized the true implications of this confession. Rafe himself had dug these awful crevasses. “You can’t do that!”
“Why? Because Guntram told me not to?” He snapped out a bitter chuckle. “I tire of working in the shadows. It’s time to show people what real shepherds are capable of. And once I’m finished with Wonderland, Guntram and the rest of the Talol Wilds are next on my list.”
As Rafe lost the sanity in his expression, my fingers went through all the sigils I hoped to execute. A fireball. A water blast. I even tried absorbing the double A batteries in my kangaroo pouch. Every attempt fizzled out. I didn’t have the ability to do a damn thing.
Rafe drew Ss in the air. “I don’t know if your pithways will ever heal again, but I’m not going to let you find out. You’ve caused enough trouble as is.”
He jerked his hands toward the lava crevasse. The obeying winds flung me over. I clawed around like a cat stuck in a burlap sack, my movements about as effective. My heart pounded as I hovered over the lava pit as it threatened to melt me into nothingness like Tabitha.
“Rafe!” I tried one last plea, not above a bald-faced lie. “I could show you lightning pith.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Ina. You’re too much of a liability. Goodbye.”
Then he released the wind, and my body hit the lava. For a brief moment, energy lit up my pithways in a pulsating strobe. I could taste fire, see air, smell water, and hear earth. My senses reached out into the surrounding Oregon wilderness, past the Pacific Ocean, and out across every country thousands of miles away. If a pebble toppled off a cliff in India, I could have grabbed it with my palm.
I might have become Nasci herself.
Then the moment passed. My flesh vaporized as I sunk below the coils. Thankfully, my nervous system shut down before I could comprehend the horror of such an ugly death.
CHAPTER 13
IT’S DIFFICULT TO describe what happened next since technically I didn’t exist anymore. Lava doesn’t tend to leave a recognizable corpse behind. Despite this physical setback, my pithways stayed intact. I could still manipulate all the elements: earth, fire, air, and water. I could even swish them around a little, like shaking an almost empty milk jug, though I didn’t have hands to cast any magic.
My consciousness seemed fine too. I could string a litany of curses at Rafe no problem, the strong desire to wring his neck not abating even a little. As I sank deeper and deeper into a colorless, sensationless world, that rage morphed into sadness. I’d never hug my parents again. Never make it up to Guntram. Vincent would never know what happened to me, since I’d disappeared off the face of the planet.
Dammit, I thought, unable to cry tears. This sucks.
“Life sucks, haggard. You better get used to it.”
I didn’t have any body parts to move, but I wanted to turn toward that familiar voice. Tabitha?
I didn’t see her, per se, but she appeared anyway, an entity made up of pith, mostly rock-solid earth with heapings of the other three elements as well. What she lacked in physical form, she made up with her usual attitude.
“Don’t ask stupid questions. Who else would you expect to meet inside Nasci’s lifeblood?”
Tabitha could read my mind. Interesting.
I don’t know, I thought. Maybe Nasci herself.
Tabitha groaned. Apparently, she could still do that. “That’s just like you, haggard, thinking the goddess will come personally greet you whenever you come calling.”
Well, I am dead. Aren’t I supposed to get reabsorbed back into her or something?
“Normally that’s true. But as usual”—Tabitha somehow audibly executed an eye roll—
“you get to be the exception to the rule.”
Exception?
“Don’t let this get to your head, Miss Lightning Shepherd. You messed up big time up there.”
You mean Rafe?
“Of course, I mean, Rafe!” My (inner?) pith swirled a little, sensitive to Tabitha’s irritation. “Are you paying attention to his body count at all?”
An intense guilt washed over me.
Tabit
ha, I’m sorry. It’s my fault.
“Your fault?” Tabitha snapped. “Are you trying to say I died because of you?”
Well, yeah, I did help Rafe.
She yanked nearly all the pith out of my pithways, an action that left me disoriented. “Are you saying I don’t have any free will of my own?”
Well, no but—
“Then don’t try to act like you control everything in the entire universe. I’m a shepherd, just like you. I protect Nasci. It’s what I do. And no one tells me how to do it.”
So, you’re not angry with me?
“Yes, I’m angry with you.” She absorbed all of my earth pith, paradoxically lightening my intangible form. “Can’t you feel I’m angry?”
Yes. Definitely.
Tabitha sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”
Get what over with?
But instead of a reply, a bolt of lightning hit my pithways, zipping up and down. I swear I could pinpoint each individual atom it touched. My pithways twisted inside out like someone wringing a towel dry, an unnatural bending of everything that remained of me. This pushed me past my bearable pain threshold. My consciousness flickered but did not succumb. I held onto one thought, screaming out in my mind for mercy.
Tabitha!
“Quit whining and hold on.” Her voice held a bitter, strained edge.
The pressure intensified for one last second, then eased. The wringing lessened, flattening me back out. I felt more solid, but light, floating away. I knew, despite having no real senses, that I drifted away from Tabitha.
Wait! Tabitha, what’s going on?
Her voice grew fainter. “Rafe’s weak now, but his power will grow if left unchecked. You still owe me, haggard. Prove me wrong.”
Then an intense light overwhelmed me, and I became disoriented once again.
CHAPTER 14
THE LIGHT SEARED my skull. I didn’t recognize it at first, having gotten used to not having a skull at all. Or eyes for that matter. It’s a good thing shepherds bend the rules of nature because I only became aware that I’d been staring up in a daze at the sun after an incredibly long time. Any other person would have been blinded.