Spellbent (32 page)

Something had to be done, and quickly. Perhaps I could find a way to warn Mother Karen. But what could
she
do? She was unarmed, and afraid for her foster son. No matter; I had to try.

I hopped down into the front passenger seat, clambered up the door to the sill, and leaped out, landing painfully on the packed, dried mud of the overgrown roadway. I began to run through the dry grass toward Mother Karen—

—and felt my spirit yanked out of the ferret into the aether, then into my true quamo form in my Overseer’s lair.

The old white wyrm was a knot of indignant rage on his ottoman, his tail stiff as a butcher’s knife. He stared at me balefully, his sapphire eyes glittering.

“We don’t appreciate being lied to, spider. The depths of your subterfuge plumb straight down to rank stupidity I do wonder if you appreciate how
very
much trouble you’ve gotten yourself into.”

“Wait,” I said. “Jordan’s been lying to you—”

“You accuse Benedict Jordan?” the wyrm replied, his voice caustic. “That’s a fine laugh. I’ve seen the cerebral recordings from his servants. I know what you and the Shimmer girl have been up to. You’re most fortunate the men she attacked have not perished from their injuries.”

“Innocent people are about to die,” I insisted. “If you don’t believe me—”

“Indeed, I
don’t
believe you, and that’s perhaps the first true thing that’s come from your ugly duplicitous mouths—”

“Come to Earth,” I said, panic scrabbling in my very core, “and you’ll see—”

“No. I shall do no such thing. You’re planning some trick, some escape from your just punishment. I’m not about to be fooled twice by the likes of you.”

“Sir, please—”

“Quiet, or I shall cut those vile flapping calliope valves from your belly! You’re legally entitled to fifteen minutes to say your good-byes; after that, you will be recalled to your true body and returned to prison for intensive reprogramming. I hope to never see your chitinous grotesquery or hear your disharmonious piping ever again!”

I came awake inside my ferret body, swinging limply midair, suspended painfully by my tail. Bruce was holding me at eye level, squinting at me suspiciously. I continued to hang limp, breathing shallowly, eyes half closed and unfocused.

“I found the
girl’s
familiar,” Bruce called to Wilson. “I think it got recalled. What should I do with the body?”

“Wring its neck,” Wilson replied. “Just in case it gets sent back here.”

Oh dear, I
thought.
We’re completely fucked now.

Underworld

I had no idea what was happening to Pal, but I had plenty of my own troubles to deal with. As I traveled through the portal, I was crushed on all sides by an oppressive darkness as I felt a vacuum try to tear the air from my lungs and boil the blood from my veins. At one point I wasn’t sure if I was falling or simply spinning in place, trapped in some horrible spot between worlds and time where I’d go on dying forever.

Abruptly I felt myself jerked sideways, and I tumbled out into chilly moonlit air and hit snowy ground feet-first. I might have been able to stay upright but suddenly something yanked hard on the back of my neck and I fell forward, flailing to catch myself. My right hand jammed into a padded convex surface, and I felt the chain at my neck snap free.

I hit the ground, jolting my knees and wrists painfully.
Wrists?
I looked down; my good right eye saw nothing but buzzing darkness, but my stone eye showed both my hands before me. My right gloved hand gleamed faintly in the moonlight; it rested on a big upholstered plate the size of a manhole cover.

My left hand was sunk into a few inches of snow, ghostly pale but apparently completely intact. The snow looked normal enough in the half-light, and it was certainly cold, but it felt weirdly spongy The air hung stale and icily humid.

Oh crap, I’m touching the snow bare-handed,
I realized in alarm, remembering the Warlock’s warning. I scrambled to my feet, scrubbing my freezing palm furiously on the front of my jacket as I stared around me. I was in a small clearing amid dark woods. The trees looked like larger versions of the kinds I’d seen near the dead field. I wondered if their trunks would feel as strange and unreal as the snow. Nothing seemed to move within the snow-blanketed woods; as far as
I
could tell, I was alone.

The full moon hanging in the
sky
was twice as large as it should have been. The satellite had been shattered in two by some terrible cosmic accident. The ragged halves ground soundlessly against each other, sending a constant stream of meteors streaking down into the atmosphere, flaring red like lunar blood.

Unnerved, but satisfied I was safe for the time being, I raised my left palm up close to my stone eye to inspect it. The skin was uninjured, unscarred, the lines and whorls completely normal and familiar. It was indeed my own hand, though I could still feel pain deep in the bone in the spot where my arm had been bitten off. The jacket sleeve had magically extended to cover my arm to my wrist.

I wiggled my fingers and flexed my wrist. The Warlock had said that hells were realms of the Spirit; had my arm actually regenerated, or had my phantom limb simply become more solid in this place? I stared down at both my hands and blinked through several gemviews. Some views were utterly bizarre and I could make no sense of what I was seeing, but others gave me a fairly normal view of myself. In those, my left hand was translucent while my right remained solid.

I decided my renewed arm was probably just a spiritual extension. Possibly it wasn’t something I should trust to hold me if I found myself hanging for dear life from a cliff or tree limb. But who could tell? I dug out my other glove and slipped it on, just to be safe.

I knelt to examine the object I’d fallen on. Moonlight gleamed on bronze edges. The inside, I soon realized, was padded leather. My hands found straps; I tentatively lifted the object out of the snow, and realized it was a shield. The remains of the silver chain I’d worn on my neck still hung from a fist-width loop at the top. A leather-wrapped hilt stuck out diagonally from the top of the shield: A sheathed short sword was affixed to the front with copper wires.

I slipped my left arm through the shield loops and carefully pulled the sword free with my right. The sword had good balance and nice heft; the blade was about thirty inches long. We’d had a couple of sessions on sword fighting in my hapkido class after the ninja- and pirate-crazy youngsters pestered the sensei. I was no swashbuckler, but the weapon felt comfortable.

The Warlock said his mother had given the necklace to him; had her metaphoric protection simply become literal in this dimension? Or had the necklace been enchanted in a way that Pal couldn’t sense?

Either way, so far this place doesn’t seem that bad,
I thought, staring up at the shattered moon.

Suddenly I heard someone crashing through the underbrush nearby. I turned, sword raised, and saw a pale young man with long, curly blond hair and a fringed buckskin jacket stumble into the clearing, panting hard, his breath steaming in the icy air. The guy bent over, resting his hands on his knees, trying to get his wind back. He wore a gray or red T-shirt beneath his jacket—it was hard to tell the color in the moonlight—and faded jeans tucked into tall suede lace-up boots. He reminded me of the Who’s lead singer; I guessed he’d been trying to play up the look.

“Benny!” he exclaimed, looking up and seeing me for the first time. Wait, he was certainly looking
at
me, but didn’t exactly seem to see me.
“I
told you to go home, man! This shit ain’t right! We gotta get outta here!”

He ran up to me. I couldn’t quite bring myself to take a swing at him, so I stepped back. Frowning, he grabbed the sleeve of my shield arm and tugged me sideways.

“Don’t stand there like a jerk, we gotta
go,
Benny,” the young man insisted, starting to jog again and pulling me along behind him. “Bad storm’s coming!”

A wind rose in the trees, and I thought I heard hail hitting the leaves, but it didn’t sound right. The hissing was far too loud, and I thought I could smell smoke. I looked up.

The meteor shower from the shattered moon had intensified, and fiery moonstones were streaking down into the trees. Steam rose where they struck snowy branches. Dark leaves flashed into orange flames.

I stopped resisting the young man and matched his pace.

“You ain’t supposed to be here,” he told me. “I thought I got you home safe. I—I shouldn’t have brought you out here. I’m sorry,” the young man gasped, running faster.

“It’s okay,” I said reflexively, feeling lost.

“It was a terrible thing your dad did, but nobody needs to know. We gotta do what my mom said, and keep it quiet. You didn’t tell anyone else, did you?”

“No,” I replied.

“Good boy,” the young man said, looking relieved. We broke out into a freshly plowed field, kept running. The hiss and thump of the meteorites sounded closer and closer.

The young man stumbled, doubling over in pain. “Oh God. They’re comin’ for us.”

“What’s coming?” I asked, peering over my shoulder as I ran. The front edge of the meteor storm was emerging from the trees. The cooling moonstones turned black as they tumbled earthward, their crusts cracking. . . and dark, winged things were hatching from them in midair, shaking off the rocky shells and flying toward us through the trees.

As the first few darted out into the moonlight, I saw that they were big crows with cold, shiny black eyes and cruel curved beaks and talons. More and more flew from the woods in a dense flock swirling toward us, strangely silent but for the rush of wind through black feathers.

The young man looked back at the horde and let out a shuddering sob. In his moment of inattention, his foot fell through a hole hidden by the snow and he went tumbling headlong.

I hurried over to try to help him up; the snow was thicker here, and running was difficult. “Are you okay?”

“No, don’t touch me! Get out of here!” The young man’s face contorted into a profound grief I dared not imagine.

The crows were less than fifty yards away and gaining fast. “Let me help you up—”

“No! Benny, go, get out of here! It’s too late for me.” He rolled up onto his knees and threw a hunk of ice at me, which I easily dodged.

I hefted the shield in front of me and closed my eyes, beginning a chant to cast a protective sphere around the two of us. But the words wouldn’t come; the ancient languages were blocked in this place, and my magic with them.

The young man was staring at the snow. Tears spilled down his cheeks. “Oh God. I shoulda known what he was doing. We shoulda stopped it, shoulda done something to help Siobhan and your brothers. All I did was burn the damn house down so nobody would find out, but I can’t forget.”

He reached inside his buckskin jacket and pulled Out an old revolver. Before I had a chance to protest, he put the barrel of the gun against his chest and pulled the trigger. His whole body jerked as the gun went off. He collapsed sideways in the snow.

“Get outta here, Benny,” he gasped, clutching the wound near his heart, struggling to breathe. “It’s a sin to kill yourself.”

I began to backpedal, shield raised, sword clenched in my gloved fist, staring at his dying form.

The mob of crows slowed as it reached the young man, hovered, and dove on him as if he were a tasty bit of roadkill. He weakly tried to shield his face as they pecked and tore at him. The birds were eerily silent in their attack. Their talons and beaks sheared through his leather jacket and jeans like steel razors. The flapping mass of birds smothered his body. Soon, only his right hand was visible, his fingers clawing at the snow.

A crow flew down beside his hand and eyed his fingers hungrily. The bird grabbed the skin between his thumb and forefinger in its beak and pulled. His pale skin came cleanly off as if it were just a glove, and beneath it was not human bone and tendon but a slender hoof.

The young man thrashed, rose up on all fours, shaking off crows and shredded clothing. He was no longer a man but a spotted fallow stag, a yearling buck with short antlers. Through the flocking crows I could see that the terrified deer bore the fresh gunshot wound on its chest, blood dark on its white fur.

Most of the crows attacked the stag with fresh savagery, but about twenty turned their beady eyes on me.

I turned and began to run as hard as I could. The field arced around a small copse of trees, and after I rounded the curve I saw a big three-story Victorian house at the end of the field. The windows glowed with yellow electric lights, the rooms inside indistinct through gauzy curtains.

The house, I realized, had the right dimensions to be an intact version of the burned farmhouse. I didn’t much want to go inside, but knew I had to if I expected to find Cooper. And the crows closing fast behind me weren’t giving me much of a choice.

I pelted across the field into the front yard, up the broad wooden front stairs onto the wide front porch. I slid to a hard stop against the front doors and pounded on the red-painted wood with the pommel of my sword. My bruised knuckles ached sharply, hut I didn’t care. “Hello! Is anyone in there?”

A tall, clean-shaven man in a flannel shirt and jeans answered the door. His brown hair was buzzed close to his skull, but I could see a touch of gray at his temples. Something about the set of his jaw and broad shoulders reminded me of the Warlock, but his smile and glacier-blue eyes made me think of Mr. Jordan.