Fantastic Hope

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  It was stupid to get into a car with him, she knew that. But a werewolf wouldn’t need to trap her in his car in order to hurt her. And she was, as he’d said, a witch. She was not without power.

  He knew she was a white witch. This time she couldn’t help it; her right hand wrapped around the pendant, but she said, “I walked here from my apartment. Where is your car parked?”

  * * *

  —

  “Joshua is fifteen and has two much younger sisters who are five and three,” the witch told him.

  She hadn’t taken her hand away from the amulet she wore; he supposed that it held some sort of protective magic. With rare exception, white witches were not very powerful, and they were prey to their darker sisters. They needed all the protection they could get.

  Asil knew a lot about witches. He and his beloved had taken a witchborn child into their home. That child had grown up and killed his mate. She had killed a lot of other people, too.

  “Take the next left,” she said, then continued as if he had asked her a question—maybe he had. “We found Joshua wandering around homeless two years ago, scooped him up, and as there was nothing wrong with him other than his mother being a hoarder, we dusted him off and found a foster home for him. Straight for about two miles.”

  He had to admire her emergency persona. Her voice was calm, and if she kept a hand braced on the dashboard, he didn’t hold it against her. He was driving thirty miles an hour over the speed limit in traffic, and she was only human.

  “But he visits his sisters?”

  “A good thing,” she told him. “His mother was better when he was a child. He tells me that before she inherited her parents’ house, they lived in a small apartment and she kept that clean. But her parents were hoarders and she just . . . let the house absorb her, too. Next right.”

  His wolf didn’t like taking orders—even directions from her, from someone less dominant than he. And few people were more dominant. Also, his wolf did not like witches. Neither did Asil, but he also believed in being fair. She had not asked to be a witch; she had chosen not to go after power, to remain vulnerable to the witches who were not so nice.

  His wolf felt no need to be fair: a witch was a witch. White witches might draw upon only themselves for power—unlike gray witches, who drew upon the willingly offered pain and suffering of others. Or black witches, who did not bother with consent when they tortured and killed their victims. Black witches like Mariposa, who had killed his mate.

  The Subaru broke loose on the ice, and Asil had to concentrate to bring it back in line.

  So. Part of the speed he was driving was to keep his wolf occupied. Even with his reflexes and his car—he’d brought the Subaru, which handled better on winter roads than his Porsche—driving on the ice and slush was tricky.

  They turned onto a street of Victorian houses—not mansions, but substantial two-story buildings. Most of them were well tended, a few showed signs of being recently renovated, and one of them was boarded up with scaffolding lining the outer walls.

  The one Tami directed him to park in front of had good bones, as if it had been in good shape sometime in the last decade. But the paint was faded and peeling in places. The once-white picket fence leaned this way and that and was missing pieces, giving it the look of a jack-o’-lantern’s grin.

  As soon as he got out of the car, he could smell rotting food, moldering fabrics, and something foul that had him reaching over the back of the seat for a case he kept there for old times’ sake. He slung the strap over his shoulder and followed Tami to the gate.

  “No smoke,” she said, her voice quiet. “Let’s head to the back door. It’s closer to the girls’ room. That way we might avoid Joshua’s mom. She doesn’t like strangers—especially strangers who are male and—” She looked for a word, then said, apologetically, “Not white.”

  “I am a Moor,” he told her.

  He did not expect his words to bring her to a full stop. “‘Moor’ is racist,” she told him. “Not to mention antiquated and imprecise.”

  He closed his eyes because the snap to her voice made his wolf—already agitated—want to show her why people didn’t just contradict a dominant wolf. Especially when one is a witch.

  She was a defender of the downtrodden. He would not hurt her, would not allow his wolf to hurt her.

  “Tami,” he said softly, and when he opened his eyes, she hissed and took a step back. “I am very old and my wolf is generally angry and very dangerous. Arguing makes it obstreperous. I am descended from African Berbers and people from the Arabian Peninsula. I am thus a Spanish Moor, however antiquated the term. Perhaps we should go rescue the children?”

  She watched him like a rabbit who suddenly sees a hawk. He sometimes enjoyed making people look at him like that. But he didn’t enjoy it from her. His wolf did, but he didn’t.

  “I apologize for scaring you,” he said. “You are not in danger from me—” A promise must be kept, he advised his wolf. “But you will help me greatly if you make suggestions rather than give orders.”

  When she didn’t move, he started walking toward the back of the house. A woman who worked with the homeless, where predators and prey mimicked each other, would not stay frightened of him long, he trusted. And indeed, after he had walked a few steps, she fell in behind him.

  “My mother told me that some of the werewolves get really old,” she said. “Centuries.”

  “Your mother was right,” he told her.

  “The Spanish Moors . . .”

  “I am very old,” he agreed.

  “Okay,” she said in a small voice as they came to the back of the house. “Very old. I am sorry, my reaction is a hazard of the job. A lot of my people are minorities of one sort or another.”

  We like her, he told his wolf. She’s a good person.

  There were a set of wooden steps that rose about three feet to the only door in the back of the house. No one had attempted to clear them of snow, but there were signs that they were used. Like the picket fence, there were missing boards here and there.

  This close to the house, the smells were very strong.

  “Joshua said on the phone that his mother barred the window—would it be easier to go through this window?” Asil asked.

  She shook her head. “The window in the girls’ room is about a square foot. We might be able to get the girls out through it, but Joshua is six feet tall and broad shouldered.”

  He could go through the wall, but since there was no immediate danger, there was no reason to destroy the structure. Danger . . . he was reminded why he’d chosen to carry his weapon case on his back.

  He breathed in through his nose deeply to see if he’d scented what he thought he had. And was rewarded with a bounty of odor so rich that it was hard to single out anything more subtle than rotting meat and rat urine.

  “Very well,” he said. “Why don’t I lead the way, and you tell me—politely, please—where to go?”

  She nodded. “I can do that.”

  He turned the handle on the door, and it opened into what had once been a kitchen. He could tell because about two feet of refrigerator were still visible over the top of masses of garbage bags and boxes and totes. Asil coughed at the cacophony of mephitises and took an involuntary step back.

  “The kitchen is the worst of it for smells,” said Tami in a grim tone. “At least they don’t have pets. I’ve been in places full of kittens and half-starved dogs that look like this and smell worse.”

  “There are rats,” observed Asil. “But I suppose that you might not consider them pets.”

  “I wouldn’t, no,” she said, looking as eager as he felt about stepping into the cave of aggregated stuff.

  “Rats are clever beasts,” Asil told her as he began climbing into the room. “As smart as dogs.”

  “I don’t want to talk about rats while we a
re crawling among them. Please?” she said. “And the way to the kids’ room is down the hallway to the right of the fridge.”

  He smiled, mostly in relief that she seemed to be settling back into Tami for both he and his wolf, instead of witch. He noticed that there seemed to be a trail of compacted rubbish that led in the direction she had indicated. They crunched and climbed past two doors nearly covered to the top of the doorframe and then slid downhill to a small area that had been cleared of stuff all the way down to a hardwood floor. An area that looked as though it had been bigger until very recently.

  The boy had told Tami there had been an avalanche, and that’s what it looked like, too. A full-sized metal desk of the sort ubiquitously found in government offices after World War II was the main bulk of it, but there were bags and boxes—cardboard and clear plastic—scattered around. The fall had left a divot in the mass just beyond the cleaned space.

  Asil’s eyes narrowed grimly. He might not be able to pick out the scent of the creature right now, but there was an intent to the way in which the desk had fallen that made him certain he’d been right about the danger.

  There was an enemy here, and his first task was to remove the innocents from danger. That was not as easy a task as it initially appeared. As with digging a tunnel or shoveling snow—the hardest part was figuring out where to put the material you were removing.

  He couldn’t just put the desk where it had come from. That pile was now unstable—and there was no room to set it where they stood and still open the door.

  He was not as interested in preserving the structure of the house as he had been before he understood what they faced. So he picked up the desk and slammed it into the exposed wall on the opposite side of the children’s room.

  It broke through the lath and plaster and into the room beyond. That room, now visible through the hole he had made, was not nearly as packed as the hall. Probably because the door to it had been buried before it could be filled to the top.

  After one almost-incoherent protest, Tami simply started grabbing bags and boxes and sending them through the hole after the desk. It took them nearly fifteen minutes to clear a stable space that allowed the door to swing open and stay that way because the mound where the desk had fallen from kept spilling more bags and boxes at them.

  Eventually, Tami was able to open the door.

  The room was tiny for the three bodies it held. Two small children and a boy just entering manhood. Asil presumed this was Joshua. The boy had a pierced lip and tattoos inked by unskilled hands—and he looked with horror at the wall with the hole in it where Asil had put the debris from the hall.

  “Mama is going to blow a cog,” said the oldest of the girls.

  The fear in her voice made Asil’s old wolf rise.

  You’ll get a battle today, old wolf, Asil assured the bloodthirsty creature. But for now we must get these children clear of the danger.

  Content for the moment, the wolf retreated.

  “Out first,” said Tami. “All of you. Worry about the wall later.”

  “It is a good thing,” said Asil softly, “that the desk fell when Joshua was here with his cell phone to call for help.”

  Joshua, who had grabbed a bag and was shoving clothes for the girls into it, paused. He looked again at the hole in the wall.

  “It’s time for the girls to get away from this permanently,” he said. “Can they come to my apartment?”

  Tami nodded. “That’s the best place, at least for now. We’ll talk to your mother tomorrow—if we don’t see her tonight. Then we will look for a more permanent solution.”

  You will see her tonight, thought Asil. I will get Joshua’s mother out of this house. She will be more difficult to free than the children because it has its hooks in her.

  He thought of the avalanche that had fallen to trap Joshua and his sisters. They had been intended to be part of the hoard. And over the foul stench of the hoard, the scent wafted to his nose again.

  Wyrm, whispered the wolf.

  Hah, thought Asil. I was right.

  “Come on, squirts,” Joshua said. “You’re staying with me tonight.”

  No mother appeared as they exited the house. Asil shut the back door and took them all to his car. As Joshua worked on how to make his sisters safe in a car without car seats, Asil held out his keys to Tami.

  “Take them away,” he told her. “You can come back and pick me up later.”

  “What are you going to do?” she said, not taking the keys. Then, dropping her voice to a whisper, she said urgently, “Their mother is broken, she’s not evil. Don’t do anything to hurt her.” Then, belatedly: “Please?”

  Asil shook his head. “This is not a human thing,” he told her, waving his hands at the house. “I know you can’t smell it—especially given the odor of that house. But I would think that you can feel it.”

  She frowned at him, then turned toward the house and lifted both of her hands. After a second, she took a step toward the house, and this time he felt her magic. Witch, snarled his wolf.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Wyrm,” he told her.

  She turned a startled look on him. “A dragon?”

  “There’s a lot of debate about that, I am told. But I have seen both—and wyrms are very different creatures. Thankfully. I do not think even I would be equal to a true dragon.”

  She stared at him a moment, then said, “I’ll leave that one. A wyrm, my mother told me, is driven by the need to surround itself with treasure. But unlike other . . . unlike dragons, it doesn’t gather its treasure by itself. It takes a human in thrall and uses them to gather it.”

  Asil nodded. “Yes. And a wyrm’s treasure is not what a dragon’s treasure is. Dragons surround themselves with metals. Wyrms gather whatever catches their eye.”

  “If it’s magic shit,” said Joshua, coming up to them, “we need to get Mama out of there.”

  Asil looked at the boy. He was shivering in the night air even with his coat on. He didn’t appear any of the ways Asil had seen mundane people react to the supernatural world.

  “Magic?” said Tami, sounding surprised. It was the first lie Asil had heard from her—and it was a lie of tone, not substance.

  “We all know you do magic,” Joshua told her. “It’s like a beacon of hope in the shelters. People get better when they shouldn’t. Bad people back down or go away—when they never would normally do that. People say, ‘Things will be okay, because we got our own witch.’”

  Tami’s mouth fell open, but she didn’t say anything.

  Joshua turned to Asil. “So are you a witch, too?”

  Asil shook his head. “Werewolf.”

  And despite the cold and fear, Joshua’s face lit up. “No shit? No shit? We got rescued by a werewolf?”

  “Correct,” agreed Asil solemnly. “And I am going to rescue your mother, too. Tami will take you and your sisters to your home, and I will call her when I’m finished.”

  And then there was a great round of protests.

  If his wolf hadn’t been so eager for hunting the wyrm, Asil might have had serious issues. It was decided that Joshua and the girls would wait in the car—a defeat Joshua agreed to only because someone needed to stay with the girls.

  “I can break the enthrallment,” Tami told Asil. “A little spell my mother taught me.”

  “Your mother taught you a spell to break a wyrm’s enthrallment?”

  “Well, no,” she admitted. “But an enthrallment is an enthrallment. The one I know breaks the hold of a black witch—but my mother used it against a vampire . . .”

  “Blackwood?” asked Asil. Blackwood had been eliminated, but he had ruled Spokane for a long time. Even other vampires had stayed away from him.

  She nodded.

  He had killed wyrms before, though only a handful. In his experience, pe
ople held in thrall sometimes died when their enslaver died. If Tami could break that bond before he killed the wyrm—maybe Joshua’s mother would live.

  “Then you should come with me,” he told Tami.

  He gave the car keys to Joshua. “Start the car and turn on the heat. If you get scared, drive to your home. Don’t wait around for us.”

  “We’ll be here when you come back out,” Joshua said stoutly.

  Asil turned his attention to other matters. He asked Joshua, “If this hoard had a heart, where would it be?”

  The boy opened his mouth, hesitated. “The basement.”

  “And what,” asked Asil, “is the best way to get to the basement?”

  * * *

  —

  There was an outer entrance to the basement along the side of the house—the side Asil had not yet seen. When the house was built, the entrance would have allowed ice and coal to be delivered. Now, Joshua had told them, it was kept secure with a sturdy padlock and chain.

  “What about their mom, Helen?” asked Tami as Asil started to dig through the snow that had accumulated on top of the slanted doors.

  “What about her?” he asked. He grasped the chain and shook it, dislodging more snow and revealing the latch.

  “She isn’t going to be in the basement,” Tami said, a hint of exasperation in her voice. “We need to get her out.”

  “She’ll come to us,” Asil told her. “It will call her as soon as it views us as a threat.”

  He broke the chain, dropped it into the snow, and pulled the doors open. The inner stairs Joshua had described were nothing but a pile of rubble on the basement floor. As he watched, they crumbled further in a drift of wyrm magic.

  “It knows we’re after it,” Asil said. “Wait a moment. Let me go first.”

  He opened his case and drew out his sword. It was a fine weapon, a gift to himself that he’d purchased a few years ago. Its modern steel was better than his old Spanish steel blade, as much as he hated to admit it. Sword in hand, he made a diving roll over the wreckage and came to his feet on the far side.