by Jayne Hawke
“Please,” Elijah added.
“It’s a big ancient oak tree sitting up on top of the cliffs about twenty minutes outside of the city. You know the patch of open land off the twisting coastal road? It’s about four acres big, nothing from the fae forest ever lays foot there. I like sitting up there and watching the storms roll in.”
“Anywhere for someone to hide?”
“The fae forest, assuming the creatures in there don’t try and eat them.”
Elijah nodded.
“So we should be able to see someone coming pretty easily.”
“Let’s not get cocky, here. They wiped away all of their magic and killed people in broad daylight. We’re not dealing with an amateur.”
“Noted,” Elijah said.
Jess and Rex had gathered a large array of blades. I was used to shifters fighting in their animal forms.
“We make sure we’re proficient in anything bladed for situations where our animal form is less than ideal,” Elijah explained.
“We’ll need to stop by my place on the way there. I have to gather up my stockpiles of magic.”
Some witches wore charms or tattoos that allowed them to hold magic close to them. I usually preferred to pull on my surroundings. I wasn’t going to take any risks here, though. My charm bracelets held some of most forms of magic from enough air to form a small tornado, through to a raging fire, lightning, and a few very nasty poisons.
“Time to go and kick some ass,” Jess said with a grin.
I did not share her enthusiasm.
My forearms were almost covered with metal disks of various forms, each one holding a lot of magic. I was ready for anything. I pulled into the lay-by formed of compact dirt by the side of the narrow road. I’d never met anyone else on that road, which was a lot of what I loved about the place. There was never any fear of someone else being there. I felt as though the stalker had sullied something beautiful.
The ground rose steeply up away from the road. It was covered in short hardy grass, leaving no room for something to hide. The wolves casually leaned against the car and looked out over the roiling ocean while Jess and I slowly crept up the hillside towards the tree. The ground began to flatten out into a gentle rise about fifty feet up.
I kept my witch sense open, trying to detect even the smallest change. We were hoping that the stalker would be waiting by the tree for me so we could kill them and end this whole thing. There were no life signs there that I could detect. If I reached out farther, I could catch the edges of the forest, but there was nothing else.
Either the stalker was hiding very well, or they weren’t there. I was about to head back down to the guys when Jess tensed at my side. She lowered her body closer to the grass and watched a space near the tree intently. It took me a second, but I felt it. The ripple in magic... something was coming. I didn’t know what, but I knew it was big and powerful.
Forty
The treeline burst apart, trees cracking and falling, and out of it marched a line abreast of ice and water constructs at least a dozen strong, each twenty feet tall or more. The ices were covered in a rainbow of different bloods, and the water ones had each turned a cloudy brown with the suffusion of pigment. They’d been waiting for me, and while they did the local wildlife had seen the worst of it. I was more sad for the loss of life as I watched their bloody march than I was afraid of their attack. They were deadly, that was obvious, and I would have to fight them without my shadows, but at least it was me they were here for. The fae creatures had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I recognized the spirit of mourning that was settling over us all as unproductive. It wasn’t the right way to go into any fight, let alone one this dangerous, but I couldn’t get away from it. I tried to be angry, but the person I was angry at was nowhere to be found. These things were barely more than beasts themselves, killing because that was what they were made for.
I wondered how long it had taken to make them all. The size, strength, dexterity, and clarity of form, not to mention the sheer numbers, meant that we were looking at years of work, maybe decades. Nothing and no one I knew of could just throw together constructs like that. There were artifacts that made things in the same vein, but they were small, ill-formed, short-lived creatures, and even then the artifacts themselves were worth more than enough for me to be sure of their locations. Was it all for me, or had my stalker been building a construct army on principle and just found this to be the perfect moment for it?
More importantly, what were their orders, exactly? I watched them march and flow along the way towards us and wished they had faces. I knew there wouldn’t be any expression to read there, no spark of intent in a creature made with complete, robotic obedience in mind, but somehow a face would have given me something to latch onto. As it was, I was staring down a line of mud puddles and snowballs and wondering whether they were there to kill me or just kill virtually everyone who mattered to me.
The water constructs had abandoned their upright breaker forms and were sliding along the ground like fast-moving rivers, their icy cousins left behind as they were forced to hold the humanoid shape they began with and ponderously stomp their way across. That gave us a target priority. Now all we needed was a strategy.
Elijah began shouting out orders, but I tuned him out. I wasn’t going to take tactical advice on magical combat from someone whose entire magical repertoire involved turning into a slightly worse animal than he started out as. The upside to that was, they’d have no idea what the limitations were on normal witch magic. I couldn’t use the shadow, but I had a great deal of stored energy and the magical power of an entire coven in my veins. They might be suspicious, but I could talk my way out of it.
It was my responsibility to put this right. There was nothing his people could do against these things, and they wouldn’t run if I asked them. I wouldn’t let them die for being too stupidly noble. As the water constructs grew nearer, I pulled on a spell I’d made and stored in an artifact designed for just that. Normally magic had to be done on the spot, but with time and power it had been possible to tap into an acquisition of mine that everyone else thought was just a magical battery.
In it, I could store one spell and one spell only, but I’d made very good use of that space. Carefully tugging at the spell, I threw it out in front of me like a massive net, blanketing the earth. A moment later, the water constructs had flowed onto the space, and I triggered the spell. The earth beneath them opened up in a huge area forming a pit too deep to see the bottom of and then, scarcely a moment later, closed back up over the top.
It had been my experience that virtually nothing survived being buried that deep, but I was fairly confident these would be the exception. It took some work to feel down far enough to find them, but they were there and regaining their control. It wouldn’t be very long before they started to flow upwards, and when they got back to the surface it would be only marginally weaker than before. Luckily, the spell had the side effect of causing masses of stone lattice to form in its wake, and that meant they wouldn’t be able to reach the surface in concentration. The time it took them to dribble out and form up would have to make the difference.
I saw the pack gaping in my periphery and ignored them. They were civilians, equally likely to get me killed or get themselves killed but extremely unlikely to do anything more useful than that. I reached for a mass of fire magic that was stored in a pair of charms, one on each wrist, and started to jog towards the nearest iceman. Halfway there, I realized that I didn’t actually know if a melted ice construct would be a pool of water, a fully functioning but extremely angry water construct like the ones I just buried, or something else entirely.
I spent another couple steps trying to come up with something more creative, but apart from calling a spellbreaker the only way I knew to destroy a construct of this quality was to turn the element it was made from into something it couldn’t work with. The quickest thing to do with ice was to melt it, and melt it
I would.
As I came into what I considered a reasonable range of engagement, all four of them stopped in unison. Not waiting to see why, I took the extra moment to craft a fire spell of substantially greater heat than I’d have been able to create on the fly. As I worked, a creaking, crackling sound of icebergs rubbing together began from all four, and after a second or two resolved itself into something like a voice, a pale but comprehensible mimicry of human sound rendered at deafening levels by the sheer enormity of the constructs forming it.
THIS DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A TEST FOR YOU. THEY CAN’T HELP YOU. LEAVE THEM TO THEIR FATES AND THE CONSTRUCTS WILL PROTECT US FOR ALL TIME. IF YOU INSIST ON FIGHTING THEM, EVEN YOU MAY NOT BE POWERFUL TO SURVIVE.
The trembling rubber sensation of the spell I’d been forming told me that it was as powerful as I was going to be able to make it. No time like the present. I gently pressed the spell outward in a wide arc at around chest height of the constructs, which had agglomerated themselves into a huge heap of ice as the speech went on. As the fire pressed home, I saw them begin to struggle free of each other, reflexively responding to attack now that their master was no longer using them as a megaphone. Entangled as they were, the flame rendered them into slush in minutes, the spell clinging to the magic in them and wearing away the substance. I paid careful attention to the process, ensuring that they didn’t reform or simply change into something else, but as the damage piled up the construct spell fell apart around it, just according to plan.
I turned to face the liquid water constructs that made up the major part of the force, hoping against hope to find them still struggling free of my trap, and instead saw Elijah and his pack being slammed this way and that, half drowned and better than half dead. That was enough to make me angry. The melancholy that had been dragging me down the entire battle faded into the background as I saw the water beasts wearing down the brave, kind pack that had come out here with no idea what they were facing just because they thought I needed backup. I let the rage come, stopping just short of embracing it entirely, and began spellmaking on the run. A fair amount of slippery fae magic to let me guide the spell’s actions precisely, some solid earth magic to guide it to exactly the right spot, a substantial amount of very tightly packed ice magic for a critical moment, and last but not least the leafy swish of every scrap of pure storm I had on me.
By the time I reached my target, I’d crafted a spellcraft masterwork halfway between a human science textbook and the grimoire of a storm ascendant. I latched onto the earth that was guiding it and pressed it outward, a thrill running through me as the rage found its outlet and a surge of pleasure when the pack saw me coming and looked relieved.
I guided the spell to the centre of the water construct ranks, a space that had become a deadly and dangerous wave pool where each construct flowed into the next, the group working in tandem to make it impossible for anyone to escape or even get their balance. When it hit, the storm struck out in every direction, passing through the water and trying to ground itself. I held onto it, forced it to falsely ground into the earth magic guidepoint and return out again, diverted the ice magic into the pack as the spell worked while forcing the storm away from the electrolyte-filled bodies and back into the right circuit, and within mere seconds I felt the lattice of the water break. I unleashed the ice magic all at once, letting the energy of the reaction burn into the Highland snowstorm I’d picked up just in case on my last vacation instead of into the drowning victims who’d tried so hard to die needlessly for me. Within a few seconds, the water was gone, and so were the construct spells that had relied on it. All that was left was an outpouring of hot air.
“Where’d they go? Was that spellbreaking?” Jess asked.
“Spellbreaking is boring. I just proved why my sisters should have been reading in the coven library instead of listening to their lessons.”
“Reading what?” Rex growled, curious but not loving the guessing game.
“Reading about pre-Fall chemistry and the relationship between electricity and storm magic.” I paused for effect. “It’s electrolysis. Humans used to use it to split water into hydrogen and oxygen when they still built things like that. Only difference is, mine was the greatest piece of storm magic performed in a century and theirs was a chunk of metal that cost too much to run.” I smiled. “Anybody catch the speech earlier? He’s getting crazier.”
Forty-One
Jess was soaked from head to toe, and she was pissed about it. She kept shaking her feet and trying to peel her dripping wet clothes away from her skin. Eventually, she stripped down to her underwear and shifted into her mountain lion form.
I’d been pulling on the sunshine and air magic around us to dry my clothes off, so I was doing just fine. The wolves wore stoic looks as their shoes squelched and their clothes dripped all the way back down to the car. We hadn’t killed the stalker, but we did have a new piece of information. The bastard was at least half finfolk.
Finfolk were a very rare form of fae that were only supposed to lurk around the Orkney Isles. I’d thought they were extinct, but there were at least enough left to produce the stalker.
“Liam, get us everything you can about finfolk; their locations, magical abilities, everything,” Elijah said into his phone as I unlocked my car.
I smirked at Elijah as everyone fit into my far more sensible muscle car. It might not have cornered well, but at least it fit everyone and their armoury into it. He said nothing.
“Lily, can you give us anything to work with?”
“I don’t believe he’s pure finfolk. From what I remember about them, they’re sea fae. He was using ice and construct magic as though it came naturally to him. My guess is finfolk and sidhe, which explains the potent magic. He’ll be a dangerous foe when we do hunt him down.”
“Liam, narrow that down to finfolk-sidhe mixed breeds,” Elijah said to his phone.
“Aren’t finfolk those creepy ones that used to kidnap humans to live as their slave spouse down in their underwater city?” Rex asked.
“Yes. Although no one can decide on the exact details of their nature, or the location of Finfolkaheem,” I said.
Rex gave me a flat look and said slowly, “Finfolkaheem...”
“Don’t look at me, I didn’t name it.”
“Are they related to Atlantis?” Elijah asked.
“No, they’re distinctly fae. They’re closer to mermaids. I think.”
“This guy will stand out then, won’t he? Fins? Gills? Shell bra?” Rex asked.
Jess made a huffing sound that I thought was laughter.
“We can’t be sure. The sidhe side complicates things. Sidhe magic is nebulous. It changes depending on the personality of the individual. I don’t know how it would intertwine and work with the finfolk magic. He could look very much like a finfolk, which if I remember correctly are humanoid with webbed hands and feet along with a flatter, more amphibious-looking face.”
“Why did they kidnap humans? Surely they couldn’t breathe in the underwater city?” Elijah asked as we entered the city.
“This is only what I can remember of the bits I read as a kid. I believe that finwives, the females, become hideously ugly and slowly turn into a finwife hag if they marry a finman. And they take their spouses to some mystical island.”
“I thought hags were a separate type of fae that lived by rivers?” Rex said as he rubbed his temples and muttered about fae.
“They are. A finwife hag is different to a hag. Finwife hags are old crone types that claim territories near the ocean. They lure people in with a look of frailty and ‘wizened old woman’ thing, then they kill them and eat them. They’re said to be particularly fond of gnawing on disloyal men’s bones.”
“Remind me why we let the fae continue to exist? They’re all assholes and murderers,” Rex said.
“Coming from the wolf man...” I teased.
He grumbled and looked out of the window.
“So, this guy, he’ll want to be near th
e sea? Or will he be able to hide out on this island?” Elijah asked.
“As far as I’m aware, the island is up around the Orkneys somewhere. So, if he’s here, he’ll probably want to be near the sea. I can’t be sure, though, due to the potential sidhe side.”
We were approaching Elijah’s office when Jess stretched and popped her head up to look out of the window. A human woman who’d been waiting for the pedestrian crossing to turn green leapt back with a yelp of surprise as the mountain lion looked at her. Jess yawned, showing off her large sharp teeth.
“Really?” I asked.
Jess grinned at me before she curled back up on the back seat purring. Rex looked down at her.
“Would you like me to move to the boot so you can have the entire back seat?” he grumbled.
Jess stretched out a bit further in response.
I bit my lip to stop myself from laughing. Seeing the pack relax and interact with each other was a much-needed respite after the fight we’d been through. Elijah put his hand on my knee and gave me a warm smile, a reminder that I could be part of that too if I wanted.
Forty-Two
We’d left Jess and Rex back at the office. Elijah had insisted that I was joining him in getting the pack some food, as they’d earnt it.
“Talk to me,” he said softly as we walked along the beach path towards the fish ’n’ chips place.
“What’s there to say?”
“You tell me. I’m worried about you.”
I laughed.
“It was just a little construct pack,” I teased.
He shook his head.
“It’s more than that. He knew the private space where you like to relax.”
I sighed. I didn’t know if I’d be able to go there again. It felt as though the stalker had stolen it from me, turned it into something dirty.