Black Coven (Daniel Black Book 2) (38 page)

“So that’s why she kept trying to get close to me,” Elin hissed. “She was trying to recruit me.”

“I’m not sure it’s that simple,” I said. “I saw part of your fight, and it looked to me like she was trying not to hurt you. But we can figure that out later. Right now you’ve got a massive headache and some kind of systemic shock I need to heal.”

“Yes, and you have a concussion and some terrible burns,” she replied. “Also, I fear I may have injured some of the guards.”

Fortunately none of the gate guards had anything worse than a broken arm, so we healed each other and then combined our efforts to patch them up. By then the whole keep was in an uproar, of course, and it took some time to get everyone calmed down and make sure the fortress was secure again. Then I had to bring the girls up to speed, and send a message to the Conclave warning them about Mara.

What a disaster. I needed to replace that amulet urgently, or I was going to be a far softer target than I’d like the next time I got into a fight. But at least I wasn’t caught completely without a portable power source. I resolved to start carrying my new gun around whether I was expecting a fight or not, and spent a few minutes modifying the enchantment on its power source so I could draw energy from it without having to take it out of the gun and hold it in my hand.

I returned from that emergency project to find Cerise, Avilla, Tina and Elin all sitting around the breakfast room table looking glum.

“Now what are we going to do?” Avilla said disconsolately. “I’m already starting to lose my grip again, and who else do we know that we can even ask?”

“I know one Conclave member who might suit you,” Elin offered. “But she isn’t going to jump into this without spending a few days considering the issue.”

“I guess we have to talk to the nymphs,” Cerise said. “But I really don’t know if we can make that work. Maybe if there’s a really young one?”

“They don’t start studying magic until they’re several centuries old,” Avilla pointed out. “Any nymph with the ability to join us will be too old for us, and unbalance everything.”

“Let’s not give up hope just yet,” I said. “I have a few ideas of my own. Elin, can I talk to you for a minute?”

Elin frowned, but rose from the table. “Of course, Daniel. Did I miss an injury?”

“No, nothing like that.” I took her back to my workroom, and closed the door. This was going to be awkward, especially considering her ideas about our respective stations. But I’d kick myself forever if I didn’t ask.

“Elin, what do you think of my ladies?”

She frowned at the unexpected question. “I’m not sure what you’re asking, sir. I rather like Cerise, although she can be unsettling at times. Avilla is a bit overbearing, and we have little in common, but she has treated me quite well. Tina is a very sweet girl, and I think it’s a good thing you decided to make her your mistress.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Cerise and Avilla may care for you, but they’re in love with each other. You need someone whose first priority will always be you.”

“Hmm. If it weren’t for the time factor, do you think we’d have any trouble finding the coven members we need?”

“Of course not,” she scoffed. “An especially independent wizardess might reject the idea, but any sensible woman would jump at the chance. The few wizards who might offer such a thing would always demand bindings of subservience, but I know Cerise designed this as a circle of equals. It’s all very romantic, actually.”

I smiled. “I see. Then I have to ask, would you be interested in joining?”

She froze, looking up at me in bafflement. “Me? I… but… please don’t be cruel, sir. That’s obviously impossible.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Why is that?”

“Sir, I do know what I look like,” she said firmly. “You deserve better than a… a misshapen abomination. Really, sir, I shudder to think what the coven bond might do to your senses if it included a binding of attraction to such a repulsive visage.

I sighed. “You haven’t had a good look at yourself since you got back inside, have you?”

I pulled out one of the little experiments I’d done in spare minutes stolen from other things. A tall mirror, clear glass backed by actual silver, which gave a better reflection than the metal sheets that were the norm in this world. I set it against the wall in a hastily conjured frame, and stepped back.

Sure enough, Elin was already staring at her reflection. Slowly, her hand rose to one of those long ears. Her new shape was alien looking, a bit close to the Uncanny Valley in some respects, but not especially repulsive. I thought she looked kind of cute, actually.

“Sure, you don’t look human,” I said. “But so what? You don’t need to. Beyond that, well, point out something you don’t like.”

“I have little fins on my elbows,” she complained immediately. “That’s absurd.”

I ran my fingers down her bare arms, and smoothed the offending features away. “Next?”

She frowned. “That doesn’t feel like it did before. I… I think perhaps I could change it back, if I so desired, but it doesn’t itch at me.”

“I thought that might happen,” I told her. “You’ve spent most of your life stuck in an unstable hybrid form, Elin. It was taking half your magic just to keep you alive, and anything I did threatened to unbalance that. But this is a real shape. Probably the closest thing you have to a natural form. So it isn’t so unstable. Now, what else?”

“Um. My hair is all scraggly. The color is actually nice, but the texture is awful.”

I combed my hands through her hair, transforming the coarse locks into a cascade of silken strands. Then I moved on to her scalp, and changed her hair follicles so it would grow that way from now on. “Next?”

She stared into the mirror with wide eyes.

“My nose is too big.”

“Next.”

“My mouth is too wide, and all my teeth are pointed.”

“Next.”

“My thighs are chunky.”

“Next.”

She licked her lips. “I… don’t have breasts, to speak of.”

I smiled over her shoulder. “I think you know perfectly well what I can do about that. Want to give Tina some competition?”

“No!” She blushed furiously. “Just, um, something reasonable? Like Cerise, or perhaps a little less?”

When I was done with that, she leaned back against my chest and gazed in amazement at her reflection.

“You can make me look like anything I want,” she said in wonder.

I let my arms slip around her waist, and hugged her gently. “Yes.”

“I might lose your work if I switch forms,” she warned. “I can feel the changes you’ve made to this shape, as deviations from the one my magic naturally wants to assume. I might be able to accept them and make them mine, if I work at it. But I can’t promise that.”

“Then I’ll change you back again, as often as you like,” I told her. “Hey, you can make an opportunity out of that. Experiment with different looks, and see which one suits you the best.”

She looked stunned. “Why… why aren’t you simply shaping me to your own taste, Daniel? If you can make me… attractive… why, you have to know I’d pay any price for that.”

“Because I want to see you comfortable in your own skin, Elin,” I told her. “It’s obvious you’ve always hated your body, although you’ve a lot less reason to now that you aren’t mixing your undine shape with grendelkin features in an effort to look human. I want to see what you settle on, if you have the chance to pick any form you want.”

“Besides, we both know you’ll end up wanting to be beautiful. What woman doesn’t? So why would I want to dictate the exact kind of beauty you settle on?”

She bit her lip, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “You really want me, don’t you? But why?”

“Because you’re brave, and tough, and absolutely brilliant, and those are all qualities I appreciate,” I told her. “You’re practical, and well educated, and somehow against all the odds you have a good heart. But do you want me?’

The tears broke free to trail down her cheeks. But her face was full of wonder.

“Yes! Oh, Daniel! I thought I’d live out the rest of my life as a hideous beast, and never even kiss a man. I’ve wanted you since our first healing session. When we started doing enchantments together it was all I could do to hide my desire.”

“It was actually pretty apparent,” I told her. “Your magic is very sexy.”

She turned in my arms, and kissed me.

She was warm and soft in my arms, but even now she held on to her self-control. Her lips brushed mine delicately, hesitant and curiously experimental. An intellectual savoring her first encounter with sensual pleasure, determined to wring every drop of novelty out of the encounter.

I pulled her in close, and kissed her back until she broke off, gasping for breath.

“You realize the coven binding will invalidate my promise to you,” she warned me.

“I never asked you to make yourself my servant,” I told her. “I’ll be happy to have you as an equal member of the coven.”

Tears still ran down her cheeks, but she was smiling when she kissed me again. “Thank you, Daniel. Yes, please, if the others will have me I will happily join you. But who will be our fifth?”

“Tina,” I told her. “She may not be a witch or a wizardess, but Bast seems to be quite grateful to the mother of her rebirth. I think she can do her part of the ritual, even if she has no idea what she’s doing.”

Elin smiled. “Good for her. It may not be a conventional choice, but I think it’s the right one.”

              Tina couldn’t read.

              This was a bit of a snag, since the vows Cerise had prepared were entirely too long to memorize easily. She’d painstakingly written out five copies of the whole thing, on the assumption that she and Avilla would eventually convince me to go through with it. But the written word was a complete mystery to Tina, to an extent I’d never encountered. In America we call someone ‘illiterate’ if the best they can do is slowly sound out words one letter at a time. Tina didn’t even know what a letter was. She actually seemed to think reading was some kind of mystical art that involved communing with paper spirits.

              But my witches had been unexpectedly enthusiastic about my suggestion of including her. They both found her adorable, and there was certainly no question about whether they could get along with her. So we weren’t going to give up that easily.

              “It’s only three pages,” Elin observed. “Couldn’t she just memorize it? I know I’ll have it down in another few minutes.”

              “Memorize it? A whole big speech? I’m sorry, Elin, but I don’t think I can do that,” Tina said.

              “That’s alright, cutie,” Cerise reassured her. “I couldn’t do it either, not without a few days to study it. Miss big brain here is just forgetting that the rest of us aren’t as smart as her. Hey, what if we pause after each line so Tina can repeat it? You can manage one sentence at a time, right?”

              “What’s a sentence?” Tina asked innocently.

              “Let’s just give it a try,” Avilla suggested, picking up her copy of the ritual. “Pretend we’re starting, and repeat what I say. We gather this night to pledge ourselves…”

              “We gather this night to pledge ourselves…”

              They worked through the first page like that. Tina’s clear, high voice echoed every word Avilla said flawlessly, even down to the inflections.

              Cerise grinned. “Sounds like that will work. Having someone out of sync will blow up the energy cost of the ritual some, but if we both use our power sources I think we can compensate.”

              “Oh, is power going to be an issue with this?”

              Elin scoffed. “Really, Daniel. I know you have limitless magic to draw on, but for the rest of us this is a very ambitious ritual. Not only are we redefining ourselves on the most primal level, but Cerise has worked a whole series of wards and alarms into the bindings to strengthen our protection against outside influence. Which, by the way, is a masterful bit of spellwork, Cerise. I’m quite impressed. But the fact remains that even under ideal conditions only the strongest of circles could complete this ritual. I’m going to be exhausted by the time this is done, and I’m afraid Tina might not be able to finish.”

              “I’m sorry I’m so much trouble,” Tina said. “Maybe you should ask one of the nymphs instead? They’re really pretty, and I’m sure they’re better at magic than I am.”

              Avilla hugged her. “No, Tina. We want you.”

              “They couldn’t do it, anyway,” Elin said. “I inherited the Spark of Prometheus with my human blood, so I can master a complex ritual in a matter of hours. But nymphs are divine immortals of Olympian descent, which means their nature is changeless. I’d be astonished if any of them could master a novel ritual on this level in less than a month.”

              Tina’s brow crinkled. “Huh?”

              “It takes nymphs a long time to learn anything new,” Avilla explained gently. “Pelagia would have to study for weeks to cast this spell. But you can do it today.”

              “Is it really that hard? It seems so simple to me,” Tina said.

              “Bast’s blessing makes it easy for you,” Avilla assured her. “For anyone else, it would be like a deaf person learning to play music.”

              “Oh. So, Elin is so smart she could learn to play the pipes even if she was deaf?”

              Elin opened her mouth, but I put my hand over it. “Yes. She’s pretty amazing, isn’t she?”

              “No wonder I can’t understand anything she says,” Tina enthused.

              “Yep. So, anyway, about that power problem. I’m thinking maybe we should do this down in the basement, so we can all tap into my main power stone. That way no one will run short of magic, and we can invest as much power as we want in each step of the casting.”

              “That’s a great idea,” Cerise agreed. “Just put some guards on the door, and make sure we can seal it from the inside. We have to strip off all our wards and open ourselves up completely to do this, and we really don’t want to be interrupted in the middle of the vows.”

              Well, that wasn’t a problem. I called a brief staff meeting to pass the word, with the leaders of the dryad groves in attendance as well as my officers.

              “I’m going to seal the door, so that it can’t be opened until we’re finished,” I told them. “But there’s a chance that our enemies will try something while we can’t respond, and the Unraveler is very good at getting into places she shouldn’t. So I need a strong guard force on the door, just in case. I also want all our forces on high alert. We can’t interrupt this ritual once we start, so if there’s a monster attack you’ll have to deal with it on your own.”

              “I congratulate you on your impending nuptials,” Pelagia said with a smile.

              “How long will this take?” Marcus asked.

              “A couple of hours, for the ritual itself. But I suspect we’ll be too exhausted to be good for much afterwards.”

              “I will stand guard, with my two strongest sisters,” Corinna announced. “We can deal with any attempt at enchantment or illusion.”

              Gronir nodded. “I’ll join them, with Gudrin. That will give us some good firepower, and the rest of the pack can patrol the walls to keep an eye out for trouble.”

              “A squad of veteran infantry will round out the guard force well enough,” Marcus added. “Force blades, shields and flamers will handle most anything, but I’ll add a couple of marksmen as well. Although if that fox comes back I want to see how it handles a cannon.”

              I winced. “You don’t want to fire one of those indoors if you can help it. The blast will deafen everyone in the room, and as strong as the walls are the slug would probably bounce around the room killing people at random.”

              Oskar cringed. “Let’s not do that, then. I’ve got a couple of men who’ve been practicing with those new ‘grenade’ things, and we’ve got a big stack of them piled up already. I’ll put them on the guard team.”

              It was close to sundown by the time we had everything arranged. I’d rather have waited until morning, but since Cerise had designed her ritual to be cast at night that wasn’t really an option. Besides, the girls had already been forced to enlist Pelagia’s help in re-casting that ritual that allowed Avilla to resist the love spell. If we waited it would wear off sometime during the night, and Avilla was terrified of what she might do if she woke up back in the grip of that obsession.

              So we trooped down to the basement after a light meal, and the girls began to prepare the room while I gave the guard team a last once-over and barred the door. I was tempted to fuse the stone together just to make sure there was no way in, but if something happened to me that would leave the girls trapped in a room they probably couldn’t break out of on their own. So I made do with weaving a curse barrier around the room, hoping that would interfere with magical attempts to open the door.

              Elin saw what I was doing, and reinforced my efforts with two spells of her own. One to freeze the door in place, and another to keep out a type of spell I wasn’t familiar with. A barrier against scrying, maybe?

              Avilla laid out a complex diagram on the floor in chalk, her hands moving with the confidence of long practice. Her magic bled into the chalk as she worked, priming it to carry our blended power. The smooth, sweeping lines were intended to help channel and contain the magic we were going to unleash here, ensuring that any backlash we might generate with a false move would be safely grounded out instead of detonating in a storm of wild magic.

While she did that Cerise made a circuit of the room, chanting under her breath in Greek. Her efforts raised yet another barrier around the room, this one a protection against intrusion by spirits.

By the time they were done I’d finished spinning a temporary extension of the power stone’s enchantment, creating five connections designed to feed a healthy but not overwhelming stream of power to a group of mages. My own connection had a master control for all the links, to adjust how much power they gave. So I connected that one first, then Elin, and then turned to Tina where she was standing in the corner with her hands behind her back.

“I’m going to put a spell on you that will give you all the magic you want,” I told her. “It may feel strange, but it shouldn’t hurt.”

“Okay.”

I attached the connection, doing most of the work for her since she didn’t really know how to draw on an external power source. She smiled.

“It’s warm,” she said. “Is this what you feel all the time? No wonder you’re so strong. It feels like you just took a big weight off my back.”

“Really?” Elin said. “Daniel, can you give her a larger flow? I think the baby may have been putting more of a strain on her than we realized.”

              Well, now that she pointed it out it did make sense that reviving a long-dead goddess might take a lot of magic. I gradually expanded Tina’s power tap, and watched carefully as the magic filled her. Sure enough, half of it was going straight to her womb. But most of what remained was immediately snatched up by something that had been woven into her aura so seamlessly I hadn’t even noticed it before.

              Tina gasped, and arched her back. “Oh! That feels really good. What’s happening to me, Daniel?”

              “I think Bast’s blessing is using the magic to get stronger,” I told her.

              Elin nodded. “Yes, I recognize some of these patterns. You’re going to be very, um, healthy.”

              “She means fertile,” I corrected, amused. What was Bastet supposed to be the goddess of, again? Women, fertility, cats and sensual pleasure, or something like that? It seemed to be covering that ground pretty well.

              “Does that mean I’ll have lots of babies? Good! I always wanted a big family.”

              I mussed her hair. “Sounds like a plan, sweetie. But first we need to get this done, and you’re not actually getting much power there.”

              She cocked her head, as if she were listening to an invisible voice. “Maybe that’s because I’m not using any right now? It doesn’t want to hurt me, or get in my way. I bet if I cast a spell the blessing will let me have the rest of that magic.”

              Cerise came over and leaned against me. “Makes sense, kitten. Why don’t you try that little bit of dance magic you did earlier, and see how it feels? Just be careful not to step on the chalk.”

              “Okay.”

              We all stepped back, and she tried a few moves. Sure enough, the drain on her magic backed off as soon as she started using it. So the blessing was consuming as much power as it could take without hurting her? Interesting.

              “How did Tina come to have such a powerful divine blessing?” Elin asked quietly. “I’ve never seen anyone with that level of favor.”

              “You remember an ancient Egyptian goddess named Bastet, who used to be a war goddess called Bast? She was dead for a long time, but she’s about to be reborn. Tina is going to be her mother.”

              Cerise laughed at Elin’s thunderstruck expression. “That’s the kind of thing that happens when you get involved with gods. Looks like it’s going to work, though.”

              “I’m done,” Avilla announced. “Check my work, love?”

              Cerise inspected the diagram with a faint smirk. “Perfect as always, honeydew. Alright, we’re ready to start. Daniel, do you mind if I lead?”

              “Go right ahead,” I told her. “Oh, here, let me get you and Avilla hooked up.”

              I established the last two power feeds, and the witches took a minute to replenish their reserves as we all settled into our places. Avilla had us standing in a circle, close enough to hold hands. Cerise was to my right, then Avilla, Tina, and finally Elin at my left.

              The ritual began with a blending of all our magics, to erect a complex warding spell around us all. It was a heady experience, feeling my power flex and slide against the auras of three powerful and attractive wielders of magic. Our powers blended together around the edges, leaking flickers of emotion from soul to soul. Affection and confidence. Shame and hope. Curiosity and desire. I wondered for a moment what they were getting from me.

              When Tina joined us her presence was altogether different. There was no hesitance to her at all. No wall around her heart, keeping others at bay. The wild magic that blossomed from her welcomed us all, singing a joyful song of love and acceptance and faith in a bright future that we would all share together. It made me smile, and I wasn’t the only one. The rough edges of our hesitant joining were smoothed away under the influence of her boundless optimism, and we spun the next step together with far less hesitation.