Faith Hunter - Host

My side, punctured by the spur of Darkness, wrenched hard, as if all the muscles on that side contracted at once. As if the spur pierced me anew. I clapped a hand to my side and rolled forward, to the floor, across the beans, crushing them. My side was blazing hot, and the flesh deep inside rippled and spasmed. I couldn’t breathe. Agony and mage-heat surged over me like an avalanche, exquisite and deadly. Tears and blood, I wanted.

And then, as if someone pulled a plug, it reversed. My back clenched and I flipped over on the floor, my whole body contracting. With a shudder that wrenched the muscles in my back, the heat and the agony were gone. I managed to inhale. “Tears of Taharial,” I groaned, focusing on the rafters and crossbeams overhead. “What the heck was that?”

Beneath me was a lump of beans, a potato was under my thigh, but I didn’t care. I quivered a final time in reaction to the sensations that had seized me. Overhead, the fans turned lazily, pushing warm air to the floor. Downstairs, a horde of children squealed with excitement.

When I could draw breath easily, I crawled to my knees and scooped up the bag of beans and chased potatoes until I had them all. Laying the bags of food on the kitchen table, I started to lift my sweater and paused, as my abdominal muscles tightened. I realized I was afraid. And fear had always made me angry.

Stubborn, I crossed the room and raised the sweater and under-tee, activated mage-sight, and looked at my side. The wound was worse. I had thought it was getting better, but the wound site on my left side where the spur had punctured me in two realities—one I called the otherness, or the here-not-here, and in this one—was worse. It was now an irregular, raised black ring with a bloody red center. In human sight it was more colorful, looking like an old bruise, purple center ringed with purplish black, greens and yellows swirling out. Like an eye, I thought. Like an eye from hell, staring out at the world from my side.

I had been better. A lot better. But I had kept the spur, opening myself up to reinjury and maybe even claiming should the amulet fall into the wrong hands. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I had kept a talisman of Darkness like some kind of memento. Someone in the street battle had realized I was under its control and had broken the spur, shattered it with a single blow. Audric? I remembered the sight of a big body, silhouetted in the light of a fire, raising up a weapon, two-handed, to the sky, and bringing it down. Smashing the amulet.

It had been nearly twenty-four hours since I was freed of its hold. Shouldn’t the wound be healing? Unless…What had Audric done with the shards? I remembered the sight of the queen, dead or nearly so, broken down to dust and scooped up by the Dark tornado. Had Audric taken time to burn the splinters? Had he safeguarded the remains? Why had I just experienced both mage-heat and pain from the wound unless something seraphic—or not—had the spur?

I dropped my shirt and sweater and went back to the kitchen. I’d have to ask my champard just how much danger I was in now. I wondered if he would even know the answer.

I t was dawn, and the sky in the east was a metallic gray. Darkness hadn’t come. I was filled with relief, safety, a false sense of security brought on by the rising sun. It wasn’t real, but it felt pretty good.

Outside, the footsteps of sentries crunched through old, crusted snow. A rooster crowed. Inside, the buildings were silent, almost a hundred humans finally asleep, no crying babies, no whining toddlers. No preteen girls giggling in the hallway.

I should’ve been asleep, but I was cramped and miserable. To one side, Rupert snored softly, little puffs of sound. He slept on his side, his healing back held clear from the mattress. I still smelled blood and worried about that, but he needed sleep more than he needed a pesky inquisitive mage poking around on him. To the other side, Audric lay like a dead man, breathing so shallowly his chest didn’t seem to rise and fall, only his body heat proving him alive.

Though the dream of seraphs killing me hadn’t intruded on my rest, I hadn’t slept well with two big men in bed with me. Notwithstanding the rare mage fantasy, and my few months as a married woman aside, I liked sleeping alone. It had been different when I was injured, weak, too exhausted to roll over, too feeble to get to the bathroom alone. I had needed them then, and welcomed their combined warmth, but I had been really happy when they left me and returned to the loft apartment across the way. Now the bed was crowded, and the mingled scents of human, half-breed, and mage were strong, almost unpleasant. I wanted my bed to myself again. I wanted my life to myself again. If wishes were horses…. Yeah, right.

I sat up and crawled down the middle of the bed to the floor, and padded to the bathroom on bare feet. After I relieved myself, hidden behind a screen I had put in place the night before, I dressed in clean underwear and socks, yesterday’s jeans and fuzzy sweater, my amulets around my neck. Audric and Rupert slept on.

Silent, I paced from window to window, watching the morning’s activities in the street. Black rings had burned through the snow to the cracked asphalt beneath, and charred remains of logs still smoked. Men and women who had spent the night watching stretched and walked off night terrors and doldrums, exchanging words as they passed. I spotted Cheran Jones striding away in the distance, and an idea formed.

I left a note on the kitchen table for Audric to make a quick trip north if possible, and before I could change my mind, turned off the ward on the lofts and shops, grabbed boots and a jacket I hadn’t worn in a while, and slipped out the door. Stepping over girls snuggled into a thin down mattress, around a woman on a cot, I went downstairs and into the frozen morning.

As I left the shop, I hung the Apache Tear over the doorknob and activated an identity glamour I had used before. To the world I looked like a middle-aged woman, plain, nondescript, unmemorable. The conjure was a two-parter, the glamour and a second conjure, less strong, less well defined. It simply made people forget they had seen me. Her. Whatever.

Miz Essie lived across the street and up a ways, in a small two-story house wedged in between two others of similar Post-Ap design. The house was at least fifty years old, constructed of sturdy rock and brick with functional solar panels lining the roof and white-painted trim. It had been built after the start of the ice age, and the front door was up ten steps, on a narrow stoop. A little more than ten feet separated the houses to either side, sloped lanes where snow and ice collected when it melted off the roof and ran down the hill behind, refreezing along the way.

Right now, because there had been no snow accumulation for two weeks, the collected ice was only a few feet deep, but it was slick and solid, and I could see fine cracks radiating through the foundations of all three houses from the constant varying pressure of ice.

I climbed up the front steps as if I belonged there and entered the house. I had never been in Miz Essie’s home, and immediately I saw dozens of pictures hanging on the walls. Eli as a baby, as a toddler with two other children, as a young man, with a beautiful Cherokee girl, both laughing, the girl with black hair blowing in a spring wind, arms bare to the bright sunlight. Other children, some that looked like him, were in even more photographs. The stairway was also lined with prints, and as I climbed, I upgraded my estimate of the numbers of photos to hundreds. Every vertical square inch was covered. Where there weren’t photos, there were embroidered plaques, cross-stitched homilies, and embroidered winter scenes, a dizzying panoply of images.