by Annie Bellet
“She’s a kid and she’s terrified. We have a direction to go in now. Perhaps if we find these children, Sky Heart will allow us to help.”
Fat fucking chance of that. I didn’t say so, there was no point. Alek was right. Finding the kids was something I could help with, something tangible to do besides sit around and wait until more people got killed.
If the children were alive. Visions of little bodies gutted and splayed with crows struggling in their bloody chest cavities swarmed my mind. I shoved them away. The evil spirit, as Em had called it, liked to be dramatic. If the children had been murdered, they would have been left where the tribe could find them, wouldn’t they? I hoped that wasn’t my brain engaging in wishful thinking mode and trying to put order and sense where there was none.
“Fine,” I said, looking at the three sad items that represented three lost and probably dead kids. “Let me finish my tea and then we can go look for them.”
“No,” Alek said, sinking down into the seat across from me. “Not tonight. First light. We should not go wandering around unknown woods in the dark. Alive or not, one night should make little difference, no?”
I hated that he was right, but he was right. I had known these woods well over thirty years ago. But forests are not static, they live and breathe and change. Stumbling around half-familiar land in the middle of the night was a good way to get hurt, even without an evil spirit that could incapacitate a shifter running around.
The woods weren’t the only thing around me that was half-familiar and yet irrevocably changed. It took me a long time to fall asleep, even with Alek’s familiar warmth and his musky vanilla and clove smell making me feel safer. His calm presence didn’t banish my resentment, my old anger. Laying there in the dark, I wasn’t sure anything could.
We slipped out of the trailer as soon as the sky lightened. It would get warmer later, but the morning air was crisp and cool, and dew dampened the grass and ferns, glittering like tears in the early morning sunlight. My hair was in a tight braid down my back and I put on a kerchief over my head to protect from branches and brambles. Jeans, a Half-Life tee-shirt, and sturdy hiking boots rounded out my outfit.
I had pulled hairs from the brush and twisted them into a knot so I could tuck them into a rubber band on my wrist and have my hands free in case I needed them. We had decided to use Peter’s hair, since it was the most personal thing, being a former part of the boy’s body, and because he was the most recently missing, which we hoped meant we’d find him alive. The plan was to cast the spell, follow it to Peter, and if he wasn’t with the others, to return and do it again until we found them all.
We didn’t really have much of a plan for dealing with the spirit if we found it beyond “kill it with fire” or something similar. I wasn’t sure how we’d accomplish that. Not that I was bad with fire, fireball being one of my magical specialties, but using it in the woods seemed like a terrible idea. I looked around for Wolf, but my guardian was nowhere to be seen. She came and went as she pleased, but her absence made me uneasy. She was probably the best defense I had against a spirit. I hoped she’d show up sooner rather than later, but had to trust if I got in real trouble she’d appear. She always had before.
Alek and I had agreed to play it by ear and hope our combined strengths could deal with it. I wished I had time to figure out how to make a knife or something “ghost touch” like in the DnD manuals, but enchanting items hadn’t ever been one of my fortes. It was possible, however. Anything was possible with sorcery, provided you could focus the power and summon enough of it.
I pushed away the thoughts of what we couldn’t do or deal with, grabbed my D20 talisman with one hand, and focused on the knot of hair strapped to my other wrist. My magic flowed through me and I pushed it into the knot, casting the tracking spell. The spell was pretty crude, telling me only direction. The knot pulled on me, pointing the way, leading us into the woods.
We moved cautiously for a while, passing through the warded boundary of the camp. I spotted one of the boundary stones, now that I knew to look for it, and made a mental note to come back and examine the hunk of white granite when I didn’t need my focus to keep the tracking spell going.
The woods were quiet. No insect or bird sounds. Even the brush didn’t seem to shift or rustle except where we disturbed them and there was no wind. The spell pulled us north and a little west from the houses, into older woods, the underbrush falling away as the canopy above grew denser. It was easier to move here, but dimmer. The dead lower branches of the coniferous trees stuck out like accusing fingers, jabbing at us and obstructing longer distance vision.
We’d been walking carefully along for at least an hour, not speaking, just following the spell. Alek drew up beside me and held up his hand. I stopped and looked around, keeping my concentration on the knot of hair but trying to peer into the dim forest. I heard nothing for a moment, and then the sound of footsteps, the crunching of dead pine needles and the snap of little sticks.
“Carlos?” Alek called out, his ice blue eyes focusing on something I couldn’t yet see. “Wait!”
The footsteps sped up, retreating. Alek took off after them. I started to follow but a flash of red caught my eye. Emerald, in a red sweatshirt, moving parallel through the woods with us. What the fuck was she doing here? I had to get her to go back before she ended up missing or worse.
“Em, damnit! Come here.” I turned and waved at her. She shook her head and ran off in a different direction than Alek had gone.
I didn’t even think about what I was doing and charged after her. She was only twenty or thirty feet away, I could catch her.
I stumbled through the trees, following the elusive red sweatshirt, muttering curses and calling out to her to come back. A broken-off spear of dead branch swiped my arm, cutting into my skin and drawing blood.
The sudden pain cleared my mind for a moment and I jerked to a stop as the girl in the sweatshirt disappeared. I summoned my power, using it the way I had the night before, pushing it through my body and mind like cleansing fire. It took a lot more energy this time and I felt an intense ball of rage and resentment and confusion push back. It was almost tangible. The spirit.
“Oh fuck toast on a stick,” I muttered, looking around. No Alek. No Em, though I suspected she had never been real. The spirit was here and it was royally fucking with us. We’d broken the cardinal rule of adventuring.
Never. Split. The. Party.
I gripped my talisman and kept my power going through me, though I knew between that and holding the tracking spell, I was going to tire sooner rather than later. It was eating more concentration and power than I liked to just hold off whatever that thing was. Better exhausted than dead, I guess. I had to find Alek before the spirit did. No, I wasn’t going to think about Alek splayed and dead and bloody and oh fuck.
For a moment I panicked, my heart pounding and blood rushing to my head. I forced the panic down with careful, steady breaths. I could track Alek if I went back to camp and got something of his. I turned and started retracing my steps, eyeing what little I could see of the sky to get my bearings.
The spirit was smart, separating us. Using illusions and deception. I should have expected it from what Em said but with so little information, it was hard to know what it was capable of.
I was learning, though. Boy was I learning.
“Why can’t my life be more like a porno than a horror movie,” I muttered as I walked. I forced a chuckle at that. If this was a porn movie, with my luck Maid Marion and her Merry Men would show up. I could almost hear Harper quipping, “time for the mandatory girl on girl scene.”
I smiled and shook my head. What was I even thinking about? I almost walked into a huge tree as a giant black beast appeared beside me and slammed into my hip, knocking me on my ass. It was a huge beast, the size of a pony, with the head of a wolf, the body of a tiger, tufted ears like a lynx, and, I swear to the Universe, an amused expression in its fathomless, starry night black eyes.
Wolf. My guardian and one of the fabled Undying. Fucking finally. I glared at her, but her furry black face and unfathomable eyes just kept laughing at me. My head cleared again and I swore some more, mostly to make myself feel better as I got to my feet and brushed pine needles off my ass.
I’d lost my grip on my magic and I snatched it back, dragging on the well of power inside. It was so easy to become distracted. More spirit shenanigans. This was getting really frustrating.
“Where have you been?” I said to Wolf. Spirits are something she’s supposed to be able to help with, being all magical and shit.
She whined and pawed at the tree I’d almost run into. It looked familiar. It was really two trees that had grown too close together, their trunks twisting and combining as they strained for the sunlight. The kissing tree, we used to call it.
Which meant the old mine entrance was close by. I shivered. Though I’d only been four when my cousins John and Connor got me lost down there on purpose, I still vividly remembered the dank air, the dirty walls pressing in, and the feeling of being buried alive, trapped in a labyrinth and all alone in the dark. If it hadn’t been for Wolf, I might never have come out of there.
The mine. It would make a good hide-out if one were a terrible person who didn’t mind darkness. It had been boarded up after I’d been lost in it, but still, it might be worth checking. I pushed power back into the tracking spell, recasting it on a hunch. The knot of hair pulled me back to the north, toward the mine. The pull was strong. Peter wasn’t far.
Turn back and try to find Alek? Or find the kid? I didn’t want to go back into the mine and the spirit was fucking with me pretty hard, despite my magic. I had Wolf with me now, however. And I knew what Alek would want. He’d say to go after the kid. No question.
“This is a terrible idea,” I muttered.
Then, one hand on Wolf’s thick fur and one pointing out in front of me to guide the way, we went north.
The entrance to the mine was no longer boarded up. The entrance had been cleared recently; brush cut back and the old boards were piled off to one side. The opening yawned in the sunlight like a beast, damp air slightly cooler than the air in the clearing around it seeping out and making me shiver.
At least, I told myself the goosebumps on my arms were from the air.
I called on more magic, focusing it on my outstretched hand and bringing up a brightly glowing ball of golden light. I sent the light ball floating into the entrance. The floor in the opening was scuffed and furrowed, the dirt having long since clogged the tracks that used to run down there. I saw fresh footprints and went to examine them.
A man had come this way. Alek? No, the feet were too small for that. Alek had giant Viking boat feet. It was too much to hope he’d come this way.
The spirit wouldn’t have left prints. Wolf didn’t, anyway. Perhaps the intermediary we’d speculated about? Gah. I hated that all the things I found just led to more questions. The tracking spell pulled downward. So Peter was in there. Or Peter’s corpse.
I looked down at Wolf and took a deep breath. My magic flowed through me and my mind felt clear, so I hoped I was making this probably incredibly stupid decision of my own free will.
“Wolf,” I said. “I need you to find Alek. You have to protect him from the spirit or whatever is doing this, okay?”
She whined a little and turned her head east, her nose lifting as she scented the air. She looked back at me as though wondering if I was serious.
“I’m serious,” I said. “Please go protect Alek.”
With another whine, she vanished. I pulled my light ball back and made my talisman glow instead. Keeping that going while I kept the tracking spell up and kept my head clear of spirit interference was going to suck, but I didn’t have a choice. I told myself to just think of this as more practice. If I couldn’t handle running a few concurrent spells and finding a lost kid, I had no hope against Samir.
With that cheery thought, I faced the gaping mine entrance.
“I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” I muttered. It almost made me smile. Almost. Cautiously, I stepped inside, following the pull of Peter’s knotted hair down the main tunnel.
The walls changed from earth to stone as I descended. The mine had been active back a century or more ago, but while the shaft dropped at a sharp angle, it was clear of most debris. I would have thought it would fall in after all this time, but the thick timbers reinforcing it held. The ground layer had built up, especially once the opening leveled off a few hundred feet and the first split came.
The tracking spell tugged left, so I took the left channel. Water dripped somewhere ahead. Or maybe behind. It was impossible for me to tell. The glow from my talisman only illuminated a few feet around me. Had Peter just wandered in here and gotten lost? I doubted it. The kids I grew up with used to dare each other about how far we could go in. I’d gone with John and Connor, trusting them and their flashlights, feeling like a really important person that they would let me go along when they normally shut me out of all activities.
The mine had felt like a horrible maze then. It seemed smaller, less ominous now in some ways and even more terrifying in others. Smaller, because I had magic now, a way to defend myself, to get myself out of here. More terrifying because there was a spirit possibly down here waiting to fuck with me. I kept my magic flowing, ignoring the headache that was starting to tighten a vise around my skull. I couldn’t afford to get distracted or lost down here, not if I wanted to find the kid and get out again.
Besides, I kinda wanted to encounter the intermediary and kick the unsub’s ass. That way I would know they weren’t doing something awful to Alek.
I don’t know how far underground I went. The tunnel dropped again, branched twice more, and dropped deeper. The walls were all rock now, timbers in the ceiling obscured by darkness, though the height wasn’t much and I had to duck. No roots nudged through down here, I was too deep for that, I guess, somewhere into the rocky soil or perhaps even the bedrock.
Then the tunnel opened up, the walls no longer close beside me. The smell of crushed pine needles and cooked meat flooded my nose. The hell?
I pushed more power into my talisman, making more light. The shaft had ended in a cavern, the ceiling somewhere overhead and out of range of my limited sight. I could make out furniture to my left, a table of some kind in the dim edge of my vision. I moved toward it, my glowing D20 casting crazy shadows in the space.
One of the shadows moved oddly in the corner of my eye and I spun to the right, gathering power into a shield. I was too tired, too slow.
I made out the shape of a man before the baseball bat he was wielding smashed into my head. I felt pain, tasted blood, but I didn’t see stars. Only darkness.
I came to with the mother of all headaches. I hate getting knocked out and this was the second time in as many days. It’s disorienting as fuck. Most knock-outs are pretty quick, not like in the movies where the person goes down and stays down for a convenient amount of time. I had a feeling more time had passed, however. I remembered the hit first, that explosion of pain, then the where and what next.
It was pitch black when I opened my eyes and I couldn’t make out a thing. I hoped that meant I was still underground rather than blind.
I took stock of my body, flexing fingers and toes. I was still dressed, but there were restraints of some kind on my wrists and ankles. My arms were pulled back behind and half under me as I lay on my side and my fingers felt swollen, though they wiggled so they weren’t totally asleep. With the painful tingling in them, I found myself wishing they were. I tried to push my legs apart, but they were stuck together with whatever was binding me. Something clanked and I guessed I was chained up. The bindings felt rigid enough to be metal. Shit.
I listened, hearing breathing near me. All I could smell was dirt and the faint scent of cooked meat. I figured I had to be in the cavern still, or near it. Pushing through the pounding pain in my head, I tried to call up my magic and brin
g light into my talisman.
The magic flowed into me grudgingly and hanging on to it hurt so much I whimpered. Something moved near me and I froze as the breathing noise grew closer, almost drowned out by the clack of metal on stone. My talisman didn’t light up. I realized I couldn’t feel the chain around my neck, couldn’t sense the residual power that I stored in it. My D20 necklace was missing.
“Hey,” said a soft male voice. “You awake?”
Was it a trap? Probably a trap. I decided I didn’t care.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “Are we alone?”
“The kids are sleeping, I believe. And I haven’t heard the man in a little while,” the voice said. He had an accent, very slight, but almost Hispanic in how he accented some syllables and not others. He was near me now, I felt the warmth coming off him, felt his breath as he talked. A hand touched my arm and I tried not to flinch. “You were very beat up, I did not think you would wake. You are not a shifter.”
“Carlos?” I guessed, going with the most obvious explanation.
“Yes,” he said, a little louder now, excited. “Who are you?”
“Jade, a friend of Aleksei Kirov’s,” I said, knowing that he and Alek talked all the time. He might know who I was, if Alek mentioned me. I hadn’t ever been brave enough to ask. “Alek is here somewhere, in the woods. He didn’t come into the mine. Are we still in the mine?”
“Yes, I think so. There’s a huge cavern off this area. I heard Not Afraid pacing in there, talking to himself earlier. He is gone now.”
“Not Afraid? He told you his name? Is he a shifter?” I tried to remember if I had ever heard of a Crow by that nickname. It rang no bells.
“He and I have talked, a little. When he brings food, and the bucket. He is not a shifter. I don’t know what he is. He smells of dead things, old bones, old blood.”
I remembered that Alek had told me Carlos was a lion shifter. His hands seemed free; he had touched me after all. “Can you untie me? Can you shift?”