Authors: Sara King
Alaskan Fury (20 page)
The djinni was still watching her
narrowly.
Kaashifah took a moment to wrap
herself in a similar shield, then, on second thought, added a barrier of
invisibility and bullet-proofing to both of their bubbles, exclusive of
themselves. It was time, she decided, to start taking these Inquisitors
seriously. And, as a Fury, she had many millennia of stored-up seriousness at
her disposal. They would not catch her unprepared again.
“Thank you for the shield, mon
Dhi’b.” She knew he wasn’t talking about the invisibility. Blind to a
First-Lander weave, the djinni probably hadn’t even noticed.
Kaashifah grunted and made a
dismissive gesture. “It was a small thing. It takes me no more than a few
seconds to weave a shield.”
“Yes,” ‘Aqrab said softly, “but
it was a kindness nonetheless.”
Kaashifah felt her face flush and
she refused to look at him. Clearing her throat embarrassedly, she said, “The
sun is coming up. We should get moving.” She started out through the snow-covered
brush before he could dwell on her supposed ‘kindness’ and start gushing
typical lackwitted, mushy djinni sentimentality.
After a thorough search of the
area had—once
again
—revealed absolutely no trace of the path in which
her foes had taken to flee, Imelda had told Herr Drescher to take her down in a
nearby clearing and she walked in.
The first thing she noticed, of
course, was the perfectly hemispherical hill. She approached slowly, keeping
her mind open, adding up facts in her head.
Fact: She had seen what had
looked
like the djinni on infrared for a few brief seconds, right before it
disappeared.
Fact: The djinni, if that was
what it was, had been hiding under a hill shaped after a fey mound.
Fact: Something had protected
the inside of the hill, a barrier of some sort, impenetrable by bullets or
bodies.
With a sinking feeling, Imelda
got to her knees and switched on her flashlight to shine it into the hollow
inside the hill.
She needn’t have bothered. A
globe of eye-searing white light in the ceiling lit the inside of the cavern as
if by daylight. Ducking her head, Imelda crawled through the ragged hole the faespar
had made in the wall of the cavern. Behind her, Jacquot and Giuseppe took up
stations on either side of the entrance.
The first thing Imelda noticed
was the scent of cooked meat. When she squatted, she found a bloody sack
beside the coals of the creatures’ fire, the blood only then turning brown.
Trying not to consider whether the creature’s meal had been human or
otherwise—after many years at her job, and listening to Padre Vegas stories of
his
decades in the Order, Imelda had seen a good many things that would make Satan
himself weep—Imelda picked up the sack.
The fey, as annoying as they
were, rarely caused the same atrocities as the Third and Fourthlanders because,
for the most part, Second Landers were vegetarian.
Craning her neck, Imelda glanced
up at the globe of light once again. The light and the mound were identical to
dozens of fey dwellings she had seen in the past. Yet the fey despised meat. “Has
anyone tested this light?” she called through the hole in the wall.
Jacquot ducked his head through
the entry. “Our instruments say it will burn out in twelve hours, Inquisitrice.”
“What breed of magic?” Imelda
demanded.
At that, Jacquot winced. “The
instruments say First-Land, ma mie, but we will test again.”
Firstlander magics.
Practitioners of which were supposedly all long-dead. Imelda glanced back up
at the light, burning brightly despite the structure obviously being some
temporary abode. The last magus who had had the power to create such lasting
spells on a
whim
…
…was working in the basement of
the Order’s Eklutna compound.
“Spread the word,” she said
slowly, eying the light above her, “we might be dealing with a dragon.” It
would make a certain sort of sense. Different dragons had different elemental
proclivities, and they could shapeshift and disappear at whim. It would have
been easy to mistake the fires of a dragon for the inferno of a djinni.
Jacquot froze. “A
dragon
,
Inquisitrice?
But they are extinct.”
“Do you know of some
other
First-Land abomination that could create a spell of this magnitude, with such
frivolity?” she demanded. “The magi have been weakened by our conquests, their
libraries burned. Their powers are but a fraction of what they once were.
Something like this,” she gestured at the light, “in today’s day, could only be
accomplished by something with magic already naturally running through its
veins.”
The hesitation on Jacquot’s face
said that he wanted to believe anything but a dragon. A phoenix was bad
enough, but a
dragon…
The beasts had destroyed entire cities with their
rampages. The Order had histories of teams of ten dozen men dying to a man,
trying to bring one down.
“A waldgeist or a leshy,
perhaps?” Jacquot offered hopefully.
“Perhaps. But I doubt it.” The
First-Lander forest-demons were unlikely to help a djinni, given the chance,
being much more likely to avoid him. Leshy and waldgeist carried a resinous
sap for blood, which lit up like gasoline if set afire. And, while both a
leshy and a waldgeist were both known to carry clubs, a djinni didn’t bleed.
But if it wasn’t a djinni altogether, but a
dragon
…
Holy Mother, but her head was
beginning to hurt.
Squinting through the wriggling
tendrils of glass fogging the edges of her vision, Imelda glanced over her
shoulder at the place where Angus Ross had claimed to see a flash of ‘blackness
so deep it ate the light.’ Her spine was still tingling from hearing
that
bit of information. The last documented case of a void-walk had been in over three
centuries ago, by a wounded bastet. It had been found, frozen solid, in the
woods a hundred miles away, its lower legs cut off from when it could not drag
itself completely from the Void in its exhaustion.
“We have to assume we’re dealing
with something that can walk the Void,” she said, glancing again at the sphere
of light still illuminating the cavern.
“Djinn can’t walk the Void, ma mie,”
Jacquot said. “…can they?”
“They are not magi, so no.”
In the entry, Jacquot’s face went
pale. “I was afraid you were going to say that.” But he did not argue. Good
man.
Imelda examined the floor of the
cave. Most of the tracks of whatever had occupied this dwelling had been
smudged to nothingness by the repeated applications of military boots, tracking
across and through the fire, spreading ashes everywhere. There was one very
large bare footprint to one side, however, undisturbed in the turmoil. Imelda
felt her heart speed up, recognizing the print from the rite-bloodied sand of
the Yentna’s riverbank.
So. For some unknown reason, the
djinni—or whatever it was—was still wandering the First Realm.
Exhausted, Imelda crawled from
inside the cavern and allowed Jacquot to help her to her feet. Wishing she had
another cup of coffee, Imelda began a spiraling search of the hill, looking for
old dimples in the snow that would indicate the djini’s backtrail. Following
at a pace behind her, Jacquot and Giuseppe held their rifles at ready watching
the woods in constant vigil.
Though the area had been
completely trampled by her team’s feet, Imelda eventually found the path the
creature had taken to reach its den and began following it backwards, to where
it crossed a creek.
Crossed
a
creek
?
After the Chinook, most of the thin layers of fall ice that had begun forming
over the slower-moving waterways had re-melted. Frowning, Imelda looked at the
path that crossed a section of creek covered with almost ten inches of fresh
snow, almost like a bridge, with open water on either side. She squatted by
the edge of the creek and swiped the snow free with a hand.
A foot of ice lay beneath the
snow, as thick and solid as if they had been in the coldest part of January,
not late September. Frowning, she looked out over the bridge. “What kind of
djinni
deals in
ice
, Jacquot?”
Beside her, the Frenchman scowled
down at the ice-bridge. “Perhaps an ice-
démon. A
jötunn.”
Now
there
was an idea.
Large and pale, with Norse features and long blond braids, the jötnar were the Third
Lands’ equivalent to the Djinn—hyper-intelligent giants of the darkness and
cold of the nightlands, that slipped between shadows on moonlit nights and made
offerings of wealth or knowledge in exchange for a little blood to sustain them
and their weavings of seiðr.
If there was one thing that would
kill a djinni on sight, however, it was a jötunn. In the time before Christ,
the ice-giants had been deadlocked with the flame-demons for supremacy in the
First Realm, and humanity had suffered for it. Eventually, when the pressures
of the Church’s Incursions almost annihilated them both, the two had retreated
to the poles and the equator, respectively.
“Perhaps,” Imelda said, “but I
find it difficult to believe the djinni could have enlisted the aid of a jötunn.
They are at war.” A dragon was looking more and more likely by the minute.
Yet if it was a dragon, not a
djinni, why didn’t the beast simply take its true form and fly away? Or
breathe them out of the sky, when they’d been hovering overhead?
She was missing something. She
thought again of Angus’s sighting of the Void, then frowned. Why would a
djinni need to walk the Void? All he needed to do was retreat to the Fourth
Realm and stay there, and neither Imelda nor her team could follow him. If it
was a
dragon
, why was the beast toying with them, when they were so
pitifully under-equipped?
Then something else occurred to
her, something so horrible that Imelda’s gut sank in a wave of dread.
Fact: The wolf’s corpse had not
been found.
Fact: Those possessed of Third
Landers were not immortal.
Fact: For anything to have
survived that much bloodloss, that many wounds, and that much cold, it had to
be immortal.
Fact: Dragons were immortal.
Fact: Dragons were First-Lander
magi.
Fact: Dragons
delighted
in shape-shift. They were masters at it.
She turned on heel and marched
back to the mound, trailing Jacquot and Giuseppe behind her. Crawling back
inside the cavern, she switched on her light and began searching the prints
more closely, looking for something smaller amidst the trampled chaos,
something child-sized.
When she found it, Imelda stood
for long moments, eying the wolf’s boot-print with stomach-curdling dread. The
tiny print was unassuming, half-hidden by the print of one of Imelda’s men, but
it was shattering everything she knew about the world and the Order’s place in
it. First a phoenix, then a djinni, now a…what? How could this
thing
come back from the dead? She had riddled it with silver bullets. She had
felt
its dead heart in its icy neck. She had
seen
it change with a
Third-Lander’s curse.
Yet there it was, taunting her.
But if it was a dragon, why would
it continually revert back to such a tiny human form? Dragons were arrogant
and vain. Every legend told of the
beauty
of their assumed forms, the
magnificence
.
Sometimes they had left horns or scales or wings upon their down-formed bodies,
to accent their features. Small and quiet and unassuming simply didn’t fit what
she knew about dragons.
Imelda knew there was something
she was overlooking. It was nagging at her, and her gut was telling her it was
very,
very
important. The winged pendant was key, she was sure. Yet
she could no more force the information to the surface of her mind as she could
grow her own set of wings and fly to the moon.
I’m not getting enough sleep,
Imelda realized, staring down at the tiny print blindly. She knew the answer
would come to her so much easier if she could just get some
rest
, but
between scrambling to keep the Order active in the Chinook, organizing
excursions to likely homes of demons, and receiving reports of new demon-kin in
an ever-widening swath of the Alaskan countryside, she had been running on as
little as two, as much as four, hours of sleep a night.
More and more, it was looking as
if the simplest solution—her original, gut instinct—was correct. They had a
magus on their hands. Someone who could make shields, walk the Void, tap the
leys, and ice a creek as easily as if they were back amidst the Dark Ages. A
magus that could shapeshift, or at least create the illusion of a Third Lander
as it fled.
…And a magus that could possibly
summon apparitions of angels.
Which meant it had to carry
natural magic in its
blood
, rather than being the result of the arcane
dabblings of a scholar. The Church had been too successful in its cleansing of
the Realm for a magus to manifest such power on ley lines and mental acuity
alone.
So they were dealing with a
dragon? Both the dragons and the Djinn were word-weavers. It wasn’t a great
stretch to think that perhaps their similarities had drawn them together. If
the djinni had fallen in
love
with the dragon, it would explain why he
didn’t seem tied to anything physical.
Yet that still didn’t explain why
the magus hadn’t annihilated her team at their first two attempts at capturing
it, nor why it hadn’t simply ripped their helicopters from the sky in a fit of
serpentine rage.
She was missing something.
By Michael, she was tired.
Imelda groaned as the pounding in her head began to feel like shards of glass
slowly being pressed into her brain. She ducked her head, rubbing her temples
with both thumbs. Like a fool, she’d left her medicine back at Eklutna. She
opened her eyes again to peer again at the tiny footprint.
