Authors: Scott V. Duff
“Who’s there?” a voice, a very high voice, asked from the darkness.
“My name’s Seth,” I whispered. “We came because someone here has been calling us. Now come on, we have to get you and the other two out of here before those bugs charge the pass. You don’t have enough bullets for all of them.”
Little Brother, I need you at the cabin. You aren’t going to believe this.
What’s wrong, Pete? I’m trying to talk the kid down now
. Now I needed to be in two places at once.
I think you’re just gonna have to see this to believe it
. He sounded a little afraid.
Can you get the woman to release the wards to me? I can fight these things better with that control
.
Um, no. They’re… hardwired… through her
.
They’re… what?
“Hardwired through her”?
How was that even possible?
You’ll have to see this. Hurry
.
“Come on, kid,” I said loudly. “There’s a problem at the cabin! We gotta go. Bring the rifle. We’ll need it at least once more.” I heard scuffling from the rocks behind him, suggesting he was moving out of the hole. Scanning around the rocks, I moved to where he’d come out. A few seconds later, I saw movement in the brush and I checked on the bug’s progress.
When I turned back around, I got the shock of my life. My teenaged, Pact-holding sniper was an elf. Immediately, I checked his Pact but found only the Lock. Thankfully either I didn’t show my surprise or he missed it. He was dressed as a normal human, cotton dungarees and a thin cotton, long-sleeved shirt, in plaid. He looked very “farm-boy” with pointed ears. And he was unbound, neither Seelie or Unseelie, a Wylde Fae. What the crap?
“What’s your name? Don’t want to keep calling you ‘kid’,” I asked when he was close. He squatted down beside me, holding the rifle by the middle with the butt on the ground.
“Connor,” he answered. “You know what those bugs are? How to stop them from coming?”
“For a while, anyway,” I said, nodding. “It’s better to avoid them completely, if possible. If we can find out where they come from and fight them at the source, we might stand a chance…”
“Mom knows,” Connor said. “She won’t tell us, though. She’s afraid we’ll go after them, like Dad did.” He swallowed hard, visibly shaken. “He didn’t come back after that.”
“Well, let’s go see about the other two and getting y’all out of here,” I said, turning back to the path. He started to say something, but I’d started running for the cabin. Halfway there, I realized he wasn’t right behind me. I paused to let him catch up, then slowed to match his pace, my fast jog to his full tilt run. I didn’t want to use portals in case the bugs sensed the magic use and charged. It didn’t take long to reach the cabin, just longer than it would have taken me alone.
“Pete! I’m here!” I yelled when we reached the clearing around the cabin.
“Mom! Coulter!” Connor yelled right after me, still running for the cabin. He burst through the door, but I followed more slowly. There was something in the cabin that I couldn’t place, something Faery that I’d not seen before, which basically could be just about anything.
Stepping in the front door, I could see that calling this building a cabin was an injustice. The inside was a beautiful split-level house with two-stories on the back side, kitchen and pantry on the right and the master bedroom on the left. Pete stood in the doorway of the master bedroom, leaning on the doorframe, and I could sense all three of the other occupants there. Walking up beside Peter, I looked in, too.
“Aw, crap,” I muttered as I took in the utter mess in the room. Connor knelt beside the bed whispering to an elven-looking Fae lying prone on the bed. Another boy, Coulter, I presumed, squatted down beside him with his hand on his shoulder in comfort. Astonishingly, though, Coulter was human. And Coulter had a Pact. I gave up on the ethics and dipped a little into their minds to find out what was going on.
Connor turned to me as I passed Peter and walked toward the woman. “Mom? Who are they?” he whispered, squinting at me nervously.
“More than they appear, my son,” the woman said. Her voice was lyrical to the extreme. The feeling that harps played when she spoke was inherent.
“Mioreala, what have you done to yourself?” I asked her as I probed gently into the streaming lines of magic running into her body. She had indeed hardwired herself into the Pactwards, and it was killing her.
She laughed lightly. “See, boys? The one called Seth even knows of me, somehow.” She reached out with her consciousness seeking mine, so I let her find me. Her eyes grew very wide and she startled her sons by trying to get up.
“No, Mioreala, there’s no need for that,” I said hurriedly, rushing to the bed.
“But, Lord…” she gasped.
“No, don’t worry about that, dear,” I said softly. “Please, for me, just lie still and conserve your strength.” I pushed healing energy into her to relieve her current pain, but there wasn’t much more I could do for her. “Can you remove the wards from your body, Mioreala?”
“No, Lord,” she answered sadly. “My husband’s magic is not like mine but mine could not protect the twins from the
shuntok
.” She used a Faery word that means “accursed crawler,” which was certainly an apt description. “I had to make a choice when they found my pass.”
I canted my head slowly, holding her gaze. “May I examine you and see if there is something I can do?”
“Thank you for asking, please do,” she said and smiled, brightening the room. Both Connor and Coulter smiled with her. “May I know your name?”
Smiling with her, too, I opened Daybreak’s aura as I probed deeply into her and touched her mind with the song of Gilán, as much as she could handle. The two names held her captivated, allowing her to ignore the painful prodding I gave her. Mioreala was not an elf but a Wylde Fae, as strong as a
sidhe
but more closely related to a succubus than an elf. Not that those relationships meant much in the Wyldes, but she was very “malleable” because of that. She met Eliot near the borders of the Wyldes and the Seelie Lands. He saw through her veil but pretended not to. He did manage to fall in love with her slowly as they hiked through the Hinterlands. She loved him from the instant she saw him. It was a very romantic story.
“Connor, I need you to shoot very soon,” I said, breaking the silence in the room and startling everyone but Pete. Using a tighter depth in his awareness than he knew he had, he rode the back of my probes and saw all the same things that I did. His perspective would be interesting. Connor held the rifle up, unsure of what to do. “Pick an empty wall and look through the scope. You’ll know what to do then. I’ll take care of noise and the bullet.”
“Connor, trust Seth,” Peter said calmly. “He can help in ways you can’t imagine.”
“Peter, stop coddling the boy,” I said and stoked up the intimidation level to about six and a half. “Connor, now,” I said sternly, almost growling at him.
Connor quickly pulled the rifle to his shoulder and peered through the scope. Gasping at what he saw, he fired quickly but silently as I held buffers and portals open to move the sound outside. The bug splattered like its predecessors and rebounded off the stone wall, falling into the deep crevasse between the mountains. The next participant in the creep parade began its ascent. Connor played the bolt back and fit another shell in place. Turning back to me stoically, he said, “I have only four shells left, sir.”
“Hopefully, we’ll be gone by then,” I said and turned back to his mother. Still connected with her, I let her know how I could help her, that I could save her life–but there were consequences both for her and her boys.
“There is nothing to choose there, Lord,” Mioreala said. “My sons will live and I will live to see them again. I am in your debt.”
“Mother, what are you doing?” Coulter asked suspiciously.
“Trusting in you, son,” she said sweetly, caressing his chin. “You called out in hopes of reaching your father and found the Lord of Gilán instead. You disobeyed me, but it turned out well enough.”
“Connor, do you like being an elf?” I asked him. Peter looked at me like I was an idiot.
“No!” Connor barked. More like yipped. “I miss the feel of my father.”
“And I, my mother,” Coulter added softly, without prompting. He touched her arm lightly.
“Coulter, you know why this must be,” Mioreala said sympathetically.
“I can get around that,” I said softly. “I’ll have to. Mioreala, I need for you to change them back.”
“No!” the boys shouted together angrily.
“Why?” Mioreala asked plaintively.
I ignored the boys for now. They weren’t part of the equation, really. This was between her and me now. “To heal you, I will have to place you in a chrysalis for some time in a place where your natural energies flow freely, perhaps as long as three to four years. It will take at least that long for your memories to return. What condition would they be in three years, without your control of their forms?”
“But Coulter will lose his father!” she cried, tears falling down the delicate beauty of her face.
“No, I can stop that. I’m the Librarian. I can link the Pact to his human side and even better, I can copy his Pact and give it to Connor, too,” I said, offering the one bright spot in this tragedy still in the writing. “Connor can touch his father’s memories, too.” Connor did like that idea and so did Coulter.
Mioreala was wracked in silent agony as the Pactward sent a fiery pulse through her abdomen. Sending sensings into her, I followed the pulses through the ward and found the other fronts she was fighting the bug war on. We needed to move, now.
“Where are they coming from, Mioreala?” I asked. “The
shuntok
, where are they coming from?” The agonized Fae couldn’t speak yet, but she was strong enough to indicate the cave they crawled out of and how they escaped through the hole in back, to a place called the Sundered Realms. She gave me enough of a sense of the place to lock onto it physically on the other side of the mountain we faced on the pass.
“Connor, Coulter,” I called, looking up from their mother to find two identical, half-breed elf and human twins standing before me waiting. If it weren’t for their clothing, I wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart on looks. “You have five minutes to pack anything you want to keep. We won’t be able to come back here again once we leave. Go.” They both high-tailed it out of the room.
“Daybreak, you do not wear a veil,” Mioreala asked, though it was more a statement than a question.
“No, I’m human. You’re seeing me as I am,” I said as I started building the chrysalis that would hold her in stasis while she healed internally. “And we don’t know why I was able to inherit the mantle of the elf-lord. Just be happy that I did.”
“I truly am, Lord,” Mioreala said, smiling through the pain. “You will be a wonderful
Hant
for my boys.”
“The Fae don’t usually talk about their children like you do. Eliot must have been quite a man to take on his mindset, too,” Peter said from the end of the bed.
“Eliot was a wonderful man,” she answered with a glorious smile radiating throughout the room. “I miss him tremendously.”
“I am sorry, Mioreala,” I said. “If I’d known sooner maybe I could have done more, but…”
“Don’t be sorry, Lord. You’re giving my sons their lives and me a chance to see them as men,” she said smiling still. “That is far more than I had a few minutes ago.”
Dragging Peter down into my cavern with me, I quickly presented a visualization of the plateau we were on and the neighboring mountain with its infestation problem. We quickly drew a two-man plan of attack to destroy the over a hundred thousand present here and flood the cave with enough explosive energy to force a cave-in. That would hopefully completely block the entrance here, but I still knew the other side in the Sundered Realms. This wasn’t going to be easy with just two of us.
“I’m going to check on the boys,” I said and left the room. Running into their room I was immediately hit in the face by a flying pair of shorts. They hadn’t seen me come in. The crate they were packing was huge and already overflowing onto the floor. “Boys!” I called loudly. Startled, their heads whipped around to me. “Too much! Sentimental value. Memories of both your parents and happy times. Clothes I’ll get for you later. Now hurry.”
I watched them rush to the crate and upend it. They rooted through the contents and shoved a few things back, looking up guiltily. I smiled briefly that it was okay for clothes to have meaning to them, too, then turned back for the master bedroom. But Peter was there caring for Mioreala quite well without me. Talking about me. Was I really that interesting? Come on! Dad is interesting. Kieran is interesting. I’m seventeen, for God’s sake!
Sitting down on the stairs, I continued working on the shell’s complex healing magic. To make it last the total of what I expected her to need, I affixed the spells to the shell and strengthened each to last longer than a year, then layered a suppressant over that. A nutrient mixture was next, taken from the plateau so it would feel familiar to her. With a knowe-like twist relative to the shell, I pushed another set of spells just like the first, but with a thinner layer of suppressant. Here I also placed spikes of power in shapes to break open the chrysalis. Three more layers like this with successively smaller suppressant layers. The center I would have to guess at when I placed her there.