Zeph had told me something similar before; people all around the world called faeries different things because they were mistaken for something divine or otherworldly. Watching Zeph step out of the car, his natural form unfolding to light up the night with that eerie purple light, I could definitely understand why. I watched him take off into the night like a violet comet. Eldrick was right behind him, his beastly form flickering as though it were made of smoke.
“They’ll be fine.” Hank tried to reassure me.
I frowned and opened the car door. “It’s not them I’m worried about. We should hurry. Those kids couldn’t have gone far.”
A young, nervous-looking police officer in a long wool coat met us outside the barn. He seemed confused when he noticed me standing there, dwarfed by Hank’s massive stature. “Who’s this?”
“My assistant.” Hank gestured to me. “She’s learning the trade.”
I managed a weak smile.
The officer nodded. “We’ve been searching the woods for three hours already, even brought out the K-9 unit to see if we could use the dogs to track them. So far, nothing,” the officer explained as he handed Hank a huge flashlight. “We’ve got the rest of the wedding guests secure in the house, for now.”
“So what has you thinking this is a case for me?” Hank arched a brow.
The officer panned his flashlight away, his expression tightening with a worried frown. “Well, at first, it just looked like the kids wandered off during the party, but now …”
“Now what?” Hank demanded.
“We found some tracks in the vineyard out back.” The officer swallowed hard. “T-they’re huge. I called you right away when we found them. Nothing indigenous to this area makes prints like that.”
Hank switched the flashlight on, nodding for the officer to take the lead. “Show me.”
We marched through the snow, following the young policeman around the property and behind the barn to an open field lined with wooden trellises for grape vines. The soil was packed under a layer of snow and ice that crunched under our shoes. Moonlight poured from the clear night sky, making the winter landscape shine like platinum.
I crashed into Hank’s back. He and the officer had stopped to examine some of the tracks while I was looking around. Only, they didn’t look like footprints to me. They were huge, round-ish compressions in the snow. There was no consistency to their shape at all. They were staggered sort of like footsteps, but they didn’t look like the feet of anything I could imagine.
One glance at Hank’s expression told me I was wrong about that, though. He squatted down in front of one of the prints, touching two fingers to it like he was feeling for a pulse. A prickle on the back of my neck sent chills over me. The whispering sound of chimes echoed past my ears, almost completely hidden by the wind.
“You need to call the rest of your men back from the woods,” he said in a low voice.
The officer was looking more and more uneasy. “Hank, I-I don’t have the authority to—”
“Do it,” Hank growled through his teeth. “You’re going to piss it off even more.”
“I-it?” the officer stammered. “What is it?”
Hank slowly stood up, shining his flashlight across the field to the forest beyond. The tracks led away into the thickets, vanishing under a veil of shadows.
We left the young police officer yammering into his radio, frantically requesting that everyone fall back to the house as Hank and I headed into the forest at a brisk pace.
“What is it?” I asked again.
“Bad news,” Hank muttered. “And it probably already knows we’re here.”
I didn’t get any more information out of him as we walked to the edge of the forest. The instant the beam of his flashlight panned across the trees, I got nauseated. We both stood motionless, staring at the forest.
My breath caught.
The trees were green. How could anything be green this early in spring?
There were fresh leaves on them, and thick moss growing up their trunks. Flowers and grass bloomed all along the ground, and big vines clung to the branches like jungle snakes. Even the air that seemed to waft out of the forest felt warm and strangely humid. It was like getting breathed on by a big, hairy dog.
“How is this possible?” I whispered.
Hank’s expression had gone dark and ominous. “A lot of old magic. Older than you. Older than me. Older than both of your faerie pets.”
“It’s Fir Darrig, isn’t it?”
The forest seemed to shudder at the sound of that name. A fierce, cold wind rustled through the leaves, making sounds as though the trees where whispering.
My skin prickled. Where was Zeph? Eldrick? Had they seen this yet? Were they okay?
Hank cleared his throat. “Could be. Hard to tell. Unseelie’s don’t usually leave signatures on their handiwork, but anything that bends nature is nearly always the work of a sidhe.”
Together, we entered the forest with slow, cautious steps. Sounds seemed to come from all around us. A chorus of crickets and frogs sang sweet summertime melodies. Owls hooted from the treetops. Somewhere in the dark, I could hear the faint echoes of bells tinkling in a beautiful harmony. It made my head fuzzy. I was getting dizzy, and my steps became sluggish. First, my feet wouldn’t obey me, and then my eyelids grew heavy. I was so … sleepy.
“Don’t listen to the chimes,” Hank said suddenly. He grabbed me under the arm and shook me roughly.
My head cleared, although my fingers and toes still tingled. “It’s a spellsong? Can you tell which one it is?”
“My ears aren’t that keen, but I’ve heard this one before. We call it an enthrallment.” He let me go and kept walking slowly and carefully through the trees. “It’ll pull you into a trance. Makes you real easy to catch if you’re just standing there drooling on yourself.”
I fell in step beside him, and tried not to listen. The chimes were so beautiful, so alluring. It was difficult to ignore. No—I had to be stronger than this. I had to focus. “Can I ask you something?”
He made a grunting sound that I took as a “yes.”
“Why do you go on these cases? Is someone paying you?”
“Who’d be paying me?” He gave a raspy chuckle. “I just do what’s been passed down in my family for generations. Granted, I don’t do it the way my ancestors did. In fact, I’m sure there are some who would condemn my methods as dishonorable, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay. Things are different here. The spirits are more hostile now—smarter and more desperate. If I’m going to be of help to anyone, be it the spirits or the people here, then I have to adapt,” he said quietly. “A shaman can use the energy from the earth—what the faeries call ‘magic’—to bring healing and harmony, amongst other things. We can sense the spirit world and channel it. We do battle where no one else dares to, with things the rest of the ‘civilized’ world refuses to acknowledge.”
I studied his face. Somehow, in this light, he looked ancient—like he might be something ethereal himself. “And you help some faeries? Like Zeph?”
He nodded. “Not all of them have bad intentions. In fact, I’d say most of them are regular folk, like you or me, just trying to live out their lives in peace. But for those who aren’t, I have a duty to stop them, drive them out, and set things right.”
He crouched down to look at another deep track pressed into the soft, loamy soil.
I could understand that. What I was doing—learning about my dad’s spells and reading his journals—wasn’t so different. I was only beginning to understand magic, and yet I felt a sense of responsibility to be here. This fight was mine, too.
“How did you get mixed up with Zeph?” I asked.
“Our paths were bound to cross. He was an Unseelie faerie looking for work and a place to hide from Fir Darrig. My bar is probably the most heavily-warded structure in the city. If I activated the warding spells, no faerie would be able put a toenail ov
er that threshold without my say-so, no matter how powerful or old they were.”
I hesitated. So the bar where Zeph worked was some kind of faerie bunker? “Why? I mean, why do you need something like that?”
Hank chuckled. “I always like to have an ace in the hole. There are spell lines eight layers deep keeping all energy contained under that roof. Took me a long time to build it. If the Seelie’s found out about it, no doubt they’d assume I was up to no good since what can keep a faerie out can also keep one locked in.”
“They wouldn’t want you to have it?”
“No, they wouldn’t like it one bit. Not that I blame them. They’ve had a lot of trouble in the past with people keeping fae as slaves, using them for foul reasons,” he explained. “It’s my backup plan—something I keep in reserve for emergencies only.”
“So you just gave Zeph a bar keeping job and what, decided to have him be your personal faerie bouncer on the side?”
He stood and scratched his white beard thoughtfully. “More or less. I needed some help managing all the cases that were suddenly popping up—someone who could go bare knuckles against the worst of ‘em. Zeph has never had a problem holding his own in a fight. Eh, until recently, anyway.”
I had a new appreciation for Hank. He obviously knew a lot about the faerie world and ancient methods of dealing with it. I knew there was probably a lot I could have learned from him. Even with Eldrick’s help, I had only learned a few spells. It was incredibly difficult, even if Eldrick and Zeph made it look so easy. The shape of each mark, the position of every line, every tiny detail demanded utter perfection for a spell to work.
“Here.” Hank picked up a few thumb-sized acorns off the ground from around his feet and dropped them into my hand. “Hang on to those.”
“What for?” I tucked them in my coat pocket.
He grunted as he stood up again. “They make pretty good messengers.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Hank carefully picked his way through the forest, leading the way. The hot, stagnant air was making me sweat under my thick winter coat.
Suddenly, something made me stop dead in my tracks.
Voices. Giggling, like two children’s voices, echoed through the trees.
Something fluttered by like fabric darting through the shadows.
“Hank! Look!” I yanked on his sleeve. “The children!”
But they were gone. I stood, totally confused. I knew I hadn’t imagined that.
Hank frowned in the direction I was pointing. “What did you see?”
“I-I thought I saw them. I know I heard laughter. They were right there just a second ago.”
For several uncomfortable moments, we stood perfectly still, listening to every sound. Hank stood firm, like a grim, biker version of Santa, scowling into the dark. His eyes narrowed with concentration, and I strained to hear anything above the sound of the chimes.
Then I heard it again. More laughter. It was definitely children’s voices. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement again. This time it looked like two little figures, running together between the trees.
“There!” I shouted, spinning around. As soon as I turned to face them, they disappeared again.
Hank made a deep, disapproving sound in his throat. I thought he didn’t believe me.
“I know I saw it. I’m not making things up,” I insisted.
“I believe you,” he growled deeply. “This isn’t good. Hand me one of those acorns.”
“Should we go after them?” I fished out one of the small, oval-shaped nuts and handed it to him.
“Absolutely not.” Hank drew a circle in the dirt at our feet with his finger—a simple-looking spell. The design was a circle with four symbols around it and a cross in the center like a compass.
Standing before the drawing, he placed the acorn between his palms and pressed them together. I stood back, holding my breath as he began whispering something in what sounded like a foreign language. The words were beautiful. They rang in the air like music, seeming to weave a harmony that turned slowly into the sound of bells. My skin prickled at the presence of magic. It always gave me that feeling.
The acorn began to glow between his hands, pulsing with a brilliant golden light that flashed in rhythm with his words. As he drew his hands apart, the acorn hovered in the air. It glowed like a small star. With the final word, it suddenly shot downward into the center of the circle Hank had drawn in the dirt. Nothing but a smoking hole was left behind.
“See? Pretty good messengers.” Hank gave a small, sarcastic bow as he kicked dirt over the hole and messed up his spell circle with the toe of his shoe.
I wanted to learn that. No, I needed to learn it. “Who did you call?”
“Reinforcements,” he answered cryptically. “I’ve still got a few friends in high places. Stay close to me.”
I followed right beside him, deeper into the forest. The trees seemed to grow closer together, and the air grew so warm it was difficult to breathe. Hank panned the beam of his flashlight back and forth, following the tracks and looking for new evidence. I still hoped to see the children again. If we could find them we could get the heck out of here.
Then Hank stopped.
He snapped an arm out, blocking me from taking another step. I followed the beam of the flashlight upward as Hank shined it over the trunk of a huge tree—bigger than any I’d ever seen. The trunk was so thick you could have parked a car inside it. The massive branches spread out wide, stretching out above all the other trees.
Layers upon layers of intricate spells covered the whole trunk from top to bottom, even spiraling out toward its limbs. At first, it seemed beautiful, but the more I studied the marks, the more it almost seemed cruel to scar the tree like that. While I couldn’t be sure without getting closer, it almost seemed like some of those spells were malicious. Like they were meant to be …
“A trap,” Hank snarled bitterly.
“What?”
He shook his head, as though he were too furious to answer. At the base of the tree, Hank’s spotlight hesitated on a pair of objects propped up against the tree’s giant base. They looked like baby dolls—but they weren’t. They were a pair of lumpy, gnarled roots that almost looked like babies. Both were swaddled in pieces of cloth, carefully placed side by side in a circle of spellwork etched into the dirt.
Something about this didn’t seem right. It was as though someone had left them here specifically for us to find.
I took a step back, my heart stalling and starting. Where was Zeph? Why hadn’t he and Eldrick come to find us yet?
Then I got my answer.
From far in the distance, something roared so loudly it shook the ground. It was a booming, monstrous noise. All the trees shuddered.
Hank suddenly shoved the flashlight into my hands. He grabbed my shoulders and gave me a violent push away from the tree. “Go back to the barn,” he shouted. “Right now! Don’t stop. The smell of the other humans inside might hide your aura!”
“B-but what about you? And Zeph! What if he needs me to—”
“I said go! I’ll hold it off as long as I can!”
The booming roar shook the trees again. Whatever was making all that noise sounded really big and really upset. It even had Hank looking panicked. I didn’t want to be anywhere nearby when that monster finally made its appearance.
My feet flew over the squishy soil. I tried shining the flashlight on the tracks, using them like breadcrumbs to lead me out of the forest again. However, the farther I ran, the more there seemed to be tracks everywhere. They led away in different directions, splitting and rejoining or doubling back. I was running in circles, and I was getting tired.
I stumbled to a halt in the middle of a big clearing. With no trees overhead to block it, the moon showered the ground in sterling light. There were tracks everywhere, making craters all around me, but leading nowhere.
My throat tig
htened so I could barely catch my breath. My legs went numb.
I turned, staggering in circles, looking all around for some sign of where to go. Nothing looked familiar. I couldn’t even remember which way I’d come.
Oh god—I was lost.
“Zeph!” I screamed. “Eldrick! Hank!”
My voice echoed off all the trees. The roaring sound was gone. Even the sound of the chimes from the enthrallment spell had faded away.
Where were they? What if … what if Zeph needed me? What if Fir Darrig had already found him and I was too late? He needed me. I had to find him.
I took a few shaky steps, trying to pick a direction to start running again.
Something strong grabbed my foot.
I screamed, dropping the flashlight. I hung upside down, staring right into the face of a huge monster I didn’t have a name for.
A colossal, mashed-up mixture of rocks, roots, tree bark, and leaves held me up like a ragdoll by my leg. It stood upright, almost human in shape, with two big, gorilla-like arms and two stumpy hind legs. Its face was a featureless, eyeless mass with a big, gaping mouth that breathed blasts of hot, putrid, swampy breath over me.
I screamed again, kicking at the creature’s hand that held my other foot.
“jooosie,” the monster boomed.
My name—it knew my name? How? Why?
“Zeph!” I kept kicking and fighting as the beast hefted me higher into the air, dangling me over its giant, gaping maw. I could see straight down into its nasty, moss-covered throat.
“Eldrick! Hank! Someone, please!”
Out of nowhere, the air seemed to explode into blue light. A blast of cold air sucked the wind right out of my lungs, and the monster dropped me. I fell, twisting and screaming. I glimpsed the ground as it rushed up to meet me—and then something snatched me right out of the air.
I was flying. There was an arm around my waist, and I could see the mossy creature wallowing around in the clearing below. Parts of it were covered in a thick layer of ice.
I looked up, trying to figure out who was carrying me. My head swam. All I caught was a glimpse of bright yellow eyes and glistening white wings.
Mad Magic Page 24