Faith Hunter - Seraphs

I breathed, calm just out of reach. The silence of the loft settled about me. I could hear the ticking of the black-pig clock over my shoulder, the sound becoming one with the stillness I sought. My heart rate slowed, decelerated to a methodical, slow pace. In mage-sight, my flesh was a roseate radiance lined with blood rushing through my veins and the bright, terrible tracery of scars down my legs and arms.

The loft pulsed with energy, a bower of neomage safety I had created in the humans’ world. Stones were everywhere, at the tub and bed and gas fireplaces, in every window and doorway, on the floor. Even on the wood beams overhead. My home glowed with pale energy, subtle, harmonious shades of lavender, green, rose, yellow, and bloodred. Mage-sight saw what humans couldn’t, the power beyond physical manifestations. Mage-sight saw the energy of creation in everything. Such power should have been protection enough to keep me safe from an incubus, but this particular beast had access to my blood, which gave it power over me. I shelved that worry, concentrating.

When I was centered and calm, I sent my senses scouring out, drawing power from every stone in the loft, pulling it into myself and my amulets, as I would before battle, in a slow, easy drawing of strength, not fast enough to interrupt the charmed circle, but enough to leach through and into me, like osmosis. As I drew it in, lavender energies misted out of the walls and floor, following the might I pulled from other stones. Startled, half disbelieving, I watched the mist as it moved for the first time in weeks.

As if scenting me, it coalesced into the shape of a cobra with glowing, dark blue eyes and a hint of yellow chatoyency, like blue tigereye stone. A pale hood expanded; its tongue tasted the air. My body tensed. Evil often took the form of a serpent, but this thing didn’t glow with the energies of Darkness. It glittered with the brilliance of Light. Yet even Light could be dangerous to a charmed circle. If it tried to pierce the conjure, its energies would combine with mine, a fusion of wild-magic, the kind formed nearly a hundred years ago in the time of the first neomages. The union of disparate energies would discharge into a destructive explosion and splatter me all over the loft. Fire and death everywhere. If it was real.

I blinked. The serpent was still there, coiled on the floor in front of the salt, looking at me, a twenty-foot-long, lavender-and-purple-banded cobra of might. I blinked off my mage-sight and it was still there, a physical beast, but like nothing in nature. I knew that if I touched it, I would feel a real body, sinuous muscle beneath cool scales.

With a slow, hypnotic sway, it inspected the circle, tongue forking out, tasting the energies of the incantation. I sat frozen in the center, having no idea how to stop it from doing whatever it wanted. The serpent was a manifestation of the culled energies of the amethyst sealed in metal ammunition boxes stored below, in the stockroom. Stone that was empty, last time I looked: stones that had been so totally drained that I thought they were dead.

The cobra opened its mouth, exposing white tissue, devoid of life and blood. Hinged fangs lowered from its palate. It was hungry. It wanted in. It swayed, asking, begging. No words were exchanged, but I knew what it wanted; to join with me again.

Again? My mind found the only incantation I could remember, the first small conjure taught to every neomage, a nursery rhyme, almost the first words we spoke, later used as a conjure to calm and prepare, when a mage was afraid. Softly, I said, “Stone and fire, water and air, blood and kin prevail. Wings and shield, dagger and sword, blood and kin prevail.”

It blinked once, hissed, and struck. I flinched, garbling the words of the verse. It pierced through the charmed circle, precisely, cleanly, without disrupting the incantation. There was no discharge of disruptive mage-power. No explosion. But now it was inside with me, writhing on the floor a foot away. Fear whispered through me, raising prickles on my flesh. I didn’t know what to do except continue the incantation, my voice ragged.

The cobra grew more vivid, more intense, more solid with the ancient words. Once an incantation begins, a mage has to see it through, finish the verse, reach the end, close the purpose of the intent. I was breathing hard. My chest ached. As a trickle of sweat slithered down my back, I whispered the verse again, and then stopped, the last syllable fading away.

The serpent’s hood swelled. I raised a hand as if to stop it, and it undulated, moving side to side, its eyes on me, its tongue tasting the air in front of my outstretched palm. “I hear,” it thought at me, hissing. I realized that in speaking an incantation meant to settle oneself before battle, to draw in energies for war against Darkness, I had called it, welcoming its power. And now I didn’t know what to do with it, how to control it, or how to banish it.

“No,” I said. “No.”

The serpent slipped back against the salt of the circle, its hood brushing the circle wall, which should have shattered the conjure but didn’t. “No,” I said again, my fear swelling, thickening, my hand raised against it. The snake glittered, a coruscation of light and might. The elemental mist of its essence rippled, scales shifting, widening. Becoming eyes. A lavender snake with a body of purple eyes.

I was swaying in time with it. I blinked. It blinked. Mesmerizing. Asking. Begging. “Take me. Use me. You made me yours. And I am lonely.”

“I didn’t,” I thought back.

“Yes. Yours.”

I faltered. And the serpent struck, fangs buried in my palm.

My heart stuttered. In a single instant the snake saturated every amulet on me and overflowed, sloughing off the stones, splashing into a puddle of eyes on the tile. The floor heated beneath my thighs. The puddle expanded, splashing wetly against the walls of the conjure, soaking my skirt. But it didn’t melt the salt, didn’t feel like water against my skin; it tingled like electricity, like power. I could hear a soft resonance of bells as it rose in the circle, purple eyes rising like a flood.

My breath was rough, hoarse, my heartbeat fast, an erratic drumming of fear. “No,” I whispered. It ignored me. A pressure like the deeps of the ocean pressed against me. I had never seen or heard of anything like this. The liquid eyes rose over my waist, up to my breasts. I needed to break the charmed circle, but if I did, what would happen to the energies gathered here? Would they explode? Burn? Kill half the town? Power shouldn’t be able to gather, shape itself, and act on its own. The purple liquid that wasn’t wet reached my chin, prickling, burning against my skin. I didn’t know what to do. And I was going to drown in the stuff, whatever it was. A laugh tickled in the back of my throat, hysterical giggles of fear.

“Don’t be afraid. I won’t let them harm you,” it promised.

The liquid energy eyes spilled over my lips and down my throat in a torrent. I gasped reflexively, and it flooded my lungs, pungent and sweet, suffocating me. It filled my sinuses, my ears, speeding to my stomach when I gagged and swallowed. My arms lifted, trying to swim, but the stuff was insubstantial, ethereal.

The energies, the eyes, sped into my bloodstream like cobra venom, reaching my heart in a rush. My heartbeat stuttered, a painful irregularity I could feel in my eyes and ears and throat, a heavy pressure in my chest. It swam into my bowels, filled my muscles and tendons, and moved deep into my bones and marrow. It electrified my nerves. Mouth open, no air to breathe, I was drowning. My vision telescoped into pinpoints of purple light. And was gone.