Asil’s Third Date Asil and the Not-Date #5
As with digging a tunnel or shoveling snow, the hardest part was figuring out where to put the material you were removing. He couldn’t just put the desk where it had come from. That pile was now unstable—and there was no room to set it where they stood and still open the door.
He was not as interested in preserving the structure of the house as he had been before he understood what they faced. So he picked up the desk and slammed it into the exposed wall on the opposite side of the children’s room.
It broke through the lath and plaster and into the room beyond. That room, now visible through the hole he had made, was not nearly as packed as the hall. Probably because the door to it had been buried before it could be filled to the top.
After one almost-incoherent protest, Tami simply started grabbing bags and boxes and sending them through the hole after the desk. It took them nearly fifteen minutes to clear a stable space because the mound where the desk had fallen from kept spilling more bags and boxes at them.
Eventually, Tami was able to open the door.
The room was tiny for the three bodies it held. Two small children and a boy just entering manhood. Asil presumed this was Joshua. The boy had a pierced lip and tattoos inked by unskilled hands—and he looked with horror at the wall with the hole in it where Asil had put the debris from the hall.
“Mama is going to blow a cog,” said the older of the girls.
The fear in her voice made Asil’s darker half rise.
You’ll get a battle today, old wolf, Asil assured the bloodthirsty creature. But for now we must get these children clear of the danger.
Content for the moment, the wolf retreated.
“Out first,” said Tami. “All of you. Worry about the wall later.”
“It is a good thing,” said Asil softly, “that the desk fell when Joshua was here with his cell phone to call for help.”
Joshua, who had grabbed a bag and was shoving clothes for the girls into it, paused. He looked again at the hole in the wall.
“It’s time for the girls to get away from this permanently,” he said. “Can they come home with me? The Millers won’t mind if they stay for a while.”
Tami nodded. “That’s the best place, at least for now. We’ll talk to your mother tomorrow—if we don’t see her tonight. We can look for a more permanent solution later.”
Asil wasn’t sure that was strictly legal—he was under the impression that Tami should have had to navigate through more red tape first—but he had to admit that it was a good solution to the majority of his first problem: getting the innocents out of the way.
As they ushered the three children through the narrow path down the hall, Asil considered the avalanche that had fallen to trap Joshua and his sisters. Keeping them here in the same way the ocean of junk he’d just crawled over and through was being kept here.
He inhaled deeply. And this time, over the foul stench of the hoard occupying the creature’s den, he thought he caught its scent again.
Wyrm.
No mother appeared as they exited the house. Asil shut the back door and took them all to his car. As Joshua worked on how to make his sisters safe in a car without car seats, Asil held out his keys to Tami.
“Take them away,” he told her. “You can come back and pick me up later.”
“What are you going to do?” she said, not taking the keys. Then, dropping her voice to a whisper, she said urgently, “Their mother is broken, she’s not evil. Don’t do anything to hurt her.” Then, belatedly: “Please?”
Asil shook his head. “This is not a human thing,” he told her, waving his hands at the house. “I know you can’t smell it—especially given the odor of that house. But I would think that you could feel it.”
She frowned at him, then turned toward the house and lifted both of her hands. After a second, she took a step toward the house, and this time he felt her magic.
His wolf snarled, and he had to expend an effort to keep it from rolling over his skin and taking charge.
“What is that?” the witch—Tami—whispered.
“Wyrm,” he told her.
She turned a startled look on him. “A dragon?”
“There’s a lot of debate about that in some circles. But I have seen both—and wyrms are very different creatures. Thankfully. I do not think even I would be equal to a true dragon.”
She stared at him a moment, then said, “I’ll leave that one. A wyrm, my mother told me, is driven by the need to surround itself with treasure. But unlike other…unlike dragons, it doesn’t gather its treasure by itself. It takes a human in thrall and uses them to gather it.”
She had it right, but she sounded tentative.
“Yes,” Asil agreed. “And a wyrm’s treasure is not what a dragon’s treasure is. Dragons surround themselves with metals and materials that can hold magic. Wyrms gather whatever catches their eye.”
“If it’s magic shit,” said Joshua, shutting the car door with his sisters inside, “we need to get Mama out of there.”
Asil looked at the boy. He was shivering in the night air even with his coat on.
“Magic?” said Tami, sounding surprised. It was the first lie Asil had heard from her—and it was a lie of tone, not substance.
“Street people know magic,” Joshua told her.
“We—they all know that you work magic, Ms. Tami. It’s like a beacon of hope in the shelters.
People get better when they shouldn’t. Bad people back down or go away—when they never would normally do that.
Word out there—” He made a vague gesture.
“People say, ‘Things will be okay, because we got Ms. Tami, our own witch.’ ”
Tami’s mouth fell open, but she didn’t say anything.
Joshua turned to Asil. “So are you a witch, too?”
Asil shook his head. “Werewolf.”
And despite the cold and fear, Joshua’s face lit up. “No shit? No shit? We got rescued by a werewolf? A real one?”
“A real one,” agreed Asil solemnly. “And I am going to rescue your mother, too. Tami will take you and your sisters to your home, and I will call her when I’m finished.”
And then there was a great round of protests.
If his wolf hadn’t been so eager for hunting the wyrm, Asil might have had serious issues keeping it from showing them who was in charge. Eventually it was decided that Joshua and the girls would wait in the car—a defeat Joshua agreed to only because someone needed to stay with the girls.
Asil would have made Tami stay in the car, too. But it turned out that she could be useful.
“I can break the enthrallment,” Tami told Asil. “A little spell my mother taught me.”
“Your mother taught you a spell to break a wyrm’s enthrallment?”
“Well, no,” she admitted. “But an enthrallment is an enthrallment. The one I know breaks the hold of a black witch—but my mother used it against a vampire…”
“Blackwood?” asked Asil. Blackwood had been eliminated, but he had ruled Spokane for a long time. Even other vampires had stayed away from him.
She nodded.
If her mother’s spell had worked on that old villain, it would probably work on a wyrm.
Asil was old and wyrms had once been more common than they were now.
He hadn’t faced one in centuries, but he’d killed a few.
He’d seen what happened to the people the wyrm held in thrall—presumably as this one held Joshua’s mother.
Sometimes those people died with the wyrm.
If Tami could break that bond before he killed the creature—maybe Joshua’s mother would live.
He’d agreed to bringing Tami with him.
He gave the car keys to Joshua. “Start the car and turn on the heat. If you get scared, drive to your home. Can you drive?”
Joshua nodded. “No license yet, but I know how.”
“Good. If you are scared, go home. We will find you there.”
“We’ll be here when you come back out,” Joshua said stoutly.
“You have sisters to protect,” Asil reminded him gently. The boy bit his lip and nodded.
“Okay. Yeah. Right.”
Asil looked at the house, assessing it as if it were an enemy. Behind him, he heard the car door open.
“Joshua,” he asked, “if this hoard had a heart, where would it be?”
The boy hesitated. “The basement.”
“And what,” asked Asil, “is the best way to get to the basement?”
As it turned out, there was an exterior entrance to the basement along the side of the house. Asil found a broken shovel leaning against the wall of the house next to an assortment of battered gardening tools and started to excavate the snow that had accumulated on top of the slanted doors.
“When this house was built,” Asil murmured, “this would have been where deliveries of ice and coal would have been made.”
“What about Helen?” Tami asked.
“Helen?” he asked absently. Doors cleared enough for his purpose, he set the shovel aside.
“Their mom.”
“What about her?” he asked. He grasped the chain that kept the doors shut and shook it, dislodging more snow and revealing the padlock.
“She isn’t going to be in the basement,” Tami said, a hint of exasperation in her voice. “Joshua said you can’t get into the basement anymore from the house. We need to get her out before you start killing mythological magical beasts.”
“She’ll come to us,” Asil told her. “It will call her as soon as it views us as a threat.”
“And will it view us as a threat?” Tami asked.
Asil bared his teeth in something like a smile. “I am always a threat.”
He wrenched the heavy chain apart, dropped it into the snow, and pulled the doors open. The inner stairs that should have eased their way were nothing but a pile of rubble on the basement floor. As he watched, they crumbled further in a drift of wyrm magic.
“It knows we’re after it,” Asil said.
The drop to the basement floor was about eight feet, which meant the basement was unusually deep. And dark. There used to be lights, Joshua had said, but he didn’t think they worked anymore.
Asil took the sturdy electric lantern he’d brought from his SUV and tossed it into the basement. After a few bounces and a short roll, it hit a structural post and came to rest on its side, illuminating a concrete-floored room.