Alaskan Fury (57 page)

Lying on her back, Kaashifah
sniffed the dart, praying it wasn’t hydra venom.  It was.  She would recognize
that pungent fishy-almond stench anywhere.  She tossed it aside in disgust.

“You
upset the balance
!”
she screamed up at her sister, stumbling to her feet, one arm and one wing
hanging limp from her body, gravel imbedded in the boils in her skin.  Zenaida,
meanwhile, had taken the signpost through one enormous wing, knocking a dozen
radiant feathers free over the congested mass of traffic, bringing her
awkwardly to the ground.  She down-formed, reshaping the wing to suit her,
then, with a sneer, started stalking towards Kaashifah.

“The balance?”  Zenaida, now
returned to half-form, snorted.  Kaashifah felt the sudden mental assault as
the writhing, undead snakes twisted in her thoughts like a nightmare, but
managed to force it to the back of her mind before the terror could take root.  
“Oh, I’m sorry.  Not only is the great Blade of Morning trying to
run
from me, but she thinks I’m
cheating
?”  She tisked as the snake-heads
roiled around her face.  “Surely you, of all people, would know…  All’s fair in
love or war, sister.”

“I told you, this isn’t war!”
Kaashifah snapped.  “I’m not
trying
to kill you!  I’m trying to
talk.
” 

Zenaida laughed, much too
confident.  “So you say.”  She picked up a car and threw it at her.

Kaashifah rolled out of the way
of the SUV, wincing at the sound of crushing glass and crunching metal as it
tumbled past her and pancaked into a parking-lot beyond the highway. 

All around them, mortals were
gathering in droves, pointing, taking pictures.  The
fools
.  Raising her
sword at them, Kaashifah flared her wings at them and screamed, “Get out of
here!”

Some of them backed away, some
ran, but the vast majority continued to stand watching them like statues.

No, Kaashifah realized,
horrified, they
were
statues, their flesh and clothing glinting like
polished stone, their bodies transfixed by Zenaida’s gaze.

Laughing, Zenaida grabbed several
more vehicles and, with seemingly no intent other than to make Kaashifah duck,
threw them one at a time across the highway, arcing them into other cars,
buildings, and light-poles.

“Zenaida, stop it!” Kaashifah
snapped, knowing that people were trapped in those cars, dying.  In a nearby
SUV, she could see a family of four hanging upside-down, dangling from their
seatbelts, limp, either dead or in shock.

Her sister laughed and threw
another car much too hard, lobbing it across the far parking lot, dropping it
through a box-store, caving in the snow-covered roof.

She’s just destroying for the
pleasure of it,
Kaashifah realized, stunned.  She watched her sister put
her fist through another engine block in preparation to hurl an empty Ford
truck, and hastily kicked down a nearby light-post so that it toppled on the
bed of the pickup, pinning it to the asphalt.

“Please just talk to me!”
Kaashifah cried, as her sister grunted and wrenched her fist out of the hood of
the vehicle, abandoning it to the aluminum pole in disgust.

Stepping through the statues, Zenaida
stopped ten paces away from Kaashifah, her hundred horrific snake-heads
twisting to face her, increasing the petrifying push against Kaashifah’s hasty
defenses a dozenfold.  “Let me guess,” Zenaida sneered.  “You just want to
lecture me on my wicked ways.”

My Father’s Sword
,
Kaashifah thought, quickly diverting her gaze before the unholy stare could
crack through her wards.  She considered her options.  She couldn’t flee by
air.  She could slip the Void, but that would leave Zenaida free to hunt down
her friends before they could reach the compound.  She could run, but on
foot
,
with Zenaida free to take wing at any time, she would be like a sitting duck.

But what choice did she have? 

Then, she realized, with a
coldness pooling in her stomach, there was one choice.  Something she had never
even considered until the djinni, whose kind were notorious cowards, slipping
realms at will.  She’d had to do something to keep him at hand, something that
would force him to fight.

No
, Kaashifah thought,
forcing it from her mind. 
I will not kill my own sister.

She would do anything but that. 

Yet, seeing that her sister was
not going to listen to reason, that she was killing
innocents
, Kaashifah
had to do something.  Reluctantly, keeping Zenaida at a distance with the
dragon’s favored sword, she drew her mirror-clean claymore and forced her magic
down it, lighting it afire with pure white radiance.  She tested its heft,
then, steeling herself, she lifted her gaze back to the writhing black mass
upon Zenaida’s head.  She saw the tiny red eyes, saw the undeath in their
gazes, and smiled at Zenaida, making her sister frown.  She lifted her blazing
claymore between them, the huge, flat blade facing her opponent…

…and pulled her energy back out
of the sword.

“You’re yanking my hair,” the
beast complained.  Though her eyes and ears were
telling
her that it
came from its long, equine mouth, Imelda knew the words had been deposited
directly into her mind, care of, she had quickly begun to realize, the most
innocent creature she had ever known.

Imelda reluctantly released her
grip on the silvery-white mane.  “Sorry,” she muttered.  “I don’t like—” she
caught herself before she said, ‘horses’ and replaced it with, “—riding.”

The unicorn rolled a blue eye
back at her.  “Why not?”  He didn’t seem to trot
through
the snow so
much as dance
over
it.

“Umm.”  With the way the land was
passing by in a blur, it was everything she could do not to retch.  “My early
experiences were not…pleasant.”  Imelda fisted her hands on her pantlegs to
resist the urge to grab the unicorn by the shaggy silver mane again.

The beast flicked an ear back at
her.  “Really?  Did they bite you?”

“Among other things,” Imelda
said, not really wanting to give the beast ideas.

“Probably because they didn’t
like the feel of a Fate on their backs,” the beast replied.  “I mean, you gave
me goosebumps at first, but I couldn’t really dump you off ‘cause you’d die,
and you couldn’t really make stuff go wrong because you were asleep.”  Then he
twisted a big blue eye back at her.  “It’s not so bad anymore, though.  I got
used to the tugging.”

Tugging?  Imelda frowned at him
through a building headache.  “What did you say about Fate?”

“Nobody likes them, really,” the
unicorn confessed.  “Things go…wrong…around Fates.”

Imelda let his words settle into
her mind for a moment before she said, “I know you’re speaking directly in my
mind, not with words, so there’s no way I could have misunderstood…  But did I
just misunderstand?  Did you just call me a Fate?”

“Yes,” the unicorn said.  Then he
peered over his shoulder, looking genuinely concerned.  “You aren’t mad at me
for taking you prisoner, are you?”

“A Fate.  As in, the Roman
Fates.”

“You’re mad, aren’t you?”  He
looked crestfallen.  “I guess we can make it two years, if you are really mad.”

“Why do you say that?” Imelda
demanded.

“Well, because if three is too
much—”

“No,” Imelda interrupted, “We’re
oathbound
. 
It’s three.  Tell me why you called me a Fate.”

The unicorn danced to a halt,
looking back at her.  If he’d had a human brow, he would have been frowning. 
“I met a Fate before.  In Pompeii.  They were stoning her to death.”

Imelda frowned.  “You told me you
were alone all this time.”

“I have been,” the unicorn
replied.  “That was right before the ash came and killed us.”

Imelda gave the beast a long,
considering look.  She knew that many of the demons—
immortals
, she
corrected herself—had misconceptions about Heaven and Hell, and that, with a
select few of them, their long lives and faulty memories had given way to the
belief that they had experienced more lifetimes on this particular rock than
the one they were living.

“That’s…interesting,” Imelda
said.  “So, in this ‘
past life
,’ you were a unicorn?”

“No,” he gave her a half-cocked
look, like
she
was confusing
him
.  “I was a street-sweeper in
Pompeii.”

Long lives, she had found, often
spawned insanity.  Obviously, he had shifted to human form to mingle with the
mortals around the time of Christ and gotten caught under the blast of Mount
Vesuvius, then the decades—or more??--of loneliness he had experienced trying
to pull his way free from under fifteen feet of ash had given rise to his
current lack of social skills.  The simplest answers, she knew, were often the
closest to the truth.

“So did you like sweeping
streets?” she asked.

“Not really,” the unicorn
replied.  “It was normally my husband’s job, but he fell from a ladder and
broke his ankle.  I was pregnant and we needed money, so I swept the streets
while he made shoes for his uncle.”

Imelda froze.  The unicorn had
not worn a shred of clothing since they’d met, and she was
sure
she had
seen some
very visible
evidence he was male.  “Are unicorns
hermaphrodites?” she asked.

“What’s that?”

“Are you girls and boys?” she
asked.

“Oh, sure,” he replied.  Then he
hesitated.  “Well, I
think
.  I haven’t seen a mare yet.  I think the
Inquisition got them all here, and the ones in the Second Lands are all either
in bridles serving feylords or fled to the deep forests.”

“No, no,” Imelda said.  “I mean,
do you have
both parts
?  Male
and
female?”

“Uh…”  By the hesitancy in his
voice, if he’d been a human, he would have flushed red.  “I honestly don’t know
what a girl’s…parts…look like.  So maybe?”

Imelda then thought of something
else.  “Could you get pregnant now, if you wanted to?”

He gave a startled snort.  “No. 
I’m a boy.”

“But you could get pregnant in
Pompeii.”

“I was a girl in Pompeii.”

“Okay,” Imelda said, backing up,
deciding it wasn’t really important which life the unicorn thought it had
been.  “You said you saw a Fate?  How many are there?”

“Well, legends say three, but
they’re never in one place.  That’s very bad.”

“All right,” Imelda said,
reasoning with him, “So this Fate was getting stoned to death?  Did she die?”

“Of course she did.  They were
stoning
her.  You ever been
stoned
?”  He said the last with indignance, like
he’d had personal experience with it.

“Um,” Imelda said, “no.”

He slowed and twisted to peer at
her, and Imelda had to lean out of the way of his horn.  “Not
once
?” he
cried, sounding like he didn’t believe her.

“Um,” Imelda said, “I can’t say
I’ve had that misfortune, no.”

He snorted.  “That’s weird. 
Fates get stoned a
lot
.”

“All the more evidence I’m not a
Fate,” Imelda said, forcing a weak grin.  Her innards, however, were starting
to do revolutions in her gut.  Something was nagging at her, something from an
old memory…  Then a more important question came to her.  “Why do Fates get
stoned a lot?”

He was still busy frowning at
her, peering at her like he thought she was lying to him.  “You know, prisoners
have to tell the truth,” he said finally.

“As far as I know,” Imelda said,
“Your horn prevents people from lying.  Unless that’s just legend?”

“No, it does,” the unicorn said. 
He was still peering at her dubiously.  “How have you never been stoned?”

The way he said it, Imelda got
the feeling that he fully believed that people would stone her at present,
given half the chance.  She cleared her throat carefully.  “Maybe you could
help me understand.  Why would people stone a Fate?”

“Oh,” he said, “because Fates
make things go wrong.”  He started skating over the snow again, as if that
explained everything for her.

“Can you tell me more?” she
urged.  “I haven’t had anything go wrong.”  Then she thought of the escaped
djinni, the wolf that turned out to be a Fury, the unveiling of a fallen angel
in the order, the death of an entire helicopter crew, Jacquot’s murder, a Third
Lander escaping with Herr Drescher, probably under the guise of
her
… 
About the only thing that had gone
right
for her was becoming the
‘prisoner’ of a unicorn.

“Of course not,” the unicorn
said.  “You’re still locked down.”

Imelda froze.  “Excuse me?”

“I can see it when I look at
you.  You’re all bound up, like someone wrapped you up real good inside.  Can
see a bunch of knots.  Pretty ones.  Look Celtic.”  He cocked his head at her. 
“They’re fraying, though.  Around the head, especially.  It’s started
unraveling there, working its way down.  Got the idea the one who put them
there probably died.”

Imelda forgot to breathe.  She
remembered that sunny window on the shores of the Mediterranean, scooping clam
chowder into her mouth as quickly as she could manage it. 
Fate is with you,
child.
  Over the years, her Padre had made many such comments, and she had
always just considered it a quirk of his nature.  But now, she gave it another
look.  The last one she could remember left her with a hollowness in her soul. 
She remembered how…final…it had felt. 
However we poor humans stumble in our
attempts to serve our Lord, the Fates will right it in the end.
  For a long
moment, she couldn’t speak.

Then, softly, “What are the Fates
supposed to do?”

“Oh,” the unicorn said, “that’s
easy.  If the energy of the land is going sour, they make it sweet again.”

Imelda didn’t
want
to
know, but found she
had
to.  “How do they do that?”

“Well, the one in Pompeii set off
the volcano.”  The unicorn sighed.  “I wanted to have my baby, but I can see
why she did it.  No one was very happy.  There was lots of people making
babies, all the time, even in the streets.  They even brought in slaves to make
more babies.  And they used a lot of stuff to try and make them happy—wine and
beer and something you smoked—but it didn’t work very well.  They all kinda
started thinking a lot about money, and how they were going to afford their
clothes and their smokes and their babies and nobody really was very happy.  I
was happy, but I didn’t have much money to start with.  My husband and I were
really young.  Maybe fourteen summers?”  The unicorn cocked its head as if in
thought.  “Yeah, I think.  My momma said my baby was going to come around my
birthday, so I was really excited.”

“Uh…” Imelda said, not sure how
to talk to a male unicorn about a baby he thought he’d carried in Rome.  “So
she ‘set off a volcano.’  How’d she do that?”

The unicorn frowned at her.  “How
do I know?  I’m not a Fate.”

“Have you ever
been
a
Fate?” she demanded, turning his own argument against him.  He had been a
pregnant street-sweeper and a unicorn…surely there was some bridge between the
two.

But he chuckled.  “No, the Fates
are just the Fates.  They show up when they’re needed.”

“Uh…” Imelda said, “I think
you’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

He twisted to look at her, once
again coming nerve-wrackingly close to touching her with his horn.  “Nope.  I’m
pretty sure.”

Imelda thought of Mount Redoubt,
St. Augustine, Mount Spurr, and all the other Alaskan volcanoes that were part
of the Ring of Fire.  “And you think I’m going to set off a volcano and smother
Anchorage.”  The unicorn, clearly, had spent a bit too much time alone.

“Well, the whole place is really
sour,” he replied.  “As soon as you start getting close to the roads, you can feel
it.”  Then he hesitated, glancing back at her, sounding unsure.  “…can’t you?”

“Um, no,” Imelda said.

“Oh,” he said.  “Well, hmm.  It’s
kind of like a rot that’s spreading.  It just feels…wrong.  I don’t like to get
real close, but when I do, it kinda makes me feel tired.  I get real sick, if I
stay too long without a break.”

Like there’s too many people
out there making babies and not a lot of happy,
Imelda thought, with a
tingle of unease.  “Um,” she began, “so this Fate who was getting stoned…  The volcano
went off
because
they were stoning her?”

The unicorn cocked its head. 
“Well, before the volcano, I remember hearing rumors that she was staying at
one of the inns with her priests.  My uncle knew the innkeeper, who was really
upset because nobody would stay at his inn with a Fate staying there.  He said
she was meeting with the politicians every morning, but they weren’t telling
anyone what they were saying.  But I think they started stoning her after the
volcano.  I remember digging through ash to find rocks.”

“
You
stoned her?” Imelda
cried.

The unicorn grunted.  “Like I
said…  I wanted to have my baby.”  Then the unicorn sighed and said, “I don’t
hold it against you, though.  You were doing what you had to.  Just like this
time…  Whatever you’re gonna do, I don’t hold it against you.”

Imelda did
not
like the
sound of that.  “I
really
think you’ve got me mistaken for someone
else.”

But the unicorn was sounding
thoughtful.  “You get close to the roads, it’s like all the power’s leeched out
of the land, you know?  All stopped up, so it’s not flowing right.  Like a
logjam in a river.  Sometimes you gotta knock a few logs loose to get things
flowing again.”  Then he cocked his head.  “Except this time, it’s not just one
town.  It’s a
lot
of towns.”

“Look,” Imelda said carefully,
not wanting to hurt the unicorn’s feelings, “I was never stoned, and I
certainly can’t set off a volcano.”