I kissed him again. He had said what I needed to hear. The doctor had a cure; all I had to do was get out of bed and accept his help.
Aaron handed me the clothes he had brought down and I dressed myself, noting that he hadn’t provided any shoes… or socks... or underwear. I guessed I had left a trail of destroyed clothes and shoes in the wake of each of my transformations and he was just being cautious. But it meant he was expecting me to transform again, and that made my heart race with dread.
It was now or never, though. The wards were failing, sure, but Frank and Damien could cast them again or reinforce them if they had enough time. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that I was hiding in a cabin in the middle of the woods while Acheris still roamed the world, happy as could fucking be. That I couldn’t stand.
We got as far as the foot of the stairs.
“Are you okay?” Aaron asked, his voice echoing through the now empty cellar.
I scanned the darkness around me and caught the glint of the now limp chains on the floor. This place had been my home and my prison. I felt like an inmate about to be released; only this inmate knew she’d offend again. Knew it would only be a matter of time before she was sent right back here, kicking and screaming.
I’ll see you soon. “Yeah,” I said, “I’m fine.”
“I need you to say these words,” he said, “It’s the incantation that’ll let you get out.”
I nodded.
“Bide the Wiccan law—”
“The rede?”
Aaron nodded.
“I never would have thought of that.”
“Neither would the wolf.”
A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth as I remembered just how much the Wiccan Rede had meant to me. I had met Damien through the pretense that we were both Wiccans. Eliza and I had spent many, many years drinking and chanting by the banks of the Geordie, venerating the God and Goddess. Somewhere deep inside, part of me felt like I had lost my way.
I took a breath, gripped Aaron’s hand, and we both said:
“Bide the Wiccan law ye must, in perfect love and perfect trust. Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfil; an’ ye harm none, do what ye will. What ye send forth comes back to thee, so ever mind the Rule of Three. Follow this with mind and heart, merry ye meet and merry ye part.”
Aaron climbed the first riser, and with my hand on the hand-rail, I followed. I wasn’t sure what I expected. A surge of magick? Some kind of epic shaking of the very earth itself? But a trickle of power, or a tingling of flesh, maybe even just a loosening of pressure; any sign that I had returned to my former power would have been welcomed.
But nothing happened, and as I stepped—for the first time in weeks—out of the cellar and into the blinding light, light I had to shield my eyes from, I found myself wondering if I had lost my magick for good.
“Aaron?” I said, still covering my eyes.
“I’m here,” he said, squeezing my hand. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I don’t feel anything. I can’t… I can’t feel… can’t…”
My heart started to pound. Aaron was speaking, but it was like I had been submerged in water. The world spun around and around, and were it not for Aaron’s hand I would have tumbled straight back into the cellar. But I didn’t. I stood firm for as long as I could as an immense pressure descended from the sky, forcing me to my knees as if I were some kind of supplicant.
The pressure came in waves, each one heavier than the last. They were like pulses. Wham. Wham. Wham. And with each pulse my head dipped closer and closer to the floor. But my body—something was happening to my body. It felt like my skin was ablaze with moon fire, with the cold, soundless flame of the Goddess; her essence, her presence made manifest. Every inch of my skin was tingling, vibrating as it had done so many times in the past. As I endured the shock of my reconnection to the raw, primordial plane of magick, the wolf hiding in my heart stirred and smelled the power it had almost forgotten; salivating at the chance for another taste.
Chapter Nine
Frank wasn’t exactly known for being able to hold his breath. A great many late nights spent beneath the waterline of some guy’s Jacuzzi would attest to that. Especially if the guy in question had a wife, and she was asking as to the nature of her husband’s random moonlight dip while Frank went blue in the face.
When Amber stepped out of that cellar, when the power came rushing at her like a roll of thunder—or an earthquake—Frank couldn’t help but suck in air and watch until it was over. Then and only then, at the point where the earth went still and the only sound he could hear was the beating of his own heart, could Frank exhale.
He scanned the living room, which he had painstakingly turned into a ritual space, for any sign of damage. The table hadn’t collapsed and the ceiling supports were holding, but a lamp-shade had fallen over leaving pieces of broken lightbulb glass lying around. Frank released his vice-grip on the ram’s head skull and carefully placed it on the couch before heading into the kitchen.
Dusk had settled, and the honey glow of the setting sun bathed the room in beautiful golds and browns. Amber stood at the center of it all like some kind of Goddess; tall, glowing, and strong. Fuck if she was strong. He had to stop at the arch to the kitchen fearing close proximity to her could in some way hurt him. Almost felt like getting too close to an oven.
“When should we run?” Frank asked, his nasally voice slicing through the silence.
“I don’t think we need to,” Aaron said.
Amber shook her head. Her copper hair was wet and dark, but tresses of steam were rising from it. “I’m okay,” she said, “I just need—”
She staggered forward, stuck her hand out, and broke her fall on the kitchen counter. Aaron was fast enough to grab her torso to stop her from completely going down. When he pulled her upright again Frank noticed her hands were shaking.
“Like hell if you’re okay, witch,” Frank said, “Causing earthquakes and shit.”
“I… don’t think that’ll happen again,” she said.
And Frank believed her. At least, he believed she wouldn’t do it of her own accord. But her temper, which had already been legendary, had been drinking energy drinks for the last three weeks and he didn’t trust her to be able to keep it in her pants.
“Let’s get this done, then,” he said.
“Where’s Damien? And Jackal?” Amber asked.
“Here,” Damien said, stepping up behind Frank. He had been helping to set the ritual space up. “Jackal’s outside.”
“Outside? Why?”
“We’ve told her to wait outside just in case…” Aaron said.
“In case what?”
“You know… in case she needs to play fullback with you.”
“Oh. Yeah, okay.”
Aaron ushered Amber through the arch and into the living room, and Damien cleared away from them like the red sea parting for Moses. Frank could sense the fear ebbing from him in pulses of hot, primal emotion. The fear was instinctual, not rational. Damien couldn’t control it any better than someone with a phobia of tiny spiders.
That’s gonna be a problem, Frank thought, like we need more of them.
He shook his head, tossing the thought away for now, and led Amber gently into the circle he had drawn into the wooden floor with chalk. The circle was a large, elaborate thing surrounded by intricate runes—Nordic and Gaelic—, interwoven by a five point star, and accented with invocations to the Catholic God in Latin. Whether one believed in what the Bible preached or not was irrelevant; demons believed, and that’s why the words and the meaning behind them had power over the angry little bastards.
“Frank?” Amber asked in a mousy voice.
He took his eyes away from the book of shadows in which he had written the details of the ritual and the following exorcism. “Yeah?”
“Are you sure about this?”
Frank put the book down and rubbed the space between his eyes. “I’m not sure about anything anymore.??
?
“You’re gonna be okay,” Aaron said. “Everyone’s gonna be okay.”
Frank watched Aaron let Amber loose and walk to the side of the room, away from the circle. A moment later, Frank picked the skull up from the sofa and placed it at the head of the pentacle, in the space between two points. He felt the jolt of memory spark up in Amber’s mind and recalled it with her; that moment on the Ever Dark Mesa, just before the man who killed Joanna and Lilly plunged a dagger into her gut. There had been a pentacle in chalk on the ground there too, and a ram’s head skull.
Frank hoped she wouldn’t make the connection; that she wouldn’t recognize it as the same one she had seen that night.
“How do you feel?” Frank asked.
“Tingly,” Amber said. “Nervous.”
“You need to be calm. Think of flowers or fields, water, clouds.”
“A fireplace, a blanket, a good book,” she said, eyes closed.
“Those work too. The rest of you, get back. Like, right the fuck back. You don’t want this thing touching you.”
Damien backed straight into a corner on the far side of the room, next to the fireplace. Aaron slipped through the arch into the kitchen again and watched from a distance, ready to act at a moment’s notice judging by his cocked stance. Frank, meanwhile, stepped into the circle with Amber. A smile crossed his lips and she returned it, though the smile wasn’t genuine. On either of their parts.
His eyes went to the ram’s head, then to Damien. Damien’s eyes were low, his body tense, and his aura bursting at the seams with anxious energy. Frank didn’t like that. Not after what he had seen in the Nether. The literal snake in the grass. He would have to play it down and fly under the radar. If it was a demon, Frank needed to be a better liar than it.
Frank cleared his throat. Amber stared at him, doe eyed but hard lipped, and nodded to indicate her readiness. “Daemonium,” Frank said, staring at the ram’s head skull, “I ad te clamavi. In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti. Surgere.”
The words flowed through him like he was meant to say them. The first part of the invocation was easy; command the demon to come in the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Infuse the words with a touch of magick to replace the need for a priest, and few demons could resist. It was at once a command and an enticement, and when the ram’s skull tipped to one side on its own, Frank knew the thing inside had heard.
He waited and then repeated the verse, giving power to the word surgere—which meant rise. His flesh crawled like a thousand ants were walking over him. In his head, his pulse began to pound. But it was Damien’s wide eyes, the sudden expression of shock on his face, which made the blood in Frank’s face drain like some tap had been opened.
When he turned around he saw it: one of the sofas was levitating a clear six inches off the ground.
“It’s here,” Damien said.
“No,” Frank said, “That’s not the demon’s doing.” He snapped around to look at Amber. Her eyes had gone white and her mouth was slack open in a lazy O shape. Even Frank went cold at the sight.
“What’s happening?” Aaron asked.
“I don’t know,” Frank said, “Gimme a minute.”
“Amber?” Aaron started to approach, but Frank’s hand went up and Aaron stopped.
“Don’t you dare enter this circle. Either of you. I need to—”
Amber’s eyes returned to normal. She dropped to her knees, held the sides of her head, and screamed all of the air out of her lungs. Frank took a step back, though he remained in the circle watching her. Her scream seemed to go on for minutes, piercing Frank’s ears and cracking windows all around the living room.
Jackal, who was waiting outside, screamed too—though hers was a scream of bodily pain. Amber’s was spiritual.
“Amber,” Frank said, “What’s happening? You need to talk to me.”
“The wolf!” she said, “It’s trying to get to my magick!”
“Stop it. Block it out.”
“I can’t!”
The sofa at Frank’s back jerked, rose a few inches off the ground, and came slamming back down. Then it went up again, and then down, like it was dancing. An armchair in the corner of the room joined the sofa’s dance. The fallen lampshade came up and flew across the room, almost hitting Frank across the head. And then the doors started to open and close. Frank looked over his shoulder and saw Jackal in the window. She was circling the house, but it was as if she couldn’t get too near it; like the house had some kind of force field around it.
“The ram!” Damien said, and he leapt for it, plucking it out of midair and forcing it back into its spot on the ground.
“Don’t let the ritual space be broken,” Frank said, “We’ve already started—we can’t stop now!”
“We have to stop!” Aaron said, “This isn’t safe!”
“If we stop now I lose control of this thing and everything goes to hell. We are not stopping! Just keep shit from flying around!”
Aaron and Damien sprang into action; Aaron pushing sofas down to keep them from hurtling across the room like the lamp had just done, and Damien using rudimentary telekinesis to make sure Frank’s book and the ram’s skull didn’t start floating on their own, while also not breaking the circle by stepping into it. It was a little like juggling.
Amber crossed her arms over her chest and began to rock back and forth, counting out loud, while Frank continued to speak in Latin, calling the demon out of the ram and commanding it to obey him in the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit. In that moment he wasn’t some rebellious gay teen running from his tyrant of a father and his church; he was a priest and a paladin, of light and of the darkness. His fingers, his hands, his soul, were all tools with which to express his divine authority over the creatures that stalk the world unseen.
The room filled with the foul smell of rotten food and garbage water, the air turned heavy and thick, and in his heart he felt the passing of the demon from out of the ram’s skull and into the world. Like Aladdin summoning the genie from the bottle, Frank had pulled this thing from its prison with the power of his voice and his magick.
And then, for an instant, there was silence.
The lights started to flicker, flakes of falling snow drawn in from the outside hung suspended in the air, and a whole bunch of stuff which should have been on the ground wasn’t. But all sound seemed to have been taken away. It was like watching a moment of unscripted television, where the actors look at each other in stark disbelief but no one says anything; no one but Amber. She was still counting, throwing seemingly random numbers into the air and asking herself questions about them.
Until she wasn’t.
Jackal came crashing into the room having wrestled with the front door like it had a mind of its own, and when Amber caught sight of the newcomer to the party the numbers stopped coming out of her mouth. Amber’s head cocked to the side. Her nostrils worked. She sniffed the air. And in the moment that followed Jackal’s entry into the fray, while Frank stood there holding a seven hundred year old demon in his hands, he saw two things:
First, he noticed how a sudden and powerful dread warped Aaron’s face into the quintessential visage of terror. And then he saw a copper blur shoot up off the ground, break out of the ritual circle, and head straight for Jackal. Only, by the time he turned around to see what was going on, Amber was no longer a copper blur; but a copper beast.
Chapter Ten
For the first time in what felt like years, Aaron Cooper feared for his life. He was in motion in a heartbeat, bounding across the living room on heavy strides, charging past Frank as his body transformed, and intent on doing one thing and one thing only. He caught Amber’s leg while she was in mid-flight, swung her around, and tossed her like a rag doll into the stone wall furthest away from Damien or Frank.
“Run!” he said, forcing the human word out of his wolf snout. The sound was guttural and wrong, but it got the point across. Damien grabbed the skull and m
ade a break for the kitchen. Frank followed. Jackal entered the cabin and removed her jacket. “You. Go.”
“Fuck you,” Jackal spat, “You asked for my help.”
The copper haired wolf-beast came flying out from behind the sofa where Aaron had thrown her, claws stretched, maw opened wide. Aaron threw himself at her, his powerful hands catching hers and twisting her into a lock. He slammed her to the ground and sat on her back, but a lamp fixture came flying at Aaron and, on instinct, he put his hand up to protect his face allowing Amber a second to break free.
She was about to go for the door when a black, lithe, wolf-woman hybrid stepped in her way; eyes glowing blue, claws ready to strike.
“Run!” Aaron said again, but Jackal shook her head in defiance and lunged, swiping at Amber’s face with her razor sharp claws. The two wolf-beasts clashed, dancing in a flurry of claws and blood and fur all around the living room. Neither one of them seemed to be getting the upper hand, despite Jackal being a much more experienced fighter. Amber’s instincts were sharp. Sharper than Aaron’s. That scared him.
What scared him more, though, in that second that stretched into forever, was the thought that Amber was holding back.
He stood, understanding that Jackal wouldn’t just leave, and howled for her to break the attack, which she did. Aaron then came in, spurred on by powerful legs, and shoulder-charged Amber into the next room, through the fake wooden wall which exploded under the sheer weight of them. He sat on her chest and, with hands balled into fists and not claws, struck at her muzzle again and again.
Some of the blows went deflected, but some of them hit with bone-crunching force. Amber just shrugged them off, roared, and continued ripping at Aaron’s hide whenever she could. Each scratch was like fire, and the flames stoked his internal anger. He may have been in control of his beast most of the time, but he still had one and it was starting to bubble beneath the skin. Begging for control. Promising to stop the hurting.
But Aaron knew no beast would be enough to beat Amber, because Amber was no ordinary animal. Amber’s wolf was intelligent, cunning, and it knew magick.