by DM Fike
I can fling out sarcasm all day long when someone’s acting like a jerk. Someone caring about me, though, throws me off guard. “If it’s dangerous, let me help,” I pleaded.
Guntram merely shook his head. “No, Ina. You, of all shepherds, must be kept as far away from this situation as possible. Go back to the homestead, please.”
I absolutely despised being shut out, but my heart skipped at the tone in his voice. He demanded, he grumbled, he occasionally cajoled. But he never begged.
“Fine.” I threw my hands up, stomping off. I didn’t even try to lose Fechin as the raven soared above me, ensuring I went where I was told. Not that it mattered much.
Neither Guntram nor his ravens would ever catch me. I had secrets of my own.
CHAPTER 3
GUNTRAM’S PARTING WORDS still rankled an hour later as I entered the homestead, the rustic farm-like property where shepherds recharge when not galivanting in the woods. What did he mean by ‘you of all shepherds?’ Was he referring to my lightning capabilities? Or my hot-headed nature?
But no. Probably a reference to my rank. Darby, another eyas trainee, also had no idea what was going on at Mt. Hood. I could almost have understood not allowing us to help given our lesser abilities, but then again, I’d saved augurs from near-fatal vaettur encounters before.
Why couldn’t Guntram tell me what was going on?
I must have been fuming because I barely noticed Sipho, the homestead’s caregiver and talented forger, even though we passed within yards of each other. She wore a homespun sleeveless tunic, dark muscles bulging in the waning evening light. Her braids hung down instead of wrapped up in a bun, indicating she was close to retiring for the evening. Kam, the nocturnal mountain lion that protected the residence, sauntered next to her, forehead bumping into Sipho for the occasional pat.
Sipho raised a hand in greeting. “Ina, you seem distressed. Is everything all right?”
Of course not, but that wasn’t Sipho’s problem. “Just the standard jitters after taking down a vaettur.”
Sipho nodded in triumph. “Glad to hear of your victory.”
“Thanks.” Not thinking we had other business, I made a motion to walk past her. On the return journey home, I’d recharged my pith stores by absorbing air, earth, and water from natural sources, then combined them internally for fire. Still, I needed a dip in the hot spring to heal my damaged arm, which I held to my chest for protection.
Sipho didn’t notice my injury at all, instead pointing to my neck. “What happened to your charms?”
My free hand rose to my collarbone to grasp at nothing. In my sour mood, I’d forgotten all about the boobrie destroying my charm necklace.
“The vaettur ripped it straight off.”
Sipho frowned. “Come, let me replace it.”
“But my arm…”
“It will only take a moment.”
Sipho had a point, so I followed her to the log cabin that held her forge supplies. Light-furred Nur the mountain lion dozed near the fire, barely lifting his head as his sister Kam batted him playfully. Sipho crossed the tool-strewn room to a miniature set of drawers where she kept her spare slats of charms. She retrieved a brand-new silver chain and threaded everything on it in a neat row: charms for fire, earth, air, water, and defense.
“I wish I had a new lightning charm ready for you,” Sipho confessed as she clasped the necklace around my neck, “but etching the right sigils eludes me.”
“If it makes you feel any better, the sigils elude me too. Normal sigils don’t help focus my lightning pith.”
Sipho frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You know how all the elements have some sort of base shape? Like squares for earth and crosses for fire? Well, lightning has a pattern too, but using a known sigil doesn’t work very well. The best I’ve come up with is rubbing my fingers across a battery’s surface, like this.” I used my thumb as a sample battery and used my other hand to show her how I often used a zigzag motion to extract lightning pith.
Sipho watched me with the scrutiny of a scientist at a microscope. “Fascinating.”
“But no worries if that doesn’t help you.” I remembered how her last lightning charm had exploded like a bomb. I didn’t fancy another blackout concussion. “Mastering lightning might take a lifetime of effort.”
“Indeed,” Sipho said, but I could tell she had multiple wheels turning in her brain.
I excused myself for a nice long soak in the hot spring to fix my injured arm. Magma is the lifeblood of Nasci herself flowing through the earth’s crust, so geothermal sources heal shepherds better than any modern medicine. Ironically, though, we can’t come into direct contact with magma. I tried touching it once. It overloaded my pithways pretty quickly. Guntram slapped my hand away, yelling that too much absorption could kill me.
After the hot spring restored my arm to almost new, I opted not to leave the homestead for real food, snacking instead on the bread and dried fruit available. I contemplated doing some sigil practice, as I’m sure Guntram would have wanted, but I noticed that besides Sipho in the forge, no other shepherds wandered the homestead. I wouldn’t have an opportunity like this again for some time, so I decided to visit one of Sipho’s gardens.
I’d helped create the garden’s fence earlier that summer to prevent deer from having a midsummer feast. The posts themselves only stood two feet high, but with Sipho’s carved sigils creating some sort of irritating noise I couldn’t hear, it kept the animals out. Any buck who wandered this way shivered and fled in the opposite direction.
I approached a crooked post toward the back of the garden. Glancing over my shoulder to ensure no one was watching, I kneeled next to its base. Gathering my earth pith, I drew a square with several Vs over the top. The dirt parted as if made of tiny ants, exposing a waterproof pouch Sipho had given me. I grabbed the bag, brushed the remaining soil off, and withdrew a white prepaid cell phone.
I inhaled a shaky breath. It was still here, despite that fact that Guntram sometimes confiscated my secret stashes. I hadn’t had the nerve to power up this particular phone since the last time I’d used it. I used this phone to access messages from one Vincent Garcia, a game warden and police officer with whom I had a complicated relationship. We’d saved each other’s butts from vaetturs, and that had led to a clandestine relationship between us. Starting as texting friends first, we shared an almost kiss that I thought signaled the beginning of something more. But then I’d caught him on a date with his ex-wife that looked pretty damning, despite his insistence that they were only friends. I’d ditched his apologetic ass afterwards, but he had to go and convolute things by saving me from a fire golem, a unique vaettur made completely out of pith. Without his help, I would have died a few weeks ago.
Since that battle, I’d concealed the phone underneath the fence post, refusing to check it. I told myself I’d kept it hidden so Vincent couldn’t track me here, but that wasn’t true. Vincent knew where the homestead was, not that it did him much good. Sipho’s magic shielded the place so thoroughly under a rock mountain façade, Vincent could never get inside. He understood that.
No, the real reason I hadn’t checked the phone is that doing so meant I cared about Vincent. I’d tried to bury those feelings with the phone. And yet, instead of destroying the stupid thing, there I was, holding it in my hand.
I waffled between reburying it or turning it on. Even if I had feelings for him, nothing would come of it. I was a shepherd, and he was a regular guy. Our worlds did not mesh. Pretending they did only prolonged my misery.
Still, I couldn’t put the thing down.
I pressed the phone’s power button before I could change my mind. Wincing, I watched the phone’s screen through my cracked eyelids, as if I’d detonated a nuclear bomb.
If I expected an explosion, though, I got a dud. The screen flashed the low battery symbol, then shut off.
Naturally, it didn’t have any charge. Sighing, I grabbed its charger and shoved bot
h items in my hoodie pocket. I couldn’t plug in the phone on the electricity-free homestead, but I could find a power source later. Then I reburied the waterproof pouch, still containing the last credit card from my folks I hadn’t maxed out yet. I itched to go eat a real meal, but I promised myself I would only use it in case of an emergency.
The events of the last 24 hours had really drained me. It couldn’t have been nine o’clock, and I usually didn’t turn in until midnight. Still, I dragged myself back to the homestead’s lodge and fell asleep almost instantly on an uncomfortable mattress filled with scratchy straw.
CHAPTER 4
FIRE ROARED ALL around me. I couldn’t escape it. I raised my hands to absorb it, but it hurt too much. Pain wracked my body whenever I tried. I attempted to tap into some inner peace, to remain calm so I could walk through the blaze that threatened to consume me, but even that failed. The unbearable heat licked at my skin, smoke filling my lungs as I realized there was no escape.
That’s when I woke up. Out of a deep sleep in the middle of the night, eyes wide open.
Wiping the sweat from my brow, I balanced upright on the edge of the bed. That was a pretty intense dream, likely triggered by my recent near-death experience with the boobrie. I took breaths to quiet my beating heart, telling myself nothing had killed me.
At least not yet.
Besides, the nightmare had a silver lining. I awoke early enough that I had time to visit Rafe.
The mysterious stranger Rafe was the source of my forbidden knowledge. I’d met him during the fire golem attacks. He’d displayed some slight magical talent but knew shepherds would never welcome someone outside of their inner circle into their ranks. Rafe regarded me as a kind of ally, someone willing to believe that even non-shepherds could play a crucial role in protecting Nasci. We’d met several times since I defeated the fire golem, always in the middle of the night when I could safely sneak away. He’d predicted that more vaetturs and golems would appear in surges.
I’d been unsure of his predictions until today. Although on the surface the boobrie was a garden-variety vaettur, its behavior shared similarities with another incident that had happened before the fire golem attacks. A bull vaettur called a khalkotauroi had stumbled around the Siuslaw National Forest, setting odd fires around human sites instead of hunting for animal pith. I couldn’t wait to tell Rafe what we’d encountered and get his take on the situation.
I tiptoed out into the hallway, ears straining. Guntram’s gentle snores filled my ears. He had apparently returned to the homestead and gone to sleep in the room across from mine. I peeked down the hallway, but no one else had taken up residence.
I had the place to myself.
I made my way to the common area that dominated the front half of the lodge. The walls were crafted of reddish-brown wood, high ceilings showcasing glassless windows for breezes to gust through. A stone pool full of pristine water sat in front of a crackling fire that never went out. The dirt floor left no dust trail, enchanted not to stick to skin or clothes.
I wandered first into the kitchen with its simple oven and various storage spaces. I climbed up on a counter so I could grope inside the highest cupboard. Toward the very back, I pulled out a gray stone with tiny hairline cracks and a bracelet with metal slats almost identical to my charm necklace. Jumping down, I clasped the bracelet to a spot above my elbow. Then, clutching the stone, I strode over to the pool.
I threw the stone into the lodge pool’s shallow waters. As the rock sank below the surface, its fissures glowed with a blue pulse not unlike the twinkling lights of a wisp channel. I considered putting my boots on but decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of drying them later. I lowered myself into the pool, face down, and absorbed the water pith soaking my clothes. With a practiced underwater breathing sigil, I triggered the stone’s power. It sucked me downward and spun me around a few times before I ended up in Rafe’s motel room a hundred miles away in the coastal town of Florence, Oregon.
The first thing that struck me when I landed in the bathtub was the noise. A discordant hum filled my ears, its cadence sporadic and muted. I thought it might be a malfunctioning bathroom fan, but I couldn’t locate one in the cramped space.
I exited the bathroom to a bedroom with a front-facing window. That strange buzz came into sharp focus. A wild wind slammed against the walls, making the glass warp slightly under its ever-changing pressure.
More alarming than the wind, no one else occupied the room. Rafe had always been waiting for me on my previous visits. He often ushered me into the small wooded area behind the motel, saying the outdoors felt less confining than inside the dingy room. I couldn’t say I blamed him as I glanced at the lumpy comforter and odd stain on the pale walls. My best guess was that he’d stepped out, despite the wind.
I grabbed the door handle to search for him, but a heavy weight swung in my kangaroo pouch. The phone. I might not have a better chance to plug it in again. I certainly didn’t want Rafe asking questions about Vincent. I’d managed to keep him a secret from Rafe, and I intended to keep it that way.
A place as cheap as Rafe’s motel didn’t boast many places to charge a phone. I found only a single open outlet behind the ancient TV. I had to roll the mobile stand forward to expose it, and even then, the charger cord barely reached its dust-bunnied depths. I struggled to get the phone plugged in by feel alone, cursing as my hand scraped against something sharp.
I withdrew my hand to find a shallow cut across one finger. “Ouch,” I muttered, sucking on it. It’s a good thing I could heal myself at the hot spring later, otherwise I’m sure I would die of some infectious disease left by an occupant from the 1970s.
But my plan worked. The phone powered on so I could check for messages. Expecting a slurry of stalker voicemails, I instead found only one text message, posted the day after I’d last seen Vincent.
It read, “Please just let me know you’re ok. I promise not to bother you after that.”
My insides squeezed. I could almost hear the heartache in those words, picture his sorrowful expression. He’d risked his life for me during the fire. The least I could do was tell him I’d survived.
Before I could tap a single letter, however, the motel’s door swung open and slammed against a wall. I shrieked, dropping the phone as I twirled around, thinking a wind gust must have thrust it open.
Rafe stood in the doorway, dressed in his usual athletic pants and shirt, blond hair disheveled by the wind. His celebrity enviable good looks strained as he leaned against the door frame, circles under his striking blue eyes.
“Ina!” He stumbled toward me so suddenly, I had to jump upward to catch him from falling. His fingernails dug into my hoodie as he rasped. “Golem.”
The blood drained from my face. “What?”
Rafe gestured outside. “Air golem.”
My mind reeled at the implication. The boobrie had arrived through a weirdo breach, acting strange. Like the fire golem after the khalkotauroi, an air golem would follow its wind-based predecessor into our world.
“You have the bracelet?” he asked.
I nodded. Then I tried to ease Rafe into a chair, but he clung to me.
“I have to stop it,” I told him.
“You can’t go alone.”
“I can’t go with you,” I countered. “Where is it?”
“Through the woods.” He pointed behind the motel. “Beyond a single street with houses on either side. Inside a golf course.”
Finding the golem seemed easy enough. It was the part after that I dreaded, especially without any lightning pith. But I pushed that fear aside.
“You rest,” I ordered.
He finally let go to sink into the upholstered chair. Trembling, he said, “Be careful.”
I dashed out the door without answering. I didn’t make promises I didn’t know if I could keep.
The sprint through the trees behind the motel shielded me from the growing gales. I absorbed the air pith around me and drew two Ss in
to an infinity symbol, creating a spinning vortex around me. That proved a wise choice as a gnarled tree branch bounced off the air currents instead of my head. My defensive charm probably would have cushioned the blow, but it’s better to have multiple layers of protection when you’re hunting golems.
Especially when you’re doing it solo.
Navigating through the middle-class two-story homes took more effort. It was apparently trash week, but the 3-foot tall bins of garbage didn’t have the weight to withstand the current weather. Paper, plastic, nasty old food, and all sorts of goopy trash ripped through the air, making it hard to see. Some of it stuck to me, and while I could ignore the bits on my clothing, I gagged when something wet struck my bare feet. I barely dodged a broken computer keyboard with a USB cord flapping so fast it could cut skin.
Maneuvering past the houses into the golf course brought some relief. Not only did I cease acting as a human flytrap for trash, the wind calmed down a degree. Whipping flags denoted the different numbered holes as I scanned the dark rolling lawn for any sign of my target. I needed to locate the golem so I could suck the pith out of it.
I didn’t think it would find me first.
In retrospect, the calmer winds on the golf course should have been a clue I’d entered the eye of the storm. I learned that the hard way as an invisible hand picked me up by the waist and launched me a hundred feet up into the air.
For a horrifying second, I couldn’t get my bearings, like a weightless astronaut in space. Then I reached an apex and began my descent, an even more stomach-turning sensation. I had to slow it down before I became a shepherd smear below. I drew a dizzying series of Ss and released that energy under myself, sending a counter air blast up to greet me. It softened my landing so I only sprained an ankle instead of breaking bone.
Still, ankles help with mobility, and I found myself prone on the eighth hole as the air golem revealed itself. If a sliver of moon hadn’t been shining that night, I probably wouldn’t have detected its ethereal form. It stretched upwards taller than a two-story building, a rough humanoid shape with torso and limbs made of looping and hazy wind. It didn’t have any face that I could identify, but its head turned anyway (favoring one side for sight, I guess?). It lashed out with one handless arm, and a wind gust sent me sprawling butt over face toward a sand trap.