Random Acts of Sorcery (31 page)

Things like freezing
time. Or bringing someone back from the dead by doing a local time reversal just on their body. Or turning someone into an animal, and making it so that they can change back and forth at will….

“We all use magic, but we fear Sorcery. I think it’s much the same for the Lords of Hell, though they wouldn’t admit it,” said Arrigio. He had a contemplative look on his face. “But something tells me that, with you and your witch around, our future is going to be full of Sorcery whether we choose to accept it or not.”

Sammael didn’t play golf exactly, but he liked swinging the clubs. Even if he’d wanted to keep score, it would have been difficult; the course changed too often. O
ne minute you were teeing off on a Par 3, then when the ball was in mid-flight, the hole would change to a Par 48. Trying to play through usually left the caddies dehydrated, or just plain dead, long before Hole 18.

Of course, if he had really wanted to, he could use his influence to stabilize the course, at least for a decade or two; however, he just wasn’t sure he was ready to make that kind of commitment to the sport. For now, just hitting the balls really hard and making his caddy run to fetch them was enough.

“Get me my sand wedge,” said Sammael, taking some practice swings with his driver.

“But there’s no sand,” said Andrea. In truth, she wasn’t a very good caddy.

“No sand?” Sammael explained, turning to her. “Woman, have you no eyes?”

Now, they were in a veritable desert; it was all sand traps, as far as the eye could see. Andrea barely suppressed a groan and handed him his sand wedge.

“Now now, perk up, my darling. Can you tell me why you’re out here, enjoying this beautiful day with me, when you could be in one of my classic dungeons, getting your fingernails torn off one at a time?”

“Because Cassie Tremblay spoke for me,” Andrea said with a practiced cadence. He made her repeat it at least once a day. “She asked you not to torture me.”

“That’s right! Sweet Louise, it must be a bad feeling, when the poor little girl you tried to murder is the only thing keeping you from a lifetime of eternal torment. The overpowering self-loathing you must feel every waking moment, I shudder to imagine.”

A few days ago, Andrea would have reacted to that; now, she was just numb and unresponsive. He was going to have to change up his tactics.

“Someone’s here,” she said finally, looking over his shoulder.

Sammael turned to see Asmodeus coming across the sand to join them. Sammael had never been impressed by the other demon’s fashion choices, but at least this time, he had bowed to the setting by wearing golf whites and a visor.

“If your son is ever stupid enough to come back here, I’ll personally see to it that he gets turned into a fine paste,” he called.

“Top of the morning to you to, Azzie,” said Sammael, whacking at his ball with the sand wedge. He was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to use the wedge for getting the ball off the green, but that was the fun of it, really.

Asmodeus closed the rest of the distance between them, coming to a stop just out of reach of Sammael’s club. “Of all the stupid things you’ve done for that woman, even I never would have thought it you’d do that. A Matriarchal Lineage clause? It’s an embarrassment. More embarrassing still that you’d use it to help your whelp escape.”

Sammael shrugged. “She made me sign so many stupid things before we got married, you expect me to remember every single one of them? I had no idea that contract he made was as worthless as a human’s distended gallbladder.”

There was a pause.

“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.”

“Ah, but you just did.”

“You—”

“Andrea, be a good girl and fetch me the ball, hmmm?”

Andrea sighed and began to jog in the general direction of the ball. Really, she should be pleased; not only was he allowing her to get outside, but she was getting plenty of cardiovascular exercise as well. These humans, they never knew how good they had it.

He turned to his fellow lord. “You know, if you’re that ticked off at my son, you can go to the human world and give him a piece of your mind in person. It takes preparation to get there without a summoning, but I’ve done it; it’s possible.”

Asmodeus kept his face carefully blank. Sammael gave his club a few more swings.

“Unless, of course, you don’t want to have to face my ‘whelp’ by yourself, that is.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Asmodeus snapped.

“In fact, if you really want to go, I’ll even do all the prep work for you myself! How does that sound, big guy? Want a free trip to human playland?”

Asmodeus was silent for a moment. “Watch
yourself,” he said finally.

“Hmm?”

“You think your rank protects you, and so far it has. But if all of us, together, decide we’ve had enough of your pranks, even you will be as helpless as the most pathetic thrall languishing in a filthy cell,” he hissed.

Sammael laughed.
“Thrall? Who uses ‘thrall’ anymore? Are we back in the fifteenth century now?”

“I won’t warn you again,” Asmodeus said, then turned to leave, clearly satisfied with his threat.

Sammael gently lowered his club. “Do you remember my name, Azzie? What they called me in the original Aramaic, back when the humans knew what they were going on about?”

Asmodeus paused, his back to Sammael. “
He Who Brings Death,” he muttered.

“Cross me, little Ophanim, and I bring death to all of us,” said Sammael as he dropped the ball and prepared for another drive. “Don’t think I won’t do it; you have no idea what else my wife made me sign.”

Cassie kept seeing the Leviathan in her dreams. Sometimes it was sticking its massive head out of the decorative fountain on the Las Vegas strip, sometimes it was swaying its great body in the tidal pool where she’d first seen it, and sometimes it was nowhere in particular. It never did anything but look at her, even in the most violent of her dreams, but the sight of it inside her mind unnerved her. There was an overwhelming mournfulness to it, like it was grieving for her, though she couldn’t imagine why it would.

No one needs to grieve for me, I’m alive. I did what I needed to do to survive.

She also kept having a dream where she was running after John, in his rat form, trying to get him to grade her Drama Project. He kept complaining that he couldn’t grade it while he was a rat, and she kept yelling after him while jumping over dissolving bodies in her path. Sometimes, he was in his human form, only naked, and he yelled over his shoulder that he couldn’t grade her paper because he wasn’t decent. She preferred this dream to the Leviathan series.

What she hadn’t dreamed of in a while was her grandparents’ old vacation home upstate, so it surprised her when the familiar trees came into view. Usually, it was fall when she was here, but now it was obviously spring; the leaves on the trees had fully come in, and the air had that cool, dewy softness to it of the mountains after a cleansing rain.

“Mind if I sit down?” said a voice, and Cassie turned around in her chair to see Helen. For once, the woman was wearing something instead of
one of her professional suits; a simple black T-shirt and white slacks.

Cassie hesitated for just a moment. She was about to say that it was fine, but the perceptive woman caught her instant of doubt. “I understand, this is your place, and you don’t like seeing it invaded. Come with me,” she said, extending a hand.

Cassie stood up and took Helen’s hand, and within a moment, they were on a beach. It wasn’t a tropical, tourist-friendly beach, but one that looked like a part of the estuary where Helen lived, complete with thick marsh grasses. All around them, herons and egrets were frolicking, while a cool ocean breeze made Cassie’s bangs flutter. The scent of brackish water tickled her nose.

“This is my place,” said Helen, leaning back to sit on the dune behind them. Cassie followed suit. “Like it?”

“It’s beautiful,” said Cassie. It had been the dead of winter when she’d seen Helen’s home in North Carolina; seeing it in teeming with wildlife was an entirely different experience. “What did you want to see me about?”

Helen crossed her ankles and leaned back, letting the breeze play with her shoulder-length hair.
“Just wanted to talk to you, witch-to-witch if you will. How are you holding up?”

“What do you mean?”

“It can’t be easy to have met your future daughter.”

For a moment, Cassie wondered how much Helen knew about her trip to the future,
then realized it was a silly thing to worry about.

Why not just assume she knows everything? It’s faster that way, and she usually does.

“I don’t know,” she said, hugging her knees. “It’s not that I mind that Sam and I get married and have a kid…I mean, it’s a little weird, but it’s not bad. But the fact that I know I don’t have too much longer to live is hard,” she said.

Something bothered her when she heard herself say that, and she knit her brow.

I shot Andrea stone dead, and Sam turned back time for her and brought her back to life like it was nothing. How do I die in the future if he can do that? What happens to me that’s so awful that even he can’t save me?

“Ah,” said Helen thoughtfully. “I thought you might be laboring under that illusion. Cassie,” she said, the sun reflecting off her glasses, “No matter what you saw, your future isn’t set in stone.”

Cassie was rendered speechless for a moment. “How could you know that? I went to the future, and I was dead there….”

Helen tipped her head back and closed her eyes, clearly enjoying the sea air in this world of her own making. “I know, because Corianne herself told me.”

Cassie looked at Sam’s mother, wide-eyed. Helen played with a reed between her fingers as she told her story.

“See, from the moment Sam was born, he was Wordlocked,
so he couldn’t make any knots in time for Corianne to play with. But he wasn’t Wordlocked
before
he was born, and I was pregnant with him for a solid ten months. Lazy little bastard would still be in there if they hadn’t induced labor,” she said, tossing the reed aside. “Some babies kick; late in my pregnancy, Sam would play with time. It would just be a little stutter, a second here or there, but it was enough.”

“She visited you,” Cassie said, staring at the ocean while her mind worked furiously. “She found those little knots in time and played with them, and she came to visit, because that’s what she does when she’s bored.” She looked at Helen. “That’s how you always know everything, because she told you the future.”

Helen gave a laugh that was half a snort. “Well, I don’t know everything, although she did tell me quite a bit. But one of the things she told me is that I wouldn’t necessarily meet her later on in time. She would always meet me, but I might not see her.”

Cassie felt ill. “I don’t understand.”

“She explained to me that there were different lines, and she could only play with the knots on her line; the others were too far for her to reach. Also, there were some knots that were off limits; she called them ‘scary knots,’” said Helen, her eyes lost in remembrance. “I think she intuitively knows which moments in time are too important for her to tamper with.”

“Wait…so..
.” Cassie was struggling to keep up. “There are different timelines? And the one where she’s born…where I die…might not happen?”

“That’s the gist of it, I think. Based on what she said, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a timeline where she’s born and you survive as well. But the Corianne I met, her mother was already dead. That’s why she was lonely.”

“But she came back in time, and we saw her, Sam too. How could she not be born?” Cassie said. She didn’t understand how she was feeling. She hadn’t really considered Corianne her child; the whole thing was too strange and unreal. Yet on some level, she must have accepted that the little girl that had her eyes was going to be her daughter one day. The thought that she might never see the girl again was gutting; it felt like she was grieving for a child she’d never had.

“She may be yet. Or, you may have other children who, while powerful in their own way I’ve no doubt, aren’t inclined to come back and visit you. Or none at all,” said Helen, standing up and wiping the sand off her backside. “We’re in uncharted territory now, Cassie.”

“Anything could happen,” Cassie said, feeling overwhelmed.

Helen smirked.
“No, not anything. My son will marry you, of that I have no doubt.”

“What if I don’t want to marry him?” Cassie exclaimed.

“Then he’ll be a very sad little demon indeed, and I will be very cross with you.”

Cassie scowled; that sounded like a threat. She also stood up and put her hands on her hips.

“Excuse me? You came to tell me my future isn’t set in stone, only to say that my future is set in stone?”

“I guess it is contradictory. They like to call me the Paradox Maiden for a reason, and it’s certainly not because I’m a maiden.”

Cassie blushed and looked to the side at that. Somehow, the thought of Helen and Sammael together in a loving embrace seemed particularly obscene.

“Paradox Maiden.
Virgin Witch. Silly, silly titles,” said Helen as a strong wind whipped through her brown hair. “But while I’m probably stuck with mine, yours may change. When your ancestors decide that it’s time to exert their will through you, I think you’ll be going by a different name.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something pithy, like Destroyer of Worlds. Or is that my son?” said Helen stroking her chin. “See, this is why you two have to get married. But if you’d like to play the field first, by all means, start dating some human men. My husband and I have a pool going on what animals Sam will turn them into first.”