Alaskan Fury (48 page)

But then she hesitated at the
sudden intensity—the
alertness—
in ‘Aqrab’s eyes. 

Kaashifah remembered the lonely,
joyless existence she had experienced for the vast majority of her life, then
thought about the exhilarating thrills of the last three months.  She thought
back to all of the complaints he had made of the First Realm, all the griping
he had done in their journey, all the off-hand remarks about how much he missed
his home. 
If you make that final wish,
she realized,
he’s going to
leave.

…And she would be alone again.

For the first time, Kaashifah
felt a pang of loss.  In all her years of wishing him dead, she’d never
actually stopped and
thought
about what it would be like without him. 
And, now that she did, it was tightening into an agony in her chest.  She
couldn’t wish him free.  She
needed
him.

“What would I
what
,
Kaashifah?” ‘Aqrab urged gently, though there was desperation in his voice. 
“Please finish your thought.”  He gave her a shy smile.  “It was a
good
thought.”

“I’m sorry,” Kaashifah whispered,
devastated by the hope in his eyes.  Then, before she could see the anguish
twist over his face, she turned and hurried back to the dragon’s lair.

Chapter
18: The Blacksmith’s Heart

Once Imelda had recovered from
the magus’s assault, she crawled back into the bedroom and used the foot of her
bed to prop herself back onto her feet.  Her vision was like looking through
white, pulverized glass, the dust of which was working its way into the
crevices of her mind with every jolt of her head.  Groaning, she tried to pick
up her duffels, found she couldn’t keep her balance, and then decided to just
abandon them, stumbling towards the door to her room.

The half-step-behind-her-body
feeling was now more like a full three or four, and she saw herself reach the
door several heartbeats before she actually put her hand on the latch.  That
double-image of her opened it and walked through before Imelda had a chance to
make her fingers twitch, then she had to
force
herself to
follow…herself.

What is happening to me?
she wondered, in blind agony.  

The Imelda in front of her was
gaining distance and spreading out, becoming several Imeldas.  Some veered to
the left, some veered to the right, some stumbled into the hallway wall, some
tripped and fell.

The magus did something,
Imelda thought, watching the increasing chaos as some of those Imeldas that
fell started bleeding, dying, whereas some got up and followed the other
Imeldas, some of whom returned to her room, whereas others flooded outwards,
exhausting every possibility, seizing every potential.

Hundreds more Imeldas, Imelda
realized, had stayed in the doorway with her, rather than step out, as her
forebears had just done.  Those Imeldas, as she stepped forward, stepped
forward with her, and suddenly she became the center of a turbulent wash of
human form, each one going in different directions, doing different things. 
Some of them were talking, some of them were yelling, some of them were
whistling and humming, some of them were crying and sobbing.

Imelda fell to her knees in the
center of it, fisting her hands to her head, and screamed.

Everything seemed to snap into
focus all of a sudden, the different Imeldas gone, leaving her alone in the
hall, the white fuzz back at the edges of her vision.  Someone with
sleep-mussed hair opened a door a few rooms down and peered out at her, asking
questions, but Imelda crawled to her feet and started to run.

She stumbled when the odd
sensation of being a half-step behind started nagging at her again, dragging
her backwards, until she was watching herself run once more.

“God help me!”  Groaning, Imelda
put her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut.  All around her, she
heard herself yell in a jumble of different phrases, in a cacophony of
different tongues.

Damn the magus.  She hadn’t seen
that she was trying to
aid
her.

Head low, Imelda stumbled through
the foyer and didn’t bother to grab her coat.  She could barely keep herself
upright, feeling herself stumbling ahead of her, feeling herself slipping,
falling, running, walking, yelling…

“Please make it stop,” she
whimpered, unable to keep her bearings in the chaos.  “Please, God.”  Around
her, a thousand Imeldas tittered their various prayers.  Some fell to their
knees, some merely opened the door and ran to the helicopter, some hurled the
cross at her neck to the tiles, some stepped outside and raised their hands to
the sky, some bowed their heads and sobbed.

This, she knew, was not
revisiting aspects of her dream.  This was something much worse.

Her head in agony, Imelda lifted
her gaze to the landing pad.  Through the glass of the front door, Imelda saw
Herr Drescher standing beside the helicopter, waiting.

Why has he not started it up?
Imelda thought, in confusion.  She reached for the door.

Ahead of her, several Imeldas yanked
the door open and continued to run forward, and as they did so, versions of
Herr Drescher began to collapse, limp like a doll, bleeding upon the tarmac,
and a blonde woman in a tanktop stepped from behind the helicopter, a pistol in
her hand.

In that instant, everything
suddenly slammed into focus for Imelda.  All the extra versions of herself
vanished, leaving her mind crystal-clear.  She backed away from the front door,
still watching Drescher stand—stiffly, she now noticed—beside the helicopter. 
The lights in the foyer, thank God, had been out, as Imelda had not had the
coordination to flip them on when looking for her coat.

Off to the side, she saw
Jacquot’s form emerge from the forest, rifle up, at a jog for the foyer door. 
Imelda backed further into the darkness, then turned and bolted.

The basement.  Stumbling to a
halt at the number-pad, she entered her personal code.

It was denied.

Keeping herself deadly-calm, she
tried again.  Same result.  The little light flashed red and gave her a harsh
warning beep.  Only one more try before it would lock down.  Furious, now, she
kicked the door and turned toward the armory. 

“Inquisitor!”  It was the young
American who had told her of flying caribou the night before.  Very carefully,
her back to him, Imelda pulled Drescher’s pistol—heavy and the grip made for a
big man’s hand, but still functional—from her overshirt, and looked over her
shoulder.  “Yes?”

The kid was standing in the hall,
wide-eyed, his hair ruffled.  “I know I was supposed to go to Zenaida first,
but the magic just went off the
charts
, Inquisitor.  Something
big
just happened up north.  Like an unholy comet of
magic
.”

He was supposed to go to
Zenaida first. 
Slowly, Imelda replaced the gun under her overshirt and
turned to face him.  “I’ll be sure to tell Zenaida.”

The kid frowned at the door
behind her.  “So…  Your code’s not working?”

Smoothly, Imelda glanced back at
the keypad.  “It was this morning.  I’m pretty sure something short-circuited
in the Chinook,” Imelda said, shrugging with all the nonchalance she could
muster, knowing that Drescher was out on the tarmac, a gun to his head.  “It’s
been acting weird ever since.”

The kid groaned.  “Probably a
surge.  Shit.”  He grimaced.  “Look, uh, I’m not supposed to have the code for
that, so you can’t tell anyone, okay?” 

“Oh?” Imelda asked, keeping her
face utterly calm with the smallest hint of amusement, when her heart had
already started to pound a million beats a minute.  “Whose did you swipe?” 

The kid winced.  Reddening, he
squeaked, “Zenaida’s.” 

Thinking of the man on the
tarmac, and how soon Jacquot would come barreling through the door and shoot
her, Imelda managed an amused chuckle.  “Do you think you can open it for me,
then?  Would save me a
ton
of trouble.”

The kid grinned shyly.  “Okay,
sure.”  He reached out, expertly tapped in Zenaida’s numbers—so quickly that
Imelda wondered how many times he’d been into the basement—and then timidly
pushed the door open.  He was grinning, turning to face her, when Imelda rammed
her palm into his nose and shoved him through the door.  She followed, then
tugged it shut behind her.

Inside, the technician had
stumbled down the steel steps and was crying and whimpering on the floor,
holding his face, blood pooling under his hands.  Imelda checked him for
weapons and, finding none, paused just long enough to say, “You know better
than to steal an Inquisidora’s keycode.  Wait there and serve your penance or
I’ll just get it over with and add you to the rack.”

Just like, she knew, every fool expected
when they thought of an Inquisidora.

As the kid’s eyes were widening,
she stepped over him and went deeper into the room.  She pulled out the set of
keys that she had flashed to Jacquot earlier.  “All right, listen up,” she
said, stepping up to the wereverine’s rack.  He looked paler and weaker than
before, his head drooping to his chest as he hung from the wall.  When he
looked up at her, she saw exhaustion, there.  Probably, she realized, due to the
fact that he now had
four
needles in his feet.  Zenaida was no longer
going to bother toying with him, it seemed. 

Imelda reached down, yanked the
needles from his skin.  As the wereverine flinched, she started unlocking his wrists
from the silver cuffs holding him to the wall.  “I’ve probably got about five
minutes before Zenaida figures out where I am.  I’m offering you a trade.” 
Legs first, then wrists.  As soon as the wereverine’s first arm slumped free, his
big, callused hand lashed out and he caught her by the throat.  Imelda felt the
pressure against her jugular increase in his grip, but she didn’t try to escape
the hold, just stood there, keys in her hands, waiting.

The wereverine’s green eyes were
deadly, and for a long moment, Imelda thought he would kill her.

When he didn’t, Imelda reached up
and released his other arm.  “Drink this,” she said, pulling the narrow bottle
from the paper bag she’d stuffed into her pocket.  “It had been for my Padre,
but it will work on you.”

For an eternity, the wereverine
continued to hold her by the throat, his green eyes locked on hers.  Then,
after a tense minute, his gaze flickered towards her offering.  Reluctantly, he
unclenched his fist from her neck and took it.  Still watching her with
suspicion, he uncapped the bottle and sniffed.  Immediately, his head snapped
back with a low, chest-deep rattle.  “This is
blood
.”

“That is a unicorn’s blood,”
Imelda said.  “Drink as much as you need, pass it around, do whatever you need
to do with it.  I need your help.  Badly.” 

Then, taking a deep breath, she
turned back to the basement at large.  The double-vision was plaguing her
again, and everyone on the rack seemed to have duplicates of themselves moving
with them.   Saying a prayer to God, Imelda lifted her voice.  “Is anyone here
a magus?”  When there was only sullen silence—and a few nasty curses—from those
on the walls, Imelda said, “Please.  I know I am what you have come to loathe,
but if any of you are magi, I will free you.  You have my word as a Christian.”
 There were hearty guffaws from those hanging upon the racks, along with a new
rash of insults.  Imelda took it all in stride, waiting.  She had few hopes…all
the surviving magi of the First Lands were either standing out at the
helicopter or congregating up North.

Thus, she froze in place when she
felt the low, animal rattle of, “You were looking for a magus?” against the
back of her neck.

Turning, she looked up into the
insane green eyes of the Third Lander.  The human, she realized, was gone. 
What was left was a full demon, something from another realm that had made the
man’s body its own.  Fully slitted eyes, his body transformed into grotesque, predatory
mass of fur and talons—yet
not
in a full animal form, she noted, with a
flash of bewilderment—he said, “Do you have a plan?”  The words were delicate,
every syllable enunciated through a jagged mass of fangs in such a way that he
sounded a member of a Duke’s court.

Imelda glanced at the bottle of
blood that the wereverine had emptied, then at the fully-emerged Third Lander. 
Fear, something that she knew she should have been feeling at the time, had
completely abandoned her in the last thirty minutes, leaving Imelda with an odd
sense of curiosity.  “You’re a magus.”

“A
blood
magus,” the
creature said.  “And I can smell it on you.  Give it to me.”

Imelda reached into her pocket
and handed him the folded napkin, allowing herself a vicious smile.  “Make it
hurt.”

“Oh,” the Third Lander chuckled,
“I will.”

“She’s a Fury,” Imelda warned. 
“What can kill a Fury?”

The Third Lander licked the
napkin and smiled, his demonic eyes afire.  “Why, another Fury.”  Smiling in
that odd insanity that seemed to ooze from him, he said, “I don’t suppose you
happen to have one on hand?”  He glanced around the room, scanning the
desperate faces with too much interest.

“Not here,” Imelda said quickly,
wondering just how much of a mistake she had made as she watched the beast’s
saliva dribble from the napkin.  “But I scried on one.  She knows where to find
us.”

The beast swiveled back to face
her, the predatory insanity glimmering in his eyes.  Imelda got that strange
half-sense that he was deciding whether or not to simply bite her head off.  “I
want a taste of your blood,” he said.

Imelda froze.  She knew the
horrible things that practitioners of seiðr did with one’s blood.  “Why?”

The Third Lander’s lips spread
apart in a nightmarish smile.  “Because I asked you, and because I’m going to
get the two of us out of here.”

“The two of us.”  She glanced at
the dozens of other souls still on the rack.  “What about the rest?”

The beast shrugged.  “I could
leave you behind.  Makes little difference to me.”

For a half-second Imelda
considered.  Give her blood to a seiðmaðr.  A Third Lander magus.  There could
only be one use…