Fire and Ice

  “What. Have. You. Learned?”

  Lina took a deep breath and let it out. “Okay, fine, Obi-Wan. I learned that blue visions haven’t happened yet. Any dreams that look normal are in the past.”

  “Very good. What else?”

  “That there was a third person at the murder of Kael’s family, and they’re probably the person that murdered Bertholde. I also saw him in a blue vision, so that means I’ll probably run into him again.”

  “That’s not what I meant, but all right.”

  She thought for a moment. “That’s all I’ve got.”

  “How did you get here, Goddess?”

  “I—” She pulled up short, a smile slowly spreading across her face. “I brought myself here?”

  Baba Yaga nodded. “Now you’re getting it.”

  “I brought myself here, huh?” She plopped down on the grass, allowing herself a moment to bask in her success, however small it might prove to be. “Cool.”

  “Yes. To answer your question, I left that part of the story out on purpose. I am not allowed to force events to go a certain direction. Especially since you bear the memories in your mind, although Zachary does not because he was not present when the tablet was created. Now that you have discovered the existence of the tablet, I can tell you about it. Unless you’d rather look back at the memory.”

  Lina started to say lay it on me, then thought for a moment. “You’re saying I have the answer about the tablet?”

  Baba Yaga nodded. “You just need to find the strength within yourself to revisit the past. It will hurt, I won’t lie to you. But that kind of pain only makes you stronger in the long run.”

  Lina sighed. “What you’re saying is that I should put on my big goddess panties and get it over with?”

  “Yes. Eloquently stated.”

  “Sarcastic bitch.”

  The other woman laughed. “So say my two younger sisters. Hasn’t stopped me yet.”

  Lina closed her eyes. At times like this, it was hard for her to garner any kind of positive feelings for the woman despite her saving Zack’s life. “Then I need to get home.” She opened her eyes and found herself sitting cross-legged in the middle of the kitchen table. The men all jumped back.

  “Holy fuck!” Rick said. “How the hell’d you do that?”

  She extended her hands to Jan and Zack for help getting down. “I’m thinking about taking the act to Vegas. Open for Penn and Teller.” She headed out of the kitchen. “I need a few minutes of alone time, boys. I’ll be right back.”

  Upstairs, she closed their bedroom door and plopped down into the center of the unmade bed. With a deep breath, she closed her eyes and let her mind drift, not sure how to go about finding the memories she sought. Eventually, fuzzy images swam into clearer focus as she made herself face the past. She thought about the trip down memory lane the night before with Baba Yaga on the way home from the airport.

  Then she realized she’d found the missing part.

  The morning after her first night with Jan and Rick—Stribog and Svarog, she reminded herself—the three of them met with Baba Yaga beside a sacred spring. Lina stood in the cool shadows at the edge of the clearing and watched her past self, much as she had the night before with the retelling, instead of experiencing it as an actual memory.

  It made it easier to bear, somehow.

  Lina remembered. She’d gone through the prophecy for any clue to defeat the cockatrice and called upon Baba Yaga for assistance. She watched as her past self talked with Baba Yaga.

  “What is the stone?” she asked the crone.

  The crone smiled. “It is whatever you want it to be, Goddess. You have powers beyond your ken. Unfortunately, you do not have time to adequately develop them.” The crone glanced at her two men. “The three of you prove a powerful triad.”

  “Is it your sisters I need to call upon?”

  The crone smiled and transformed into the maiden. “If it is your will, Goddess.”

  Lina watched her past self straighten. “I call upon you and your sisters to assist us in making the…tablet.”

  Baba Yaga raised her hands to the sky and chanted, calling forth two swirling pillars of cloud and light that took form on either side of her as women. Once they had completely materialized into solid flesh, she introduced them. “Brighde, Cailleach, meet the lovers three of the prophecy.”

  Lina watched as she and her two men sat, a blank stone tablet appearing in the center between them. “What do we do now?” her past self asked.

  Baba Yaga smiled. “You are the Goddess. You will feel it. Draw upon your men. Call upon the strength you know to be…present.” Lina could swear Baba Yaga turned around and winked at her, where she stood at the edge of the clearing.

  Like belly flopping into a pool, Lina now sat in the circle, her past and present selves merged. She remembered. She remembered seeing Baba Yaga turn, as if looking at someone else they couldn’t see.

  And deep inside her, she knew. Ignoring the fact that she was about to commit a temporal anomaly that would make Carl Sagan’s head explode were he still alive, Lina closed her eyes as the three women surrounded them.

  Memory and vision merged as one. “Put your hands on the tablet,” she said to her men. She felt them do it. She laid her own hands on top of theirs, the blued image of the tablet of her vision fixed in her mind.

  “Goddess within, Goddess without,” she chanted. “Goddess above, Goddess below. I summon Baba Yaga, Brighde, and Cailleach, hear our plea.” Her hands tingled. She imagined channeling the energies from the Universe down through the sky, through the three women now circling them, through the hands of her men, her energy merging and mixing with theirs, down into the tablet. “The power of three, past, present, and hence. The powers of these three, and evil banish hence. With every drop of blood that I pour into the ground, may the Goddess of all take heed to this sound. As strong as this stone, unbreakable cast, this spell guarantees our strength o’er evil, long may it last.”

  She felt the wind pick up around them but didn’t open her eyes. She knew the three incarnations still circled them, feeding their called-upon powers into the stone.

  Lina’s voice grew stronger, surer, more confident. “Goddess above, Goddess of all. We take now their evil and banish it all. The evil they sowed, the results shall they reap. We so do will it, so shall mote it be.”

  White-hot lightning impaled her from the crown of her head, through her arms, into the stone. She opened her eyes and saw nothing but the negative-light image of the tablet from her vision. Then, like that, the feeling disappeared. Her body went limp as she collapsed backward onto the grass.

  She heard the anxious cries of her men as they crowded around her. When she finally could open her eyes again, she saw the three of them were once again alone in the center of the clearing. The plain stone tablet now bore the same markings from her vision.

  Lina didn’t stop to consider the ramifications. Her body felt like it would explode, sizzling nerve endings on fire in a good way. She grabbed Stribog and planted a kiss on him. Startled at first, it only took him a moment to return the kiss as Svarog nibbled on the back of her neck. “Take me, now!” she gasped. “Both of you! I must have you both!”

  She struggled to remove the tunic she wore. Finally, the two men helped her out of it and quickly shed their own clothes. There beside the spring, she pushed Svarog onto his back and fiercely kissed him. She barely had time to think about how they even tasted and smelled the way they did in the present before she shoved rational thought out of the way.

  With her pussy already drenched with her own juices, she impaled herself on Svarog, moaning as his hot cock drove deep inside her. She rode him only for a moment before Stribog grabbed her hips and forced her to relinquish his brother’s cock. “Wait for me,” he said, driving his cool shaft deep into her pussy and making her moan. He only thrust a couple of times, enough to coat his cock in her juices before he withdrew.

  Using a finger, he scooped
her moisture onto her rim, getting her wet there before allowing her to once again ride Svarog’s cock.

  Stribog gently entered, stopping as she adjusted to his size. In this way, it didn’t feel like it did in the present. She frequently took her men in the ass and loved the feel of anal sex.

  With both of them inside her, Lina closed her eyes, threw her head back, and howled at the sky as she fucked them hard and fast, her body out of control and her mind teetering on the edge of madness. The electricity inside her flowed between her pussy and her men, back and forth, to her nipples, to her fingertips.

  As her orgasm swept over her, she cried out to the Goddess, the men’s groans of pleasure as their cocks emptied inside her sending her into a new plateau of release she didn’t know if she could survive.

  The burst of energy now gone, she collapsed onto Svarog and blackness took her.

  * * * *

  Lina extricated herself from the men and pulled on the old-fashioned tunic. At first confused with the laces, she finally figured out how to make herself presentable. She had to deliver the tablet.

  Now.

  She kissed her men. Svarog stirred and tried to stand, but she stopped him. “You cannot follow me. Meet me back at the castle.” She grabbed the tablet and ran for the horses, fumbling a little as she mounted without dropping the bulky stone. Then she raced through the woods toward the only person she knew she could trust as much as Zachary and her men.

  Her old nursemaid, Trammel.

  Lina smiled, a near-hysterical laugh escaping her…

  And she opened her eyes to find herself sitting in the middle of her bed at their house in modern-day Florida. “Amma,” she whispered. That’s what she’d called her nurse when she was a young child, because she couldn’t say “Trammel.”

  Lina flopped back on the bed, laughing and crying at the same time. The old woman hadn’t let her down. She’d been barely able to walk, but she quickly packed a small satchel while Lina had rigged up a saddlebag to hold the tablet. Then, with some tearful laughter between them, Lina had forcibly hoisted the woman onto her own horse.

  “Take it far away, Amma,” she’d said. “To lair of wolf, or flagyer of dragon, or den of bear, it matters not. But keep it safe and deliver it into the hands only of someone trustworthy. If it falls into the hands of the cockatrice, we are all lost.”

  “Aye, you can count on me, Goddess.”

  Lina had watched the woman ride off into the woods before she herself turned and hurried, on foot, through the woods and back to the castle.

  And then by late the next morning…

  She sighed.

  The next day, they had defeated the cockatrice. And all four of them were dead.

  But how the hell had an illustration of the Tablet of Trammel ended up in a hellacious book belonging to the cockatrice?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lina walked back downstairs. The men immediately stopped talking as soon as she appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  “Oh, quit doing that, would you?” She grabbed her coffee mug and took it over to refill it.

  “Sorry,” Zack said. “Force of habit. Well?”

  She waited until she’d refilled her mug and got a sip of coffee before answering. “How old is that book?” She tipped her head toward the table, where the ancient spell book lay.

  Zack shrugged. “I don’t know. At least four hundred years old, but there are newer notes in there, written in ballpoint pen. Why?”

  “They had the book with them when they killed your parents, Kael.”

  He grimly nodded. “I suspected that.”

  “And that picture,” she pointed, “was from my vision.”

  “Yeah? So?” Zack asked.

  “I know how the tablet was created. I know when it was created. I also know how it was sent away to safety before the battle. The cockatrice got that part of their story wrong.” From the change of expression on Zack’s face, she knew she didn’t have to explain which battle.

  It still didn’t answer all his questions. “But I don’t know anything about the tablet.”

  “Who was Trammel?” she asked him.

  He thought for a moment while Jan, Rick, and Kael silently looked back and forth between them during the exchange. Confused, they wisely chose to keep their mouths shut.

  He finally came up with it. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered. “But I thought she died before the battle?”

  “A lot of people did. She was old enough to be dead. She lived outside the town. And the morning before we all…” She couldn’t say it. “Before the battle. I called upon Baba Yaga, Cailleach, and Brighde to help us overcome the cockatrice.”

  Rick’s eyes squeezed shut in confusion as he rubbed his forehead. “What battle?”

  “Shh,” Jan said, slapping his arm. “Let them talk it out.”

  “And that’s when the tablet was created?” Zack asked.

  “Yep. Hence the three spirals.” Now, with the memory fully restored, she knew what the symbols represented. She walked over to the table, turned the book to face her, and traced the picture with her finger. “The elements. The Horned God and Goddess. The spell we used to remove the cockatrice’s power and bind them. It didn’t work totally, only on the forces that attacked. Which, fortunately, were most of their strongest fighters. Meaning the good genes died that day, leaving only the weakest ones. It also took out some other species that were with them that day, which explains why some of them faded from memory.”

  “And they think finding that tablet will help get their powers back?”

  She nodded. “Yep. I think so.” She looked at it. “That’s why Edgar and Lenny were both hot to get into my pants. They thought that would help reverse the spell and take the power of the triad.” She looked at her men, then Zack. “We have to find that tablet.”

  Zack frowned. “How do they know what the tablet even looks like?”

  She touched her finger to her nose then pointed at him. “That’s the million-dollar question.”

  * * * *

  After breakfast, Lina grabbed a shower and changed into shorts and a T-shirt. Just her luck, the PMS she’d suffered in Yellowstone had finally delivered. Her period had started.

  Well, at least I had a good night of hot sex before it did.

  Even though it was Monday and they’d already planned to not go into the office, she had things she wanted to get done before the men remembered Brodey’s warning that they should keep her locked up tighter than a virgin on her first spring break at Mardi Gras.

  She grabbed her purse, keys and sunglasses, and shouted, “Going to the post office. I’ll be right back!” over her shoulder before bolting out the front door to her car. Sure enough, when she glanced in her rearview mirror halfway down the drive, she saw Jan and Rick standing outside the front door.

  Most likely debating the wisdom of chasing me down. She hoped they were smart enough to keep their asses home. Especially since the post office was only five minutes away. She arrived there close to ten and waited in line to collect their mail and cancel the hold they’d placed during the trip to Yellowstone. The clerk frowned when she looked at Lina driver’s license.

  “What’s wrong?” Lina asked.

  “So that package is for you.” She returned Lina’s license.

  “What package?” Her Spidey senses weren’t tingling. She hoped that meant it wasn’t bad.

  “An overseas package arrived for you today. Let me go get it, and your other mail.”

  Lina felt her stomach churn. It wouldn’t be a mail bomb, would it? The clerk returned a few moments later. She balanced three bundles of mail held together with rubber bands on top of a box at least three feet long and two feet across. She set it all on the counter with an audible thump and sigh of relief to be rid of it.

  “Sign here, ma’am.” The clerk handed her a claim slip.

  Eyeing the box, Lina signed the slip. She’d brought a cloth grocery bag with her for the mail and dumped it inside. When she picke
d up the box, its heft shocked her, and she had to put it back on the counter to adjust her grip. It had to weigh over thirty pounds.

  Then she spotted the return address. It’d been mailed by one Bertholde Ann-Marie Marsziewnski from somewhere in France.

  Lina swallowed hard. “Thank you,” Lina whispered. She once again grabbed the box and hurried out of the lobby to her car. She didn’t have to resist the urge to open it. She wanted to wait until she got home.

  Rick and Jan were waiting for her, feet tapping and arms crossed, identical glares on their faces. When she got out of the car, they immediately swarmed her, talking all over each other.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  She held up her hands. “I’m fine.” She took a deep breath. “One of you, I don’t care which one, please bring that box into the kitchen. We’re also going to need Zack and Kael.”

  Jan reached the passenger side first. “What is—oh, crap!”

  “What?” Rick asked, shouldering his twin aside. “Holy shit.”

  “Okay, are the expletives out of the way, boys? Because I’d really like to open the fucking thing.” She stormed into the house. She didn’t need to holler for Zack and Kael. Seated at the kitchen table, they were going over the evil spell book and taking notes.

  “Hey, babe,” Zack said. He paused and studied her expression. “What’s wrong?”

  She dropped the bag of mail on the table and pointed to the doorway, where Jan was carrying the box into the kitchen for her.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know, Zack,” she said. “That’s what I’d like to find out.”

  Kael and Zack looked at the return address. “Holy shit!” they said.

  “Yeah. Fine. Great. We’ve got that covered. Someone get a knife, please.”

  Rick produced a pocketknife and carefully slit the tape holding the box closed while Lina examined the postmark.

  “According to the date, she mailed this about a day or so before she left for Yellowstone.”

  Rick pried the flaps open. Inside, on the very top, lay an envelope addressed to Lina with her name written in a very fragile-looking scrawl. Beneath it were several objects wrapped and padded with a French newspaper.