Authors: Tim Pratt
Trey reached over and took my hand. “We’ll get through this, Bekah. You’ll get your life back.”
“With luck, I’ll get a whole
new
life,” I said.
Trey went home, and I started reading. It didn’t take that long to find what I needed, and it turned out to be sort of obvious in retrospect.
The only problem with the magic was the fact that it wouldn’t work.
I met Trey for brunch at a cute little place not far from campus, and even though it was a brisk fall day we sat outside on the patio, because it was more private, and we had to talk about the kind of stuff that makes you sound insane if you’re overheard.
“The candle that entranced you,” I said, pausing in my methodical demolishment of a pretty decent eggs benedict. “The flame isn’t just a shiny thing, good for captivating people and making them stand still for a while. Fact is, anyone who looks at the candle falls into a suggestible state, and you can plant a compulsion in their mind.”
“Great! So we just show the light to the Firstborn, and then you tell her to leave you alone?” He was eating a bowl of granola and yogurt, because he’s a giant weirdo who hates deliciousness, I assume. Proof no man is perfect, right there.
“Unfortunately, no. My father wrote in the book that he, personally, was immune to such compulsions himself, because he’d put his soul away for safekeeping. It turns out that the compulsion gets its hooks into your spirit, the substance of your self, and since that essential substance wasn’t
in
his body anymore, he couldn’t be compelled by that kind of magic—trying to cast a geas on him would be like trying to put a fishhook into a snowball.”
“So look in the index of
The Book of Grace
and find the Firstborn’s stone—”
I shook my head. “Tried that. Surprisingly—or not—‘Firstborn comma soul egg’ is in the index, but there’s no page number. Hiding your soul away wouldn’t work too well if people could
find
your soul, after all. The same kind of magic that hides the contents of the sanctum from
The Book of Grace
hides away her soul. The egg is probably like a little sanctum in miniature.”
“So we’re screwed?”
“Not necessarily. I know what I need to do, so it’s just a case of figuring out how to do it…and I’ve got an idea for tracking down her soul. Come back to my place after we’re done here and keep me company?”
“I’ll only be gone a second,” I said. “Subjectively it might seem like many hours to me, but for you, only a second.”
“Do you think I’ll look good in black and white?” Trey leaned against the kitchen counter beside me. “You know, classy? Like a film noir hero?”
“Those guys were all alcoholics with intimacy issues. Be careful with your role models.” I stirred the spoon in the coffee mug, and this time, instead of just letting the vision take me wherever it wanted, I tried to steer…or, at least, make my will known.
Show me the Firstborn, I thought. When she put her soul away.
Color bled from the world, and the walls melted away, replaced by trees, but not the pines that surrounded my house. These trees were leafless, with white bark, and snow shimmered on the ground. It was a landscape well suited to black-and-white viewing. I listened, and heard a crunching sound off to the left. Soon my oldest sister appeared, walking with snowshoes, breath puffing little clouds into the air. She held a wooden cigar box in her hands.
My sister was a lot younger than I’d expected—almost as young as she’d appeared in the pictures in the photo album, maybe fourteen or fifteen. She was on the gangly side of willowy, and wasn’t dressed anywhere near warmly enough for the weather, wearing an ugly prairie dress and wool stockings.
She was just a girl—one who needed someone to take care of her, and didn’t have anyone to do the job. I wondered how long ago our father had abandoned her.
I followed her—every step leaving deep indentations in the snow, which disappeared as soon as I lifted my foot for the next step—as she threaded her way through the trees. She clearly had a destination in mind. After a while, she reached it: a low wall made of fieldstones, the kind of good fence Robert Frost wrote about. She knelt and fiddled with something, then withdrew a stone from the wall, revealing a recess inside. She opened up the cigar box, full of wadded-up toilet paper she’d used to cushion a small, greenish egg, speckled with brown spots. I wondered if it was a blue-jay egg.
The Eldest Daughter lifted up the egg carefully, then wrapped it in layer after layer of paper from the box. Once she had a fist-sized wad, she slipped the padded egg into a leather bag and tied the drawstrings closed. She put the bag into the hole and fitted the stone back over it, making the wall whole again. I took a close look at the loose rock: it was darker than the others, and speckled with little sparkling flecks.
Great. So her life was hidden in a stone wall…someplace. A place with birch trees and snow. That narrowed it down, but not enough. She couldn’t have hidden it in the Empire State Building, or underneath a convenient street sign, at least?
I took out my phone, hoping the magic would cooperate and give me usable GPS coordinates for this place, but alas, as far as modern technology was concerned, I was still in Meat Camp.
I followed the Firstborn back across the snow until we reached a road, where a beat-up hatchback was parked on the shoulder. I didn’t believe she was old enough to drive, but I guess being the daughter of a sorcerer and a forest spirit means not worrying about that kind of minor illegality. The car had Vermont plates, which helped. Assuming she hadn’t chosen a hiding place too far out of her way, I had a ballpark idea of where I was in the country. Didn’t narrow things down much, but every little bit helped.
I considered trying to get into the backseat, to ride along with her and see where she lived, and what her life was like. But I had a pretty good idea anyway: grim, and lonely, and increasingly desperate since Father had deserted her for his own asshole reasons.
Sympathizing with my sister further wasn’t going to help me do what was necessary, so when she got into the car and drove off, I didn’t even watch her leave. I settled for walking along the country road until I found a little wooden church with an epic steeple, and took note of the name on the sign out front.
I closed my eyes for a moment, thinking,
Cup
. No idea if it would work, but—
When I opened my eyes, I was back in the woods where I’d started, with the cup waiting, hovering in midair. I turned the spoon sunwise and the trees shimmered, replaced by my kitchen walls.
Trey hadn’t moved a millimeter. “You’re back?”
“Yeah. How do you fancy a romantic weekend in Vermont? I hear they’ve got good bed and breakfasts—”
Something twinged in the back of my head—I guess taking on magic gave me spidey-senses, too—and a cast-iron skillet on the stovetop flew into the air, passing in front of the window. The window glass broke, and the skillet
shattered
—seriously, like it was a ceramic plate smashed with a hammer—and shards landed all around us.
“Down!” I shouted, diving at Trey. We hit the ground together just as another gunshot cracked, shattering one of the cookie jars on the counter. I hadn’t heard the first shot, but some enhanced magic capability in my reptilian backbrain had sensed the danger and tried to stop the bullet with the frying pan. Who knew a bullet could shatter cast iron? At least it had served to deflect the shot from hitting me or Trey.
“Wait a minute.” I started to get up, and when Trey hissed at me to stay down, I kept on rising. “Screw that. I’m a sorcerer. I’m wearing a bulletproof smoking jacket here. Somebody’s about to get fucked up. You stay here, and keep your head down.” I ran for the front door and out onto the porch, circling around the house toward the side the shots had come from. I was ready to summon up fire and storms, or at least get into some violent late-blooming poltergeist action…but I didn’t have to, because the monster living in the woods took care of it for me.
A big man dressed in camouflage came racing out of the trees, shrieking, and that bizarre fluting-trumpeting-screaming that had so freaked me out when I first arrived howled after him.
Something lashed out of the trees—it could have been an immense snake, or a scorpion’s tail—and smashed against the man, flinging him about ten feet sideways. He hit the dirt and rolled, and when he tried to struggle to his feet, the noise came again, and something moving so fast it blurred raced out of the trees.
The monster was the size of a small car, and I had an impression of red wetness regarding its physiology, but otherwise, details eluded me. The creature smashed the man down again, then reared up on…whatever anatomy it had to rear up on.
The thing was, even when the creature was standing still—even with my wizardly vision—I still couldn’t focus on it. The monster stayed blurry. Maybe it existed partly in other dimensions, like Hannah’s mother, or maybe it just had its own very weird and effective camouflage. Even so, I could sense it was going for the coup de grâce, so I shouted, “
Stop!
”
The thing went still, then tilted something that might have been a head toward me. The man on the ground was either playing dead, or actually dead, or merely unconscious, so I didn’t worry about him for the moment. Instead I walked forward, hands raised in what I hoped was a placating gesture.
When I lifted my hand, I saw a silver thread running from one of my fingers, to the monster. Just like the one that had bound Trey to me.
Oh
.
“You’re…you belonged to my father?”
I saw images in my mind, and I felt things in my limbic system, and they made sense. They weren’t words, but if they had been words, they would have said,
I am bound to defend Grace and his people.
Trust Archibald Grace to have a monster for a security system. “No offense, but I’ve almost been killed a couple of times here at the ranch, big guy. Why didn’t you help me out before?”
I cannot harm any of the Grace bloodline.
Ah. The Firstborn and the Belly had tried to hurt me, but they fell outside the monster’s remit. Good to know.
“Do you, ah…serve my family willingly?”
I got served a flurry of images then. A deep jungle. Stone ruins. A creature that was part serpent and part lion, catching its own reflection in a pool of water. Patterns scored into the ground, glowing runes of fire and power. Pain, and chains, and bindings. My dead father’s face, rendered cartoonish and demonically leering in this monster’s memory, wearing a pith helmet and carrying an elephant gun, laughing uproariously.
“So that’s a no, then. Would you, ah…like me to set you free? Assuming you promise not to kill me?”
Suspicion, confusion, rage…and a tiny flickering moment of hope.
Yes
.
“You can’t kill other people around here, either. I mean, you have to just leave, go back home…or maybe I could take you home, or—”
I can make my own way, daughter of Grace. I will harm no one if you set me free.
Maybe it was stupid to give up a lightning-fast monster security guard, but I didn’t like the idea of any intelligent creature being enslaved to my will. I was fairly sure it couldn’t lie to me, mind to mind, though who knows if that was wishful thinking or more magical sensibility?
In the end, it didn’t matter—I had to set it free. I pinched off the silver thread, and snapped it cleanly. The thread vanished, and the monster flitted, faster and vaster than a hummingbird, toward the trees and out of sight.
The man on the ground groaned. I took the candle from my pocket, and the Zippo from the other, and lit the first with the second. I nudged the man in the ribs with my foot, and when he rolled over and opened his eyes, I held the flame close to his face. He was more beard than man, had a scar across his forehead, and looked like an ex-military badass gone paranoid, straight out of a thriller about doomsday preppers.
When he saw the candle flame, his pupils dilated hugely, and his breathing slowed.
“You’ll answer me truthfully.”
“Yes ma’am.”
I considered ordering him to address me as “sir” instead, but it seemed self-indulgent. “Who sent you?”
“A woman. I don’t know her name.”
“Describe her.” Not necessarily much good when I suspected it was my sister the shape-shifter, but you never know.
“Almost six feet fall, long white-blonde hair on the scraggly side, very pale skin, pointy features—”
“That’s enough. What did she send you to do?”
“To kill you. She showed me a photograph. Said I had to take a head shot, to be sure, that you might survive anything less. I had you in my sights. I don’t know how I missed.”
Someone had hired a hit man to kill me. That was a rare life experience to cross off my list. “What are you supposed to do after I’m dead?”
“Once I confirm you’re dead, I report back to my employer. In person. I’m not supposed to call. She says she doesn’t trust anything but face-to-face conversations.”
When you can make yourself look and sound like anyone else, you probably develop a suspicious worldview. “Where is she?”
“Waiting at an airport bar in Greensboro.”
Not close enough for me to go kick her ass in the next five minutes. “Why so far away?”
“I don’t like to hang around having meetings after I take someone out. I prefer to get on a plane and go far away, fast.”
“Huh,” I said. “So you go to the airport and she gives you a big sack of cash?”
He shook his head. “She paid me half up front. Once she confirms you’re really gone, I get the rest of my payment delivered.”
I could ambush her at the airport, but that was hardly the place to start a magical war, even one I hoped would end with no shots fired. Besides, I had preparations to make. I was pretty sure she’d come to confirm my death personally—I’d seen her dance around my butchered corpse in one of my visions, after all. She’d want to come to the house, to gloat over her victory, and to look for the vessel, since she didn’t know I’d found it. I could be waiting for her. “Okay, killer. Here’s what happened: you took the head shot, and I died. Understand?”