Chapter Eighteen
Senán
It isn’t an easy form of Magick I use to stop the bullet, or a common one. But it’s one which I have, graciously and proudly, mastered.
By the time I find Ryder, he’s in the midst of a heated argument with two hunters.
I recognize one of them—a stocky man in his sixties—as a Bureau agent who’s harassed me enough times to fill a book with formally-lodged complaints.
I’m certain that the girl, even with her Bambi eyes and tiny frame and the aura of an angry kitten, must also be an Agent.
I can confidently handle one Agent on my own.
Two, with Ryder’s help. Two with guns is another story.
As it turns out, Ryder is the gunman I should have been worrying about. Thankfully, I have hundreds of years’ worth of Magickal practice on my side.
The bullet hovers perfectly still in the air, the atmosphere around it rippling almost imperceptibly.
Ryder blinks once, twice as he tries to figure out what he’s looking at.
The other two Agents are frozen in place, their faces each a mask of shock—they really didn’t expect Ryder to pull that trigger.
Neither did I, if I’m being perfectly honest.
He just keeps surprising me.
Ryder lowers his gun slowly, looking at the physics-defying bullet, then at the two frozen Agents, then back at the bullet. Then he looks at me in awed and absolute disbelief.
“You can stop time?!”
Goddesses help me, this man. “Yes, Ryder. I can stop time. But only once, and the moment I start it again, I’ll disappear forever.”
Ryder’s face falls as though he’s having his heart broken, and I would laugh if our situation weren’t so grave.
“I stopped the bullet, you bleedin’ knucklehead,” I tell him. “How in the hell would I stop time?”
Ryder looks about ready to kick me in the shins. “I don’t know what the hell you can do with Magick!”
“It’s telekinesis, Ryder. You’ve seen me use it multiple times.”
“Okay, fine, point taken—”
“The bloody birds are still goin’ in the trees…”
“I got it. ”
I smirk at his irritation a few seconds more, but the effort it takes to hold the bullet and two living humans in place is draining me quickly. I can’t keep them there much longer.
“That can’t be easy,” Ryder says. “Keeping them there like that.”
Christ, is he telepathic? “It does take work.” I nod pointedly toward the bullet. “Not as much work as letting it go would involve.”
Ryder doesn’t take his eyes off me. “Just let it go.”
“That won’t solve anything, love,” I say gently. “You can take him out, but he’ll only be replaced by another one just like him.”
“It would buy us time,” he says. “Give the young one time to heal, give you and the family time to get up into Canada.”
“You’ll go to prison just to buy us time?”
“I’ve made my choice, Senán.”
I’m certain that he must know how ridiculous this is—he’s impulsive and driven by emotion much more than logic, but he’s also smart.
Even if I wipe the girl’s memory, even if we flee the scene afterwards, even if we dispose of the murder weapon…
investigators will eventually figure out that he was here and put two and two together.
But I can’t hold them forever, and a memory wipe won’t stop them from moving further into the woods, from finding Hecaterina and the family we’ve worked so hard to protect. I’ll have to talk Ryder into another solution.
“I know you did. And I know you think you’re doing the right thing, but there are better options.”
“Better options to keep him from continuing his government-sanctioned killing spree and brainwashing my sister into following him? I’m open to suggestions.”
“You remember what I told you earlier about spells?”
“That they’re like wishes… you can’t talk about them, or they won’t come true.”
“Exactly. Do you trust me?”
I swear I can see the last two weeks playing out behind Ryder’s eyes as he makes his decision. “Yeah,” he says after a moment. “Yeah, I do.”
The bullet drops to the ground, and there’s a near-blinding flash of light and energy that surrounds the two Agents as they collapse to the ground. Both of them are unharmed, but the Magick has worked. The girl, I’ve put to sleep—simple enough. The older one, on the other hand…
“Holy shit,” Ryder says after the light fades and the energy dissipates. “That is… uncanny.”
“Thank you,” I say proudly, admiring my own handiwork. Glamour spells aren’t easy, after all.
The elder Agent looks around in a daze, then opens his mouth to speak. But instead of words, the only thing that comes out is a hoarse growl. He coughs and tries again with the same result. He puts a hand to his own throat, then pulls it away in horror.
“Looks like you could do with a shave,” Ryder says.
The Agent scrambles to stand at full height, which is about two heads higher than Ryder and I—smaller than the mother of our family in the woods but larger than the children, just as the males usually are.
Now over seven feet tall and covered in hair, with a hulking posture and a jaw and tongue not evolved for speech, the Agent has been transformed (quite convincingly, if I do say so myself) into a supremely average-looking sasquatch.
The Agent’s gun lies uselessly on the ground next to him, his massive hands too clumsy to operate it any longer.
Ryder checks the cartridge on the rifle in his own hands.
“There’s a few shots left in here,” he says casually.
“So do your guys always clear out the corpses overnight, or is that just on a rush job?”
Even with his newly simian features, the panic on the Agent’s face is clear. He takes off into the trees, stumbling as he tries to run on two legs. Sasquatch bone structure is built for only occasional upright gait, and they move fastest on all fours. But he’ll figure that out soon enough.
Ryder turns to the girl, still peacefully unconscious on the forest floor, her small frame swimming in her oversized hunting vest.
“She’s only asleep,” I tell him. “But I can wipe her memory.”
Ryder looks at her, his expression full of pained nostalgia, lost in evocation, in some history I’ll likely never know. “Leave it,” he says. “She’s an adult. She can figure out what to do with all this.”
I think about wiping the girl’s memory anyway, but I sense that Ryder is holding some missing piece that keeps me from seeing the full picture, so I let her sleep.
As we make our way back to the grounds of the resort, I hear a distant cacophony of shouting, and we reach the edge of the tree line just in time to see the transformed Agent running back into the woods, followed by a dozen or so tourists with phones in hand.
“You’re going to get in some kind of trouble for this,” I say.
Ryder shrugs. “Why would I? I’m on vacation, remember?”
He grins at me, and for the first time in many, many years, I have the feeling that the System might be capable of getting fucked after all.
Ryder turns back to look at the crowd of resort guests peering into the woods where the subject of their awe has retreated. “But, uh… it’s still gonna look really bad if I do nothing.”
“Alright,” I say warmly, “go do your damage control, then.”
He takes a few steps towards the resort, then stops and looks back at me expectantly once he realizes I’m not following him.
“I’ve got to get back to the family,” I explain.
A pained, questioning sort of expression crosses his face, and I’m sure he wants to ask something more, but somehow feels he shouldn’t.
I smile and step backwards into the forest. “Good luck, Mister Witchfinder.”
Ryder smiles to hide something else as he watches me go. “Yeah, you too.”
I’m in no hurry to get back to Hecaterina and the family we’re healing.
Though he never told me directly, I’ve gathered that it’s Ryder’s last day here.
Tomorrow he’ll go back to his life in the capital, and I’ll go back to mine in Boston, both of us changed by our meeting but unlikely to ever meet again.
I’ve always known that nothing more could come of what we’ve been doing here—honestly, we’re living out the best-case scenario for our little tryst.
That’s how flings work, isn’t it? A few days or weeks or months of effortless joy with a final goodbye looming on the horizon, hopefully to come before you get bored of one another.
I’ve been through many flings. After centuries of endless life and never-ending deaths, one gets used to frequent goodbyes and an even more frequent lack of them.
But some goodbyes will always be harder than others, and something makes this feel like one of the harder ones.
“Is everything okay?” Hecaterina asks as I approach. “I heard gunshots.”
“Everything’s fine,” I assure her. “We handled it.”
Cat smirks and waggles her eyebrows at me. “‘We?’”
“He wants to help us,” I say, ignoring her tonal implication.
“Uh huh. And how much has he been ‘helping’ you with, exactly?”
“Alright, that’s enough out of you,” I scold her, but there’s no bite to it. “The young one should be safe to move in a few days, but we might not need to. Something’s changing at the Bureau.”
“The Bureau? It would have to be a really big change, for us not to move them.”
I think back on the events of this morning and smile. “I think it will be.”