by Jamie Davis
“What did you say,” Jaz asked the Wiccan girl. “Why would you call us that?”
“Because you two fight all the time. I want you to be the parents I remember, not these people, ready to kill each other. I miss you both so much. Please stop fighting.” Jo pleaded.
“Wait, we remind you of your parents?” Jaz said. “I mean that’s nice and all, but honestly, I’m a bit young to be your mother.”
Dean looked from Jaz to Jo and back again. The blonde hair was the same, as was their build. Could it be true? But how? Jaz would never let her daughter become a witch, he was sure of that. Then he froze. She wouldn’t do it unless the child was already spoken for - unless someone had already traded the life of her first-born daughter for a spell. Dean’s heart sank. This was not going to be good. If the last fight was a bad one, this one was going to be a doozy.
“She doesn’t mean we remind her of her parents,” Dean said. He looked to Jo. “Isn’t that right?”
“You know me?” Jo said taking a step towards him.
“I do, I just don’t know how it could be, not yet at least,” Dean responded.
“Oh, Daddy, I’ve missed you so much.” The teen ran up to him, throwing her arms around him. He felt awkward as he patted her on the back.
“Will someone tell me what is going on here?” Jaz asked. “I feel like I’m missing something important.”
Jo turned to her as Dean let go of the embrace. The girl wiped away her tears as she laughed. “You always hated this part of having me. You never accepted that I had to become a Wiccan, Mom.”
“Look, stop calling me that,” Jaz said. “It is impossible for me to be your mother. I’m only twenty-two. I can’t have a fifteen year-old.”
“Asha warned me that you’d resist the truth if I revealed it to you,” Jo said, laughing through her tears. “She said I’d have to show you something to convince you.”
“Who is Asha? What are you talking about?” Jaz asked. “This is crazy. No Errington would become a witch. It would not be allowed.”
“Asha is my coven leader,” Jo explained. “Take off your jacket and show me your birthmark.”
“What are you talking about? How do you know about my birthmark?” Jaz looked a little frightened. It was the first time Dean had seen something resembling fear in her eyes.
“Your family birthmark,” Jo said. “The same one I have. Show it to me.”
Jaz slipped out of her leather jacket. She was wearing a black tank top underneath. He saw what Jo was referring to right away. There was a light brown birthmark in the shape of a shield on her left shoulder. She reached a hand up to cover it absent-mindedly.
Jo took off her brown vest and then pulled her white blouse over her head. Dean started to turn away then saw that she was wearing a camisole underneath. There, on her left shoulder was a matching birthmark.
Jaz looked at it, amazement in her eyes. She reached out a hand to touch Jo’s exposed shoulder. She touched it, tracing the borders of the birthmark. She shook her head.
“There has to be another explanation,” Jaz said, stepping back. “Maybe you’re a long lost cousin none of us knew about. I told you, you are just too old to possibly be my daughter.”
“Well I’m not from now, Mom,” Jo said, laughing. “You don’t have me until you’re, like, twenty-eight or something like that. I came back from your future to help you find Aunt Ashley. Asha told me I was needed. That’s the purpose for which I was born and training had begun. The coven cast the spell to send me back in time to you both. The spell worked better than I thought it would, though I had to run out in the street to stop you before you sped away.”
Jaz looked at Dean. “Why aren’t you arguing with her? This story is crazy. It’s ridiculous.” She stared into his eyes. “Isn’t it? No Errington would become a witch. It would never happen.”
Dean just shook his head. He had no idea how to explain this to her. He thought he had years to go before he would have to address the price he paid a few months ago for a particularly dangerous spell from the Elk City coven. They had demanded his firstborn girl as a price, saying they would take her in as she reached school age and train her as one of their own.
“I didn’t have a choice, Jaz,” Dean floundered for a way to say this. “The coven demanded a price and when they asked for a child I didn’t even have as payment, I just went with it. It didn’t seem to matter at the time.”
“Wait, you’re not kidding,” Jaz said, staring at him, the fire returning to her eyes. “You gave away your daughter, my daughter, OUR daughter, to become a witch and you say it didn’t matter at the time.”
“Look at her,” Dean said, pointing to Joanna. “She turned out fine.”
“She’s a witch!” Jaz shouted. “How is that fine?”
“Here we go again,” Jo muttered under her breath nearby.
Dean flinched as he saw Jaz’s reaction start to build after their daughter’s offhand comment. He steeled himself to take the brunt of it and to take his time explaining himself. This was going to be an epic argument. One for the ages.
18
Dean puttered around the cabin straightening up and trying to stay busy. To say the level of stress was high in the small enclosed space was an understatement. It had been nearly eight hours since the heated argument between he and Jaz had died down. The sun was getting low in the western sky. It had been a long day. Since the argument, she had not said a word to either him or Joanna. Joanna had drifted off to a corner of the room and had put her earbuds in to listen to music. She was not talking to either of them either. Dean wondered what he was supposed to do.
When he had agreed to the coven’s terms for casting their scrying spell a few months back, he had thought he would have years to face the consequences of the decision. Now he had been literally slapped in the face by them. That had been the point where Jaz had walked away from the argument and ceased talking, when she slapped him. Dean’s hand drifted up to his face to touch the place where she had hit him. He wondered if this was considered domestic abuse.
He went over and sat down where the heavenly sword bundle still lay on the dining table. Having run out of things to do to keep busy, Dean decided to look more closely at the blade. He would be more careful this time, though he apparently healed from the blade’s wounds quickly.
The argument about his ‘powers’ was still unsettled. It had been deflected by the fight about who Jo was, but it would have to come up again. Jaz insisted that the fact he could even handle the blade made him an Unusual of some sort, and that he had been hiding his true nature from her. How could he get her to understand that if he were different in some way, it was hidden from him too?
Dean reached over and untied the twine that held the bundled sword’s cloth wrapping closed. He carefully pulled the cloth aside and looked down at the blade as it was exposed. The sword’s brightness and gleam was not diminished in any way by the darkness that had filled the room as night started to fall. It didn’t glow exactly, but the reflective surface of the blade seemed to capture any available light nearby and reflect and magnify it. The sword was beautiful, with delicate etching on the blade that seemed to be both decoration and words or runes of some sort. Dean didn’t recognize the language or even the letters that made up its alphabet, but he was sure the blade’s decoration meant something to the right person. Ashley, Ingrid, or another Eldara might be able to decipher it for him.
Moving his gaze up the blade to the hilt, he saw more intricate work there. The cross guard was of the same silvery metal of the blade and seemed to meet the blade without a seam of any kind, as if it were forged in one piece. The grip of the hilt was covered with a glossy white leather of some sort. When Dean leaned forward to examine it more closely he noticed the leather didn’t have grain but tiny scales that made up its surface. Continuing his examination, he looked at the pommel where gripping silver talons, those one might see on an eagle or other raptor, clutched a multi-faceted white crystal.
He reached out to touch the sword and gripped the hilt in his right hand. And then he wasn’t in the cabin any longer. It was disorienting and it took the paramedic a moment to realize he was seeing the new location through another person’s eyes. They were walking through a cave or a cavern of some sort. No, it wasn’t a cave. The walls appeared to be finished in some way. There were squared-off timbers supporting the walls and roof periodically along the passage. Here and there, he saw an old-fashioned oil lantern hanging from one of the supports, providing pools of yellow light along the way.
Dean tried to turn his head and look backwards but was unable to do so. He was locked inside the viewpoint of whoever this individual was. Dean and whoever’s head he was in continued on their shared journey down the passage until they reached a junction in the corridor. Turning left down a different, narrower passage, they walked a bit further to a stout wooden door set in the rock wall ahead of them. There was a hinged panel in the door and a white, cadaverous hand reached up and opened the panel, leaning forward to peer through it into the room on the other side.
There was a figure, dressed in a dirty white gown, seated in a chair in the center of the room. No, the figure was tied in the chair, her hands bound to the chair’s arms, and her ankles tied to the chair’s legs. He couldn’t see who it was. The long, dark and filthy, matted hair hung over the face as the person’s head sagged down with her chin resting on her chest. He peered closer to see who it was, and as he did, the individual lifted her head and her familiar green eyes looked back into his.
“Dean, you must leave me,” Ashley rasped, her voice rough as if she had been yelling or maybe screaming for an extended time. “It is too dangerous.”
He tried to answer back as the cadaverous white hand slammed the panel in the door shut. As the latch clicked something rocked his body to the side and jarred his vision. He blinked and then he was back in the cabin. Someone was shaking him by the shoulder.
“Dean, can you hear me? Wake up, snap out of it. Are you all right?” He heard Jaz’s voice, but it sounded far away, as if he were in both places at once even though he could see the cabin and the table and sword in front of him. He pulled his hand back from where he had been gripping the hilt and the rest of the vision vanished leaving him firmly in the cabin with Jaz and Jo.
“I said, are you all right?” Jaz repeated. Her annoyance was evident in her tone.
“I saw her,” Dean said. “I saw Ashley.”
Jo rushed over then. “You saw her? How? Where was she? Is she alright?”
“She’s bound and looks like she’s been mistreated. She sensed me looking in at her somehow,” Dean said, relaying what he had just seen. “She told me to stay away.”
“Are you sure it was her?” Jaz asked. “It could have been a delusion of some sort, or a spell cast on you.”
“I wasn’t a spell, Mom. I would know,” Joanna said.
“Don’t call me that,” Jaz snapped.
Jo spun around and walked back to where she had been sitting. Dean could see she was hurt by Jaz’s response.
“You don’t have to take it out on her. She’s not responsible for this. I am,” Dean whispered.
“I know who is responsible and it is not, I assure you, Dean Flynn,” Jaz replied. She shot him an angry glare. “You will not get off that hook anytime soon. We will have more than one long discussion on this issue, but now is not the time. I am honor-bound to help find the Eldara, and I plan on reuniting you with your true girlfriend as soon as possible. Then I will put as much distance as possible between us. Now go over what you saw again. Take it step by step.”
Dean went over the vision from the first moment he found himself inside the other’s head to the moment when he was wrenched back to the cabin and his own body. Jaz asked him several times to describe the hand he saw opening the panel in the Eldara’s door. She seemed intrigued by it and Dean asked her why.
“I think you were occupying or sharing the vision of a revenant,” Jaz said. “We know they are involved with this, and the dead-looking skin on the hand would match up with what I know about them and how they look.”
“I could grab the hilt again and try to reconnect,” Dean offered, reaching out to the sword on the table in front of him.
“No,” Jaz said. “The revenant might have noticed your presence from either your own bumbling around in its head or from Ashley’s direct communication with you. We have to be careful using that link moving forward. Do you know how you activated that ability?”
“I was thinking of her while looking over the sword up close,” Dean said. “I jumped into the vision when I gripped the hilt.”
“Okay, let’s try not to do that until you learn to control what you can do better,” Jaz said.
“How come you think it’s me and not something the sword is doing?” Dean asked. “I want to understand more of what this blade can do. If it can help us find Ashley sooner, we should be using it.”
“There’s plenty that blade can do, Dean,” Jaz said. “In the hands of a being from one of the higher planes, it is said to be able to heal that which cannot be healed. It also has a negative effect on those from the netherworld, the lower planes. If you strike a fatal blow to a netheworlder, you kill it, not just banish it back to regenerate in a hundred years, as my sword does. That blade severs not just skin and bone and sinew, it severs the soul’s connection to the body of the creature it strikes. It’s why I, and other normal mortal types cannot touch it. The divine power vested in it would consume us. The fact that you can handle it is proof that you are more than you say you are.”
Dean started to object and Jaz raised a hand to stop him.
“I know you don’t understand it any more than I do. I accept that. But, just the same, we need to understand it. It could be important to how we act later on in this quest. It could change what we do.”
“So what do we do?” Dean asked.
“I could attempt a scrying spell,” Jo offered from across the room. “We know that Dad-uh-I-mean-Dean connected with Aunt Ashley somewhere. Perhaps if I center the spell on him it will tell us where she is.”
“No, it’s too dangerous, Joanna,” Jaz said. “That kind of spell puts you at risk if there are any sort of defensive wards in place. You would be opened up to the backlash.”
“Aw, Momma, you do care,” Jo said.
Dean saw Jaz tense up. He spoke up and tried to defuse the situation before another argument started.
“You can’t have it both ways, Jaz,” Dean said. “You can’t treat her like your daughter one moment and turn around and tell her not to call you Mom the next. I say we treat her as a full member of the team, just as we have since the beginning. It’s a calculated risk but one that would get us on the path to completing this quest.”
Jaz looked at him and back to Joanna before she nodded. “All right, you can do the spell, but I want you to take precautions. If you detect any sort of wards in place, back off.”
“I’m not stupid,” Jo said. “Anyway, Asha says I’m more powerful than any of the other sisters in the coven. I can do this, especially now that we have the new connection between Dad and Aunt Ashley.”
Dean looked at Jaz. She nodded and he nodded in return. “Okay, kiddo, let’s do this. What do you need me to do?” Dean asked.
“I’m going to need to spend a few minutes meditating,” Jo replied. She was bouncing a little in her seat in her excitement. “I need to settle myself down a little. This is going to be awesome. Okay, in the meantime, you can try to clear your mind. I don’t want you to think about anything. When the time comes, I’ll ask you to reach out and touch the sword hilt again but don’t try to reconnect with Aunt Ashley. Just think about the blade. I’ll make the connection through you.”
“All right,” Dean said. “You will be careful with this, right?”
“Absolutely,” Jo responded. “You get set. I’ll be ready in a sec.”
Dean and Jaz watched their newly revealed Wiccan daughter
settle onto the floor, sitting on a throw rug in front of the cabin’s rustic couch. She crossed her legs as she sat down and rested her hands on her knees, then she closed her eyes and was still for a minute or so. The other two in the room sat at the table and waited until she was ready.
Jo opened her eyes and Dean almost thought he could see a white glow surrounding her. It was as if her image was shimmering, like she was a video of a person superimposed on the image of the room. He reached out and laid his hand on the hilt of the blade, working to keep his mind clear as he did it by thinking about random EMS drug protocols. As his hand contacted the sword, the room again vanished from in front of him, swirling away into darkness. It had begun.
19
Jaz sat at the table, watching Dean and Jo as the spell took effect. Dean sat up straight and started staring straight ahead, but his eyes glazed over and were unfocused. Jo sat on the floor nearby, like a statue, immobile and almost humming with magical energy. Jaz’ amulet’s night vision function let her see into the non-visible light spectrum that humans could not ordinarily see. That let the hunter catch a hint of, well, some sort of waves emanating from the witch girl.
She still couldn’t quite wrap her head around the upheaval in her life that had struck her in the last two days. Her mother, father and the rest of her clan had likely been wiped out in the explosion and fire at their offices in Elk City two days ago. She couldn’t even come forward to ask for information about them because of the nature of their quest, and the authorities probably counted her among the dead anyway. Then she had discovered, against everything she had been raised to believe, she had a daughter, who had come back from the future in some manner. A daughter who was a witch. Hunter children didn’t grow up to be witches and use witchcraft, they grew up to guard against them. But, then, that particular wrinkle was Dean’s fault.
Jaz thought about Dean. She knew they had not started off on the right foot with their clash in the self-defense and safety class she taught at the fire academy. To his credit, he sought her out to try and make things right. That didn’t make him any less infuriating, however. He was good at what he did, and he knew it. He also had learned to accept the Unusuals in a way she thought she never could. She knew that her upbringing carried a certain prejudice with it. That was necessary to maintain the skepticism and vigilance to catch the creatures that were out to harm mankind. Now it appeared he had some sort of supernatural background himself, not that he was likely to admit it to himself. Jaz accepted that it was something he honestly didn’t know and she did not have a clue as to who or what he could be. Touching that heavenly blade uninvited should kill any human or normal Unusual on contact. At the very least, Dean should have received some sort of shock or burn from it.