The Demon's Revenge (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 4) (7 page)

“So we should do some kind of hungry spell?” she asked. “Is that even a thing?”

I shook my head. “No. But the Hell door will suck in the magic and energy of everything around it,” I said.

“So we should do a spell that searches for that?” She looked confused.

“Yes. Imagine a hurricane, and the dead eye at its center. That door is a hurricane in this city, but in itself it is a null place. We search for the lowest point of magic in the city, and we find the door.”

“Sort of an anti-magic spell,” Lila said. “How?”

“We’ll need….” I stood and walked to her kitchen, humming as I checked her fresh herbs, her drying herbs, and her ground herbs. A less experienced witch might need a wider palette for this spell, but I had dozens of lifetimes improvising with what was at hand, and had made spells working with far less. I was pleased to see that Lila had large hanging bundles of basil, chamomile, lavender, and mugwort. They were versatile, as were her yellow tinctures of pennyroyal and yarrow. I made a pile of ingredients on the counter, and added cocoa powder and a couple of brown eggs I found in the refrigerator.

“For binding?” Lila asked. “They’re local
—
from my neighbors who keep chickens. That will help root the spell in localization, right? The herbs are all grown in Seattle, too, from my patio and some from the farmer’s market on Broadway.”

“Excellent,” I said. It had been months since I’d offered her any instructions, but it seemed she had been learning, nonetheless.

“Should we make some kind of paste of it?” she asked, studying the gathered components of the spell’s recipe.

I looked at them as well. The magic of spells never lived in the physical elements it embodied, but in the strands of magic I wove and put into it. However, a good vessel for a spell, one that mirrored the spell’s objective, could amplify the spell. “We’ll make door cookies and bake them,” I said.

“That’s so cute,” Lila said.

I rolled my eyes, but I rather liked the idea myself.

Lila found some flour, sugar and butter, and pulled out a chipped mixing bowl. She began adding different herbs, looking at me for confirmation each time she threw in a handful of basil or some sprigs of chamomile.

“Excellent,” I said. “Trust your instincts around making the vessel. It’s an art, not a science, and you may not always have me around to help you.”

“Says the immortal,” she said as she eyed her yarrow tincture. She put in one dropperful, and then another. “Are you thinking about going on a trip? Going somewhere that no one knows you and just being chill for a while? I get that. Whatever you need to get over the Grail stuff. I get that.”

She didn’t. She couldn’t understand the weight of the years and all of my wrong decisions. I sighed and watched as she stirred it all together with a thick wooden spoon made of madrone wood.

I turned from her and walked to the window. I looked out at the weakening afternoon sun, and then closed my eyes. I turned inward as I felt the sun’s light seep into my skin. I breathed in deep and sought the magic within me that would make the spell. I drew on my wells of sadness and loss, pulling up thick skeins of them, and adding in loneliness and lethargy. The four strands stood in my mind’s eye as pieces of yarn, a useful metaphor for spell making. I pulled them together and used a series of shroud knots to tie them and interweave them so that all four strands were bound and touching each other. With my eyes still closed I tested the spell’s strength. It made me feel drowsy, maudlin, and bored. Perfect for the null spot we were seeking. Like would call to like.

I opened my eyes and slowly walked to the bowl of batter that Lila stirred, keeping my knotted magic alive and well-knit within me. Lila stepped aside when I neared. I plunged my hands into the dough, coating my knuckles and palms in the sticky batter. I let the magic throb out of me and into the herby mixture. It shone with a green light before it bound and disappeared.

“Even though I’ve seen you do that kind of thing a lot,” Lila said, “it’s still so cool that magic is real.”

She pulled out a battered aluminum cooking sheet from under her oven and we grabbed handfuls of dough and shaped them. I would miss this rooted work of making spells. I would miss teaching Lila what I knew.

I smooshed the dough onto the cooking sheet in a rough rectangular shape, and Lila did the same. I made both door cookies more symmetrical while Lila used the point of a chopstick to draw a door handle on the doors. The shapes felt good. They felt like they would take me to the door, when the time came. The oven dinged and Lila slid the cookies in.

Someone knocked on the door.

“Pizza,” Lila said.

I grabbed my wallet and opened the door.

And stood there.

And stared.

10

Lost

“Lila!” Adam said and strode past me. Lila ran toward him, and Adam grabbed her in a hug and then a kiss. He lifted her off the ground and swung her around. They laughed and looked the part of the average young couple in love, even if he turned into a vicious wolf every full moon, and she would soon change.

Behind Adam stood Merlin. My eyes swung to his, acting on their own volition. Anger, rage, and desire moved across his face before he smoothed his features into the still waters of an ancient wizard. We stared at each other. I fell into those eyes, into that place that I had returned to again and again in my life. That place that held all the love that I didn’t deserve.

“You’re back early! Yay,” Lila said, and I heard the sound of another long kiss. “Oh, and Morgan is here. Crap. Morgan, if you could not throw any wicked spells at Merlin and mess up my place, that would be great. And Merlin, if you could, you know, not attack Morgan back, that would be….” Her voice fell off as she came to stand between us.

“I won’t hurt him,” I said.

“Because today is your day,” Merlin said simply, as though the sky was blue and I was dying and both carried equal weight. He saw it. Of course he saw it.

I bit my lip and nodded. “My day,” I echoed.

“What does that mean?” Adam asked. “Are you all right, Morgan?”

“She isn’t and never will be, lad,” Merlin said. “She has done the most despicable thing a witch can. She has given up.” He strode past me into the room. I noticed a red scar across his hand. It was a scar from where I had hit him with a death spell. Odd. Our immortality should have healed it fully.

“You’re just in time for Hell-door cookies,” Lila said, trying to sound cheerful.

“Cookies?” Merlin turned and stared at me again. I got lost in it. There was a thin line between true love and mortal enemies, and Merlin and I had walked that line for far too many centuries.

I let it all go, just as I would have to let everything go today.

“Cookies,” I said and took in a deep breath and told them both about the unders causing trouble, about the Queen of Hell, and about our spell to find the door to Hell in order to close it.

“A full day,” Merlin said mildly.

I nodded. I hadn’t mentioned Lila’s episode with the patasola in Woodlawn Park, of course. Or what I truly planned on doing.

“How about you guys? Did you find what you were looking for?” Lila asked.

“Indeed and then some,” Merlin said and flashed a warning look at Adam, so swift that if he had not been my heart of hearts, I would never have noticed. What was he hiding? I itched to know, and then made peace with the fact that I never would.

“It’s good to be back,” Adam said.

Merlin added, “Your cookies smell good, but perhaps a tad smokey?”

“No! I always forget my oven heats twenty degrees over.” Lila ran to her oven, pulled a crocheted oven mitt over her hand, and grabbed the smoking cookies out of the oven. “You two in?” she asked.

Merlin nodded.

Lila cut both of them in half so there were four pieces. We each took a piece. They were bitter and dry, and I ate it in two bites. I felt nothing, and wouldn’t, until the spell cooled and coalesced within me.

Adam examined his half of the cookie. “You think the door to Hell has a doorknob?”

“You think it just slides open like at the grocery store?” Lila asked.

“I saw the door to Hell once,” Merlin said. All attention swung toward him. “It had both a knocker and a handle. That surprises all of you?”

“I think we’re surprised you’ve seen the door to Hell,” Lila said.

Merlin shrugged. He walked over to her couch and sat down. “Should I tell you the story? I think we have some time before the spell fully embeds.”

“Tell us,” I ordered.

He glanced at me and sighed. “Very well. Perhaps you will be able to relate to it. There was a time that I was lost. Lost for a long time.”

I stood in the kitchen and shifted from foot to foot. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear this story after all. For he meant that he was lost after I had left him. After I had run away from the murderous rage the Holy Grail’s water had put me in. After I had left him for eleven hundred years.

“It was my darkest time, and I was lost and looking for any meaning in the world. I was not sure I had any business still being alive at all.”

Ah. So that’s what this was. Some last hour parable about redemption meant to pull me away from my final decision. As though I was some impressionable girl who did not know my own mind. Today was a death day. Nothing would change that. I stood and walked to the window. I stared out at the clouds turning pink and blue as the sun set for one last time in the west and I listened to Merlin’s words.

I vowed not to let any of them in and change me.

11

The Realm of Shadows

“It was a dark time for me, but also a dark time in the world, full of short and brutal lives.” He paused and shook his head. “Of course, it is still those times, all across the world. I dabbled here and there and every place in all kinds of magical realms that are best left unexplored. I searched for oblivion of one sort or another. Some escape from my own misery. Some quest for my existential center. I looked in all the easy and worst places, and when one goes looking for darkness, it is ever easy to find and willing to swallow you whole. There were long months lost to spelled drugs that once taken sought to transform me into someone else. They all worked, on a superficial level, but deep down I was always and still me. I took part in rituals to banish any of the gentler emotions within me, and they worked too. For a while I was evil, yet it bored me and once again I felt the echoes of my true self, calling me back. So if I could not change myself, then I decided to leave the world.”

I nodded at him. I understood that. Not his chaotic quest, but the desire to leave.

“You decided to die?” Adam said quietly.

Merlin shook his head. “No. For even in my deepest despair, a curiosity and a desire to see what came next never left me. But I did decide to leave this realm behind and travel to a different reality. A different realm, or multiverse, as modern parlance might say. Perhaps that would be far enough to out run my…” he paused and glanced at me, “troubles.”

Adam leaned forward. “No way? The multiverse is real? My Physics prof talked about the many worlds theory and the multiverse, but it’s just a theory. You’ve traveled into it with magic?”

I found myself just as interested as Adam, despite myself. I knew little about the realms, except that when portals opened between them, what came through was rarely good. The knowledge of realms was one of the few magical things I knew almost nothing about.

Merlin nodded. “It is not easy, moving between realms, and not done without a great cost of power. There are many strange lands, some of them so similar to this one with only a few minor variations that there is a great temptation there. To do things over. To make things right. Except, of course, in those similar places there would always be another Merlin. So I traveled widely, but stayed away from those places where I might find….” He sighed and shook his head.

Where he might have found a slightly different Morgan who would not leave him without telling him why. I sighed too, and felt the pull of that halcyon thought: of going somewhere and getting to do it all over, even though I knew there was no such thing, not truly. “You saw the Hell door,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, did you actually go to Hell?” Adam asked.

“Hard to imagine you going dark,” Lila added.

“Walking in the light has always been a chosen path for me, not a reflection on the depths within,” Merlin said.

I smiled at that. It was a deep truth of both Merlin’s soul and my own. And I had loved him all the better for it, once I’d discovered, long ago, that deep down he was not some knight shining in the sunlight, but a more complex and measured man.

“As I got better at navigating through the realms, slipping in and out of different realities, a certain door kept showing up. Unlike the other portals, it showed up often and easily, and seemed to want to be opened. I was wary but interested. It was a well-made door with oiled mahogany wood, carved with a thousand symbols, and no signs of aging upon it. I did not know where it led and one day I put my hand upon the doorknob, and as soon as I touched it….” He paused and shook his head. “A wizard is sensitive to magic. I felt more power and darkness than in every other realm combined. I knew there was a place for me within, where I could shed many parts of myself and lose all of my morose and modern feelings. I felt a part of my nature rise up, long bound within me. I had finally found what I was searching for, and I wanted to go in.”