Becoming Crone, page 20
My hands stopped moving, and I stared as the mass grew larger and darker. Streaks of light flickered within it, and a low rumble echoed through the stone chamber. My jaw dropped. Was that a storm cloud? The skin along the back of my neck and shoulders prickled, and I cast a quick glance around the cellar. Had I done that? But how? And why was Keven watching it with such bemusement?
No, not bemusement. Outright dismay, coupled with alarm.
“Um...Keven?”
“It’s not possible,” the gargoyle murmured, hands on haunches as she stared at the cloud.
A jagged fork of lightning darted from the cloud and zapped my shoulder, and I yelped and retreated behind the shelter of Keven’s body. Thunder growled in the lightning’s wake. Yup. That was a storm cloud, all right. I reached up and shook—or tried to shake—a granite shoulder. “What’s going on, Keven?”
Keven’s head swiveled all the way around, like an owl’s, and she regarded me with the same dismay she had the cloud. “I didn’t think it was possible.”
Irritation surged in me, and the cloud emitted another fork of lightning. This one struck the table, leaving a black, smoldering char mark in its center. The thunder that followed shook the floor.
“Milady.” Keven’s tone was urgent, and a heavy hand closed around my arm and shook me. My teeth all but rattled in my head. “Milady, remember how you were rooted to the floor?”
How on earth could I forget? “Of course—but I’m not now.” I lifted a foot to prove it.
“No, because this isn’t Earth magick. It’s Air magick.”
“It’s what? But I thought you said—”
A bolt of lightning zapped one of the gargoyle’s ears, knocking a chip from it, and Keven’s expression turned stern. “Forget what I said. What do you feel?”
Petrified, of course! But I bit back the obvious answer, knowing it wasn’t what Keven meant. Wasn’t what she asked. Thunder shook the cellar floor again, and I tried to suppress the panic blooming in my chest. The storm was getting stronger by the second, and if I really was causing it, I had to figure out how.
Still in the shelter of the gargoyle, I lifted one foot again, then the other one. Definitely no roots. I examined my hands. No blue fire, and no heat coursing through my body, either. So what the hell...?
Prickles.
My head snapped up, and I stared past Keven at the storm. A tingle had begun on the back of my neck, spreading like quicksilver along my shoulders to my arms. At first, it seemed like a reaction to a cool rush of air over my body. But it wasn’t that. It was the other way around. The air wasn’t causing the sensation, the sensation was stirring the—
A gust of wind tore through the room, flinging open the storage cabinet and scattering papers and dried herbs across the floor. I squeezed my eyes shut against the onslaught. Braced to stand against it. And without Keven’s steadying hand, I would have toppled when it dissipated as suddenly as it had sprung up. The cellar went silent. I took a deep, shaky breath and opened my eyes.
The cloud was gone.
“Prickles,” I said.
“I beg pardon?”
“Across my skin. Prickles, like goosebumps. I thought it was because of the wind, but...”
“But instead, it caused the wind,” Keven finished. She studied me for a long moment, her stony gaze watchful. Wary.
I scowled at her in return. “First you tell me I have Fire magick, then you say it’s Earth, and now it’s Air? How is that even possible? You said the Morrigan divided the elements. Each Crone has only one. You said so.”
“Because it has been that way since Camlann. This—” Keven walked around me, examining me from every angle. “I don’t know what this is.”
I knew exactly what it was: a mistake. A ginormous, terrifying, impossible mistake.
I opened my mouth to tell Keven so, but a loud trill cut me off. I froze, staring at her. She frowned and stared back. Was that...a cell phone? But it couldn’t be. There was no signal here. And the one Natalie had given me had died anyway, and I had no charger for it, and it was upstairs in my bedroom, and I wouldn’t be able to hear it from here even if—
The trill came again.
That was definitely a cell phone.
I took the cellar stairs two at a time, pulled open the door to the back staircase beside the kitchen, and raced up those stairs, too. Arriving breathless in my room, I stared at the uncharged cell phone on my nightstand. It rang again.
I let go of the door frame and slowly walked over to the device. Another ring. I picked it up. The display lit up. Paul, it said. I thumbed the answer icon and put the phone to my ear.
My daughter-in-law’s voice came through before I drew breath to say hello, and her panic landed like a fist in my gut. “Claire? Oh, God, Claire, he’s gone! There was an awful noise—I thought it was an earthquake but it wasn’t and his window—the wall—and then Paul—and he’s gone!”
I folded under the weight of her words as they piled up on one another.
“Natalie, slow down.” I groped for the bed and collapsed on its edge. “Who’s gone? Paul? Did you have a fight?”
“No! Not Paul, Braden! Something took Braden!”
Keven arrived in my doorway, scowling. “Lady Claire—”
I flapped a hand to silence her. My heart alternated racing and stuttering and I tried to calm it enough to let myself think. Information. I need more information. And then what? Questions first, Claire.
“Something—what? What did you see, Natalie? Was it flying?”
“What? No! I don’t know. I didn’t see it. I just heard—we heard—we were watching TV and then the house shook and there was so much noise, like the whole building was collapsing. We ran upstairs—” Natalie stopped to inhale a wrenching breath, and my heart twisted in an echo of her pain. “Braden was asleep in his room. We went to get him, and his wall was gone. The whole wall, Claire. Like something ripped it away. And Braden—his bed—”
Sleeping? Why had he been sleeping in the middle of the—
I looked over my shoulder at the night that had fallen outside my window. I’d been down in the cellar for the whole day, and I was still no closer to controlling—
I tamped down my rising alarm. I didn’t have time for another pity party.
Something’s coming.
“Paul,” I said. “Where is Paul?”
“He went after Braden. He told me to call 911 but someone already did and the police are everywhere and—”
“Natalie,” I cut across the terror rising again in her voice and threatening to trigger my own. “Breathe.”
Another harsh gulp for air. Another ragged exhale.
On both ends of the connection.
My mind raced. Seized on an idea. Clung to it like a lifesaver.
“Natalie, listen carefully. You need to find a police officer by the name of Kate Abraham. Constable Kate Abraham. No one else, do you understand? Only Kate. Tell her to bring you to the house on Morgan’s Way.” Dear goddess, please let Keven have been right about the house being found if I willed it. I’d never willed for anything so hard in my life.
“There’s a path at the end of the road,” I continued. “It leads straight to the house. Have you got that?”
“But what about—”
“I’ll find Braden,” I said. “And Paul. I promise. Just get to Constable Abraham and tell her Morgan’s Way. Remember that.”
“Morgan’s Way,” she repeated. “I’ll remember, but—"
Downstairs in the great hall, the front door crashed open, and Keven lunged for me even as Lucan’s distant bellow echoed up the stairs.
“Gargoyle! Protect the Crone!”
And then, from beneath my closed window, came a child’s thin, high-pitched scream.
Braden.
Braden.
I fought the arm wrapped around me and pounded with both fists on the granite back over which I was draped. “Put me down!” I yelled. “Damn it, Keven, put me down! That’s Braden! That’s my grandson!”
I might as well have pounded on the stone walls of the house, for all the good it did. My head bounced up and down and my teeth slammed together as Keven jogged down first the back stairs, then the ones to the cellar. I fought on.
Braden.
Paul.
“Let me go!”
With her free hand—the one not effortlessly holding me captive over her shoulder—the gargoyle smashed the shelves from the cellar cabinet. She shoved me into the wooden shell, snarled, “Stay,” and slammed the door in my face.
Blackness closed around me. I pushed against the door and bellowed again. Continued pushing even after the padlock snapped into place on the outside and I heard the pounding of stone against stone—the hard, granite footfalls of Keven running to Lucan’s aid.
I pushed some more as a part of my brain tracked the gargoyle up the stairs and down the hall toward the front of the house, her footsteps growing fainter. Then came the distant noises of wood splintering. Deep, guttural bellows. A roar of pain. Fury. A high-pitched shriek.
Braden.
My hands fell to my sides. My breath rasped in my ears. I tried to sort through the sounds, to determine what belonged to whom. To convince myself that my grandson’s high-pitched shriek had been one of fear and not pain.
Terror became a rising, bitter bile in my chest and throat. What had brought him here? And how in hell could I stop whatever it was?
The muffled battle noises raged on. I pulled my focus away from them and turned it inward. What would work best? Fire? Air? Think, Claire, think!
In turn, I tried to summon each of the ones I had called on before. The heat of Fire magick, the prickle of Air magick, the roots of Earth magick. I focused. I strained. I held my breath and released it, curled my hands into fists and flexed them wide, pressed my feet as hard as I could into the cabinet’s floor. I did everything I could think of, including reminding myself not to think, and still I got nothing. Not so much as a hint of power or a glimmer of—
The cabinet rocked under my feet, throwing me off balance. No, not the cabinet. The house. The entire house shuddered, trembled, and then shook as a mighty crack that boomed through the cellar. My heart swooped down to reside in my toes. Goddess, now what?
The shaking subsided, and through the door came the muffled scrape of something moving—or being dragged—across the floor, faint at first, then growing louder as it drew closer.
My thoughts turned slow. Heavy. This was it. The time for choosing had come. My grandson’s life, or the pendant that would set a god on the path to destroying the world. My hands went to the chain around my neck. They closed over it, one on each side.
Lift it over your head, Claire, I urged myself. Take it off and give it to the Mages. It’s only one—it doesn’t mean Morok will get the others. There are still three Crones, and—
“CLAIRE!”
The voice was loud and unexpected and—
“Edie?” I croaked. I’d jumped backwards into a corner of my prison, and something sharp poked into one shoulder blade. I shifted to one side and blinked into the darkness. Dear goddess, I’d well and truly lost it now.
But no, I hadn’t imagined it, because the voice spoke again.
“You can hear me? Finally! Fuck it all, woman, I’ve been trying to reach you for days. You really need to start listening to your elders.”
My what? I thought.
“But how?” I asked.
“Never mind that. You have no time. You have to get out of here, my friend. The Mages are outside with—whatever that thing is. It has Braden, and they want you.”
“No,” I said. “They want the pendant.”
“No,” Edie replied grimly. “They want you.”
“But—"
“You know they’ll never let you go. Even without the pendant, you’re too powerful.”
Another time, I might have laughed. But right now, somewhere outside, a monster held my grandson, and a wolf and gargoyle fought to protect the Crone I never wanted to be—and my inability to save any of us was anything but funny. “I’m not,” I growled at my friend’s voice. “I can’t—”
“You must.”
“It’s not as easy as—"
“You might want to stand back.”
Something scraped against the cupboard exterior, and a faint rectangle of light filtered around the door’s edges. I ducked back further. Edie? Or—
With a screech of iron pulling from wood, the door and its hinges parted way with the cabinet, and a tree branch filled the opening, its leaves dancing as if in a breeze.
A tree branch attached to a larger limb, attached to—my gaze trace it backward. A tree trunk. Growing where no tree could or should grow, right through the stone floor in the corner of the cellar, where I’d thrown the wand Keven had given me.
A linden wand, she’d said. Because linden would protect me as its wielder and bring balancing energy to me, and—
“They’ve almost breached the wards, my friend,” Edie’s voice said quietly. “It’s time.”
Time to what? I wanted to ask. What is it you think I can do? But I didn’t, because regardless of what Edie thought, I knew what I had to do. And I had to do it now, before it was too late for my grandson.
I grasped the cabinet frame around the door opening, one hand on each side, and pulled myself to the front of the cramped space. The tree branch gave way before me, leaves rustling. It retracted again when I stepped down onto the stone floor, then again when I moved forward, staying just ahead of me. When I reached the stairs, it extended itself to accompany me, growing extra branches and leaves as it did. Earth magick, I knew. If only I had more time to figure out how.
I paused at the top to get my bearings. More precisely, hoping to get a bearing on either of my would-be champions. But the battle sounds had subsided, and the house stood silent and empty except for me and my tree companion.
And that.
A faint, low chant drifted down the corridor from the front hall. My core went cold. The Mages. Which meant the wards had fallen.
I homed in on the sound. More than one voice—at least two men and a woman.
Underpinned by the wail of a child.
My heart split in two. I lunged forward, but the tree blocked my way, sprouting multiple branches that wove together into a lattice.
“Move,” I hissed, shoving at it. The lattice stayed. My voice dropped to a growl. “I said move, or I swear I will break every branch in your body.”
The linden hesitated, then slowly unwound itself, retracted the extra branches, and withdrew to one side. I took a few steps forward, then stopped.
That the tree had sprung from my Earth magick, I had no doubt. But I hadn’t intended it to manifest, and that worried me. Nor could I be certain of how to control it now that it was here. With my luck, I’d barge in on those voices in the great hall, tap into the wrong element altogether, and bring down fire or a hurricane by accident.
Or both.
Or nothing.
The chanters’ voices grew louder, and I caught snatches of words. “...our will...darkness rise...fire burn...”
Freaking hell, that didn’t sound good. I strained to listen for the child’s voice, but there was nothing. Goddess, Braden would have nightmares for the rest of his life after this. Assuming he survived. Assuming I saved him. Somehow.
Damn, but I could use a gargoyle and a wolf-shifter right about now. There was only me and my tree, however, and—
And then I heard the first whisper.
It wasn’t a human whisper. It was more like the soft rustle made by the rub of fabric against itself, coming from overhead.
I looked up in time to see a gossamer-fine black filament drop from the ceiling to the floor near my feet. It ignited the instant it touched the stone, flaring bright white before fizzling out when it found no fuel. Others followed.
They drifted like fine spider silk caught in a gentle breeze, each one bursting into flame when it touched a surface. The ones that landed on the floor flared as harmlessly as the first had done. The ones that brushed against the wall, not so much. More and more of them formed, a rain of fire falling so fast that by the time I fully registered the threat, realized that they seemed to be moving ever closer to me, it was too late.
Beside me, the tree drew back as flames engulfed the corridor’s wood-paneled walls, cutting off any chance of escape. The crackle of fire drowned out the chanting from the front hall. A filament landed on one of my shoulders and sparked white. I beat at the flames with my other hand, but instead of dying out, they spread and clung to my hand, too, searing my skin. I scrubbed palm against hip. The flames spread down my leg, to the back of my hand, to my wrist.
Pain lanced through me and surprise spiked into fear, then panic. Another filament drifted toward my head, and I had the impression for a second of tiny, malevolent black eyes. They were alive?
I ducked, staggering against the tree branch beside me. As if galvanized by my touch, it lunged upward and wove a tight canopy of leaves between me and the threads raining down. Leaves blazed and branches burned. More took their place. More met the same fate.
Dimly, I recognized three things. First, the tree couldn’t hold off the filaments forever. Second, my arm and leg were still on fire. And third, somehow the tree’s agony had joined my own, twisting inside me as if it were a part of me, like another limb. Its otherwise silent shrieks filled my brain and made coherent thought impossible. Acrid smoke filled my lungs and made my eyes water. The flames devouring my charred arm licked along my shoulder.
Then, through the chaos raging inside me, a voice spoke. My third voice. Calm. Quiet. Certain.
Water, it urged. Summon water.
So I did.
Ceiling, paneled walls, floors, light sconces. Things that should have held next to no moisture at all suddenly contained oceans of it, and it gushed from everywhere, rising up from the cellar, flowing out from under doors, filling the corridor. In seconds, it swirled around my knees, then my thighs. The filaments hissed and spat as it swallowed them, drowning them out of existence. The water reached my waist. I thrust my burning arm into it and splashed it across my shoulders. The fire consuming me sizzled and died; the pain lived on.
