Daniel nodded. “When I became aware the Spear was in this area, I knew I needed the assistance of a magician, someone naïve enough to help me, powerful enough to find the Spear, and selfless enough to not keep it for herself. I told you the truth when I said I had been observing you for some time. You seemed to fit the bill of what I needed. I correctly surmised that, thanks to your fundamentally good nature, you would risk exposing your magic for the sake of protecting those people from the gargoyles. That in turn would get you into trouble with the Conclave, which would pressure you into agreeing to steal the Cloak of Wisdom. Hiring the wererats put financial pressure on you to further goad you to help me.”
“And what if the gargoyles or the wererats had killed me?”
“Then you would have proven yourself not strong or resourceful enough to help me.” Daniel shrugged. “I eventually would have found another magician who was. I was not lying when I said I am immortal. Time was on my side.”
“You’re immortal, but not an angel, I’m guessing. Unless you’re the world’s worst one.” I was beyond disgusted. “People at the Institute of Peace died because of you.”
“Billions have died in the millennia I’ve walked the earth. A few more won’t matter in the grand scheme of things. And no, I’m not an angel, fallen or otherwise. I am as human as you. Have you heard of the Wandering Jew?”
Holy crap, Puck whispered in awe.
Clearly Puck knew something I did not. “The plant?” I asked Daniel.
Daniel looked startled for a moment, then gave me his smug, indulgent smile again. “Sage, you’re an interesting woman. You have oases of unexpected brilliance surrounded by deserts of breathtaking ignorance. No, not the plant. I am the Wandering Jew. Though the plant is named after me.
“I was born over two thousand years ago in Jerusalem and, when I grew up, I worked there as a cobbler. I was a contemporary of Jesus Christ. As Jesus walked through the streets of Jerusalem, struggling under the weight of the cross he was forced to carry to where he was to be crucified, he stumbled and fell.” Daniel’s eyes were distant now, as if he saw the scene playing out again in his mind’s eye. “I didn’t know who he was. I just thought he was some criminal who deserved the punishment he was getting. I kicked him and said, ‘Hurry up and get off the streets. Decent folks are walking here.’ I’ll never forget the look in his eyes when he turned and looked up at me. His eyes seemed to burn like fire. ‘My journey on this world will be over soon,’ Jesus said, ‘but yours shall not end until the world does.’”
Puck cursed. I didn’t admonish him. I felt like cursing too. That explains those coins Daniel is always playing with. Centuries ago I read some ancient Christian texts about how the Wandering Jew was forced by God to carry around five Tyrian silver shekels everywhere he went to remind him of the five wounds suffered by Jesus, namely the one on his side from the Spear of Destiny, and the four on his hands and feet from where he was nailed to the cross. Those texts also said the Wandering Jew could speak every language in the world. Puck cursed again. It never even occurred to me to connect the Wandering Jew legend and Daniel.
Daniel was still talking. It was hard to follow both him and Puck. “Since then,” Daniel said, “I’ve been cursed to wander the world. Never allowed to stay in any one place for long, never allowed to put down roots, and never allowed to die until the world ends.
“At first, it actually wasn’t that bad. I was immortal. I’ve been an eyewitness to some of history’s greatest events. Other men have dreamed of what God cursed me with. But over time, I grew to hate my existence. If I got close to someone, I was inevitably forced to leave them thanks to the divine compulsion God forced on me. I’ve married and had children more times than I can even remember, yet my compulsion to wander always forced me to abandon them. On top of that, I outlived them all. Can you imagine what it feels like, looking down on a newborn baby boy, knowing you can’t watch him grow up, knowing he will wither and die long before you ever will?
“After a while, I gave up on forming relationships with people. Century after long century, I lived the life of a hermit wanderer. It was hell on earth, like solitary confinement with no end in sight.
“I turned all my attention to finding a way to end my punishment. Eventually, I learned that if a part of Noah’s Ark was destroyed, God’s covenant to man to never flood the world again would also be destroyed, triggering the end of the world. The end of the world would mean the end of my punishment. The problem was the only thing I knew of that was powerful enough to destroy an artifact like the Ark was the Spear of Destiny. And I didn’t know where it was.
“I’ve spent centuries looking for the Spear. Eventually, I traced it here. Unfortunately, I had to wait for many years before my divine compulsion to wander brought me to this area. I already had obtained this fragment of the Ark thanks to my association with the Smithsonian as I already explained to you. All I needed was the Spear. And now, you’ve acquired it for me. My long torment is finally near its end.”
“You’re the poster boy for counting his Armageddon chickens before they’re hatched,” I scoffed. I still didn’t understand why Daniel was so confident and why he so readily confessed his true motivations. “I have the Spear, you’re trapped way over there, and there’s no way I’m going to give it to you.”
“As I said, you’re sometimes brilliant, but more often than not you’re simply ignorant. I’m not surprised you don’t know holy Relics have an affinity for one another.” The Ark fragment shimmered in Daniel’s hand.
The Spear of Destiny was ripped out of my grip like an invisible giant had come along and grabbed it. The Spear whipped through the air. It smacked into Daniel’s empty hand.
I felt some external, implacable force push against my will, like a finger pressing into a fragile soap bubble. My will maintaining my earth spell collapsed. The dirt holding Daniel in place dropped back to the ground.
Daniel gave me his canary eating smile again.
Uh-oh, I thought.
Uh-oh, Puck said.
“Surprise,” Daniel said.
CHAPTER 23
I flung a ball of spellfire at Daniel. Before it got halfway to him, Daniel moved his hand holding the Spear in a gesture that seemed almost contemptuous.
The fireball dissipated, instantly disappearing like it had never existed.
Before I could get another spell off, the vines dangling from the trees behind me grew like someone had sprayed them with magical Miracle-Gro. Fast as lightning, they wrapped around my arms and hands, tightening around my limbs like countless little anacondas. Despite my strength, I couldn’t free myself
The vines spread my arms far apart. My shoulders howled in protest. The vines yanked me off my feet. I dangled several feet off the ground. Vines also whipped around my ankles. They spread my legs just like my arms had been spread. My joints were on fire. I felt like a human wishbone.
Despite struggling, I could not free myself. Thanks to my hands being bound, I couldn’t cast a spell.
Daniel walked closer until he stood just a few feet away from where I dangled.
“It’s a real shame things had to end this way,” he said. He seemed genuinely regretful. “I have grown quite fond of you. Despite your flaws, you’re a good woman. There are too few people like you in the world. If things were different, we could have been good friends. Perhaps even more. I would have preferred to end the world without you knowing the truth about me. It’s strange, but after all these years, I find myself caring what you think of me.”
He put the Ark fragment on the ground. With both hands around the Spear, he lifted it over his head, with its iron tip aimed at the Ark fragment.
Thrashing, I struggled futilely against the vines binding me. “Daniel, don’t do this. There are billions of people in the world. You can’t kill everybody. I’ve spent a lot of time with you. I know you’re not a bad person. You’re better than this.”
Daniel looked up from where he focused on the Ark fragment.
His eyes met mine. I saw resolve and determination within them. “I once was better than this. I was a good man.” He shook his head. “But that was a very long time ago. Not anymore. My punishment ends today.”
The Spear of Destiny descended like a guillotine.
“No!” I screamed.
The tip of the Spear bit into the Ark fragment. The fragment exploded with a deafening, deep, bell tolling sound I more felt than heard. A barely visible shockwave expanded from where the Ark fragment had been. It passed through me, taking my breath away and making every fiber of my being tingle.
The shockwave grew up and out like the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. It reached high into the clear blue sky.
Like a button had been pressed on Photoshop, the sky instantly got dark, changing from a bright blue to an angry gray. Storm clouds quickly rolled in, covering the sky. It was like watching time-lapse footage of a gathering storm.
I felt my hair stand on end. A bolt of pure white lightning lanced down from the sky. It struck Daniel.
Blinded, my eyes squeezed shut. The afterimage of the lightning strike seemed burned into my retinas. A thunderclap hit. It made my insides shake, like I was at the epicenter of an earthquake.
I forced my eyes to open. It took a few moments for my vision to clear.
When it did, Daniel still stood before me. Though he appeared unhurt by the lightning strike, the strike had burned off all his clothes. He was as naked as a newborn. The silver coins he always carried were on the ground at his feet. The scars on his body danced on his skin like they had come alive.
Daniel’s arms were outstretched. His face was turned up to the heavens. He had a beatific smile on his face. For the first time since I had known him, the sorrow that hung around him like a dark cloud was gone.
The heavens opened up. Perhaps literally, in this case. Sheets of rain began to fall. It was though we were suddenly in the middle of a monsoon. The world became as dark as a closet with the door left ajar. The rain sounded like countless pans of frying bacon as it hit the ground and the surrounding vegetation. I had been damp from perspiration before, but now I was drenched, like I had dived fully clothed into a swimming pool.
At first I thought it was my imagination, or that I couldn’t see right because of the darkness and the pounding rain. Then I realized it was definitely not my imagination:
Daniel was melting. The water flaked away his skin and flesh like he was made of salt. In seconds, Daniel’s bones were partially exposed.
“It is done!” Daniel shouted, his bones and teeth flashing white in the darkness. “Forgive me!”
I had no idea if he was talking to me, the world, or someone else entirely.
Daniel, entirely skeletal now, fell backward. His bones separated from each other and flew apart when he hit the wet ground. The Spear of Destiny rolled out of the bones that had been Daniel’s hand.
I felt the vines that bound me relax. The tension had gone out of them. I steeled myself, then heaved, bringing my arms and legs together in front of me like a high diver.
The vines snapped around me, freeing me. I went tumbling. With a splash of water, I landed heavily on the ground on my side. Though the fall jolted me, I had not been very high up. I was unhurt.
I blinked mud out of my eyes. It was hard to believe how hard it was raining when the sky had been clear minutes ago.
Splashing on the already soaked ground, I got to my feet. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. I pulled Puck over it, using him like a canopy so I could read my phone despite the pounding rain.
Hey! I’m not an umbrella, Puck said indignantly.
“Now’s not the time,” I said tersely as I tapped my phone. I checked social media. It confirmed what I already knew in the pit of my sinking stomach: Storm clouds bringing torrential rain had appeared out of seemingly nowhere everywhere around the world.
“How long did it rain in the Noah’s Ark story?” I asked Puck.
Forty days and forty nights. The floodwaters allegedly covered the highest mountains.
“And how long before all life will be destroyed if it keeps raining like this?
What am I, a meteorologist specializing in the Apocalypse? How should I know? I’m guessing not long, though, at the rate this water’s coming down. Days, maybe. Weeks, certainly.
A small bone floated by my foot in a small stream of water.
Ewww! I think that’s one of Daniel’s metacarpals.
“Forget about that,” I said, though the sight made my flesh crawl too. This was all my fault. I never should have confronted Daniel. Since I was already suspicious of Daniel when I ventured under the Washington Monument, I should have left the Spear right where I found it.
Too late. It was all water under the bridge now. Literally. I had to fix this.
“Do you know any spells that can stop this from happening?” I asked Puck.
A spell that will counteract the effects of the destruction of a holy Relic? His voice was incredulous. Um, no. I know a lot of stuff, but that kind of magic is way above my pay grade. It’s way above everyone’s pay grade.
“I was afraid you’d say that.” I started to peel my gloves off. Soaked, they were hard to remove.
What are you doing?
“I’m good at elemental magic. Including water and air. That’s exactly what this storm is: water and air. I’ll try to dissipate it.”
Are you insane? You’re not powerful enough to control the weather on a worldwide scale. Nobody is.
“On my own, you’re right. But I won’t be on my own. I’ll use the Spear.”
It took me a couple of minutes to find the Spear in the rain and gloom. Puck spent the time giving me a hundred reasons why my plan wouldn’t work, saying that it wasn’t a plan at all and just wishful thinking, that I’d just wind up tearing my body apart and frying my brain, and that we needed to take this problem to the Conclave’s Inner Circle and maybe they could figure out a way to deal with it.
I tuned him out. I had created this mess. I was going to clean it up.
Or die trying.
My groping hands finally found the Spear. As soon as my flesh touched the Spear’s wood, my mind expanded, exploding like a mental Big Bang was occurring in my brain.
I grasped the Spear firmly. I stood upright. How dare Puck question my abilities. Of course I could reverse what that suicidal fool Daniel had done. I could do anything.
I strode into the center of the clearing. I hardly realized I repelled the rainwater from me as I walked. The water sloughed away from me without touching me, as if I were surrounded by an invisible force field.
The Spear was in my right hand. Shifting so I grasped the end of its shaft, I lifted the Spear over my head. Using the Spear as a conduit, somehow my mind probed the raging storm. My mind examined it not merely overhead, but all around the world.
I had magically condensed water and created wind many times in the past. To stop the storm, I needed to simultaneously trigger both air and water spells, only in the reverse of what I normally did, and on a much more massive scale.
If you want my advice, what you need to do— A flick of my wrist, a murmured Word, and an exertion of Will cut Puck’s voice off like he had been muzzled. He was a fool, unworthy of being bound to me.
My left hand moved in an unfamiliar pattern that still somehow felt as familiar as brushing my teeth. I was creating a brand-new spell, one that was an improvised riff on the standard air and water spells I knew so well. Normally, creating a new spell took weeks if not months of research, testing, and refinement.
With what I wanted to accomplish firmly in mind, I finished the new Wave, spoke several complex sentences that were the new Word, and unleashed my Will as my left hand came to rest on the Spear above my right one.
A blue light shot out of the tip of the Spear, stretching at the speed of light into the sky. It was so bright it lit up the clearing and beyond.
The blue light hit the dark clouds above, piercing them like a la
ser. Where the light hit the clouds, the clouds thinned and disappeared, like the morning sun dissipating a lingering fog.
As I continued to channel my Will through the Spear, the hole I poked through the clouds expanded, exposing the sun. The hole chasing the clouds away continued to grow. In seconds, the rain had stopped in the clearing. Several seconds after that, I sensed the dark clouds over the entire city dissipating, leaving behind a clear blue sky.
I kept at it. The hole destroying the storm clouds grew and grew, expanding beyond the city like antibodies destroying bacteria.
Suddenly, I met with resistance. An unexpected opposing will. It was a dark, malevolent force I did not recognize that was still somehow familiar, like the face of someone I had fleetingly glanced at in a crowd years ago. It pushed against me. Some of the dark clouds I had erased returned.
Annoyed, I increased my efforts. The opposing will matched me, stopping me from progressing further.
Enraged that anyone would dare stand against me, I drew on magical and mental reserves I didn’t even know I had. The blue beam of light grew blindingly bright, into a second sun.
Whatever it was that fought me howled almost bestially in rage, frustration, and a hint of fear. I felt it withdraw into the deep, dark shadows it lived in.
All resistance to my Will gone now, the hole I caused which chased the storm clouds away rocketed around the world, evaporating the rain clouds created by Daniel’s destruction of the Ark fragment.
In minutes, it was over. The rain was gone everywhere. I had done it.
I relaxed my Will. The blue light flicked off. I lowered the Spear of Destiny. I cradled it in my hands. I had been foolish to reject it before. I looked at it with satisfaction and anticipation.
Sorceress Super Hero Page 24