A bard’s power was muted in this world, but still held some sway. Well written letters and speeches had changed the course of history, and truly great authors had given children the will to learn to read.
Bards also held the power to create the very spells that witches and wizards cast. A spell written by a bard carried more inherent magic than one that didn’t. The October Ritual that Lehrer’s grove performed every year was one such example. The words to the spell had been written by a Keltic bard long, long ago.
Right now, Hell Hounds bore down on Lehrer and his young witch companion, and the lives of several non-magic-using innocents were at stake. It was going to take a lot of magic to get them out of this bind. A bard’s written words would have come in quite handy. But it was a luxury they didn’t possess.
“Put your hand on the ignition,” Dietrich instructed, glancing nervously out the window as another of the Hell Hounds rose onto his back legs to paw the rolled-up window. Something like oil and blood remained smeared on the glass as he slid away. His growl reverberated through the vehicle.
Meagan didn’t question Dietrich, and he was grateful for that. What he was about to do was absolutely insane. But it was the only thing he could think of. If it was going to take magic they didn’t have in order to get them out of this mess, then he needed to steal that magic from somewhere else. The dogs outside were constructed of magic – evil magic albeit, but magic all the same.
His plan was to harness that magic, start the car with it, and get them both the hell out of Dodge before a dozen innocent people came out on their front doorsteps and were ripped to shreds.
“Concentrate, Meagan,” he told her. “I want you to let what I give you flow through you and into the car. Just focus on starting the car. Got it?”
She nodded hurriedly, and he fisted the handle that would manually roll down the window. Every Jeep he’d ever been in had possessed old-school manual fixtures such as this one. It was irritating on a normal day, but in this case, it gave him more control over how fast he could roll the window up and down, and right now… that was a good thing.
One, two – three.
Dietrich worked himself up, took a deep breath and held it, and rolled down the window, letting in the night and fangs and the claws and death.
A furry, toothy maw nudged its way into the crack his window provided, and Dietrich didn’t bother rolling it down any further. He released the handle, the window pressed in on itself with the weight of the hound behind it, and Dietrich pressed his hand to the animal’s throat, squeezing as tightly as he could.
It was a near impossible hold. One always thinks that if a dog ever attacks them, they’ll just be able to reach up and grab its throat and squeeze until the animal suffocates or dies or at least lets go. But a dog’s neck is pure corded muscle, and it’s much, much stronger than a human grip. And these were magical dogs. That made it worse in spades.
Dietrich growled as the animal’s claws found purchase in his arm, digging deep furrows right through the material of his button-up shirt and suit coat and into his flesh. He felt muscle tear, so quick and deep, it was nearly painless. It was something he would feel later.
He tried not to think about it. He looked into the monster’s eyes, drawing its return gaze. The dog bared its teeth, growled like the abyssal creature it was, and smoke escaped its jaws to curl around them.
Dietrich focused on the glow of the iris, the smell of the sulfur, and the pulse of the beast’s magic as he used the animal’s sudden stillness to extract that magic from its very veins. The dog seemed to falter, its growl weakening. Dietrich’s grip tightened when he felt the first wave of unnatural power leave the dog’s body and enter his own.
The beast’s growl died and the dog whimpered, suddenly unsure. The smell of sulfur grew stronger. Something hit the windshield, no doubt a fellow Hell Hound come to help. Dietrich paid it no heed. Unless the glass around them should break, they would be safe.
A new sound joined the noises of the Hell Hounds’ siege. It was the Jeep’s engine, slowly turning over. Dietrich couldn’t spare Meagan a glance but the fact that the engine was coming alive told him she was holding her own and his plan was working.
Dietrich redoubled his efforts, wincing when the dog turned its head and sank his fangs into his left hand. Tendons slid to the side or popped, and his grip automatically loosened. But the pain was brief, drowned out by the adrenaline and magic coursing through his veins. Again – he would feel it later.
The Jeep’s engine roared to full life just as the first of the neighborhood doors popped open and a head peeked out. Dietrich could sense the sudden change in the dogs’ attention as some of them slid away from the car to glare at the newcomers.
“Move over!” he bellowed, releasing the Hell Hound he’d had a grip on and slamming the Jeep into reverse. His hand was slippery and the gear shift slid from his grip a few times, but Meagan’s fingers closed over his, held them in place, and together, they maneuvered the Jeep first back, then forward and down the street.
Large black blurs with red glowing eyes were highlighted briefly in the headlights and then knocked to the side with a sickening thump and whine as the Hell Hounds tried to stop the Jeep and failed. As they were thrown to the shoulder of the road, they burst into flame and vanished, the magic that fueled their existences going out like extinguished candles.
Dietrich followed the lights of their eyes like targets, aiming the vehicle with cruel precision to take out as many hounds as he could. By the time the road was coming to an end, he’d run over what felt like a hundred animals. He could imagine what the front of the vehicle looked like; fur-spotted, covered in blood and other bodily substances.
He turned the Jeep sharply to the right at the next intersection and floored the gas pedal, leaving nothing but vanishing fires, curling smoke, and a handful of confused, sleepy people in their wake.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
London, England 1561
Hugh Draper barely listened to the man who stood at the open door of his cold, damp cell. He pretended to listen, nodded his head once in a while, and even turned to glance over his shoulder from time to time. But his attention was really focused on the task at hand.
The jailor behind him leaned against the stone wall, his once white sleeve long since stained by the muck and grime of the stone around him and of the sweat of long hours and poor hygiene. The jailor’s little daughter stood beside him – or rather, under him – her tiny hands wrapped around his thumb and curled into the skirt of her aproned dress.
Draper would occasionally turn and meet her questioning, slightly shiny gaze and give her a wink. She was a sweet child, all rags and coal rubbings and ratted hair atop perfect skin, rosy cheeks, and the possibility of youth. She was the jailor’s daughter. Her mother had died in childbirth and the jailor had no choice but to bring her here with him to the Tower. In ten years, she would no doubt be a harlot on the streets and in the cubbyholes of London’s rank and dank darkness.
Draper tried not to think on it. It was not his business. This time period had been a complete disappointment in that he’d once again failed to find what it was he sought. Queen Elizabeth had recently ascended the throne here in England and the Renaissance was reaching its zenith with genius like Shakespeare and Marlowe. It was enough to cause him to hang around for a bit, tend the bar at a local tavern, and enjoy the burgeoning intelligence.
But there was no magic here. Not the kind he was looking for.
And he shouldn’t have stayed. Staying had been a mistake; it had gotten him arrested.
Maybe this was a hopeless quest, but it was one he’d undertaken for his people long ago and with heart-felt hope. Somewhere out there, some when out there, his kind would no longer be shunned, relegated to the shadows – or burned at the stake. At some point in the future, magic would be accepted. And he would find that time, or he would tirelessly travel eternity looking for it.
This wasn’t it, that was certain. In
fact, this time and place was so much worse than the one he’d initially left. His people had once imagined that the human race could only become more knowledgeable with the passage of time, and therefore become more open-minded and accepting of the world around them. Clearly that was not the case. Time did not heal all wounds. Some wounds, it ripped wide open and filled with salted lemon juice.
Draper glanced over his shoulder, nodded about some other pointless thing the jailor said, and then returned to his work. A few days ago the jailor, a man named Black who was not necessarily a bad man but a man relegated to a bad job, had provided Draper with a chisel. Black had been bored, Draper had been charismatic, and the chisel had been shortly delivered thereafter with the promise that Draper would only use it under Black’s supervision.
Draper didn’t plan to tunnel his way out of the Salt Tower with the tool. That would have been ridiculous. Not only would a hole that size be seen and its rubble be impossible to hide, getting out off of the castle grounds would have been impossible. The Salt Tower was in the lower East corner of the massive castle more commonly known as the Tower of London, and should anyone actually manage to tunnel through the dense wall of any of their cells, they would next have to contend with the outer walls encircling the twelve acre estate encompassed therein.
Instead, he would simply use the chisel to draw the symbol he needed to make his next slip through the centuries.
“Wha’ is tha’ there?” Black the jailor asked, his deep gravely voice slick and thick with the sludge of impending sickness.
Draper finished off an angle in the symbol on the stone that he had painstakingly been working on for hours without a break. It was the last angle to be smoothed out. He was finished now. He straightened and dropped his arms to his sides. His muscles ached. No doubt he was becoming ill. The putrid water and food he’d been given during his stay had been of better quality than that of the other inmates, but it was still contaminated. Everything in this time was. Fortunately for him, traveling would automatically heal him of whatever malady he’d acquired.
Unlike the other prisoners taken by religious fanatics, when Draper had been arrested, he had immediately admitted that he was a “witch,” as his accuser had suggested. After all, he did indeed use magic. It was the truth.
His immediate confession spared him the torture that would have come if he’d denied what he was and laid false claim to the pious love of some god he did not believe in. And the uncertainty of what he could do earned him enough fear and respect that instead of sending him to be executed on Tower Hill or to a dungeon to be abused, he’d been relegated here, to one of the larger, higher rooms in the Tower. Not many Tower prisoners were actually put to death. No one wished to anger a real witch.
Here, he was assigned Black as a jailor, perhaps because Black had the most lenient reputation amongst the guards.
“It is a calculation of the angles and pathways of the planets and stars,” Draper told Black, referring to the carving he’d just completed.
The jailor of course stared at him as though he had two heads rather than one. “Wha’?”
Draper took a deep breath and shook his head. “It is a diagram. Nothing more.”
“Oy, papa, look!” the jailor’s daughter exclaimed. Draper turned to glance at her. She was pointing at the diagram. He followed her gaze to find that the opposite end of the carving was now glowing, its lines shimmering and vacillating with familiar magic.
He smiled. And nodded. It was really was finished. Now the magic would happen.
“It has been illuminating making your acquaintance, Mr. Black,” said Draper. He placed his hand atop the diagram and attempted to mentally prepare himself for the shift, pull, and disorientation that would come any second.
The last trip had taken him back in time, like an arm cocking in preparation for a hard throw. It was the necessary back swing he was forced to repetitively endure in his efforts to reach that special point in the future he so desperately wished to reach. With the last casting of the travel spell, he’d gone from the eighteenth century, where he’d seen the abolishment of slavery in Russia and a culmination of enlightened renaissance, to two hundred years prior.
This next trip would take him forward once more some uncertain distance in time.
It was his theory, based on what he’d been through thus far, that he would now be shoved forward through time to somewhere near the twenty-first century. That was, if the world still existed in that time. Plague, famine or war might have taken its toll on the planet by then. The gods knew they were given the chance to do so again and again.
But there was only one way to find out.
The Tower of London jailor, Jonas Black swore under his breath and pulled his tiny daughter away from the Salt Tower cell as the carving on the wall lit up entirely and the air in the cell heated. The wall beside Hugh Draper turned red, the carving flashed once with its culmination of magic, and Draper gritted his teeth as time yanked him from the here and now and threw him head-long into the then and there.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I think we’re far enough from Southbridge now,” said Katelyn. She had been peering out into the darkness beyond the passenger side window. “This is probably a good place to stop.”
They’d pulled off of the main road a while back and had been following dirt paths for several minutes. The forests surrounding town were full of them, some smooth and well traveled by hunter and forest ranger alike, others barely trails that were at the best of times braved by ATV’s.
Dominic had said he wanted to move downstream a bit in case the bottle was actually tossed into the ravine exactly at Southbridge. It had been raining steadily, and the ravine was in full flow. The rain would have washed the bottle down a distance.
Dom pulled the Volkswagen to a stop between two tall pines, shut it down, and stared out the window. The ravine gurgled and roared a few yards ahead, its ledge illuminated by the car’s headlights.
“We didn’t come far enough,” Logan muttered as she stared over the seats at the rushing water ahead of them. There must have been a flash flood; the ditch was completely full and the water was moving faster than she’d ever seen it. “I don’t think there is a far enough.” There was no way they were going to locate a single bottle in the gurgling, bubbling mess of muddy water speeding past.
Dominic turned around in his seat until their faces were a mere few inches apart. Logan’s instinct was to pull back, but Dom reached out, like lightning, and his fingers encircled the denim sleeve over her wrist.
She froze; her breath stilled.
Dom’s pupils dilated. “Logan,” he said, his tone low and serious. His green eyes burned with their strange, new aqua-colored light. “We have to find that potion. If we don’t and Sam gets his hands on it, he’ll come after you. And if he comes after you….” He didn’t finish his thought, not out loud. But Logan had a feeling it went a little further than, “I’ll lose you.” She had a feeling he was thinking about his best friend, and that he knew if they could somehow defeat Sam, Alec might just come back the way the others had the first time they’d beat him.
“There’s nothing she can do, Dom,” said Katelyn, who reached over and placed her hand on his shoulder. He brushed it off, suddenly and apparently very irritated, and shot her a warning look. Katelyn moved back.
Logan pulled her wrist out of his grasp. “Yes there is,” she admitted.
She was betting that at this point, with as crazy-insane as life had become, she – the bard – could simply write their way to finding the spell bottle.
The problem was, if Sam was anywhere nearby when she did the writing, he would absorb more power from it. Mr. Lehrer had insisted that she not take any more chances like that. He’d warned her against this.
But it was zero hour and they were desperate. “Give me a piece of paper and something to write with.”
*****
“Did you know that in 1755, there was an earthquake in Lisbon on All Saints Day
?” Mr. Lehrer asked, clenching his teeth as Meagan maneuvered him closer to the streetlight. She needed to see how bad the wounds were.
She met his gaze for a split second, noted the glassiness of pain, and returned her attention to his arm. The Hell Hound had managed a bite and a claw, both of which had taken chunks out of his flesh. At one location, bone peeked through, pink and shiny.
Meagan swallowed against a rising queasiness.
“I can’t heal this,” she told him frankly. She had nothing left to give. And even if she’d possessed enough strength to cast another healing spell, her magic was useless against this particular wound.
“I know,” he said. She heard the tightening of his voice and understood that pain was getting the better of him.
These were not like normal dog bites. Meagan knew from reading lessons Mr. Lehrer had given her and other young members of her coven that a Hell Hound’s bite left poison behind.
“We need help,” she said. They couldn’t go to an emergency room. Modern medicine could clean the wounds, suture them, and prescribe antibiotics, but there was nothing in the medical journals to deal with Hell Hound magic. It was in Lehrer’s veins now. They had to fight fire with fire.
“We need to find a phone.” She released his arm and looked around. Pay phones had all but gone the way of the Dodo, but landlines still existed inside businesses.
Mr. Lehrer had managed to drive the jeep all the way into town and park it in the wet, empty lot outside of a mini-mall before his wounds forced him to shut it down and get out. He was edgy, restless, and unable to hold still. Meagan would guess that severe pain was literally driving him nuts.
“The coven can help us,” she told him.
There were nine businesses strung side by side along the mini-mall. Four were women’s clothing shops, one was a donut and coffee shop, one was a craft store, and the last was a dry cleaners. That one was sure to have a phone near the front windows.