He leaned against the tree.
Midnight
.
He had to hold on to that thought.
He knew what was inside the forest now.
But how was he going to get home?
First, he pressed a palm to one of the larger trees near the driveway to Midnight.
The path itself was barely wide enough for two cars to pass, and was not marked in
any way, so it was only by remembering the trees near it that he would later be able
to recall where it was.
Since he didn’t know where he was, there was no point in calling anyone to pick him
up, so he started down the road in search of the nearest town.
Less than an hour later, he reached his goal. The town was dark and most of the stores
were closed, but the old-fashioned stone monument in the town’s center welcomed him
to Pyridge, established 1612. The plaque beneath it spoke of a small town founded
by a group that had suffered disagreements with their neighbors and so moved farther
west. He wondered when this town, first built by rebels and malcontents, had been
taken over by vampires.
J
EREMY AND CARYN
pulled over to pick Jay up. They were both so tense that his head started to ache
the instant he climbed into the car.
Their pre-wedding bickering didn’t help.
“Stop that!” Caryn snapped when Jeremy sneezed as she followed Jay’s circular directions
back to Kendra’s home.
“Sorry,” Jeremy replied. “Something’s going around school.”
“I don’t want you snotty and sneezing through your vows.”
“I can’t really help—”
“Let me,” Jay said, deliberately interrupting. Leaning forward from the backseat,
he touched fingertips to Jeremy’s cheek.
“I thought witches can’t heal illnesses,” Jeremy remarked.
“It’s more of an empathic thing than a healing thing,” Jay explained.
Healing meant fixing something that was broken. When someone was sick, the body wasn’t
broken;
symptoms were the result of the body doing what it needed to do to fight off an invader.
Jay didn’t have an incredible amount of practice dealing with diseases, but he could
help boost the immune system and direct the body so it could fight off the common
cold a little faster.
“You are so lucky that witches can’t get sick,” Jeremy said. “I have to worry about
every cold that comes my way, while you two could share soda with a plague ward and
be just fine.”
“But it’s so hard to find a good plague ward these days,” Jay replied as he did the
equivalent of some traffic-directing with Jeremy’s body. “You should start to feel
better in a few hours,” he added, sitting back in his seat.
“Thanks.”
“Do you want one of us to drive your car back to SingleEarth for you?” Caryn asked
as she pulled into the driveway. “You feel wiped out.”
He nodded tiredly. “Too much time fighting evil forests, I guess,” he mumbled. Sensing
her confusion, he added, “If someone else could drive, I’d appreciate that.”
“No problem.”
Jeremy was more than happy to drive Jay, so he could share his jitters as if the two
men were old friends instead of mere acquaintances.
“How did Christmas dinner go?” Jay asked.
Jeremy shook his head. “As well as I could have expected,” he answered. “Everyone
behaved appropriately enough that we had to stay for the full dinner, even though
everyone desperately wanted to leave.”
It still seemed like a lot of stress to get a family’s grudging blessing. Jay just
didn’t get weddings.
Then again, the closest Jay had come to a date in a long time was Xeke’s inviting
him out to a “night on the town.” It was hard to find someone whose ego could hold
up to a first date with someone who knew every random thought they had and had trouble
following the out-loud conversation because the neurotic internal monologue was so
much more interesting.
Could he bring Xeke as a date to the wedding?
Was he even invited to the wedding?
“Mind if I ask how you got stuck out here at this hour?” Jeremy asked.
“Investigating a spell,” Jay answered, intentionally vague. There were times when
it was best to keep things from others—like information that could get Jeremy stuck
in the middle of an ownership feud with Midnight. SingleEarth regarded human members
like Jeremy as equals, but to Midnight, they were pawns.
Deliberately returning the conversation to the one topic he knew would distract Jeremy
from anything else, Jay asked, “Do you have a best man?”
Jeremy stared at him a bit longer than Jay was comfortable with, considering he was
driving, before answering, “Yes. Though I was wondering if you would be willing to
be an
usher? Caryn suggested that that empathy of yours might help you keep the guests from
coming to blows.”
“I can do that,” he answered. Could be fun.
First, though, he needed to settle the mystery of this shapeshifter once and for all.
It would be a damn shame if the wedding were spoiled by eminent war with Midnight
over a comatose shapeshifter.
Once back at SingleEarth, Jay changed into dry clothes, picked up a few of the kinds
of trinkets he usually made fun of Vireo for using, and then went back to the shapeshifter’s
room.
This time he would be more careful, better armed and armored. He would find her mind,
and he would bring her high enough to the surface to determine what they needed to
do with her.
Maybe she wasn’t a slave, but a visitor or an employee of Midnight. Or maybe she had
gone into the woods, become lost in the spell that had tried to trap Jay, and been
unable to break free.
The first step Jay took was to write a note and pin it to the door, saying,
Complex magic. Do not disturb
. Thinking again, he revised it:
Do not disturb except in case of unexplained life-threatening injuries
. It would suck if the healers let him die because he left a badly worded note.
He adjusted the position of the shapeshifter’s bed so he could form a circle around
her. He marked the perimeter with a combination of hematite, agate, and obsidian stones,
some tumbled and some rough. All of them had been created through volcanic activity
and still held the power of that heat boiling up
through the surface of the earth. The magic in Jay’s blood also came from fire—from
the elemental Leona, who had bonded herself to his kind thousands of years ago—so
the stones would simultaneously boost his power and help ground him. The hematite—a
silver-gray iron ore—would act as a tether so he wouldn’t get trapped in the shapeshifter’s
mental and magical woods again. One of the obsidian pieces he had chosen had been
flaked into an arrowhead; its edge was as sharp as a razor and cut through his skin
easily as he drew it across the fingertips of his right hand.
He touched each stone in his circle, linking his blood to the ancient volcanic power
and the solidity of rock. The world seemed to hold its breath as he touched the last,
sealing the circle around himself and the silent shapeshifter.
Another power wailed in fury.
There was magic inside her that did not like the fire one bit.
Jay stepped forward into her mental hell.
What do you want?
the forest snarled at him. The trees nearby twisted, writhing in irritation.
How can we help her if you keep intruding?
The forest ransacked his mind. It found his fear of Midnight, his fear that the vampire’s
empire might threaten his kin, and his anger that it had once nearly destroyed them.
It found his plan to share Midnight’s location with other hunters. It found his conviction
that Midnight
must
be cut down again, and forever.
It knew that he could speak to the trees and had merged
with them in order to slip away from the circle of magic that had tried to trap him
in Midnight’s forest.
It knew how much he despised being trapped.
The more this power learned about him, the more welcoming it became.
We can’t reach her
, it lamented.
They locked her away from us
.
The images that came with the words were brutal.
The shapeshifter was a slave. One of the trainers had claimed her hundreds of years
ago and had worked tirelessly to break her mind and turn her into the perfect … Pet.
That was the name the trainer had given her.
Until him, she had been nameless, a priestess dedicated to her people, her land, and
her power. She had been holy; he had made her profane. She had been …
She had been beaten, and broken, and with each stroke she had built stronger walls
inside her mind as she had tried to protect something so precious that it alone could
never
be sacrificed to the trainer.
Me
, the power whispered.
My child let herself be savaged so she could protect me. She sealed herself off from
me, and now I cannot even tell her that it is safe to return
.
Is it worth saving her, if Midnight then comes to claim her?
Jay wondered.
The other power responded as if Jay had spoken aloud.
If you can reach her, and help me reach her, then she will be all I need to destroy
those who hurt her
.
“You mean Midnight? The trainers?” Jay asked. “She could fight them?”
You will not need to fear them anymore
.
“I’ll try to reach her,” Jay said. “I’m not sure if I can, but I’ll try.”
There are many traps in her mind. I will do my best to protect you
.
First, he needed to be something fast and powerful, to get through the brambles. A
stag would have been nice, but Jay had never had the opportunity to study one well
enough to know its thought patterns. A lynx would be too small. Wolf?
Here
.
The thought came along with the overwhelming sense of …
not
a house cat. Not a lynx or a bobcat. Bigger. Mountain lion.
That would work.
Jay stretched his new body and felt the forest respond with wary interest. This form
was known to it. Was the shapeshifter a cougar?
He fought his way through the forest, his lithe body wriggling out of the way when
branches tried to form a cage, and his thick fur shrugging off even the worst of the
brambles.
As he reached Midnight’s black iron fence, crows and ravens began to dive-bomb, shrieking.
He batted them out of the sky, his jaws sending feathers and avian blood splattering
as he made his way inexorably closer.
He changed shape only momentarily, and a much smaller cat slipped easily between the
black iron bars, before the mountain lion was running across the open front yard.
He struck the front door with claws extended. The building itself began to bleed and
writhe.
Where are you?
he called.
She was in there, somewhere.
Acting on instinct, he shredded the door, and the walls next to it. They looked like
hardwood and stone, but they tore like flesh. Once he had cut a hole, he padded through
it into a quiet, shadowed grove of white birch trees.
In the middle lay a woman, her body bleeding from a thousand cuts, her black flesh
burned and slashed, her hair matted, and her moss-green eyes wide with fear.
“No!” she shouted. “You can’t be here! No one can be here!”
“I’m here to help you,” Jay said.
Started to say. Or roar. He wasn’t sure how far he made it before the ground shook,
knocking him off his paws. The trees wept. Whatever power had spoken to him earlier
had followed him here.
“Is she—”
Before he could finish speaking, he was thrown brutally backward, into his own flesh
in the shapeshifter’s room.
He was alone. Her bed was empty, and the door was standing open.
Nothing should have been able to get in or out of the circle he had built, but as
he looked around, he realized that several of the stones on one side had fractured
before being pushed aside.
What on earth had he just released?
W
HATEVER HAD JUST
spoken to him in the shapeshifter’s mind, then thrown him out and fractured his circle,
had left him so fried that he kept spacing out as he attempted to gather his tools
back into their bag. At one point, he jumped when he spaced out for a moment and suddenly
found Jeremy standing in front of him, holding a large book titled
Ancient Elavie Cultures
. The human was looking from the note on the door, to Jay, to the empty bed.
“It’s okay to come in now,” Jay said, trying to focus on the human’s mind but unable
to glean anything more than static.
“Did you magic her away somewhere?” Jeremy asked.
“I woke her up, and the next thing I knew, she was gone.”
He wasn’t ready to go into further details, such as promises
to destroy Midnight. Maybe he should have asked a little more about that—like
How?
or
When?
Instead, he asked Jeremy, “Are you still awake, or already awake?”
“A combination of the two,” Jeremy admitted. “Having trouble sleeping. Nerves. I thought
I’d try to solve our mystery, but I guess it’s a moot point now.”
“What’s the book?” he asked Jeremy.
Elavie
was SingleEarth’s scientific term for shapeshifters.
Jeremy plopped down to sit on the floor next to Jay.
“The way her power reacted to yours made me think about the way some of the older
Elavie, especially the ones from cultures with additional magic, can live hundreds
of years or more. When I started looking at the older cultures, I found a reference
to the Shantel.”
“You’re on the right track with the age thing. Who are the Shantel?”
“I found them in a book about language, actually. Many of the older shapeshifter cultures
make reference to something or someone called a
sakkri
. The serpiente use the word now to describe a kind of dance, but their myths say
that dance is the remnant of an ancient magical ritual. The Mistari use it to mean
something said or done to mislead. And the Shantel used the term to refer to the magic
that kept them protected, and to the witch who controlled that power.”