Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

What they had wasn’t enough, Donal realized as the Glasduine finally came face to face with its quarry. What they had would never have been enough. They were a primal force, but the Glasduine was a part of the very source from which the Gentry drew their strengths.

Most recently, the chase had led through a territory of high mountains and deep canyons, with the Gentry loping along ridgebacks, scrambling up slopes of loose rock fragments and boulders, the Glasduine following in their wake as though they were joined, their minds linked, their fates inexorably tied to each other. The Gentry made their stand at the flank of a towering butte where two canyons met in a V. They were to await the leader’s signal, attacking as a group, rather than individuals. But when the Glasduine came upon them, one of the wolves couldn’t wait.

He lunged for the Glasduine’s throat only to be plucked from the air and torn to pieces. Sickened, Donal tried to turn the Glasduine away from attacking the rest, but with that first kill, he couldn’t pretend to be in control any longer. While he might have set the Glasduine on the trail of the wolves, the creature had taken up the chase only because it had its own score to settle with them.

For a long moment the Gentry stood motionless, staring at the remains of their comrade that lay scattered upon the stones around the Glasduine. It was only when they attacked, coming at the creature from all sides in a snarling rush, that Donal realized that they, too, knew they had no hope to bring their pursuer down. They attacked as they did so that they would die fighting, as the hard men they were, rather than be hunted down like rodents.

The battle was short, though the Gentry fought like devils. The leader was the last to die. He met the Glasduine’s gaze without flinching, a half-smile playing on his lips, blood dripping from a half-dozen wounds, his companions torn apart, transformed by the Glasduine into nothing more than chunks of bleeding flesh.

“Ah, you’re hard,” he said. He spat on the stones at his feet, a spew of red. “I’ll give you that. But I’ve this much bloody consolation. You’re corrupted now and there’s no going back for you. All it took was killing the first of us and you’re just as bloody damned as I am.”

Donal couldn’t tell if the Gentry’s leader was talking to him or the Glasduine. It didn’t matter. Either way it was true.

“So fuck off away with yourself,” the leader managed to get out before he made his final charge and the creature tore him apart.

For a time the Glasduine went away into itself then, its mind going somewhere Donal couldn’t follow. He drifted out of its body, still linked, but no longer housed in the flesh. He floated in the still air, slowly turning in a circle, still the ghost. He would always be a ghost now. There would be no return to how things had been.

Now what? he thought.

He’d managed to turn the Glasduine away from those he loved, from the world he’d imperiled, but what was to stop it from returning? They were deep in the spiritworld, so deep he knew it would take him forever and a day to find his way back, if he even could. But that was him. He was nothing. The Glasduine might be able to return in the blink of an eye. And once there it would—His mind went still when he saw that the Glasduine had returned from whatever place its attention had drifted to. Its head was cocked, listening. And then Donal heard it, too. The summons. An insistent call that demanded to be heard and answered. Like the Glasduine, he recognized its source. He knew the Glasduine was so powerful that this summoning call had no power over it, but because of who it was that called, it would answer. For its own corrupt reasons.

No, he thought. You can’t—

But he had no more control of the Glasduine now than he had ever had.

As it allowed itself to be drawn to the source of the summoning call, there was only time for Donal to will himself back into the Glasduine’s flesh and ride along in the creature’s body to where it would execute its next act of horror.

Bettina hadn’t actually expected the summoning to work. Unlike her wolf, she didn’t believe that she had any true connection to either the Glasduine or Donal, nor did she consider herself to have the necessary brujería the spell would require. But there was so much at stake that she had to make the attempt.

So she sent out her summoning call with a pretense of strength she didn’t feel. Sent it out with power when all she truly held were small parcels of luck. Her brujería was a healing magic, augmented by her father’s blood, perhaps, but mostly entwined with her knowledge of a curandera’s art. She knew herbs and the use of medicines from what her abuela and Loleta Manuel had taught her. She had her relationship with los santos and the spirits. She could infuse charms and milagros with the push those who accepted them needed to accomplish what they could have done on their own, if they only had the necessary self-confidence to do so.

These weren’t powerful spells. They were only small magics that depended more on paying attention to how the world worked, to recognizing the pattern all things had to one other and helping to make connections between them when those connections were severed, or too tangled to be of practical use. They were a curandera ’s magic, not a bruja ’s , and she was sure that they would no more help her summon the Glasduine than they could raise the dead.

But it did respond.

The Glasduine arrived in the canyon like a dervishing wind, with a suddenness and force that knocked her and her wolf off their feet. That wind sent up a cloud of dust and tore apart the remains of the fallen saguaro, spraying its broken ribs about them like bullets. It was only because they were sprawled on the dirt at the time that neither of them was hit by one of the wooden projectiles.

“Sweet Bridget,” el lobo said, his voice holding the same shock that Bettina was feeling. “How could we be so naive as to think we could stop such a creature by ourselves?”

Bettina had no words to reply. Through the settling dust, she stared in horror at the towering monstrosity. It seemed to be as much tree as human, a man-shaped fusion of bark and branch and corded roots from which sprouted an untidy snarl of twigs and leaves, feathers and bits of matted fur. But the barklike skin was supple and the Glasduine moved with an easy, panther’s grace. Its face was the wooden mask she remembered from the sculpting studio in Kellygnow, only now the features were mobile, snarling, eyes dark with a cunning rage. The rough tangle of vines and leaves that trailed from its shoulders and made up its hair and beard moved of their own accord, coiling and writhing like a nest of disturbed snakes.

The only movement in the canyon were those vines. Neither Bettina nor her wolf felt able to get up from where they’d been thrown. The sheer weight of the Glasduine’s presence paralyzed them. They could see that they wouldn’t be its first victim. The creature had blood splattered on the bark of its limbs and torso—stark against the green leafing and barklike skin. Fresh blood, from the wet glisten of it.

For a long moment the Glasduine seemed content to simply hold onto its anticipation, devouring Bettina with its dark gaze. When it finally took a step toward her, she scrambled to her feet. Before she could dodge, a long powerful arm reached out to snatch her, fingers with a grip like a vise closing on her shoulder.

“No!” she cried, but the sound came out as the shriek of a hawk.

The Glasduine’s touch woke something inside her—a long frenzied wail that shifted the bones under her skin, an ache rising deep up from the marrow of her soul. It brought her father’s blood bubbling up through her veins and she was wracked with an indescribable pain, as though every muscle she had was spasming, her skin tearing, her bones grinding against each other. Her mother’s rosary dropped from her hand. Feathers burst out over her skin, her face pulled into a sharp, narrower shape, and she was suddenly only a fraction of her normal size, slipping free from the rough fingers that had trapped her.