Plagued: Book 1 (52 page)

“So are you going to tell me what this ceremony was about?”

“Do you remember the
word
I gave to the Fetch?”

How could I forget the Fetch? “The little blue crystal thing you made it eat? Was that a
word
sort of word?
”

“Every important word has its own power and its own true form. There are many ways to manifest that power, sometimes just saying the word is enough. Look at what 'I love you' can do even without magic! My gift allows me to transform the power of words, manifest their true nature. During the ceremony, the essence of the word undergoes a metamorphosis and appears there,” he indicated the silver bowl with a turn of his head.

I stared at the bowl. “What does it form into?”

“Usually nothing exceptional. A tiny pill or shard of glass. The one for the Fetch, the interlocking rings, was unusually large. That's because 'freedom' is a long and winding spell. When I possess the
word
, I can turn it into a weapon, or a gift.”

“And you called forth a word to use against Vanessa. The word you got from the
kami
at Meiji Shrine. From Hiro.”

“I did.”

“What was it?”

He shook his head.

“Come on Julian,” I said in a cajoling voice. “You can tell me.”

“You wouldn't want to know.” He drank his tea and said nothing else for some time.

“I got something as well.” Slipping my hand in my pocket, I held out the full moon medallion.

His mouth fell open.

“It came from a feather. Isn't that crazy?”

His eyes stretched wide, looking from me to the medallion.

“I'll, um,” he cleared his throat. “It's, that's a, a....” He stared at it again, reaching out to stroke the shiny metal with his fingertips. He seemed completely overwhelmed.

I raised the medallion up to the candle light. “Pretty, don't you think?” And it was. Like something you'd find at a craft fair, all boho-gypsy looking. “Can I keep it?”

“The object came for you. Not me.”

“Cool. Like a 'but wait, that's not all' Home Shopping Channel extra from your spell?” The feather, soft and silky under my bra, I said nothing about. It was just a feather, after all. A souvenir of this strange encounter.

Setting down the cup of tea, he covered my hand holding the medallion with both of his. “Don't make light of this. Something is moving behind the scenes. Watching us. I didn't just
know
you needed to be here, someone told me.”

“
Who?”

He hesitated and I thought, '
he's not going to say
'.

“
Hiro told me.”

“At Meiji Shrine?”

“No. He showed up floating outside my window the other night, while you were in the hospital. Said when I called for the
word
, you must be near. And that's all.
This
,” his hands squeezed mine harder, “is unexpected and I don't know what it means exactly. To you. To us...”

His voice had an odd quality to it, hollow sort of. The little buzz connecting us gave me a sudden insight. “You're scared.”

His eyes met mine with burning intensity, the connection turning physically painful. I pulled my hand away.

He picked up his tea again, his hands trembling ever so slightly. “I will give you some spoken
words,
well, short phrases to use. The only ones I have without doing some very extensive research which we don't have time for. We will try them in Greek, Latin and Celtic and see which is the best fit for you to invoke their power.”

“
Word
words?”

“Yes. Each can be used only once with the moon pendant, as far as I know.” His green eyes glittered as they met mine. “This is not a talisman, Alexandra, or a good luck charm. The pendant is a weapon. You kill with
it
.”

It was my turn to stare at him, open-mouthed.

Chapter 35

Intervention Blues

Dad walked out with my cell phone, locking the door behind him.

This was not good. I had only a few hours to get to the rendezvous with Julian and then to our confrontation with Chen. Dad had chosen this day of all days to stage an intervention.

The ceremony had taken much of the night – though it seemed to me like only minutes passed. Julian and I fell asleep, slumped against one another around dawn. I'd just come home to change into something more battle worthy than school clothes. Dad was waiting; he should have been at work.

“Who was that guy I saw you with?” was the first thing he said as I walked through the front door. He had his arms crossed over his chest and looked very angry. Very un-Dad like, in fact.

I looked back at him, totally perplexed. “What guy? Where?”

“The boy, man, hair.” He made some vague motions with his hands around his head. “That
hair.
Tell me it was dyed and not really gray and he isn't in his fifties.”

Crap, I thought with a flash, he meant Julian. He'd seen me with him. In fact he had
seen
Julian clearly enough to pick out the color of his hair. Julian's magic was supposed to prevent that, or so I thought.

“Not gray,
silver
. And he's...” Crap, how old
is
Julian? “Uh, eighteen, not fifty. Jeez Dad, what are you thinking?”

He followed me as I walked to my room to set down my cell phone and hand bag.

“You were holding hands with him outside the building the other day.”

“I didn't see you.”

“I didn't want you to.”

“So now you're
spying
on me?”

“What do you expect? You spent a week in the hospital. You stay out all night. The school says you may not get into twelfth grade because you cut so many classes. You are out of control, Lexie. Is he the one giving you drugs?”

“Drugs. You think I'm on drugs? Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

“How else to explain how you've been acting? The mood swings, the anemia.”

“I don't do drugs. I have never done drugs unless you count ibuprofen, which I hardly think I misuse, or stuff for cramps. I don't smoke –
anything
,” I added with emphasis. “I admit I drink a little, but I do not get drunk. You know how easily I throw up. Julian would never give me something bad.”

“I saw him give you a tube of something. You swallowed it.”

He'd seen me take the potion. When was that? I had to think pretty fast. “He's all into holistic medicine. You know the Brits. It was a natural supplement, I told him about the anemia.”

“He's not from your high school.”

“No, I met him, um, through friends.” I'd awoken nearly naked in bed with him after those friends had ripped out my soul. There was no way Dad needed to know that or I wanted to tell him. Jeez, he'd think I really was on crack.

“Where are you going?” He demanded.

“I have to go out again. This isI important.'”

“Are you going to meet him?”

“Yes, no. What does it matter? Dad, he is
so
not the bad guy in my life.”

“And I am? Have you made love to him? Or should I say, had sex with him?”

“How can you ask me that?”

“Who else but me? God, at least tell me you used protection!” He waved his hand as though to silence my objections. “You're staying in for now. I have to run to the office and pick up some work. I'll be back and we can talk more.”

Snatching the cell phone from my desk where I'd set it, he closed the door, locking it from the outside with a key. I didn't even realize my door had a lock feature to it. Or maybe he had this put in especially for me. Unbidden, a scene from an old British TV series I'd rented after our transfer to Rome
flashed into my mind.
In it, the future emperor's mother walled up his sister in her own room and let her starve to death rather than watch her bring more shame upon their family. The walls were closing in. I kicked desperately and futilely at the door again and again before I calmed down. My room didn't open onto the terrace and we were five floors up. I looked down at the door where I kicked it.

Oh my. Well,
that
was coming out of the deposit.

If I had my phone, I could call Taka and he could magic me out. I tried opening the window and shouting his and Hiro's name just in case they were listening. I mean, who knew
how
kami
hearing worked, right? Unfortunately, they both must have been busy doing something else because no CG gorgeous Japanese elemental gods popped up outside my window to magic me away. However, I did see someone almost as good. Tina, our maid.

“Tina! Tina!” I shouted, waving a T-shirt out the open window to get her attention. “Up here! I'm locked in!”

A few minutes later I heard sounds from the hallway. Hopefully not Dad. Tina had her own key.

“Miss Alexandra?”

“Tina!” I pounded on my door. “Tina, help! The lock broke or something,” I lied. “I don't know what happened. Could you get Mr. Walters to call the caretaker and get a spare key to let me out?”

“Just a moment, I will go now.”

Today was Tina's afternoon at the Walters as it turned out and just pure luck I'd seen her come in the way I did. A short time later, lots of lies, a few apologies and heartfelt thanks after the caretaker managed some magic of his own with a lock pick, I was free. Out the building's front doors I ran, my feet pounding down the street as fast as I could go. There were still a lot of miles between me and our meeting point farther down the coast from Tokyo. Julian was going to wait for me on the train platform at Yokohama Station. From there, we were heading to the American Naval Base at Yokosuka. Dashing for the express, I caught it by the skin of my teeth and the tail of my shirt, which a nice man helped me tug out of the door.

Sitting on the train as it rattled and rocked along the tracks past factories and train yards near the bay, I couldn't help reflecting on this devious streak that had surfaced in my nature. Was my mom like that? Lying to Dad, lying to me, lying to both of us every time she said, “I love you.”

Becoming like her was not who I wanted to be. Clutching the moon medallion, I felt I didn't know who I was anymore.

Chapter 36

Spelling Match

At the rendezvous point later that day, the Club was waiting with a counter proposal to our hostage exchange deal.

Rather a lot of proposals in fact. Some had wings, some had tails, a couple had both. There were humans as well. At least they looked human on the outside. Though that didn't mean as much as it once did.

We'd come to the prearranged place, the American Naval Base dockyards, slipping through security cloaked in shadow, riding in the back of a delivery truck. No big ships tied up tonight at the massive berths on this side of the dockyards. All the activity seemed centered some way off. Buildings, storage sheds and warehouses, all deserted. A scattering of overhead lights left on.
Above us a flock of crows circled, watched warily by the local sea gulls.

Nobody jumped at first. They saw us, we saw them. It was sort of like a Japanese samurai movie. Or maybe Power Rangers. Everyone seemed to be waiting for an unseen cue before flashing into action. Julian gave my arm a squeeze, then brought his hands up in front of him, his long, expressive fingers spread wide, the metal hexagram from his battle with the Kiros held in one hand. He was as armed and dangerous as any soldier with a gun, I knew. I gripped my own little talisman, repeating the words from Julian in my head. Four phrases, that was all he could give me. Each could be used only once. He decided Latin was the best fit for the resonance of my voice and character. Whatever that meant.

We also had the bulky leather case from his apartment. His “insurance,” he called the thing. It weighed heavily across my chest, the shoulder strap cutting into my skin even through the thick hoodie. Every so often the sides
thumped
very suspiciously.

T
he darkness closed in, taking shape and form on the edge of my vision. The
other,
making my skin crawl as though skeleton fingers caressed my flesh. We stood in the checkerboard of light and dark from the port spotlights. Standing like chessmen carefully placed upon a broken and scarred playing board. Who was a pawn and who was a knight? And who was moving us around? Whether it was the hand of God or the devil, I didn't know. There was an utter alienness to what was happening. I didn't belong here. My world was one of light, of hope.

There was no hope in this place, only terror and something worse than death. I wanted to run away, screaming. What was the use? The darkness would only run faster, catch, and kill me. Might as well go down fighting.

Overhead, the strings of lights on the dock flickered. I could feel Julian drawing power to him, wrenching it from the earth, the air, as he called on all the souls he had consumed. Hissing and sparking, tongues of energy licked out, shooting up to touch the transformers and overhead lines. A seagull flew too close, flared, and dropped to the broken pavement where it lay still.

Albert leaped down from the top of the nearest warehouse, landing lightly on his feet. Somehow, my fight had become his as well. Two supernatural men willing to put their lives on the line for one very non-supernatural girl. Tail lashing, he crouched low, looking very much like his family's panther namesake. His teeth seemed bigger, sharper. The long knives shot out into his hands from the triggers hidden beneath his sleeves. There was a roll of thunder and part of me thought, how appropriate to the drama. The heavens opened and the rain poured down in torrents. lightning flashed, real lightning, quite close by. With a very 'Albert' sort of wink at me, he leaped for the demons.

And so it began.

Julian shielded me, throwing magic spells like fighting stars, his hexagram burning through the darkness with an incandescent light. The pain in my heart flared up again and I felt the familiar wave of vertigo. '
No, not now!
' I pleaded silently. Julian had given me one of the ornate crystal vials a few minutes before, filled with his potion and twice the size I normally drank, warning me to use it sparingly. Breaking the vial's seal, I pulled off the stopper and ignoring Julian's advice to take just a tiny amount at a time, swallowed the whole thing straight.

The energy from the potion surged through me. A jolt of electricity singing along every nerve. The pain and much of the fear vanished before I even finished swallowing the thick, sweet mixture. Back-to-back I stood with him, holding the moon pendant before me, the silky white feather still tucked into my bra, over my heart. I hadn't showed it to Julian. His news about the killer pendant and practicing the phrases had sort of pushed it out of my mind.

Three winged demons swooped in from above. I shouted the first phrase of power, “The Burning Death.”

“
Igneus nex!
”

A flash of white light shot from the pendant directly into the demon's path, engulfing all three in blue flame. Screaming horribly, they spiraled down to crash in a twitching heap not more than three feet away.

Howling a battle cry, two goblins leaped to take their place. The second phrase came nearly unbidden to my lips, such was the power of the potion. Speeding up my reflexes both physical and mental. Magical steroids. Shouting the words, I watched as the goblins flared like well-oiled torches in mid-jump. Unfortunately the spell affected neither their speed nor trajectory – they kept coming straight at me. Crouching, I prepared to dodge out of their path when Albert barrel rolled into them, scattering the creatures like pins in a bowling alley strike, heedless of the flames.

“Atta' girl Alexandra! Kick their asses!” he shouted in what I thought was a
much
too cheerful voice. Spinning around, knives flashing silver in a sudden flare of lightning, he met the head-on attack of something furred running on four legs.

Behind me, I felt Julian's position shift. With a quick look over my shoulder, I saw him grappling with the stuff of nightmares. Several nightmares maybe. It was difficult to tell where one began and the others ended. There were already a lot of bodies on the pavement. Two humans were closing in on Albert, they must be Soul Eaters.

A spurt of blood arced high into the air as Julian drew his knife across the throat of whatever he was fighting. One of the Soul Eaters slipped under the swing of Albert's blade to send a black curse written on the wind in our direction. The deadly words flew straight at Julian, tearing up the ground in great gouges of jagged tarmac. It caught Julian squarely in the chest, throwing him onto his back. Though only the tiniest edge of the spell flicked me, it still packed enough paranormal punch to send me up in the air like chaff in the wind. Julian's case served both to break my fall and sorely bruise my ribs. A spine tingling growl came from inside. No time to think about that now.

The Soul Eater howled in triumph and leaped at the two of us. Though he must have been moving at near superhuman speed, my potion-enhanced senses slowed him down so he appeared as a series of afterimages moving slowly, one after the other. Shoving the case to the side and flipping onto my stomach, I thrust the pendant forward shouting the third curse, believing in the words as Julian had told me to. Believing with all my heart and whatever tenuous hold I still had on my soul. My desire to protect Julian seemed to ignite the very air around me and I glowed with golden flames.

All his attention focused on Julian, the Soul Eater did not even see my curse coming.

“
Perspicuus nex!
” I screamed, the words of bright death burning my lips.

The lightning ball engulfed the Soul Eater. He stood there, his curses turning to screams as his clothes and hair and finally his skin started to peel away from the otherworldly flames. Julian recovered and clutching his talisman, wrote something in the air between them. The
spell
rushed at the flaming Soul Eater and I looked away, hearing only a terrible squelching sound. At least the screaming stopped. Another human moved in to take his place and Julian ran to block his attack.

Pulling myself to my feet, I stood, for a moment isolated, the battle raging on around me.

“Now I have a pawn of my own,” a familiar voice whispered in my ear.

Vanessa seemed to appear out of thin air, grabbing me before I could make a move. Her grip was like iron and though I twisted and turned, I couldn't break it. She slapped me hard with her other hand and I tasted blood on the inside of my cheek. In a flash, she twisted my arms behind me at an agonizing angle. I cried out in pain. Ripping the moon disk from my grip; she gave a surprised screech and threw the medallion from her as though it was on fire. For a moment she stared at me in surprise before turning away to bark commands in some harsh language, calling to a pack of gibbering goblins. They swarmed down from the roof of a nearby shed, quickly surrounding us.

I still had the heavy case over my shoulders. This certainly seemed like an emergency. Unfortunately, with my arms twisted around, it was impossible to flip open the locks. She shoved me forward towards the dockside and the water. Maybe there was a boat waiting.

Albert ran to the goblins surrounding us, cleaving one right in two. The halves twitched spastically, blood pooling on the cement.

Vanessa snarled something at her slaves. One of the goblins stepped in to take me and she threw herself at Albert and his double daggers. A flash of silver caught the light as she pulled a sword from a scabbard strapped to her back. The clash of metal on metal sent sparks shooting out as their blades struck. They hurled curses at each other as well, the
words
sharp and stabbing. Lightning flashed and I could only stare at this nightmarish scene of blood and peril.

Albert's tail snaked out, wrapping around one of Vanessa's ankles. With a tug he pulled her feet from under her and she fell hard onto the concrete. He raised his knives to plunge into her chest. Slipping into the super speed of between-time, one of the goblins threw itself over his mistress. The blades sliced into flesh and it screamed. Vanessa pushed the goblin from her, higher onto Albert's knives while simultaneously twisting herself out and away. Her sword swept out, a bright blur, to chop at the Daemon's tail. Too late. Albert had already sprung away. Vanessa launched herself into the air and they flew at each other like eagles locked in aerial combat.
Slipstreaming
between time, a hundred strikes of their swords lasting only as long as the blink of an eye. Only my blood-enhanced senses let me see what was happening.

As Albert touched ground, another goblin tried to creep in and take him from behind. The Daemon threw himself effortlessly into a backflip, slicing it to ribbons. Springing up and back, he twisted in midair as though earth's gravity had no hold on him, to face Vanessa again. His barbed tail whipped in and out leaving a jagged cut across the length of her forehead. She howled in anger.

The goblin kept shaking me like a cat does with a rat while I purposely dragged my feet, hoping to slow us down. We were still edging slowly towards the dock side. He smelled awful, like rotting meat, and I gagged. Most of his attention was focused on his mistress as she battled Albert. Vanessa screamed and I took that moment to fall to my knees, catching the goblin off guard. Somehow, I managed to pull an arm free. I forced open one of the locks on the case and had almost gotten the second latch when the goblin snatched my wrist. Swinging me around by my arm until I thought it would pull right out of the socket, he threw me across the tarmac. I landed badly; skidding across the rough surface of the road, coming to a stop on my side and sobbing from the pain. It was a moment before the world swam back into focus. The case had slipped off over my head and fallen nearby, just out of reach.

The goblin approached, its long arms dragging on the ground, the claws scraping gouges out of the tarmac. Between us lay the case. As I watched, the leather bulged out as though being pushed from the inside. It bulged again, farther this time. Lightning flashed and in the momentary burst of brilliance, I quite clearly saw a long set of claws attached to a paw emerge from the narrow opening swiping frantically at the button for the other lock. Quite suddenly it gave, the top popping open. Spitting fury emerged, clawing and screaming at the goblin in front of me. Vanessa's slave went down like wheat to a scythe. Two more goblins turned to give battle. They fell nearly as quickly. The thing, whatever it was, stood on their bodies and howled. It looked bigger than a lynx, very cat-like with a snub-nosed snout and long tail. How could it have fit inside the confines of the case? It turned towards me and all I could see were teeth.

I had a perfect moment of clarity then, when everything seemed to slow down, like when the Soul Eater attacked.

Julian's voice came from quite near shouting, “Hex, no!”

Albert looked over, just for a millisecond to meet my eyes. He was smiling, no, laughing, I think. So very Albert.

In that moment, Vanessa took the advantage, her sword striking at paranormal speed. She thrust the point deep into his chest.

Albert gasped.

I was already on my feet. Vanessa raised the sword again. Running by the demon cat-thing, heedless of fang and claw, I tackled her from behind, screaming almost as fiercely as the creature that gutted the goblin. Punching and clawing, I attacked her with a fury I didn't know I possessed. Perhaps it was the blood from Julian empowering me. Anger burned through my body. I had to keep her from hurting Albert any more. Ripping and tearing, I bit her on the throat like an animal and tasted her blood.