by Jayne Hawke
“I’m going to gather my fire magic, then we head out and make him pay,” I said.
Standing there and fighting with them was just a waste of time. At the end of the day, they knew what they were walking into, and I had to let them make their own decisions.
I had a piece of phoenix fire that I’d been holding onto for a special occasion. Saving Castor fit the bill. I’d only be able to use it once, but phoenix fire burnt hot enough to turn a small lake into steam if I needed it to. Nothing would be able to survive that.
There was a strange comfort in the act of putting my sword and knives in their sheathes, ready for this fight. I’d trained as a combat witch for so long. Did the stalker know that? Did he know what he was really up against?
Elijah and the others were standing tall, shoulders back and their predators shining in their eyes when I stepped back into the entrance hall. They were all emitting strange magic, artifacts they kept hidden for rainy days. I wondered if there was anything I’d stolen there but didn’t have time to lose focus.
“You’re not doing this alone,” Rex growled.
My heart warmed a little. The grump did like me after all.
“We’ve had a taste of what he’s capable of. Now we’re walking into his domain, and he might be ridiculously powerful. Be prepared for that. I don’t know how much magic I’m going to be able to put into protecting you from water if you need it.”
“We won’t need it,” Rex said.
I didn’t see the point in arguing. There was a stubborn resolve to the set of his jaw. It was foolish and arrogant, but such was his nature.
“Our priority is to free Castor and bring him home,” Liam said.
“Agreed.” I said.
“Ok, rousing speech done, everyone ready to kick some stalker ass?” Jess asked.
I didn’t feel right having Liam with us. The fox just didn’t look like he was combat ready, but he was determined to help his friend out. I couldn’t deny him that.
I tore down the coastal road towards the cave. The darkness felt deeper than it had done before. Clouds hung thick and heavy across the night sky, blocking any moon or starlight. I had light woven into my charms if I needed it, and the shifters should have had excellent night vision.
Parking in the small gap between two fence posts, I got out of my car and set off down the narrow dirt path winding down the cliffs. The waves were crashing against the rough rocks below, making them slick. If any of us fell into the dark water, there was a real chance we wouldn’t come back. Mermaids were savage hunters, and hippocampoi had also been spotted in the area. Then there were the other, more monstrous things that I didn’t have names for. Black squid-type creatures with far too much intelligence in their eyes and creatures that seemed to be human at first glance but were something far more terrifying when I looked again.
There was something about that particular cove that brought all of the dangerous creatures in close to the beach. Maybe it was the arrogant divers. Maybe it was something beneath the water.
“Be careful,” I warned as I stepped down onto the dark rock.
I tugged on the earth and water magics and tried to give the rocks more grip while keeping the water off their surfaces. The water rolled against me in frothy waves, which broke against my mental hands. The earth magic complied without any question.
We slowly edged across the rocks, hugging the cliffs and trying to stay as far away from the cresting waves and monsters that hid within. I desperately wanted to risk hopping from one rock to the next so I could get to Castor, but we’d be no good to him dead.
There was a large flat rock at the entrance to the cave where the waves seemed to die out and gently lap against the ancient stone. Whoever was in there was clearly playing with the sea magic. Reaching out with my own magic, I tried to get a feel for it, to see what we were getting into.
What I felt was old and strange, a being that belonged to another place and time, primordial and confusing. Its magic was formed differently, as different to ours as ours was to human physics. I paused, and the pack paused with me.
“What is it?” Elijah whispered.
I paused several seconds, running through the magic and everything my other senses were telling me, trying to come up with an answer for him, and then gave him the only answer I had.
“Hungry.”
Whatever it was, the only reason it hadn’t eaten my familiar was because someone had convinced it a bigger, better banquet was coming. They had been right. The question was, would it manage to make good on the meal? I didn’t like how uncertain I was about the answer.
“Me, too,” Elijah snarled, half-shifting and leaping ahead, rock to rock, eager to meet the challenge.
When I caught up with him at the mouth of the cave, the intervening minutes had given me no insight whatsoever into what we were about to walk into. It could as easily have been C’thulu as the Easter Bunny. When we turned the corner, it was stranger than either. In the centre of the cave was Castor, magically and physically bound to a stone pillar and under the influence of some sort of sleeping spell. Just behind him was a massive frog with the head of a crocodile sitting in absolute stillness staring at the cave mouth with the laser focus only a crocodile or a house cat could manage. The hard scales of the crocodile ran all the way down the frog’s belly, armouring a frog’s most obvious weak spot, and at the time the thought at the forefront of my mind was that the inflexibility of that skin must’ve made it impossible for it to croak.
I turned out to be correct. Instead of croaking when it saw us, it opened its mouth and gave out the devourer-of-worlds edition of the hissing snarl I recognized from nature documentaries. The terror it raised in me was primeval, the remnant of something so old I was barely related to it preparing to run in fear at a watering hole. I diverted the emotion by focusing on Castor, whose state left him utterly vulnerable in front of a creature that had left him alive this long only because it was waiting for the rest of the meal to arrive – and here we were.
Even that wasn’t enough when it opened four additional mouths, one in each of its four knee joints, and made another, higher-pitched variant. I was transfixed, unable to focus beyond the fact that a five-mouthed crocodile frog was roaring at me with no expression and no magical signature beyond hunger.
“Cipactli,” Castor mumbled, waking up. No sleeping spell was enough to keep you out through that. “Get me down and let’s get out of here. You can’t kill it.”
“I can kill anything,” Elijah said, moving towards the animal now poised to leap, biding its time as if enjoying the moment.
“No, you can’t. Cipactli matters. It will eat you and I will let it. Get us out of here before it starts with me.”
I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I didn’t know if he meant “can’t” meaning the thing wasn’t capable of dying or “can’t” meaning the thing was too important to kill, but I was willing to take direction from the only one present who seemed to even know what we were looking at. I ran my senses over the bindings and found them simple but strong. There was nothing to outsmart, just ring after ring of pure fae magic holding him still and protecting the pillar from assault well into the rock on either end. There was only one way for any of us to get through that in the next twelve hours, and that was with a shadow blade.
Without a second thought, I reached into the shadows and pulled out a chunk of shadow, formed it into something vaguely resembling a knife with the instruction to suit itself to the next wielder, and threw it to stick in the ground at his feet.
“Someone cut him free. I’ll make friends with the frogodile.”
Castor winced at the irreverence, or maybe at the impossibly sharp weapon that had buried itself to the sort-of hilt inches from his feet. Either way, I would have to trust the pack not to do anything stupid or horrible with it, at least long enough for me to get us clear and, if it came to it, on a plane to Fiji under our fake passports.
In the meantime, Cipactli, which, or rather who
had been watching us with what I imagined to be curiosity but which was just as likely ennui or dispassionate loathing and was far more likely to be hunger, launched himself into a lightning-fast predatory hop that put so much pressure on the rock he’d been sitting on that I heard it crack. His massive body, which must’ve weighed several tons, moved towards me faster than I could react.
Before I knew what was happening, it smashed into the wall to my right, throwing rock free that broke my arm in three places. I saw Jess in cougar form clinging to its side and deduced that she must have had the speed to match the hop and had pounced as he moved, throwing him just enough off trajectory to leave me with most of my body working.
He quickly regained his feet, and as he came back into sitting position ready to leap again, the mouth on his left hind leg came into reach of Jesse’s flank. There wasn’t enough time to warn her, I grabbed at the nearest piece of shadow with the hand that still worked and swept it out towards the leg, not sure if I was hoping to wound it or not given Castor’s attachment, just knowing that I wasn’t going to let the cheeky cat girl get eaten by a kneecap after she’d just saved my life.
The sword formed in my hand as my arm moved, a thin, quick rapier sharp enough to cut a sunbeam in half, a masterwork like all shadow swords. Cipactli was still too fast, though. He kicked out with the leg and caught me square in the chest, slamming me back against the rock. I fought to keep myself from blacking out, grasped for the life magic in my sword only to realize that I was holding the shadow blade which, for all its unlaboured flawlessness, was full of the wrong thing. I wasted precious seconds dragging at my consciousness to get ahold of the life magic in my charms, and when I’d managed to get my shit together I knew I should be long dead.
My senses returned to find that all I could hear was a snarling, roaring sound that echoed through the cave like a freight train driving on gravel. I reopened my eyes and saw Elijah fighting in his half-wolf form, massive sword held easily in his right hand as his left dug long claws into the clamped-shut jaws of Cipactli. He was enormous, far larger than he should have been, closer to a polar bear than any breed of wolf I’d ever seen, and I thought back to the artifacts they’d all brought along. That must have been one of his. Impressive.
I climbed back to my feet and joined the fight. Cipactli was showing wounds along his legs, but only there. Everything else was untouched, his crocodilian scales apparently strong enough to withstand anything they’d brought. They’d fought him to a standstill, which was incredible, but it was going to fall to me to finish him.
Or rather, it would have, except I couldn’t, because he was apparently a friend of Castor’s or something. I struggled to figure out what to do, and as I did I took another strike from his front leg to my own, far smaller lower leg. I stopped myself from making the shin block that came naturally and shifted my weight to my other foot, letting his kick sweep my foot back and spinning through the hit. I would’ve congratulated myself, only I was limping nonetheless and Cipactli was still untouchable.
Elijah looked at me, his face only semi-human but still registering despair. His muscles were shaking as he held the huge beast in place, and no one had a plan. Jess was dodging hard kicks from its back legs and getting in slashes at a speed I could barely discern, but it wasn’t slowing down and if even one of those strikes landed we were down a pussycat. I knew nothing about Cipactli, nothing about its magic or its abilities that couldn’t be discerned from a drawing. I wracked my brain, pressing against panic to make myself think.
It finally came to me that whatever I didn’t know about Cipactli, I did know about reptiles. I grabbed at the ice magic in my charm bracelet and began to weave a simple cold spell. Crocodiles are adapted to warm climates, which meant he might be, too. The cold would slow him down, maybe put him to sleep, without killing him. He was too strong to freeze solid, which is why I hadn’t even thought to try, but if Elijah could hold him still for long enough I might have our solution in the kind of spell witch children used to fog up windows.
The problem was, it didn’t work. I could feel him cooling down, I knew the spell would solve our problem, but it was happening too slowly. The sheer bulk of him, combined with the fact that he was burning through huge amounts of energy in the struggle, meant that he was maintaining core temperature. I reached out to Elijah’s life energy and saw that whatever he was using was draining him fast.
I had no other ideas. All I could do was put every bit of skill I had into making it North-Pole cold in the cave and hope the frog tapped out before the wolf. I promised myself I’d practice my ice casting when I got home. If I got home. I reached out to the shadows with the image of icebergs forming in stop motion and they sent me back images of shadow snowflakes, shadow icicles, shadow glaciers. Message received. Shadows weren’t ice. They couldn’t help me any more than they could turn themselves into snowflakes.
With his very last ounce of energy, Elijah rolled the monster onto its back and wrapped his entire body around its jaws, closing his eyes tight and letting himself fall back into human form, his muscles slowly relaxing even as he poured his will into keeping them taught.
I didn’t see any options. I couldn’t let him die, not here and now, not when I hadn’t made my last move to save him. If it was this primordial spirit of hunger or my wolf, Castor was just going to have to take a wine class and meet some less horrifying things to hang around with.
I swept up the shadow blade that I’d abandoned somewhere between waking up and watching the fight come up on its end, and I prepared a coup de grace. Cipactli, breaking free and ignoring the sleeping meal so recently attached to its face, turned towards me before I could even finish my swing and snapped me up in its jaws. The turn was enough to get Jesse clear, and she took the opportunity. I expected that to be the last thing I ever saw, but the crocodilian jaws seemed to catch on something, not quite able to close. I looked down and saw that the shadow that had made up my sword, its reflexes apparently far better than mine, had slithered up my arm and reformed into a breastplate, one that Cipactli couldn’t break through; or at least, one it hadn’t broken through yet.
Taking a page from the playbook of every movie ever, I used its open mouth as a weak target for a quick flame spell, reluctantly omitting the phoenix feather in light of Castor’s warning. I needn’t have worried. The massive throat down which I could see nothing but the end times despite having night vision nearly as good as a cat shifter with my starlight spell was exactly what it looked like. It was a bottomless pit. The flame poured into the blackness and was consumed, enough fire to obliterate a hydra family reunion gone before it could provide so much as a glimmer of candlelight. I heard snarling and the clatter of metal and knew that the pack warriors were doing their best to draw its attention away from me, but crocodiles don’t let go of their prey and neither, it seemed, did primordial embodiments of hunger.
I sat and contemplated for several long seconds, ran through my magical options. I couldn’t unhear the certainty in Castor’s voice. That was the shadow goddess talking, she was the one who said it couldn’t die. It wasn’t a warning or a command, it was an observation of fact. It couldn’t die here because this wasn’t where it died. I reached into the shadow realm and found a shadow that seemed like a playful, fun sort of creature, and I told it I was going to make it into something unusual. It sent back an image of something I couldn’t recognize, some sort of modern art photonegative of a human femur made of stars, which I took for a yes because I didn’t have time for it to be a no.
I formed a spell with the phoenix feather at its centre and the shadow in a two-dimensional ring around it. Based on the thought I’d put into the nature of the dimensionality of shadows, I was confident that it would try to fix its dimensional wrongness and expand until it reached something with magic stronger than a phoenix and then press on that with the full strength of the shadow’s presence in our world. Now I just had to let it go and hope that putting something with the wrong number of dimensio
ns onto our plane wouldn’t just exterminate the universe. I was beginning to wonder if the people who wanted my kind gone didn’t have a point.
I released the spell and felt it do what it was meant to, the heat of the phoenix contained within the shadow plane but energetically forcing the shadow outwards. Even Cipactli couldn’t keep his jaws closed around that. In an instant, I was free and the bones of his jaw hit their absolute limits, disjointing with a pop. It threw itself backwards against the wall and the shadow pulled free, expanding beyond our view and disappearing. I couldn’t even begin to think where it would end up or what it might end up as, but that was a problem for another day.
Staring at the space where the two-dimensional shadow had been moments ago, Cipactli remained unmoving and transfixed. I didn’t know what he was thinking, if he even thought in the same sense that I thought, but so long as he wasn’t moving he was a free target. I gestured for Rex and Jess to pile up rocks and I worked the fastest and most impossibly sloppy earth magic of my life to meld them together just enough to buy us the time we needed to be gone from this place.
By the time we heard Liam and Castor shouting at us, I’d made what looked like a mound of chunky brown superglue over the top of the jumping legs of what I was fairly certain was a living god. It would have to do. Rex threw Elijah’s still-unconscious form over his shoulder and we all rushed from the cave and tried our best to climb the cliff wall at a dead sprint despite the narrow and precarious path that lay there.
Forty-Five
We’d made it back across the rocks to the safety of my car. The second we were firmly back on solid ground, I pulled Castor into a suffocating hug. He leaned his head against mine and gently hugged me back.
“You’ll not lose me,” he whispered.
A swell of emotions rose up, threatening to bring tears to my eyes. He’d been my only friend, my confidante and big brother for the last eight years. I’d never cared about someone the way I did about him. He stroked my hair and pulled back with a gentle smile.