Tara would have given anything for a hot shower, but she had to make do with a basin of warm water and a rag to wash away the blood and unidentifiable bits of still-twitching hellbeast meat. Now she understood why villains in slasher movies wore hockey masks when using power tools for dismemberment: It was protection against flying gore. She had blood up her nose, and the contents of the creature’s gut on her face.
After another round of soap and water in the bowl, she dug literal crap out from under her claws with the tip of her pocket knife, then washed her hands for the fourth or fifth time. Mild nausea roiled her stomach, and she pressed her lips in disgust. Her revulsion wasn’t just due to the nastiness she’d been splattered with but also the fact that her hands were too long, her fingers narrow, and her nails were heavy, thick, and had deadly points. She tried not to look at what she’d become, but sometimes it was unavoidable.
Tara had tried trimming her nails to a blunt angle, but she wasn’t able to cut them back very far without blood and pain. Almost overnight, they would become razor-sharp again. She wanted her own hands back almost as much as she missed her face. Everything about her body belonged to a stranger.
The bathroom, at least, was temporarily warm. Although she couldn’t use heat for long for fear of melting the snow on the roof and thus revealing her presence, she’d hooked up a propane canister to a Mr. Buddy heater for the time needed to get cleaned up. Mindful of limiting the burn time, she quickly dressed and then turned it off. However, the room would take a few hours to cool back down to below freezing. For a little bit, she enjoyed the luxury of not freezing half to death.
Now wearing a brand-new shirt and a pair of too-tight jeans from the downstairs clothing stash, she started a kettle of hot water on top of the propane stove. The newest tea in the house was several years past the best-by date, but it was better than the coffee. The latter was a weird off-brand instant powder sold in giant number-ten metal cans, and it was so old it could vote. Earl Grey, hot, it was.
After a few moments, the water was steaming, and she poured it over a tea bag. Then, she wrapped her hands around the warm mug and sipped it carefully. A hot drink always made everything seem better because it reminded her of Granny and Granny’s remarkable ability to solve problems.
After making tea, her next task was to figure out what in the hell Esmon was doing on Earth, and then try to contact him. If he’d manifested his prophesied powers, maybe he could help her. The layered spells that Todd had hit her with would be tricky to remove without permanent and potentially deadly consequences, but she was willing to take the risk if he had the power to pull it off.
Granny would have just marched up to Esmon and asked both questions — ‘What are you doing here?’ and ‘Will you help?’ — and somehow, she would have gotten a straight answer even from the most maddeningly indirect and dismissive of elves. Tara didn’t have the option of the direct approach since she was trapped in a run-down, boarded-up hoarder house in the middle of nowhere, and anyway, she’d never been good at talking to people. Social skills were not her forte.
However, she was technically skilled at scrying, even though her power and, therefore, her range were limited. With the storm stirring up the leys, she’d have more energy than usual to tap and, therefore, would be able to reach farther. It would be worth a try, especially since she knew that Casey lived somewhere in the area. She just needed a flame and a reflection.
Fortunately, she had no shortage of candles. They were scattered all throughout the house. Whenever she started to run out, she’d just start opening random boxes until she found more — as far as she could tell, Mrs. Riley had included a handful with every other Amazon order. There were scented jars, prayer votives, tapers, pillars, kits, and tea lights, in random combinations, assortments, and collections nearly everywhere she looked.
The bedroom also had a small, ancient vanity. With a scowl that nearly pressed her eyebrows together, she pulled the blanket off the vanity’s mirror.
The image in the glass was not her. It creeped her out to see the face of a grimalkin looking back, and it didn’t help that the monster in the mirror looked exactly as unhappy as she did. There was a zit on its nose, which explained why hers had been hurting whenever she bumped it, but she couldn’t bring herself to pick it. She didn’t like spending any more time looking at her new features than she had to, much less touching them.
Her hair was too long. She should cut it again. She’d been stuffing it up into a bun, because she was never happy with the result of hacking it off with scissors. Before, she’d kept it short, an inch on the top and faded to fuzz on the side, but even if she’d had trimmers, she couldn’t do that herself.
She glanced down at the half-burned red pillar candle on the vanity, and the monster’s face moved in sync. That was uncanny, creepy, and wrong.
While attempting not to look at her not-self more than she had to, Tara sat down on a dusty stool. It creaked alarmingly but held her weight. When she was sure it wasn’t going to dump her on the ground, she rested her hands palm-down on the battered wood vanity top, took a deep breath, relaxed every muscle in her body, and opened her mind to Sight.
The first thing she felt was the magic that ran through this land: Ancient and wild, touched by man since time immemorial but never tamed. It was a living presence that eddied and swirled through the rocks and trees, dirt and water, and the relentless snow.
The act of reaching out, finding the wild power, then gathering, compressing, and intensifying it in one spot — the wick — was a familiar exercise. It quieted her thoughts and drove the horror of her current existence away. The effort left her tired, but her mind became sharper and more focused.
Magic was energy, and energy could be converted to other forms. She deliberately introduced a slight instability in the tiny bubble of power, just enough to create heat without losing everything in a violent burst. A flame flared tall and strong. She then dissolved the bubble back into the earth in a tidy flow that would have earned her a smile from Granny.
The blood-soaked scrap of down would work nicely as a focus. She pinched half of the tiny tuft between her claws and fed it to the flame, saving the other piece for later. The burning blood allowed her to hone in on the man who’d shed it, but a hair or fingernail clipping would have worked just as well, as would a sentimental object. Close family ties or deep friendship would also allow one to find another across the astral pathways, but neither applied to her and Esmon — the last time she’d scried him, she had used her sword as a focus. Esmon, apparently, had a strong emotional connection to it.
She wished she could scry Todd. She had a common Adrial-clan elven ancestor with the Riley boys, rendering it less of an improbable coincidence that she and Todd were both Gifted. However, that connection was multiple generations back and, therefore, not close enough to be useful for magical purposes. She’d attempted to use multiple items from his apartment in the garage, but Todd had kept his hair buzzed shorter than hers and had left no usable bodily fluids or nail trimmings or so forth behind. He didn’t seem to be attached to any personal items, either.
Casey’s source of Power, on the other hand, was a mystery. His brown eyes and dark hair, freckles, and wholly average features gave no hint of elven ancestry. Both his parents were from somewhere in the Midwest and were, according to Granny, utterly mundane. Granny thought his mother had a tiny whisper of receptive empathy, which was the most common of Gifts, but she had no sign of power akin to Casey’s. His father had been absolutely ordinary. Perhaps Casey’s was simply a wild Gift, cropping up unexpectedly due to a random genetic mutation or a quirk of development in the womb.
As she turned her attention to the blood-soaked down and reached for the power in the leys that ran through this land, she immediately felt a bone-deep exhaustion sink into her body. The effort of controlling the magic stripped something from her very self. She ignored the sensation for now, though she knew from experience that discomfort would become pain if she pushed too hard.
The outside world disappeared as her entire awareness enveloped the candle and the tiny pinch of clumpy, sticky feathers smoldering amid the wax. A smell remarkably similar to burning hair filled her nose, and she sneezed. The grimalkin’s senses were vastly keener than human. Then, at last, she found the thread connecting the blood to the man who had shed it, and followed a tenuous connection for a few miles until she reached Esmon’s location.
The trickiest part, and where she often failed, was transferring what she could sense with her mind’s eye to the world of the mirror.
She was not strong enough to completely transform the glass surface without the help of the Book. Her grimalkin reflection only dimmed, and through it and over the top of the candle flame, she saw the faint outline of a mundane bedroom. Esmon was curled up in the bed under a thick white comforter.
By sheer force of will combined with the skill that came from over a decade of practice, she wove the Power of the local leys into a balanced construction, with no more energy going into the casting than was being used to sustain it. Then, with a sigh of relief, she sagged in place. She’d sleep well tonight; despite the storm’s extra power, this level of magic wasn’t easy for her.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Casey Osbourne sat on the edge of the mattress and rested a hand on the man’s arm. There was no sound, but she knew what he said all the same. “I won’t order you to rest, Simon, but I think you should. You’re drunk, and the geas just whammied you extra hard.”
Simon. So, he used a human name. Casey might be a complete ass to his friends, but he did use their chosen names. He’d even yelled at Mark on several occasions in high school for calling her Fugly, though that was probably about trying to impress her and get in her pants. Why else would a teenage boy stick up for a girl several years his junior? She’d barely known him.
Casey’s mention of a geas was ominous. Depending on Simon’s level of training and internal self-awareness, he might not be able to break it, no matter how powerful he was. If Casey had managed to put a mage with Simon’s potential power in thrall, something needed to be done.
Damnit.
If she’d discovered Simon a few years ago, before she was turned into a monster, she would have simply called Libby, who would undoubtedly have involved a few of the more powerful elves — Feric’s ability to break spells would have been remarkably useful — but the entire length of Sanctuary Road had no cell service. She no longer even bothered to charge her phone with a tiny solar panel on the sunroom roof unless she wanted to play Tetris or listen to one of the twelve songs saved to it. There was no point.
What made her extra angry was that there was no good reason for her isolation. Her father and eldest brother had come to the house the morning after she went missing, but they had just as quickly left, even as she chased their car as far down the road as the spell allowed. She had not been surprised. They had a motive to see her gone, and she was suspicious that her father had been working with Todd to see the last of her.
She’d saved up enough money for a down payment on a trailer of her own, but it had taken five years of shopping for clothes at local thrift stores (and enduring the occasional frown from the cashiers at her unfeminine choices in clothing), eating ramen for most meals, and working three jobs.
Unfortunately, her father had stolen her bank statement from the mail, and found out about her bank account’s balance just a week before Todd had turned her into a monster. Predictably, he had demanded she put it towards the six-figure amount of child support her mother owed. She had furiously refused. Not only was her mother’s child support not her debt, but the asshole was also trying to double dip. He’d been paid by Tara herself for all her expenses growing up. He’d forced her to work odd jobs as soon as she was physically able, claiming he “nobody else was going to pay her way” if she didn’t. Starting at nine or ten she’d done yard work, babysitting, and washed cars; at fourteen, she’d gotten her first part-time job at a fast food place.
She barely remembered not having some sort of job, and nearly every penny she’d earned, her father had claimed for himself.
In the ensuing argument, he’d warned her that she would regret not ‘taking care of her old man.’ He had, in fact, ensured she regretted it, and she was certain that he’d cleaned out her bank accounts and trashed her car by now.
No, she hadn’t expected help there. But for days after her father had refused to help her escape from the Riley house and find a way to turn back, she’d waited for her more sensible cousins to show up. None had come.
Perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised, but even now, the bitter sense of rejection rose and threatened to choke her. It seemed nobody cared, and Libby had reasons of her own to want Tara gone. She’d hoped the rest of the clan might care more than the old elven woman did, but that had been a vain dream.
In reaction to her mood, the spell wobbled and wavered until she managed to turn her full attention back to the scene in the mirror.
The image continued to show Casey sitting on the edge of the bed. Simon drifted off to sleep as she watched. The poor guy was thin and tiny, and the arm visible under the covers was severely bruised. Had he been beaten? Based on the stories she'd heard from the elves, geasbound men were rarely treated well.
Casey smiled at Simon, a soft expression that she’d not expected to see on the man’s face, given the number of mean things she’d heard him say to his friends. Big jocks were not supposed to be tender.
Then he rose. It took real effort to shift her attention from Simon to him, but since she could see him in the image, it was possible. Her exhaustion was rapidly becoming a physical presence, weighing her limbs down and clouding her mind. But she managed to follow him out of the bedroom.
Tara had assumed Casey’s home would be akin to Todd’s apartment in the garage; Todd’s place had been full of absolutely disgusting ‘art’ before the cops had taken that away as evidence related to their 'disappearance,' plus a hefty dose of messy, unsanitary clutter. Instead, Casey's apartment clearly belonged to a respectable grown-up. It probably smelled good, and she would have bet money that he moved the couch when vacuuming. There wasn’t a gross torture-porn poster, an empty pizza box, or a hugely oversized bra in sight.
The latter, which had been all over Todd’s apartment, were proportioned to fit Hindenburg-sized tatas attached to a tiny torso. The man had a definite type for his fantasies, also visible in the paintings of o-faced anime girls on his walls; most of each image was taken up by improbably large breasts. With that fetish in mind, Tara was somewhat mystified as to why Todd had picked her to turn into a cat-girl. She had A cups as a human, and a build best described as “fat linebacker.” Her lack of boobage had carried over into her grimalkin form, though the monster was much more lithe and far taller than human Tara.
Perhaps it had simply been about power. She’d always defied him. He’d tried to force her to his will, and at least in that, he had failed.
Casey hurried out the apartment door with several glances behind him. His shoulders were hunched, and his mouth set into a thin, tight line. The corridor outside was brightly lit, but multiple small rooms off it were dark. He reached an arm through the last doorway before a set of stairs and retrieved a baseball bat, and then he kept going down the steps. In a moment, she realized he had reached the second floor of the Junk Shop. He looked pissed, not scared.
She’d never known his apartment was in the attic of his shop. She’d assumed he lived in a big house like his brother's beautiful, if slightly eclectic, old home on Sanctuary Road, full of character. She’d repaired a gorgeous vintage stove there once.
Tara loved Avery’s style in both clothes and home, and she could have looked at him all day without growing tired of the view, but she had been careful to conceal her true excitement about the job when her uncle assigned her to take it. She didn’t want to risk absolutely brutal teasing.
But the truth was, Avery truly was gorgeous, in a young, gender-fluid God sort of way. On that day, Avery had been wearing a pink crop top, matching pink lipstick, fuzzy zebra-striped boots, and his trademark curly purple hair. His abs had been on proud display from the ribs down, and the man had a six-pack that needed its own fan club.
She’d played it cool, kept her eyes to herself as much as possible, and worked quickly to diagnose the problem with the oven, replace the faulty part, and relight the pilot. While she worked, Avery had perched on the kitchen counter, long legs and bright smile distractingly visible in her peripheral vision, and had cheerfully chatted with her. The conversation had started out about the weather, but they’d quickly ended up dissecting the latest Marvel movie — and they had shared similar snarky opinions about it. However, despite their criticism of the movie, it turned out they had shipped the same characters and had even read the same very popular fix-it fanfic.
Then, Avery had left her astonished and delighted when he’d improvised a parody of ‘Jolene’ worthy of Weird Al about the stove’s stubbornly uncooperative propane regulator — and he had encouraged her to sing along. His eyes had lit up with absolute delight when she’d hesitantly suggested several more lines.
She hadn’t sung a duet with anyone since high school, and his voice was, as always, absolutely amazing. He had a lifetime of professional training that she could only wistfully envy, and it showed. His approval had been flattering, but also enthusiastic enough to make her suspicious of possible ulterior motives.
After Avery had paid for the repair in cash and thrown in a substantial and much-welcome tip, he’d hesitantly mentioned that he met with friends twice a month in the back room of a local bar, the Rockin’ Road, for a game of Cards Against Humanity. However, she had heard uncertainty in his voice and had guessed that he was only being nice. It wasn’t a real invitation.
At any rate, her father and his brothers were notorious for causing trouble, and the Brights were not welcome at the bar. She’d given that reality as a polite excuse rather than voicing her other concern, which was that her father and Gus would freak the fuck out in the most dramatic of homophobic ways if they found out she was hanging with Avery Pazia.
To her surprise, Avery had offered to move the game elsewhere, but his tone had remained hesitant. So, she told him she was crap at card games, and declined again, a bit more firmly than before.
He’d given her a wry smile and said, while staring past her ear and fidgeting, “Sorry, uh, well, can’t fault a guy for trying. You’re fun. See you around, then.”
Tara had hurried off in her truck, feeling weird about the whole exchange how their conversation had ended. Fun? Her? Had he been trying to ask her out? If so, why? She couldn’t possibly be Avery’s type, for an absolute multitude of reasons!
In the mirror now, Casey looked about, mouth pressed into an angry line that snapped all her attention back to the scrying. That was an expression of fury, not fear. He snarled, “I know someone is watching me. Go! Away!”
She almost ended the session. But what could he do? Could he disrupt the scrying? If he did, along with how he did it, it would tell her a bit about his training and Gifts.
“Are you a ghost? I’ve had enough of ghosts. A haunted book is enough for one lifetime. Go. Away!”
Ghost? Did he not know what scrying was? Well, that tracked with Casey being completely untrained.
And, a haunted book? Had he found The Book of Needs? If they had the Book, that would explain everything: Simon’s presence, the hellbeast, the geas.
She, no pun intended, needed to get that book.
“Seriously. GET OUT!” Casey snarled, rage and intent suddenly lighting in his eyes, with Power behind his words. He cocked the baseball bat up against his shoulder, and it lit with a swirl of iridescent colors so bright they washed out the surface of the mirror. She had a fraction of a second to realize he’d ripped a frightening amount of power from the leys with shockingly little effort.
In front of her eyes, the little vanity’s mirror shattered, and the candle blew out. Tara recoiled as heat like an oven washed across her room. She smelled burning hair and swatted out the flames. Her cheeks, nose, and fingertips stung as if they’d been sunburnt. She was covered in tiny shards of broken glass.
In that instant, she realized Casey was far more dangerous than she’d ever guessed. His force of will and the power he could harness were incredible, but the amount of energy he’d directed her way was vast overkill, like swatting a roach with a nuclear weapon when a shoe would get the job done. No experienced, or even half-trained, mage would waste that kind of energy. He’d also caused havoc to the local ley network that would take weeks to settle, and he’d made himself very visible to anyone in range.
She’d never even heard of somebody being able to ley-strike through a scrying mirror.
A piece of glass fell from the mirror with a tink of sound. Aloud, she said, “.... fuuuuuuck!”
