I Will Always Find You, page 23
Deciding against that course of action, he cast his protection spell, hoping that the invisible shield could withstand not only fists, swords, and bullets but also wayward cannonballs.
He pulled his long black cloak tight, concealing his head and face under the hood as best he could, and made his way through the streets, staying close to the walls of buildings—those that had not been blown apart or caved in—and to the shadows of the night.
For nearly twenty minutes, the Romani witch stepped over dead bodies, thankfully none of them children, while stumbling and tripping over debris from demolished houses and shops, avoiding fires left and right as he searched for Alejandro.
He assumed that, under these conditions and with little magic available to him, Alejandro, trying to escape the city, was likely in the same frustrating situation. The Romani witch was aware that his sigils not only blocked access to magic but also leached it from anyone imprisoned by them.
Surely, this has made Alejandro weak and vulnerable. And if he used up what mana he had left to break his bindings, he’s barely more than a glorified librarian at the moment. Traversing a war-torn Madrid at night isn’t going to be easy for either of us, though I do have an advantage.
“You won’t get far, my love,” the Romani witch called out into the night.
When he eventually found a moderately quiet spot to think—an alley between two still-intact shops, a bakery and a cobbler—the Romani witch set about casting a tracking spell, using an enchanted piece of parchment and Alejandro’s blood. He kept a small vial of it on him at all times, in case he ever needed to work blood magic against Alejandro.
He took out a piece of folded parchment from a small pocket in the inside lining of his silk vest and unfurled it on the ground in front of him. Then, he splashed some of Alejandro’s blood onto the blank sheet.
“Trova Alejandro Trevino!” [“Find Alejandro Trevino!”]
The blood moved chaotically across the parchment until it formed a perfectly shaped directional symbol: an arrow. This blood-made pointer would turn in the direction that led to the individual it was spelled to locate.
However, within seconds of the spell’s completion, the blood vanished, absorbed into the paper, leaving no trace behind.
“Dammit!” the Romani witch cursed.
He attempted the spell again using Aeneas’ name; this time, the blood dribbled right off the page, entirely refusing to heed the spell.
The Romani witch believed that this setback was caused by the Wheel of Destiny’s eternal interference in his pursuit of happiness. Using his witchcraft to locate Aeneas’ soul had seldom been successful, as if his very essence was somehow shielded from being detected by magical means. Still, he continued to try in every lifetime despite the frustrating failures.
As he waited in the alley, the sounds of gunfire and shouted orders in both Spanish and French echoed in the distance. He contemplated his next move, considering which direction to take based purely on chance and luck, giving a silent prayer to the goddess Fortuna. It was then that the Romani witch noticed something strange out of the corner of his eye.
A solitary man, tall and brawny with dark hair and a thick beard, had appeared out of nowhere and begun moving among the bodies on the street, both the dead and the dying, with an air of authority and a commanding presence.
The Romani witch noted that he was dressed like a Spanish officer, wearing a dark blue coat adorned with silver buttons and embroidered lace along the collar, cuffs, and lapel. He wore white trousers and black riding boots that extended just below the knee, topped off with a black bicorne hat trimmed with silver lace, a red cockade, and a red plume.
Though there was dust and blood upon his boots, the rest of him remained remarkably immaculate.
Something was not quite right about the striking man, though the Romani witch could not pinpoint what it was. He found it odd how the gentleman appeared completely unbothered by the war-torn environment, but it was more than that. It was the way he moved, along with the shadows that seemed to shift around him, that made it seem as if he wore darkness like a cloak.
When the Romani witch blinked, the shadowy figure disappeared. Then, as fast as he had vanished, he mysteriously reappeared, but in a different location further up the street.
How is this man moving so fast? Is this but a trick of the moonlight? Is he a witch, a sorcerer? What is he—by Hecate! That face! Now that I see it so clearly, can it be? It can’t be him!
Only the Romani witch was certain it was. This conviction only grew stronger when he witnessed the man lift one of the nearly dead French soldiers off the ground as if he weighed no more than a feather. Then, under the glow of the moonlight, he watched the bearded fellow sink a pair of long, glinting white fangs into the soldier’s neck and begin drinking his blood.
By Hecate! It is him!
The blood-drinker was Gian, whom the Romani witch had not seen since the 4th century.
Before he could call out to his immortal friend, the god who was a father to Aeneas in his life as Rufus vanished.
“Dammit!” The Romani witch immediately attempted to locate Gian through magic. Though he had no blood belonging to the immortal, he used his own Romani blood, pricking his finger and letting the scarlet ichor drop upon the goatskin parchment. He willed the sanguine ink not to find a specific individual but anyone with blood as powerful as his, as magical, more so.
Within a few moments of relative silence, before the gunfire started up again, the magic locked onto something.
“Yes!” the Romani witch cheered. He reasoned that once they had their brief reunion, he could ask Gian for aid in finding Alejandro amid a battle-torn Madrid.
With a renewed sense of urgency and excitement, the Romani witch followed the map through multiple streets and alleys, occasionally needing to avoid patrolling soldiers and rebels. Spells of misdirection and confusion were most effective when used quickly without drawing attention to himself. And they needed nothing extra to cast, only words and will.
What was strange was that the blood map led him north, toward the outskirts of the city, through an area he knew was sparsely populated; yet, he soon found himself wading through a surprising number of dead bodies. Most were torn apart and scattered here and there. French and Spanish. Commoner and soldier. Even, to his horror, a few youths.
Soon, the corpses practically covered the street he was led down, most displaying no signs of fatal bullet or sword wounds.
“What in the world?” The Romani witch was both flummoxed and revolted. Gian would never commit such an atrocity, not the man I knew, immortal blood-drinker or not! Who could be doing this? Who—or what—is the map leading me to?
As the Romani witch turned another corner, to what appeared to be a dead-end street, he finally got the answer to this mystery.
And he was staggered by what he saw.
It was an immortal, a blood-drinker, but it was not Gian. Not by any means. It was something diabolical and vicious. And unbelievably dangerous.
“You—!” the Romani witch gasped.
The air was heavy with the metallic scent of blood, and scattered around the dark figure were the lifeless forms of dozens of people, their faces frozen in expressions of terror. In the center of the cobblestone street, bathed in the glow of Luna’s ethereal moonlight, stood the very monster that had haunted his nightmares for over a millennium. It was the immortal fiend that had taken his and Rufus’ lives in Britannia ages past.
Their day of reckoning had finally come.
To make the situation even more horrific for the Romani witch, Alejandro was held in the immortal’s iron grip. He was cursing and futilely struggling to free himself. Although the blood-drinker was much smaller than the wizard, that did not matter; both figures were floating above the ground.
The scene of carnage and horror, with flames in the near distance, felt all too familiar to the Romani witch. It was all happening again, just like it had in Britannia, in the once peaceful village in Devonshire, where he and Aeneas—Rufus—were so happy and content, living in love and tranquility. History was repeating itself; the powerful monster was about to kill his beloved before his very eyes.
“No, not again! I won’t let it happen—NOT AGAIN!”
And in his profound fury, his visceral hatred for the immortal looming before him, the Romani witch’s eyes darkened to a deep, inky black, reflecting the enmity that surged through his veins as he summoned the ancient, dark powers he had sworn never to manipulate again.
But what choice did he have? The Romani witchcraft—the elemental magic and spellcraft—had not been enough last time. This was the reason he had taken the ancient grimoire in the first place! To grant him a power great enough to battle an immortal. He refused to experience another defeat, like the one he had suffered before against the blood-drinker and, much later, at the monstrous hands of Baba Yaga.
This was not a time for subtlety, ritual, prayer, or patience. The Romani witch needed to harness the kind of magic that could transform seawater into corrosive acid, boil a man’s blood from the inside out, or animate the dead to form an army at his command; each spell and conjuration performed with alacrity and speed.
Having studied Baba Yaga’s grimoire for three hundred years, the Romani witch had memorized every spell, hex, invocation and incantation on every page. As much of the magic was in dead languages that were entirely too difficult to pronounce, he had spent countless decades translating them into his own mother tongue; he also found that some spells, when spoken backwards, actually functioned faster and with more potency.
He suddenly recalled the single line written in Sumerian on the beginning page of the ancient grimoire, in blood. They were the first words he translated. They gave him the strength and courage he now needed.
Should reality get in your way, change it through the force of your will.
That was precisely what the Romani witch planned to do.
“Na ssendniknu sruoved!”
Speaking the spell in reverse twisted his voice into something unnatural and menacing.
From the hidden corners and crumbling walls of the street, even the darkest crevices among the sea of lifeless bodies, hundreds of ebon ravens surged forth, a swirling mass of feathers, sharp beaks, and talons. They descended upon the immortal, their cacophony piercing the eerie silence of the street.
Unaware of the Romani witch’s presence and too preoccupied toying with Alejandro, the blue-black-haired immortal was caught off guard by the avian onslaught conjured through a backwards-spoken spell. An unkindness of ravens, summoned from the shadows, swarmed him—vicious and relentless—as they tore at his immortal flesh from his head to his exposed ankles in Grecian-style sandals.
All to devour him.
The immortal immediately released Alejandro from his grasp, allowing him the use of both his hands to fight off the surprise attack.
The Spaniard dropped to the ground hard, crashing into the bone and bloodied flesh and gristle of the mutilated corpses below, which blanketed the cobblestone street. On landing, he smacked the back of his head on the curved handle of a dead French Soldier’s sabre briquet.
His head bleeding and throbbing, Alejandro began crawling through the expanse of human death to escape the chaos around him. He knew that without his magic, if he remained, he was as good as dead.
Enraged and weary of battling the unrelenting shadow birds—creatures that would have once obeyed him when all darkness bent to his will—the immortal shed his physical form. Becoming spirit, invisible and untouchable, he drifted through the deadly unkindness with ease.
Projecting his thoughts into the aether, the immortal growled, “You will have to do better than that, fool, whoever you are! You cannot kill a god.”
Once he knew Alejandro was far enough away, the Romani witch stepped out of the shadows and into the moonlight to cast fire magic. He ignited the ravens, transforming them into a fiery whirlwind. He understood that the immortal was seemingly immune to flame, but this was not an attack; his intention was to eliminate the bodies and debris, creating space for the ongoing combat.
“Do you recognize me, demon? I told you we would meet again!”
With a dramatic sweep of his hands, the Romani witch compelled the fiery maelstrom to sweep the street clean; it turned everything within a certain distance from the Romani witch to ash. Then, after a moment, when the street was clear, he clapped his hands and shouted, “Exstingue!” [“Extinguish!”] The fire turned to smoke.
But he was far from finished. Not even close.
Shaping his fingers into a pyramid, the Romani witch roared, “Ekoms nedrah dna niartser eht lairetammi!”
Instantly, the thick plumes of smoke billowed and coalesced, solidifying into a dark grey mass that hung ominously in the air like a sinister tapestry.
A piercing mannish scream erupted from seemingly nowhere; it echoed with agony, joining the distant chorus of gunfire.
This was no common entrapment spell; it was a dark incantation designed to ensnare spirits within the material realm. As their ethereal forms moved effortlessly through the conjured haze of soot and ash, oppressive to flesh and blood humans, spirits and their intangible ilk unwittingly became entwined within this treacherous, semi-solid substance. This unearthly state rendered them perilously susceptible to the grasp of dark magic.
Should the smoke be solidified through the spell, any spirit within would become trapped, transforming into a semi-solid state and becoming partially visible.
Once enmeshed in this agonizingly twisted, half-formed reality, the tormented souls endured unspeakable suffering. This was also more than a binding spell; it was a malevolent enchantment crafted to inflict exquisite torment and despair upon all spirits, all immaterial creatures.
And that torture was just what the half-spirit, half-flesh immortal was now painfully enduring.
When partial limbs of the shrieking immortal finally began to materialize, his head thrashing in a frenzy of anguish, jutting from the alchemical mass, the Romani witch turned to necromancy for his next attack.
Knowing that this spell required a physical component, he had taken a piece of bone from the limb of one of the monster’s unfortunate victims earlier before clearing the battle arena with his conjured fire. Prepared, he cut his hand on the broken, jagged edge of the femur and smeared the bone with his blood, thus creating a talisman to channel his will through.
With haste, the Romani witch cast the necromantic spell known as The Leper’s Call.
“Atrophia.” [Atrophy!”] “Interitus.” [“Decay!”] “Mors.” [“Death.”]
The partially solidified limbs of the immortal, trapped in the hardened smoke, began to do exactly what the spell commanded, following the order of the ancient Latin words spoken. The immortal writhed in pain, cursing and gnashing his teeth, his sharp fangs slashing his own flesh.
“You dare to wield necromancy against me?!” the immortal bellowed through his agony. “That unnatural sorcery the traitorous Titan Hecate bestowed upon those wretched Secundae, Hades and Circe?!”
That had been the greatest insult the Romani witch could have dealt the god: binding him with the very magic of Olympus, those second-generation gods the once-Titan despised. The blood-drinker had been cursed by The Fates after the destruction of his physical form, punished for his hubris and cast into a limbo-like realm as an apparition.
Yet he occasionally manifested in the material world and was granted powerful pseudo-flesh to pursue his destiny of revenge against the one who had murdered him. He was no longer truly immortal, but the Romani witch remained unaware of this.
The Fates worked in mysterious ways.
Frustratingly held by the Romani witch’s magic, the once-Titan cried out to The Fates for aid, to keep their promise to him that he could enact his revenge against his dark child, Olympius, the upstart god who had slain him thousands of years ago, unencumbered.
However, the enigmatic Weird Sisters remained hauntingly silent.
“Bitch goddesses!” the pseudo-immortal raged. “I do not know you, witch! Why do you do this?!”
“Yes, I do look slightly different,” the Romani witch admitted through clenched teeth. His hatred and fury were palpable. “Look into my eyes, demon, deep into the black pools, and see who I am. See my past!”
Though still in excruciating pain, the blood-drinker managed a brief moment of resolve to gaze into the dark eyes of his tormentor. Inside the ocular abyss, he saw swirls of light that became flashes of memory, and he soon recognized his tormentor.
Fighting against the pain, the partially solid apparition, his jaw tight, snickered. “I remember you! The fool witch who thought to stand against me in that nothing town in a nothing part of the world all those centuries ago. To save those doomed mortals. Oh, how deliciously you failed. I see you are also cursed, for how else could you be here now in a different body? Reincarnation never allows memory to travel with the soul into new flesh. My sister Mnemosyne taught me that!”
The fiend returned to shrieking in pain as parts of his solidified limbs continued to rot and fall off the bone, plummeting to the ground in wet, bloody chunks. But then, the wailing transformed into a raucous bellow. That noise was soon followed by several grunts, and the god’s decaying face filled with determination and rage.
“I will—not—be caged—by a mortal!”
And the furious and determined fiend vanished.
“No!” the Romani witch cried out.
But before he could gather his thoughts or give voice to any more of his feelings, he was struck from behind, the blow so intense it sent him hurtling through the air. He crashed against the weathered brick wall of the barbershop across the street. The sound of bricks breaking mingled with the shattering glass of the shop’s window.
If it had not been for his protection spell, the invisible shield around his body, the Romani witch knew he would have been instantly killed by the force of the impact, not just having the breath knocked out of him.
