Ahead of me, I saw bodies strewn about like a child’s toys. None of them moved.
My face burned. I looked down at my hands and saw red, raw blisters on my skin. The pain hit me. And then, everything cooled. The blisters shrank, the redness of my skin went away. The fire in my face cooled, and so did the rest of my body.
I struggled to my feet and leaned, panting, against the tunnel wall. In less than a minute, I felt fine. No residual effects of my ordeal. In fact, I felt better than I’d ever felt in my life. I was bigger, faster, stronger. I felt like a god.
I touched the invisibility charm and shielded again but didn’t put the stone away. I made my way through the rest of the tunnel and came to the entrance. It didn’t appear as though anyone was there, but that didn’t mean anything. The Fae wouldn’t be visible, and any Knights who were out there wouldn’t be announcing their presence.
“Oriel?” I called. Silence. Cautiously, I crept out, through the guardhouse, and into the rain and the dark.
I discovered I could see in the dark. The light had a slight pinkish tinge to it, but I could see clearly, even though I knew it was still night outside. In the distance, a hundred yards away, I saw a man on his knees.
“Cover it,” Oriel gasped. “Goddess, please, stop.”
I put the stone back in the silk bag and pulled the drawstring, then slipped it back in my pocket. The rose tint disappeared, and it was night again. The only light came from the fires burning to my right. It appeared as though the entire Knights’ compound was ablaze.
I walked toward Oriel, my legs a little unsteady. As I approached him, he fought his way to his feet.
“Don’t unshield it,” he gasped. “The ley lines are still corrupted, and you’re carrying the problem with you.”
“Where’s the car?” I asked.
“Come, this way.”
Chapter 28
We raced across the open fields toward the road. The fence came into sight, and at the same time, a fireball was unleashed from behind me and to my right. It hit me, but I was shielded. Oriel wasn’t.
“Get down!” I shouted.
I turned to face the direction of the attack but couldn’t see anyone. The visitor center was in that direction, but Karl’s lightning had knocked out all the lights there. I could make out a few magelights bobbing around but nothing close to us.
A lot of mages didn’t have to be close to use their magic, but I did. In a long-distance duel, I was at a disadvantage.
“Oriel, stay low and try to get to the car. I’ll hold them off.”
“You have the Heart,” he replied.
“And I have a shield. Get to the car, you damned fool!”
Another fireball shot toward us. It would have missed me, but I moved to my left and intercepted it. I did see where the magic wielder was, but he was too far away to reach with my magic. All I could do was wait, hope they came closer, and hope that Oriel managed to get away.
A bolt of lightning crashed down from the clouds, hitting the pyromancer, and illuminating everything in front of me. It played hell with my night vision, but it did show me six people who were either close enough to attack me, or could be in the next few minutes.
Of course, the light also showed them where I was. I took off to my right about fifty yards and stopped.
I had night vision goggles, so I pulled them out and put them on. Scanning toward the fence, I couldn’t see Oriel, but that wasn’t surprising. He had probably glamoured himself invisible. I touched one of my charms and did the same, then moved toward the Knights who were hunting me.
Even though they couldn’t see us anymore, they kept coming. All except the pyromancer who was hit by the lightning. Either his shield hadn’t helped him, or it had overloaded.
I readied my magic, and when I came within range of a Knight, I released a ley missile. He was shielded, but it knocked him off balance. The second missile vaporized him, and I moved on.
After I took out a second Knight with a ley missile, and a third one with my sword, the rest retreated. They didn’t seem to have any stomach for fighting a lethal enemy they couldn’t see.
I took off running for the fence. When I got there, I didn’t bother to try to climb over it. I just slashed at the wire and walked through the breach. I came out near the SUV we abandoned earlier and saw two bodies in Knights’ uniforms lying next to it on the side of the road. Either Oriel or some of his Fae buddies had been there.
Oriel had said our car was ‘down the road.’ We hadn’t passed another car parked on the side of the road, so I assumed our getaway car was past where we’d stopped. Crossing the road, I dropped down into the ditch next to it and headed east.
Sure enough, the ditch I was trotting along soon became a paved shoulder, and when I approached the first trees, a car parked on the side of the road flashed its lights at me. I took off running toward it.
Oriel had chosen a sleek, sporty, touring car for our getaway. I jumped in the passenger side, and he pulled onto the road, heading back toward Stonehenge. Before I could protest, he whipped into a U-turn and gunned the engine, smoothly working the gearshift until we were racing away from our heist. He wasn’t using the headlights, and I was more terrified than I’d been all night.
“Call Ian,” Oriel said.
I dug out the flip phone and punched the first speed dial setting.
“Ere ye oot of there?” Ian asked, when he answered, his Irish accent strong under stress.
“Yeah, we got it.” The line went dead. From behind us, a rumble, like thunder, started. It grew louder, and then the world started shaking. Oriel put his foot down, and the car leaped ahead.
“What the hell?” I asked.
“Ian’s earthquake. We need to get past any disruption.”
We flashed past Amesbury, and a few minutes later, Oriel took an exit to a road going north. At that point, he turned on the headlights but didn’t slow down.
He did turn on the radio and fiddled with the dial. He got an all-night station in Southampton, and after we listened to an insipid song, the announcer came on to report that a large earthquake had hit the Salisbury area. No word yet on damage, but communications in the area were disrupted.
“I didn’t know Ian was that strong,” I said.
“He’s been laying the groundwork, so to speak, since we got here,” Oriel replied. “He used his earth magic to undermine a lot of the area around Stonehenge, concentrating on all the tunnels the Knights dug there and at Sarum. All he had to do was touch it off. Really a shallow earthquake, but considering the size of the ley line running through the area, he had a lot of power to work with.”
It was still dark when we reached the Fae inn in the Cotswolds. Oriel pulled around to the back and threw a glamour and a ward on the car when we got out. I retrieved my duffel and my overnight bag while Oriel took his bag and Muller’s briefcase.
In spite of the late hour, lights were on inside. Tiana, Reginn, and Roisin were sitting around the fireplace when we came in.
“Have any problems?” Tiana asked. I wanted to strangle her.
“Have any whiskey?” I answered, dropping my stuff in the middle of the floor and flopping into a chair.
To her credit, she got up, went behind the bar, and asked, “Want anything in it?”
“Coffee if you want me to stay awake for any length of time.”
Damn, the woman made the best Irish coffee I’d ever had. Of course, I never made it with top-shelf liquor and Blue Mountain Jamaican coffee.
“You have the Heart?” Roisin asked.
“Can’t you feel it?” Oriel rolled his eyes. “We have the purification spell to cleanse it and restore the ley lines. How soon can we perform the ritual?”
Roisin wrinkled her lip. “Of course, I can feel it. I’ve been living with the taint the past ten days. So, there’s a spell we need to do? Do we have all the ingredients?”
I grabbed my duffel, pulled out the page with the purification spell, and handed it to her. The
three Fae gathered around and peered at it.
“Holy water?” Reginn asked.
“In the car,” Oriel replied. “I brought a whole jerry can.”
The three elders whispered back and forth between themselves, then Roisin said, “This is a witch’s spell.”
I sighed. “Yes.”
“You’ll have to do it.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
Oriel took a sip of his whiskey and said, “I can’t even function when she takes the thing out of the bag. And that’s wearing a ruby. Do we have anyone who can help her if she needs it?”
The Fae all looked back and forth at each other.
“While you’re thinking about it,” I said, “the corruption spell is a blood magic spell, virgin sacrifice and all that, carried out by a full circle. Nothing in the purification ritual specifies a circle, but how much power do you think it’s going to take?”
More silent looks between them. Finally, Tiana said, “I don’t even know where to get enough witches for a full circle. I guess I didn’t think you’d bring us an artifact that wasn’t clean.”
Oriel snorted. “Stealing the damned thing wasn’t a walk in the park. If it was clean, we would have had to wade through half an army to get to it.”
“Normally it was guarded by mages,” I said. “When they nuke the ley lines, no one but witches can get anywhere near it. And based on Oriel’s reaction to it tonight, Fae aren’t big fans, either.”
He shook his head. “A dozen Fae committed to help us and showed up to back us up. But when Erin came out from the underground with it unshielded, they all took off. You have no idea of the putrefaction it carries with it.”
“The chamber where they kept it smells like rotting meat,” I said. “But I was there before their blood-magic ritual, and it was clean and pure as a mountain stream.”
“We have a problem,” Roisin said.
I decided to let them work on it. I had been up twenty-two hours, and I was tired. We weren’t going to solve anything that night, so I grabbed Oriel and dragged him off to bed.
“Due to a lack of witches and the pressure of time, we want you to try and do the spell yourself,” Roisin said. At least she waited to spring that on me until I’d eaten breakfast and had my first two cups of coffee.
“And if I can’t do it?”
She shrugged. “We’ll have to transport it to somewhere with more witches.”
“Suppose I blow everything up?”
With a shake of her head, she said, “I doubt that will be an issue. The worst that can happen is the spell won’t work. This isn’t something that causes a transformation, or fills an artifact with power. It just cleans it up.”
“You’re aware that I’m really just an apprentice witch, right?”
All three of the Fae elders shrugged that off without even deigning to comment.
“You haven’t touched that thing,” I said. “It’s like the equivalent of a magical high-voltage line. What if I burn myself out?”
“You can rest today and recharge, but we have to do something. Come, let me show you our problem,” Tiana said.
She led me out to a shed in the back. Inside lay two Unseelie Fae. One had a lot of blood soaking his clothes, and the other had half his head crushed.
“We caught them sneaking around just after daybreak,” she said. “Even the way you have it shielded, the Heart is attracting those who would try to use it for themselves. We can’t fight off a concerted attack.”
I saw that I wasn’t going to win. “Oriel said that he brought all the ingredients?”
“Yes, but we need the pot to mix them in. The recipe specifies a cauldron of cold iron. Obviously, that presents a problem for us, but I called and the store in the village has a cast iron Dutch oven that should do nicely. You just have to go get it.”
“And you’ll provide me with a bodyguard?” I asked, looking down at the dead Fae.
“Oh, of course.”
So, Oriel, Reginn, and I drove into the village, where I bought the Dutch oven and some toothpaste because I was almost out. Then we drove back to the inn. I kept an eye out but didn’t see any Knights or people who glittered or shimmered as the Fae sometimes did when they were glamoured.
I lay around all day, and as time passed, I felt the tension flowing out of my body. I hadn’t realized how keyed up I had been for weeks. I was still anxious about the ritual the following day, but the anticipation and adrenaline that had fueled me in Salisbury were gone.
Roisin was concerned that a mispronunciation of the chants might screw things up.
“Have you studied Latin?” she asked.
I rolled my eyes and replied, in Latin, “I was required to read the Bible in Latin. A sixteenth-century Roman version. That was the basis for all my Romance language studies.”
She nodded, serious as a judge. “Read me the chants.”
I did, and she had me doing that for the next hour, making extremely minor corrections to my diction, until Tiana said, “Give it up, Roisin. The girl speaks Latin better than Hadrian did. Leave her alone and let her rest.”
It was a good thing I went to bed early because they woke me at dawn. They all went with me to a small clearing in the woods, carrying the ritual’s ingredients and artifacts. I carried the cast iron pot and the Heart. Roisin went over the ritual with me, making sure I understood what I needed to do, and then they all left.
First, I poured salt in a circle around the clearing, then I used the salt to draw a pentagram inside it. I placed five candles at the points of the pentagram and put a steel fire ring on the ground in the center. Then I arranged a tripod over the fire and hung the Dutch oven from it. We had brought small pieces of wood in one of the bags. I dumped the wood inside the ring and kindled a fire. Last, I lit the candles to begin the ritual.
The first chant in Latin accompanied my placing leaves of willow, ash, and oak in the pot. A single line was chanted seven times while I mixed powdered malachite with saltpeter in a small mortar and added that to the pot on the seventh repetition. I felt myself pull magic from the world around me, and that magic poured into the pot.
Next, I added petals of larkspur and rose, along with a small vial of moon water, while chanting and stirring with a rod of yew, pulling more magic through me the whole time. The ingredients in the pot slowly dissolved, turning into a thick paste.
It was beyond my understanding how a couple of ounces of water infused with moonlight could dissolve all that stuff, so the magic I was putting into the spell was doing something.
I pulled the bag containing the Heart out of my pocket. When I opened the bag, the smell of putrefaction almost gagged me. Taking the stone in my hand, I gently put it in the goop at the bottom of the pot and began reciting the most complicated of the chants.
Nothing happened. I repeated the chant again, and then a third time. The paste began to liquify and boil, and the Heart sank beneath the surface. When it was completely covered, I picked up the gallon jug containing holy water.
The last chant started at almost a whisper, then was repeated louder, and louder. At the beginning of the third pass, I started stirring the holy water into the liquid in the pot with the yew rod. When all the holy water emptied from the jug, I stopped stirring and repeated the chant one more time.
A flash of red light from the pot almost blinded me. The smell of putrefaction turned into a smell of larkspur and rose, and all the liquid in the pot disappeared. The ley lines began to settle and smooth out. In the bottom of the pot, the Heart sparkled, clean and clear. All I felt was relief. The magic that had passed through me left me feeling drained.
I reached in and placed my hand on the Heart and received the strongest jolt of magic I had ever experienced. Magical energy filled me with a warm and pleasurable feeling while at the same time imparting that god-like power I had felt when I wielded the Heart at Stonehenge. The taint was gone. My weariness disappeared. I had done it!
I picked up the Heart and sl
ipped it back in the spelled silk bag. Hanging onto that thing could get addicting, and it wasn’t mine. The sooner I got rid of it, the better.
I extinguished the flames of the fire and the candles, and scuffed the salt lines, breaking the pentagram and the circle. Still filled with the stone’s energy, I gathered up my tools and trash, and started back to the inn.
The ley lines sang to me, and I had an elated feeling, as though I had actually done something that made the world a better place.
Chapter 29
I tried to hand the Heart to Roisin, but she wouldn’t take it. She reacted like I was trying to give her a fireball or a handful of manure.
“You hang on to that,” Tiana said. “Don’t let anyone else touch it. And keep it in that bag.”
I stood there blinking at them. “What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Just hang on to it,” Reginn said. “You need to perform another ritual with it tomorrow.”
“I do?”
He held up one of the Knights’ artificial star rubies. “I can’t go around smashing all of these with my hammer. Oriel says there’s a ritual to break them all.”
“But, why?”
Tiana walked over and sat down next to me. “They filter the Heart.”
“And?”
“And there’s a strong chance you’re going to need the Heart’s power to restore it in the Well. If the Knights, or the Fae conspirators, can block its power, then they might be able to take it from you.”
The conversation had entirely too much “you,” meaning me, in it.
“Back up. Why is everyone saying that I need to do this and that? I mean, I understand how I ended up getting chosen to steal the thing. And it makes sense that I had to do that ritual this morning because of the way the ley lines affect you. But why am I still involved? It’s a Fae artifact, right?”
They all did that looking-back-and-forth-at-each-other thing, everyone squirming uncomfortably.
Knights Magica: An Urban Fantasy (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill Book 5) Page 22