They had more pressing issues to worry about, however. At the front of the line, the first driver attempted to guide his horse out of the way as a massive worm hissed and swung its head. The archers fired as quickly as they could, but it wasn’t enough.
When the worm saw Justin, it unhinged its jaw and its mouth yawned into a black void.
“Eat fireball, shithead!” he bellowed and hurled a fireball.
“What he said!” Zaara screamed and followed suit.
“Stooooooooooout!” came the call from the back of the line.
“Thanks for the support, buddy,” Justin called over his shoulder. Another fireball had already formed in his hand and he threw it. “Zaara, aim for the eyes.”
And then catch it off-balance. Luckily, she seemed to understand his plan. The two of them threw fireball after fireball at the eyes while flaming arrows crackled and whizzed overhead. Finally, with a nod to one another, the two teammates gave the last of their reserves for a massive explosion that streaked forward in a white-hot inferno.
The screaming seemed to go on forever. The worm thrashed and shrieked, its skin no longer scaled or slimy but instead, burning far too fast. He had barely enough time to regret his choice before the creature expelled its last breath and black poison spewed into the air and dissipated. It fell and crumbled to ash, and the rest of the creatures vanished into the mist.
Ahead, Justin saw the widow’s cottage through a swirl of fog.
“There!” he called. “Go, go! There’s the cottage.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
The door to the dwelling remained tightly closed as the caravan thundered closer. Justin tried to jump from Mira’s horse and barely managed to keep his feet from getting tangled in the stirrups. He still savored the memory of Zaara’s hug but he wasn’t sure her admiration would last if she saw him fall face-first into a mud puddle.
Common sense said it was best not to risk it.
The bandits lifted the blacksmith down while Justin went to knock on the door. The blacksmith’s chest barely rose and fell now. His skin looked so pale that he might have been carved from stone.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please, please.” He raised his voice. “We need help! Please, we need a healer. I’m Justin, one of those who brought you your wedding ring.”
At that, there was the sound of footsteps and the door opened. The widow looked out, bright-eyed and inquisitive, and when she saw the blacksmith, she clicked her tongue.
“Come in, come in. Well, a few of you. Only so many can fit, even if I was of a mind to take a whole bandit horde into my house—and I’m not.” She looked at them all and counted. “You, bandit leader.”
“Yes?” Hildon said with surprising courtesy. “I am Hildon, ma’am. Well met.”
“Yes, yes, well met. Tell your band to come inside the wall. There’s some protection in it, at least. And you, come inside with the other three. Where’s the dwarf? Ah, yes.” She looked over her shoulder and continued the stream of chatter. “Yes, put him on the table. Gently, now, he’s not a sack of beans.”
Justin gestured to Zaara to head inside and she smiled as she passed him.
“I’m glad you’re safe,” she said softly.
“I’m glad you’re safe,” he told her. He blushed and looked back to where Hildon ushered his people into the yard. To the young man’s amusement, all of them tried very hard not to step on the herb gardens.
Inside the hut, the widow waved them to the hearth. “Make yourselves tea. The leaves are in the blue jar and don’t use anything else. I won’t answer for the effects if you do.”
Hildon began to measure tea leaves into a copper strainer and hung a heavy iron water pot over the hearth.
The widow worked quickly and sniffed at the blacksmith’s wound. Her look of distaste was plain as she hurried across the room to her workbench. A complex bundle of herbs went into the mortar and pestle and she sniffed now and again to check the balance. Finally, she poured a few drops of oil in—something that made everyone else in the room sneeze and which gleamed like pure sunshine.
Back at the table, she unwrapped the bandage on the blacksmith’s arm. Justin, who expected something horrifying, was not disappointed. The flesh, streaked through with black veins, looked like marble and blood began to flow again as soon as the pressure was released.
“Exactly as I thought.” She spread the paste she’d mixed liberally over the wound and held her hand out to Justin. “Your sword—the one I gave you. I need it for a moment.”
He handed it to her and gaped in surprise as she placed the blade flat against the wound. Something seemed to change in the air—an almost electrical charge like a thunderstorm—and the hair on his arms stood on end. The widow passed the sword to him and bound the wound tightly before she placed her hand on the injured man’s brow.
Justin had thought she was checking for a fever, but he watched a flush return to the blacksmith’s cheeks when her hand rested there.
Hildon lingered close to his shoulder. “This woman is no mere healer,” he said quietly.
The young man shook his head. “I swear I didn’t know. I thought she was only an old widow.”
“Well, your instincts surely led you right,” the bandit leader said, “even if your guesses did not.” His smile was wry.
The widow looked at them and he had the feeling she had heard the exchange. “Now,” she said briskly. “Everyone sit and tell me why there’s a demon’s army on my road.”
A long pause followed while she waited expectantly.
“A demon?” Zaara asked finally. Her voice sounded very small.
The healer snorted. “Surely you’ve noticed those are no ordinary creatures—and the one who summoned them is equally unusual.”
Zaara shook her head. “If there were a demon wandering around, we’d have known about it before.”
“It hasn’t been here long. No more than a couple of months, I would guess. I felt something pulling the magic away but I wasn’t fool enough to go seek it out.” The old woman poured them all earthenware cups of tea. “Drink up, it’ll give you strength.”
Justin drank and was not surprised to see a buff appear in the corner of the screen. “I hoped the witch was the demon instead of there being two evil things that are still hunting us.”
She chortled at that. “I knew I liked you, young man. And, yes. That witch was never a human woman. I don’t suppose you managed to see its true form.”
“Green,” Justin said. “Oozy. With tentacles.”
“Really? Interesting. Very interesting. Well, that answers some questions.” She sipped her tea thoughtfully. “I wonder where Sephith found one of those.”
“Sephith?” Everyone else at the table spoke in unison.
“Do you know of anyone other than him strong enough to summon a demon?” she asked. “No, of course you don’t.”
“Wait.” Justin narrowed his eyes. “So the ruins appeared about two months ago, they seem like they were Sephith’s, and that’s when the demon appeared as well and claimed them.” It was so close to making sense but he couldn’t truly say it did yet.
“Precisely.” The widow went to one of the walls and waved a hand. What had been bare was suddenly full of bookshelves. She selected one with a deep red leather binding and pulled it down. When she placed it on the table, everyone drew back from the set of diagrams.
As Zaara would have said, they reeked of bad magic.
“It’s a binding spell,” the widow explained. “The demon’s life force and magic are what power the binding—or the illusion. It’s not an exceedingly useful one for most people. For one thing, it takes almost as much power to bind the demon as it does to do the rest of it, and it’s riskier. For another, there’s a chance that it will break free at any time—and there has to be containment when the binding is broken, even deliberately.” She closed the book with a snap. “But Sephith was never exactly a cautious person. If you want my guess, it suited his purposes fine.”
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“How d’you mean?” Justin took another sip of tea. It really was good. He couldn’t tell what it was made from but the buff helped him feel better than he had in days.
“It was flashy.” Her tone dripped with derision. “And my guess is he reasoned that if someone broke it or the demon broke out…well, he’d be gone, so what did it matter if it ransacked the countryside?”
“That son of a bitch,” Zaara said. Her voice sounded hot and angry.
“You’re not wrong.” The widow replaced the book and sat again. “The ruins—again, this is a guess—were likely a hideout, an entire city he could run to if he needed one. Whether the spell decayed and he simply didn’t notice, or he pulled the power from it for some other purpose, I can’t say. Either would be like him. He was sloppy. Powerful but sloppy.” Her tone was deeply bitter.
He sighed. “So, I didn’t kill her, did I?”
“You knew you didn’t kill her?” Hildon’s tone was overly sweet.
“I…might have noticed there wasn’t a body or anything.” He hunched his shoulders. “She’d already turned into a pile of goo, though, and the curse was gone, so that could have gone either way.”
“Hmph.” The man didn’t look pleased but the reasoning was good enough to forestall a fight.
“No,” the widow said. “You didn’t kill it. To kill a demon is a tricky thing. It’s not impossible but it is difficult.”
“Wait,” Zaara interrupted. “I don’t understand something. The witch made the werewolves, right? She made that curse? But then she told us to undo it because it was draining the forest. None of that made sense to me.”
“She was a lyin’ bitch,” Lyle interjected.
“You can hardly expect something different from a demon,” the healer said wryly. “Be that as it may, however, the girl has a point. There’s a reason I gave Justin a silver sword—werewolves have been known in this area for generations. I don’t know how the first came to be, and when I heard mention of large wolves behaving oddly, I thought perhaps they had returned. I was both right and wrong. The demon did make them. It wanted an army of monsters to do its bidding, you see. I can’t exactly blame it for wanting revenge after what Sephith did to it.”
“It tried to make werewolves but realized the curse took too much power,” Justin said slowly. “That makes sense. She was trapped in a weakened form—it was enough to trap us when we went into the hut but not enough to fight the entire pack of werewolves.”
“And to undo a spell takes an investment of power, much like making one in the first place,” the widow agreed. “It needed someone to get rid of the problem. It probably didn’t see you coming up with quite that solution, of course.”
“How do we kill it?” Hildon asked bluntly. He didn’t seem at all interested in the lore. “You said it wasn’t impossible, so how do we do it?”
The widow gave him a smile. “Very, very carefully, of course.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The Diatek labs were vastly more impressive than PIVOT’s had been. Amber wanted to be dispirited by that. She’d been so proud to be able to rent a space of their own and now, it looked shabby by comparison.
On the other hand, she wanted to drool at how many tools were laid out within eyesight. There would be no scraping projects together and McGuyvering solutions that might go wrong at a critical moment. They would have whatever they needed, whenever they needed it.
The pods were laid out in an orderly row. Nick worked with the Diatek engineers to get each of the unused pods hooked up while another followed them and made extensive notes.
She realized that Anna Price had come to stand beside her while she watched the activity. The CEO looked quietly pleased with the scene unfolding before her, but she could not forget the tone in her voice when the woman spoke of the trade-offs she had made to bring this company to profitability. She was very, very sure she did not want to get on the wrong side of her.
“Is there anything else you can think of that you need?” Price asked her.
“Nothing you need to bother yourself with,” Amber said. “I know you must be very busy. We appreciate you taking the time to do this yourself.”
“It’s why I started the company.” The woman glanced at her. “There’s nothing more important. My C-suite knows that I am prone to disappearing at times. It’s why I’ve been so careful in choosing them. Each is authorized to make decisions regarding their initiatives.”
Amber looked curiously at her. “So there are other projects like this.”
“There have been.” Anna’s jaw clenched slightly.
She knew better than to ask any more questions, and the pit of her stomach lurched. When this started, it had seemed so simple and it had seemed to work. She had to remember that there was still a great deal that could go wrong.
“I met a neurosurgeon once,” Price said. She did not look at her companion and her gaze was still fixed on Justin’s pod. “He specialized in a particular type of tumor that killed one hundred percent of the people who had it. Any lives he saved were considered a victory. I tell myself that we are in a similar situation with this work.” She looked at Amber now and smiled. “Do not allow fear to blind you or the complexity of the situation to overwhelm you.”
She nodded in response.
“I’ve made sure you have my number,” Price said, in a way that suggested it was somehow already in everyone’s phone. “Call if you need anything—at any hour. And…” She smiled again. “You know, I would like to try one of those pods if you don’t mind. Another time, of course.”
“Of course,” Amber murmured. She watched her stride away and shivered for a reason she didn’t quite understand.
Was this someone else’s life? It felt like it.
The ritual the widow described was so complicated that Justin’s eyes crossed within thirty seconds of her starting the explanation. Zaara, who he was beginning to think might be a terminal nerd where magic was concerned, leaned forward to listen but wound up staring at a single diagram with a shell-shocked expression.
“All of which is to say,” the woman finished sometime later, “that I’ll need to come with you.”
Everyone had hunched slack-jawed in their chairs but now, they sat bolt upright with wide eyes.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Justin protested. “We can’t ask you to—”
“To what, child?” She raised an eyebrow. “Perform the spell only I know how to perform?”
“I have a question about that,” Lyle said. He drummed his fingers on the table and frowned at the widow. “D’ye care to explain exactly how a widow in a tiny cottage knows all this about magic but never thought to stop Sephith?”
“Hey.” Zaara looked up. “He’s right. Why did you let him terrorize everyone? You hid away here, pretending to be a harmless old woman, but you could have helped.”
“I couldn’t, actually,” she said. “I was the one person who would never be able to defeat Sephith.” She looked at their confused expressions and sighed. With a snap of her fingers, she vanished and was replaced by a man who looked vaguely familiar.
Zaara’s jaw hung open.
“You’re the mercenary,” Justin said. “The one who sent us into Kural’s hideout and had us get the book.”
“Ye bastard,” Lyle added, for good measure.
The man smiled at him. “That book is how your friend first learned magic. I don’t think you should complain, Master Stout.”
“You’re a mercenary who disguised himself as an old widow?” Justin asked.
Zaara made a kind of strangled noise.
“No,” the man said patiently. “I’m a defeated wizard whose magic was chained by Sephith’s spells. Once I finished wandering around like a heartsick fool after my defeat, I decided to see who I could train to defeat him. The world needed it, of course.”
“You are Kural,” Justin said, awestruck and faintly smug because his suspicions had been correct.
“Just so. And you’ve made quite
an apt second pupil, might I say.”
“Second?” Justin asked.
Kural looked at Zaara. “Hello again.”
She gulped and finally regained the ability to speak. Her expression one of confusion, she looked at Justin and gestured to Kural as she shook her head. “This,” she said, “is my magic tutor.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
“Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” Zaara demanded.
“Sephith bound my power but he wanted me dead.” Kural stood. “He watched closely for anyone who could defeat him—remember how he told you he knew when people spoke against him? He did because he watched the whole of the valley. I did as much as I could for you in Riverbend, which he didn’t watch as closely. There was less I could do for Justin.” He gave the young man a sad smile. “More details will have to wait, I’m afraid. We need to prepare for the summoning.”
Justin looked at the blacksmith who lay alone on the table.
“Watch.” The wizard made a gesture and his spells became visible. They covered the wounded man like a blanket. “They will keep working, even if I am not here. What he needs more than anything is rest, however. Were I here, I would simply watch and wait.”
He nodded but he felt a pang of regret mixed with fear. The man had promised to make him better armor but aside from that, he should never have been mortally wounded by demons.
Kural directed Hildon and Lyle to arrange potions and salves in three groups. The first would make weapons more deadly, the second would fortify fighters’ strength or health, and the third would restore health. Every bandit was to have at least one potion, perhaps more.
Zaara and Justin, meanwhile, helped Kural prepare what was needed for the summoning.
“Summoning?” the young man asked.
“Yes—an angel instead of a demon. And before you protest, know that we will not truly summon it. It is merely to draw the demon to a place of our choosing. It will do anything it can to stop the summoning of an angel, of course.”
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