By the Embers Dies the Fire

  Lina snorted, earning her a glare from Carla. “What?” the goddess asked with a shrug. “I just imagined a comic book hero named SuperSperm. Faster than a speeding spermicide. More powerful than the strongest latex. Able to jump snugly fitting diaphragms—”

  “Enough!” Carla said.

  Lina cocked her head at her. “What?”

  “Look, can we please drop that part of the discussion? Hits a little too close to home.” Carla ran her hands up and down her arms. “I’m still getting used to my new life. Maybe more kids are in our future, but I’d rather not get that detailed in our conversations right now. Okay?”

  “Okay, Mom,” Lina said, still looking puzzled. “Sorry.”

  “You sure you’re not pregnant right now?” Elain asked her mom.

  Lina shot her a look.

  “What? She’s my mother. This is sort of reverse payback.”

  “Well,” Lina said, “I was going to suggest we get together today for another shot at the visions, but with that revelation, I have a feeling some of us won’t have our head in the game.” She flashed a grin in Mai’s direction. “So, how about tomorrow morning we start bright and early? Have Mom babysit for us and have Zack and Kael help. If we’re all here, she can keep the kids busy and holler for help if she needs it.” She turned toward Carla and gave her sad puppy eyes. “Pleeease?”

  Carla rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’ll babysit. But can I toss out an idea?”

  “Sure.”

  “I think maybe you girls should try another round with all those things again.”

  “What things?” Elain asked, although she already knew.

  Carla arched an eyebrow at her. “You know what I mean. The books and those other things. You girls are focusing so hard on your visions, maybe the problem is that to understand what’s going on with the future, you need to understand the past a little better.”

  “I was hoping to avoid that,” Lina said. “I hate those creepy little statues.”

  “Maybe all the more reason to check them out,” Carla said. “But I think taking an afternoon off is a good idea.” She pointed at Mai.

  Mai looked glum.

  “You’re not upset about being pregnant, are you?” Elain asked, feeling guilty even though she wasn’t the one who caused Mai to get pregnant.

  She just helped ensure which soul would move in when it happened.

  “I’m not…upset,” Mai said. “I’m in shock.”

  “Good thing you built the new house,” Lina said. “You’ll have plenty of room to expand.”

  When the other women glared at her, Lina had the decency to turn a little pink in the face. “Eh, sorry. Bad choice of words.”

  “Ya think?” Elain asked.

  Chapter Six

  Mai hadn’t wanted to take the whole day off, and asked if they could get together again after dinner, once she’d had a chance to talk to Micah and Jim and break the news to them about her pregnancy.

  With Brighton out of the house, it meant they could finally gather together to have a Seer planning confab without Brighton’s stifling energy pulling them down. That evening, Elain laid out her plan to Mai and Lina so that they could spend the next day working and maybe making some progress in deciphering the visions.

  Ain listened to the three women talking and finally interjected. “You sure you’re feeling up to this?” he asked Elain.

  “Yeah, I have to be. I don’t have a choice. Mai is going to be heading in the opposite direction the farther her pregnancy progresses, so it’s time for us to shit or get off the pot.”

  Ain smirked. “I was going to hang out around the house tomorrow with you and the kids.”

  “You can, if you want. You’re the Prime, and on the Clan Council. Actually, it’d be great if you did. You can help babysit and keep everyone quiet and occupied.”

  “Just sit there and shut up and look pretty?” The sparkle in his grey eyes drew a smile from Elain.

  “Sure. That.”

  “By the way, how did Micah and Jim take the news?” he asked Mai.

  Mai rolled her eyes. “They’re already planning the next nursery.” A smile crept in. “You didn’t hear the happy howls?”

  “Ah. Is that what that noise was?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  So the next morning, while Ain, Jim, and Carla watched all the kids in the living room, Elain, Lina, Mai, Zack, and Kael gathered in Elain’s kitchen with a variety of…well, cockatrice crap, including the stuff Brodey had retrieved from Lenny’s tent when he rescued Lina.

  The spell books would be their first focus this morning.

  Elain stared at the two books laying side-by-side on the towels spread out on her kitchen table. Today, it seemed, her run of luck of not having to lay hands on the damned things had come to an end. Before now, touching them had been avoidable, fortunately.

  It was only now, and maybe due to the fact that she had the extra boost to her powers from Gigi, that Elain realized it almost felt like the books were emitting a palpable…funk. That was the only descriptor she had for it that seemed to fit.

  “They’re not like those books in Harry Potter that have teeth and stuff,” Lina quipped, her lips quirked in a smile.

  Elain rubbed her palms up and down her arms. “Don’t be so sure of that,” she muttered.

  They looked to be hand-bound in some sort of leather by artisans, leather lacing wrapped around the edges.

  Too bad the workmanship had been wasted on such evil.

  Why do cockatrice have to be so batcrap crazy?

  “Well?” Lina asked.

  “Yeah?”

  Her friend smirked. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t want to. But yeah, I have to.”

  “Technically,” Zack said, “you don’t. It’d be helpful if you do, but you don’t have to.”

  Still, Elain made no move to touch the books. They radiated evil, and not just because she knew what they contained. An invisible cloud of wrongness surrounded them.

  “How do you understand what they say?” Elain asked Lina, still stalling. “How can you read them?”

  “Like I told you, I just…think it. I think that yes, I can understand them, and I do.”

  “You sure you’re understanding them, and not just wishful thinking that you are?”

  She pointed to Zack and Kael. “I read my translations to them and they said I was dead on.” She winced. “Ooh, sorry. Bad choice of words.”

  Zack let out a laugh. “You might be the Goddess of Snark, but no one ever accused you of being the Goddess of Tact.”

  “Watch it, buster,” she playfully warned before refocusing her attention on Elain. “And the translating might not even be something you can do, for all we know. We all have different talents.”

  “True.”

  Elain stared at the accumulation of other stuff and her gaze fell on the three knives, including the knife Marston had used to kill Bertholde.

  Elain knew she’d definitely want to avoid touching that, if possible.

  The five little stone icons also sat on the table, as well as the remnants of the silver cuffs used on Jan and Rick in Yellowstone by Lenny, and the silver collar used on Lacey by Aliah. Lina recalled the cuffs Lenny had used on her were close in appearance to the ones used on Jan and Rick.

  All of the silver items bore markings similar enough that they felt safe agreeing they were likely made by the same craftsman.

  Elain didn’t mention that she knew Rodolfo had, up until he died, worn a similar collar to the one used on Lacey. Although she hadn’t gotten close enough to look at the engravings. Likely also made by the silversmith murdered in Brussels by Marston.

  Her gut told her they all probably came from the same source.

  Note to self, another trip to frickin’ Bolivia is in my immediate future. Or at least a phone call.

  “Why didn’t the cuffs keep you from using your powers in Yellowstone,” Zack asked Lina.

  She s
hrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not a shifter. Maybe they were just regular cuffs on me.”

  Elain didn’t want to touch the stone icons, either. She also noticed Lina hadn’t handled them directly, dumping them out of the cloth bag they kept them in onto a towel.

  Mai, who hadn’t gotten any kind of impression or squicky feelings when she handled them, sat at the table with her chin propped in her hands and a morose look on her face.

  “You’d think with this extra dose of oomph I got from Callie’s powers that I’d be able to do something with the damn things.” Previously, she’d done everything except rub them all over her lady bits, and yet…nothing.

  Elain walked around the table to stand behind her, draping her arms around Mai’s shoulders from behind. Mai tightly clasped Elain’s arms.

  “It’s okay, sweetie,” Elain assured her. “You’ll get there. Look at that lightning bolt you shot. That was damned impressive.” She leaned to the side to get a look at Mai’s face. “And that was all you. That was before Callie threw her juju into you-you. You’ll get the hang of the poofy stuff now that you know you can do it.”

  Mai wore the hint of a smile. “Yeah, I guess that was pretty awesome. I was just so mad and scared when I saw Lacey up there that I didn’t even think about things.”

  “You both think too much,” Lina said from where she stood on the other side of the table.

  “Okay,” Elain shot back. “Then you fondle the evilness and tell us what you see.”

  “I tried. Believe me. I get nothing from the books other than the text itself. But I can’t stand touching those”—she waved her hand at the icons—“things.” She practically spat the word out.

  “And why do you think I’ll be able to stand touching them?” Elain asked.

  Lina planted her hands on her hips. “I didn’t say you would. I just meant I can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried. Last time I tried it, I nearly puked my guts up, and I wasn’t even pregnant. Any information we can get from you is more information than we had when we started.”

  “What about that copy of the spell book you guys found in Brussels?” Elain asked.

  “It was an exact scanned copy of the content of Lenny’s spell book,” Lina said. “Not just a reproduction. It was like someone scanned it and color printed it. Once we realized that, I shredded it and burned it. I didn’t want any extra print copies floating around when we already had it scanned in. Goddess only knows where the original scanned file is, though.”

  “Electronic copies aren’t that secure, are they?” Mai asked.

  “All our iPads are set to wipe content after too many wrong passcode attempts,” Zack said. “And we’ve got the original files on encrypted external hard drives stored in a safe deposit box. They’re not on any of the laptops.”

  “Then how do you know there aren’t other copies of the books out there?” Mai asked.

  Lina frowned. “We don’t. Kitty hasn’t heard any chatter about that from her networks, and these fuckers would pay a pretty penny to get their hands on them. All she’s heard are a few rumbles about some scans of a book, which is probably the copy we destroyed from Brussels.”

  “Probably?”

  “Hopefully. This is not an exact science, okay?”

  Still stalling for time, Elain straightened and pointed at the two books on the table. “But she never heard any chatter about those two books in the first place, did she?”

  Lina’s face went blank for a moment before she looked defeated. “Point taken.”

  “So,” Mai said, “we have no idea if there are more of these books out there, do we? We know these are two different books because of the names written inside the front of them, and the differences in the writing, in places. Same exact original content, hand-duplicated, except for additional notes. The question is, did someone make the second book as a copy of the first, or were they made at the same time in a batch, possibly with others? And we know these are the knives they talk about in the book, and these little Jumanji pieces, or whatever the hell they are, but there’s other stuff mentioned in the books, too, that we’ve never encountered. Like an amulet and other crap. What if that’s all still floating around, too?” She looked up at Elain.

  Lina stared at Elain.

  Everyone stared at Elain.

  Disgusted, and before she could find another reason to stall, Elain reached out with both hands and placed them, palms down, on the front covers of the two books.

  It felt like a greasy bolt of dark lightning washed through her when the vision hit. She saw it flash by, rapid-fire images, horrifying.

  The sacrifice of a young virgin female dragon. The five people, three men and two women, all siblings, who did it. The knives they’d used—three of them in their possession and also on her table.

  The five books they’d created.

  Elain yanked her hands away, unable to take it anymore. “Fuuuuck,” she muttered as she backed up and cradled her hands against her chest.

  “What?” Lina, Mai, Zack, and Kael all asked.

  Elain stepped backward, away from the table, her hands still tucked against her chest. She didn’t stop until she bumped against the counter behind her. “There’s three more of them,” she whispered, barely able to make herself say it. “Three more books, and two more knives. Five and five. If the other books survived this long, there are still three more of them. They were made together, five of them, at the same time.”

  “You saw who made them?” Lina asked.

  Elain nodded. “Five siblings.”

  “What? What else did you see?”

  “I don’t want to touch them again. Not right now, at least. I just…can’t. I need a break.”

  “Okay, fine, but what did you see?” Lina pressed.

  Elain swallowed hard. “That’s not leather on the covers. Well, it is, but it’s not…normal leather. And the ink isn’t…ink.”

  The others slowly swiveled their heads to look at the books. Mai slid her chair away from the table with a light scraping noise against the tile floor.

  “What are they made of?” Zack quietly asked, not taking his gaze off the books.

  Elain took a breath to settle her stomach. “Not what,” she said. “Who.”

  * * * *

  “Okay,” Zack said as propped his hands on the table and leaned forward. “Let me get this straight. We’re looking for three more of these goddamned monstrosities? How do we even know they’re still around?”

  “Because if two of them exist, chances are the other three might have made it through the years, too. Don’t forget there are two more knives.”

  “Cheese and rice, I’m really sick of these fuckers,” Zack muttered.

  “Join the club,” Mai said.

  Lina, now over her initial horror at Elain’s revelation about the books’ origin, tapped a finger against her chin. “I wonder how Lenny and Edgar came into possession of these books, and the knives? I’m guessing from my vision, Marston could have gotten that one knife from Lenny or Edgar, but where did Aliah get hers, then? If it wasn’t Lenny’s or Edgar’s what happened to the third knife from Lenny or Edgar that they used during the…”

  Lina glanced at Kael and didn’t continue that thought. She didn’t have to.

  They all knew she was talking about Lenny, Edgar, and Marston murdering Kael’s family.

  “I could understand one of them having a book and copying it for the other one, like Lenny apparently did with the guy in Brussels,” Lina said. “But what are the chances of both of them having unique copies?”

  “Apparently one-hundred-percent,” Zack snarked. He hooked one of the chairs at the table with his foot and dragged it out before sitting.

  “Maybe they inherited them?” Mai suggested.

  “Or stole them,” Zack said. “Knowing cockatrice, that’s far more likely.”

  “How do we know Lenny is the one who copied the book for the guy in Brussels?” Elain asked.

  “Lenny and Edgar’s notes about the oc
clusion spell were in the copy Lenny had and appeared in the copy we found in Brussels,” Zack said. “Their notes were made a hundred years ago, before computers. Since we know that, and we know that until Lenny died a couple of years ago he was still in possession of the book, we can reasonably assume he made the copy we found in Brussels. He likely wouldn’t have let the book out of his possession.”

  “So we can be fairly confident,” Mai asked, “that at least the one book was in Lenny’s possession for, what, ninety years or longer?”

  Zack nodded. “Right. Likely longer, based on the writing for the occlusion spell notes. Looks like a fountain pen, or nib and ink kind of pen. Maybe even a quill. That speaks to older.”

  Elain really wanted to jump on the phone and place a call to fricking Bolivia, to her contact who couldn’t be talked about, but knew she couldn’t.

  Not with everyone around.

  So far, Callie’s advice to her to keep a barrier around the information in her mind had seemed to work. Bolivia hadn’t been blown off the map yet, meaning the barrier in her mind against Lina and Mai was still intact.

  “Eh, what, exactly, is all that?”

  They all turned at the sound of Brighton speaking from the kitchen doorway. Brodey was with him.

  So much for getting rid of him. “Seer stuff.” Elain hoped her gruff tone of voice would send him away.

  “Sorry, I somehow forgot my phone charger when I left yesterday.” Brighton stepped through the kitchen doorway, Elain not quick enough to move around the table and block his entrance without it looking awfully suspicious. “That stuff’s cockatrice in origin, right? Let me help. I hunt those things.”

  Elain exchanged a knowing glance with Lina and made a mental note to call Kitty Blackestone to try to verify some of Brighton’s claims in that respect. But before she or Lina could voice an objection, or toss her brother-in-law out, Zack spoke up.

  “I guess it can’t hurt,” Zack said. “We can use all the help we can get.” He started catching Brighton up on what had happened.

  Elain found herself edging over to the kitchen sink to wash her hands and make herself busy preparing a mug of hot tea.