Enchantress Under Fire, page 20
part #4 of Arcane Artisans Series
Fael blew out a slow breath. “I take it it’s not working.”
“I think it is,” I said, “in small amounts. The people he’s sacrificing are the most powerful he has access to, but they aren’t strong enough. They can only heal small areas of magic. To complete his plan, he needs someone stronger.”
“Which is why he’s hunting for certain people so intently.”
“Yes.”
“Would those ... certain people have a reason why they shouldn’t be sacrificed? It sounds to me like it’s a choice between a few lives, and the end of the world.”
“There’s another way,” I said. “I’ve seen it work. With enough enchanters working together, we can enchant the magic itself, force it back into balance, without anyone having to die. Not us, and not the Voids.”
Fael swallowed. “This is more than I bargained for.”
“Welcome to having magic.”
“If I help you, they’ll kill me if they find out.”
“They will,” I admitted. “But you have a choice, Fael, and we both know which one you’re going to pick. You’ve just had your first taste of killing someone. One side wants to do more of that. A lot more. The other side never wants anyone to use magic that way again. Which team do you want to play for?”
I stared back at him, unmoving, as his inner debate played out in his eyes. But then, he’d reached his decision when we’d first found the tortured Voids. This was just the aftermath, the settling of his new mindset.
His eyes closed. “It’s really not a choice, is it?”
“No,” I said quietly. “It’s not.”
Heaving a deep sigh, he opened his eyes. “I want to see proof your solution will work. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m really not okay with accidentally contributing to the end of all life on Earth.”
“I understand. I can show you, when we have enough privacy.” I tried to smile. “It won’t end that way. I promise.”
“You’ve got major self-confidence if you think you can make a promise that big.” He paused, then looked around. “Although, you’re here, so I guess that’s proof enough that you’re baked with self-confidence. How many others have you already recruited to your side?”
“You’re the first, actually.”
“... is it too late to take back my application?”
“Yes.”
“Damn.” Fael managed a weak laugh, and that was when I knew I truly had convinced him.
We walked back to Vince’s body. A light breeze had kicked up, blowing some leaves over the corpse. “We should bury him under the horseshoe pit, where they’ve put the others.”
“Won’t they dig him up when they bury someone else?”
“We aren’t going to let them bury anyone else. Come on, I think there must be a shovel in the utilities building.” We crossed through the leaves once more, retracing our steps to the makeshift prison “Everything is coming together, soon. I can feel it. Geralt is getting hastier, talking about his plans to the whole Family, keeping everyone inside the compound, capturing Voids to try to cancel out some of the magic gathering around us.”
Fael startled. “Did that work? Did we make things worse by freeing them?”
“No. In fact, it seems like magic is less volatile without the Voids trapped here.”
“So the Mentor was wrong.”
“It’s not the first time. But even without the Voids, the problem keeps growing. Geralt is getting desperate. He’s going to make some sort of big move, and I need to be ahead of him when he does.”
“How?”
“Recruiting you was the first step. We need to spread word of this, of what he’s doing to his own people. Then we need to make everyone understand that there’s an alternative. As for figuring out what Geralt is planning, I’m hoping I can win the trust of someone in his inner circle. Not the people who’ve been with him for years, but the locals who joined the Family a year ago. This isn’t what you signed up for, and I’m betting most of them will feel the same way.”
“Um ... might be a little too full in the self-confidence department. Haven’t you noticed the way people look at the Mentor? Didn’t you listen when I told you the Family was the best thing to ever happen to me? People are scared, and this place is their shelter. What makes you think you can break them out of that mindset?”
“Because I’ve broken out of it myself.”
“But don’t you think the Mentor might notice if someone joins his Family, then suddenly starts making powerful friends with access to all his secrets? And he might start to think, ‘Gee, I wonder if this could possibly be Ad–’”
“Don’t say that name,” I said sharply.
Fael dropped his gaze. “Sorry.”
We reached the utilities building. I pulled the door open and let us both into the stuffy interior. “I know it’s ambitious. And risky. Really, really risky. But the problems with magic keep getting worse. Geralt is starting to get desperate. That makes him more dangerous, but it also makes him more likely to make mistakes. More likely to overlook things that otherwise would catch his attention and make him suspicious. When you’re drowning and the universe throws you a rope, you grab it, without bothering to check if it might be a snake.”
“Or a magically enchanted lariat wielded by a boatman with great organizational skills.”
“And good timing,” I added. “I didn’t thank you for saving my life.”
“Yeah, well ... don’t make me regret it. And maybe let me win tonight at our game.”
“Tell you what. We’ll both pick each other as allies. Then we can both win.”
“My tremendous intuition tells me that was a metaphor.” He reached behind the control panel for the generators. “And also that this is a shovel.”
“Good. We should do this quickly and get back. People will start wondering what we’re doing out here together.”
“No offense, but I’m too old for you, and you’re not really my type.”
“That’s fine. You can be my lovable and witty father figure.”
“Okay, smart-aleck, I’m not that much older.”
We left the building and returned to the horseshoe pit. Fael started digging, while I tried to wipe the blood off the cut on my neck. I’d need to cover that until it healed, to avoid questions.
“Marcela,” Fael called quietly.
I stepped up to look down at the half-dug hole.
A human hand was sticking out of the ground at the bottom of it.
My eyes closed. It was one thing to know I was right about the missing enchanters. It was another to see proof before my eyes. A lump formed in my throat. The temptation came to push my revulsion away, to refuse to let this hurt me. They were only fleshwriters, I thought. They’d probably have been killed by your own people in battle eventually. But they were still people, still victims of the cult.
I chose to feel for them.
“When this is all over,” I said, my voice rough, “we’ll try to identify the victims. If they have families, we’ll see they get closure.” A few tears pricked my eyes. I let them.
Fael was watching me closely. He gave a small, respectful nod, and shoveled dirt back onto the dead hand.
Chapter 20
A COUPLE EVENINGS LATER, I lay sprawled on my bed, struggling to concentrate on a book from the lending library. My neck injury was bandaged and covered by my black turtleneck t-shirt, one of several high-necked shirts I could wear in rotation until the wound healed. My hairbrush had been sitting on my bedside table for hours, but Kendall had yet to appear. Worry had begun churning my gut, disagreeing with the curry we’d had for dinner.
I tried again to read the next page of the murder mystery I’d checked out, and again the words blurred before me. Instead I glanced toward the tree branch outside, hoping to see a flash of fur. My neck twinged with the movement.
If I was uncomfortable, Fael was twice so. He lay on the gold and red carpet beside the bed, out of sight from the balcony door. Throw pillows from the armchair propped him up as he thumbed through a sailing magazine for the third time. Like me, he wasn’t really reading. He kept staring off into space, rainclouds in his eyes.
I resisted the urge to ask if he needed another pillow or something. No doubt Kendall watched from the trees for a long while before any visit, ensuring I was alone. If I started chatting it up, she wouldn’t make an appearance. A glance at the clock made me stifle a groan. It was almost ten. She might not be appearing at all. If that was the case, I’d stay up the rest of the night worrying. Again.
Fael gave his head a forceful shake. “I’m losing consciousness here. I should warn you, I snore. Really loud. Is your friend coming or not?”
I glanced again at the window. “I don’t know. Probably not. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
“You said that yesterday.”
“I know.”
“Someone is going to notice this pattern.”
“I know.”
Fael stood and cracked his back. “If this goes on much longer I may die of boredom.”
“That’s what she said,” announced a voice from the balcony. Both of us jumped.
A very naked redhead swiped the cover off the bed and wrapped it around herself. “Hi, I’m Kendall,” she said, sticking one hand out of her cocoon to wave.
“What are you doing here?” I hissed, horrified.
“Uh, you were waiting for me.” She pointed at the hairbrush on the nightstand.
“Yes, but what are you doing here now, once you saw someone else is here? He could be one of Geralt’s minions for all you know.”
“See, I actually thought that at first, because you two were just sitting in here not talking and pretending not to see each other. And I thought, that’s really weird, and not like Adrienne at all. I better wait and make sure everything’s spiffy. When you guys went and did the same thing again tonight ...”
“You’ve been watching us for two nights?”
“Shut up, I’m telling a story. When you guys went and did the weird not-talking thing again, I figured, okay, this guy is definitely not on the up-and-up. I was about ready to go tell Yvonne she needed to come in here and muscle you out of prison or whatever, when suddenly you two start chit-chatting like college dorm mates, and I realized, oh, he’s a friend, and Adrienne probably wants me to meet him. What the hell took you guys so long to start acting like normal people?”
Fael was staring at me, one eyebrow raised. I felt my face warm. “Not a word,” I told him.
“I didn’t say a thing.”
“You were not saying it loudly.”
Kendall’s nose wrinkled. “Oh, is this one of those things where you thought you were being all subtle and sneaky, and I totally saw through it from the beginning, and your attempt to be clever actually made you look really silly and wasted everyone’s time?”
“That’s exactly what this is,” said Fael.
“Yeah, she is so bad at overthinking things.”
“I’m noticing that.”
“Knock it off, both of you,” I said, “before I regret introducing you. Kendall, this is Fael. Fael, Kendall Snarkyface.”
Fael crossed the room and shook Kendall’s hand. “That’s your real surname?”
“Yup. We have a proud and long lineage dating back to the plague, we Snarkyfaces.”
“Is your middle name really Kyckass?”
“No, that was just a joke. It’s actually Awesomesauce.”
A grin split Fael’s face. “I like you.”
“Thanks, I like me too. I take it you’re the new convert to our let’s-maybe-not-murder-everybody party?”
His cheeks lost some color, but he nodded. “That’s me.”
“Cool beans. Then you can hear my exciting news.” Turning to me, Kendall said, “We’ve got it.”
“Got what?”
“The Macguffin of Ultimate Destiny that you need to defeat the Dark Lord at midnight. What do you think? We’ve got a plan to get you into Geralt’s good graces and earn his trust.”
I blinked. “You came up with a plan for that? How? Why?”
“You asked me to.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Sure you did, weeks ago. You said you needed a tracker to find that Void chick, unless we could come up with a plan to get you into Geralt’s inner circle. Well, we already rescued the Void chick, but we have a plan for you to win Geralt’s trust anyway.”
My thoughts raced along this new track. “That would help us stay ahead of any moves he makes against the Underground. It might also help me figure out which people in the Family are most likely to join our side, if Geralt talks about his followers behind their backs.”
“I bet he totally does. Dude’s probably a grade-A gossip. Anywho, want to hear the strategy?”
“Yes.” Despite the late hour, my adrenaline pumped at the prospect of a shortcut in my plans.
Kendall leaned forward. “You know Taevas?”
“The bird shifter mob boss?” Fael asked. When we both looked at him, he shrugged. “I read the reports that cross my desk. The Family is hunting for him, ever since he failed in some project for Geralt.”
“Yes, him,” said Kendall. “That project he failed to complete was capturing us.”
“Oh,” said Fael. “That would do it.”
“What about him?” I asked. “You said he was hanging around the city, but nobody was quite sure why.”
“We know now. Apparently since he’s a screw-up in Geralt’s eyes, he’s decided his best bet is to turn fully against the fleshwriters.”
“He joined the Underground? Did he go to Yvonne?”
“Nope.”
“Don’t tell me he sided with the vampires.”
“Nope. He’s apparently decided his best option is to wage his own private little war against the cult. His birds keep stalking cult members through the streets, reporting to Taevas about what the fleshwriters are doing. Then Taevas offers that info to us for sale. I assume he’s double dipping with the vampires, too.”
“He’s ... he’s war profiteering?”
“He told Yvonne and Maribel that he’s making it about business in case the cult wins. Then he can say he wasn’t personally against Geralt, that it was just for money.”
I rubbed my forehead. “He’s an idiot.”
“Desmond told him the same, and so did Maribel, actually. I guess Geralt heard about this little business venture, because a handful of fleshwriters out in the city have started taking out bird shifters. Just sniping them out of the air with magic, or sometimes bullets. They’ve probably killed dozens of actual birds, too.”
I glanced at Fael, who shrugged. “I haven’t heard about this.”
“Which means Geralt’s keeping it to his top people,” I reasoned. “Probably doesn’t want word spreading that more paranormals are turning against him.”
Kendall nodded. “Anywho, Taevas came back to the Underground demanding we go all-out fighting against the cult, trying to avenge his people. Of course we said no, they kicked our asses last time we tried that, and doing it again was a stupid plan. So he said he was taking things into his own talons.”
My eyes closed. “My team leader was ambushed by birds. None of us knew why. Geralt tried to pin it on me, actually. The real me, not my persona. But I guess even then he knew the real cause of the attack and was just trying to cover it up. What does Taevas think he’s doing? He’s going to get all his people killed and accomplish nothing.”
“That nutcracker should have taken your alliance offer when he had the chance,” Kendall said, shaking her head.
“Hawks don’t eat nuts.”
“And isn’t that species-ist?” asked Fael.
“I’m a squirrel, I can say whatever I want about nuts.” Kendall retorted. “Anyway, Taevas is planning an attack on Geralt’s stronghold. You know, here. He contacted the Underground asking us to basically storm the fortress, but Yvonne said it’s too dangerous. Desmond and Maribel agreed with her.”
“They’re smart,” I said. “This compound is huge. They’d get bogged down in little skirmishes with individual fleshwriters and give Geralt and the magical heavyweights time to plan a counterattack. We can’t risk that unless we have enough people working with us on the inside.”
“That’s what we tried to tell Taevas,” said Kendall. “But he’s doing it anyway. Says he’s just going to take out as many people as possible. That’s your chance to earn Geralt’s trust. You’re going to see the attack coming and capture Taevas before he manages to kill anybody.”
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. I’m not handing anyone over to Geralt.”
Kendall huffed. “I told Desmond you’d say that. Look, Adrienne, this is a guy who tried to sell you out. When that failed, he tried to kill us. He’s lost all sense of direction now, and he’s literally throwing himself into the heart of danger. It’s like he wants to be caught. You wouldn’t just be winning Geralt’s trust, you’d be taking an unpredictable element off the field. The Voids and the rest of us would thank you. We’ve all been living in fear of him doing something stupid and forcing us into open war with the fleshwriters.”
“Something like assaulting the Family in their own home,” Fael murmured.
“Exactly.”
Fael looked at me. “It does make sense.”
My shoulders slumped. How many more moral lines would I have to cross to stop this? It was easier when I could rationalize it all away for the greater good. But I couldn’t close off my heart again. It was too big a risk.
Besides that, I’d promised to let myself care about the people manipulated into following Geralt. If I let Taevas assassinate some of them when I could have stopped him, I couldn’t live with that, either.
So, though it made my chest tighten with guilt, I agreed. “Fine. Tell me when and where. I’ll be ready.”
