Hellforged (29 page)

Read Hellforged Online

Authors: Nancy Holzner

Tags: #Fantasy, #Contemporary, #Fiction, #General, #Demonology

BOOK: Hellforged
7.31Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
After two hours of practice, I’d made it through the whole routine—decreasing circles with the left hand, transfer to the right, and pointing at the slate while saying the magic words—three times in a row. But way too slowly. Whenever I tried to move with Mab’s lightning-quickness, I lost Hellforged in the transfer.
Mab picked up a two-foot-long stick that lay on the ground by her feet.
“This stick is oak. I’m going to—”
“No!” A sick tide of panic flooded me. “No, don’t. I’m not ready. I can barely get Hellforged from one hand to the other without it rocketing across the lawn.”
“I know, child. I’d prefer to have you work with just the left hand for a month.” Her words were sympathetic, but her tone was steel-edged. “There’s no time. Pryce can release the Morfran. He’s not going to wait until we’re ready before he makes his next move.”
She tapped the ground once with the stick and walked to the tile.
Oh, God, please no.
Not that pain again. My throat constricted, and Hellforged went crazy. I wasn’t centered. I couldn’t
get
centered, not when I couldn’t even breathe.
“Mab,
wait
. I can’t do it!”
“Of course you can. What’s more, you must.” But she paused. “Relax, child. Last night’s attack was Pryce’s first test. I don’t believe the Morfran will attack you again. But whatever happens, I won’t let it hurt you. You
must
learn this, Victory. Take a moment to collect yourself. Bear in mind, though, you won’t have that luxury in battle.”
Still panicking, I tried to relax, to turn inward, to notice my heartbeat and breathing.
Easy. Take it easy.
I pushed away all thoughts of pain and fear; muscle by muscle, I unclenched. Hellforged calmed, grew still. The cramping in my fingers showed how hard I’d been squeezing the grip.
Three gonglike chimes rang out as Mab struck the slate once … again … again. My stomach lurched. As the dark mist emerged from the stone, I began to make slow, wide circles with my left hand. The mist rose up and floated in my direction, tendrils reaching for me like tentacles.
Focus, Vicky.
The mist stopped a few feet away, and the tendrils changed direction, reaching upward, toward the athame. They thinned as the mist was drawn into Hellforged’s orbit.
There was no buzzing, no headache. The dark mist swirled in wide arcs above me, following the motion of my arm.
I was doing it. A sensation of bitter cold passed into the athame as the Morfran locked onto my movement. The coldness traveled into my hand and crept up my arm; as it did, I made smaller circles and pulled my hand closer to my body. The Morfran followed. In another minute, the cold had reached my shoulder. My arm felt like it was encased in ice.
A jolt hit the obsidian blade and shot up my arm like a freezing-cold spark.
Now.
I switched Hellforged to my right hand; it jumped in the transfer but didn’t get away. I pointed at the slate, pushing the Morfran with my mind.
And forgot the incantation.
I stood on the grass, pointing at the target, my mind a complete blank.
The Morfran energy flowed up the blade, moving into my right arm. My fingers turned frostbite black. My wrist, my forearm, my elbow seized up from the icy energy.
Mab clasped her right hand around mine. She drew back both our arms, then flung the Morfran at the slate, yelling the words of power.
“Parhau! Ireos! Mantrigo!”
The cold shot from my arm. The Morfran hurtled into the slate target. It hit so hard, I thought the slate would shatter, but the tile stayed in one piece.
My arm ached and stung as though I’d mainlined a hypodermic of snake venom. I rubbed it, trying to chafe normal feeling back into my skin. I flexed my fingers, watching as they gradually grew pink, then red. I’d learned something about the Morfran—if it didn’t gouge you to pieces and digest you from the inside out, it froze you to death. I had an image of my frozen-solid body cracking into Vicky-flavored ice cubes for the Morfran to snack on.
Mab waited, holding the athame. I looked in surprise at my empty hand.
“Guess I screwed that one up.” Need someone to state the obvious? Call me.
“Practice the incantation again. I’ll do it with you.”
We said the words, over and over. If we’d been in a school-room, I’d have been writing them five hundred times on the blackboard.
After the fiftieth repetition or so, Mab dropped out, motioning for me to continue. The words began to burn themselves into my brain. I could see them, written in a thin, fiery script. I could taste them.
Parhau
had a chalky, mineral-like flavor.
Ireos
was salty,
Mantrigo
sharp and bitter. After a few hundred repetitions, there was no way I could ever forget those words again.
Until I did. We practiced for another hour, and each time Mab came to my rescue. Hellforged would jump from my hand. Or, fearful of that cold, painful spark shooting up my arm, I’d switch hands too soon. Or else the words tripped me up—I’d leave one out or say them in the wrong order. Maybe I just wasn’t fluent in the language of Hell.
 
AFTER PRACTICE, I DRANK SOME NO-DREAMING TEA AND FELL back into bed. Sleeping was less like sinking into blackness than it was like wandering through a featureless gray fog. I woke up in the afternoon, feeling like I hadn’t slept at all and wondering if the tea was already losing its potency. Mab was right—time was slipping away from us.
I got up, dressed, and went downstairs. On the kitchen table was a note saying that Jenkins had driven Mab and Rose into Rhydgoch for some shopping. The village’s only retail establishments were a tiny grocer and a shop that sold tobacco, candy, and newspapers, so I wasn’t missing much. Still, I would’ve liked to pop into the Cross and Crow to make some phone calls. Telling Mab about Kane and Daniel made me want to hear their voices. I needed to update Daniel on what I’d learned about the Morfran. And I wanted to find out if the local packs had finally left Kane alone at his full-moon retreat.
Jenkins usually went into town for a couple of after-dinner pints at the pub, so I’d hitch a ride with him tonight. My black eyes were gone, and I was more or less presentable. In the meantime, I’d do what Mab’s note suggested: spend some time with
The Book of Utter Darkness
. Lucky me.
I opened the book to where I thought I’d left off last time, where I’d gotten a brief flash of meaning about the three tests. Almost immediately, the question I’d seen then appeared in my mind:
And shall thrice-tested Victory be conquered?
No, I thought. She shall not. Not by Pryce, not by his stupid tests, and not by some bogus prophecy. Next question.
For several minutes, though, that question was all that the book offered. Then, like a blurry movie slowly coming into focus, two more sentences emerged.
First, the carrion-eater consumes living flesh. Second, a battle in the world between the worlds.
I stared at the page until a headache clamped my temples, but that was all the book would give me. I closed the cover and sat back to think about what it might mean.
First, the carrion-eater consumes living flesh.
Okay, in test number one the Morfran snacked on something other than its usual din-din—that would be me. But what did the next sentence mean?
Second, a battle in the world between the worlds.
I knew of only two worlds: the demon plane and the human plane, what Pryce called Uffern and the Ordinary. What was between them? My dreamscape? Difethwr used that as a bridge between the realms. But the Hellion said Uffern had expanded, claiming my dreamscape within its territory. The prophecy didn’t make sense.
Not that I expected crystal clarity, but still.
“Don’t try to figure it out,” Mab said when I asked her about it later. “If you grasp at a meaning, you’re likely to latch onto the wrong one. Just hold the sentence lightly in your mind, and be ready for anything.”
Great. So the book would drop me clues, but if I tried to understand them, I’d be wrong. And Pryce’s next attack could jump out at me any time, any place. Helpful, really helpful. I might as well choose random words from the dictionary and string them together into “prophecies.”
“Now, look at this,” Mab said, like she was addressing an overexcited toddler. “See what I’ve brought you from the village.”
She handed me a white tissue paper-wrapped rectangle. Inside was a plaque, about six inches wide by eight inches high. Hand painted, with flowers and a curlicued border and the words HOME SWEET HOME, it looked like something that would hang in a grandmother’s gingham-curtained kitchen, right next to the cross-stitch sampler of a girl in an oversized bonnet watering sunflowers.
“Um … thanks?”
“Look closely. What do you notice?”
Mostly that Juliet would choke herself laughing if I ever brought this piece of décor into our apartment. Then I realized what Mab was getting at.
“It’s made of slate.”
“Very good. I commissioned it from Mrs. Hughes; she’s a highly accomplished witch who lives in the village. The plaque is magically enhanced to hold many, many times the amount of Morfran a slate of this size could normally contain. Everything that looks like decoration, such as these yarrow flowers and the symbols in the border, serves a magical purpose.”
A portable Morfran prison. Cool.
“Well, everything but the inscription,” she went on. “
Home Sweet Home
was my idea.” The corners of her mouth twitched. It was the closest my aunt had ever come to making a joke.
“My other purchase,” she said, digging in her shopping bag, “was also custom-made. It’s something you’ll see an immediate use for, I think.” She handed me a leather ankle sheath. It had an extra strap at the top, which curved over the hilt and snapped into the main part of the sheath, holding the knife in place. Not very useful for a quick draw in a fight, but perfect for hanging on to an athame that tried to run away every chance it got.
“I want you to wear that sheath, with Hellforged inside, as often as possible. Keeping the athame close against your body will align it with your vibration.”
That sounded like a good idea. I strapped on the sheath and adjusted its buckles. Mab handed me Hellforged, and I slid it inside. I held the dagger in place while Mab snapped the top strap over it. The dagger pushed and struggled. If it could talk, it would have yelled, “Let me out of here!” It strained at the strap until I thought it would rip the snap from the leather.
Eventually, it settled down. The athame lay against my calf, shuddering from time to time, so that I never forgot it was there. It was probably every bit as aware of me. Either we’d drive each other crazy, or we’d finally figure out how to get along.
THAT EVENING, JENKINS AGREED TO DRIVE ME TO THE CROSS and Crow. Mab didn’t like the idea, though she didn’t try to keep me home. She gave me a second ankle sheath and a bronze-bladed knife. Then she asked about five times whether I had Hellforged and the slate, and she fussed over me in a way she hadn’t since … well, ever. By the time Jenkins and I made it out the door, it was past nine.
As we pulled into the car park, the Bentley’s headlights swept across the pub. Mr. Cadogan had made some improvements since the last time I’d been here. He’d put up a new pub sign and installed floodlights that lit up the building’s stone walls, giving it an Olde Worlde, slightly eerie look, the very picture of a haunted pub.
I got out and inspected the sign, illuminated with its own bright lights. Against a background of a gigantic full moon and darkened hills, an eagle-sized crow perched on a gallows, complete with dangling noose. The huge bird looked like it could swallow the next hanged man in a single gulp. I shuddered. This new sign was overdoing the spooky look. Instead of inviting people in to quench their thirst with a relaxing drink, the sign shouted
Danger! Death! Run away!
Jenkins paused at the front door, holding it open. “Coming in?”
I hurried over, and we went inside. The ominous feel of the pub’s exterior disappeared as soon as I stepped into the warm, fire-lit barroom with its smells of wood smoke, varnish, and beer. Massive beams stretched across the low ceiling, lending solidity and coziness. In the huge fireplace, a roaring fire cast light and heat into the room. Hunting scenes and nineteenth-century prints of the village church decorated the whitewashed walls, along with crossed dueling pistols, old muskets, and an ancient military rifle, complete with bayonet. The wide-board floor slanted the way floors do in old buildings; so did the diamond-paned windows, framed by faded red velvet drapes. I passed a cluster of tables, making my way to the bar. Mr. Cadogan stood there, bald, red-faced, and jovial, talking to a customer. He looked up as I approached.

Other books

Black Dog Short Stories by Rachel Neumeier
Gods & Monsters by Benedict, Lyn
Dazzled by Jane Harvey-Berrick
La hija de la casa Baenre by Elaine Cunningham
The Older Man by Bright, Laurey
Forest Shadows by David Laing
Fear the Night by John Lutz