Asil’s Third Date Asil and the Not-Date #6
He could see in the dark, but not as well as the wyrm could. He wasn’t sure about the witch. Some of them could see just fine in the shadows.
He opened his case and drew out his sword.
It was a fine weapon, a gift to himself that he’d purchased a few years ago.
Its modern steel was better than his beloved old Toledo blade had been, broken centuries ago on the battlefield of a forgotten war.
He still missed his old sword every time he drew the new one.
Tami made a surprised sound, then asked, “How did that sword come out of a case ten inches shorter than the blade?”
As if she couldn’t help herself, she bent and reached for the case where he’d laid it on the snow. Before she could touch it, it disappeared. It was picky about who it allowed to touch it. So far, it had found its way back to him, usually to a mantelpiece—and he had two fireplaces in his home.
Still crouched on her heels, she looked up at him.
“Lady, I am old,” he said. “And well-traveled at a time when magic was less rare than it is today. One tends to collect a few useful oddities.”
The case was less useful around curious witches. He’d have to carry the blade home naked.
She stood up, rubbing her fingers together. He couldn’t tell if she was sampling the leftover magic from the case’s leap, or if she was trying to feel magic that was no longer there.
A soft sound—scales dragging on a piece of newsprint or paper perhaps—drifted out of the gaping, slanting doorway.
“Wait up here until I make it safe for you,” Asil told the witch.
Stepping toward the house, Asil shrugged off the guise of civilization like a too-small coat. He leaped lightly over the mound of the rotting stairs onto the cleared, rough-finished concrete floor.
Other than the remains of the stairs, this room of the basement was almost empty.
It made sense that the wyrm would keep an escape route clear—the chain and padlock would have slowed it down scarcely as long as it had slowed Asil.
But there were small piles of garbage lying in the corners of the room, wires and strips of colorful plastic hung from the walls, and the hoard seemed poised to grow like mold and take over this last clear space.
Tami sat on the edge of the defunct stairway, then jumped. Asil caught her and swung her over the rapidly disintegrating debris onto the bare cement.
Tami brushed his touch off uneasily—some people reacted that way to werewolves or to understanding just how much stronger Asil was than they were. Sometimes his immense beauty made people uncomfortable with his touch, too.
“Can you tell where the wyrm is?” Tami asked; he thought it was to distract both of them.
Asil raised an eyebrow. Her sense of magic should be better than his. “Can’t you?”
After a moment she shook her head. “No. It feels like it’s all around us.”
He nodded. “Smells like that, too.”
He heard someone running outside—too light for the footsteps to belong to the boy, too heavy for the other children. He pulled Tami away from the open doors, shoving her, not ungently, behind him.
“Thieves,” accused a shrill voice. A woman—Helen, he presumed—jumped into the basement. She landed in the middle of the stair rubble, falling because she didn’t have a friendly werewolf to catch her. She scrambled awkwardly to her feet.
She was a tiny woman, less than five feet tall and half-starved at that.
Her hair had recently been shorn by an indifferent barber using scissors, leaving little tufts sticking up from her vulnerable scalp.
She wore a dirty white T-shirt and ragged fuzzy pajama bottoms with purple unicorns dancing incongruously on them.
Her feet were bare and scratched, toes reddened from trekking through the snow without cover.
She looked younger than her son and far more defenseless.
“Thief!” She directed her accusation at Asil specifically this time, growling at him like a scared kitten.
“Killer,” Asil corrected under his breath, because they weren’t here to steal anything.
Tami gave him a sharp look.
“I believe that this task is yours, Tami,” he reminded her. She needed to do something before the poor thing in front of them forced Asil to deal with her.
“Mine,” agreed Tami. Her magic swept over him and engulfed the smaller woman.
He stepped out from between them. Tami could deal with Joshua’s mother without harming her. He didn’t know how long it would take. Such things could be nearly instantaneous or take several hours. But that was Tami’s business.
The wyrm was Asil’s task. Its hoard might disguise its odor well enough for the wolf to be unable to find a scent trail, but it was difficult to move soundlessly in a place so filled with things. As it slid between boxes, its scales scraped the cardboard. Plastic bags crunched under its weight.
The doorway between this room and the wyrm-occupied one was closed with a pair of old pallets tied together with yarn. The pallets held back the sea of stuff that filled the room beyond, though a few things were starting to slide over the top.
“Helen,” said Tami behind him—her magic making his skin crawl. “Listen to my words.” And then she started a chant, slow and melodic and filled with power. For a white witch, he noted, most of his attention on the wyrm, she had a lot of power.
He stepped to the side of the pallets, the memory of the avalanche of garbage that had trapped Joshua and his sisters in their room reminding him that gravity could be problematic.
He was unlikely to be hurt by falling boxes or even furniture, but he didn’t want to encounter his enemy with his feet trapped in detritus.
He cut the yarn and watched the garbage fall, the noise obscuring the more subtle sounds of the wyrm.
Behind him, Tami’s magic writhed and built with her chant. Writhed and grew and struck while she thought him distracted.
But Asil was never so distracted that he could not react. And his old wolf had not trusted the witch, even though she had smelled as white as snow.
When black magic blasted at them, the wolf threw them backward, going to the ground where the still-falling boxes, bags, and assorted random things provided enough of a shield.
The scourge of foulness washed by, leaving him choking on the reek of it.
He rolled to his feet and saw Helen lying motionless on the floor and Tami’s face twisted in hatred.
Joshua’s mother’s eyes were wide with fear, and blood oozed from her outstretched arm where Tami had cut her.
He felt his wolf’s rage shake his bones, softened a little by smugness. The wolf had known that witches were not to be trusted. Or at least that this witch had not been trustworthy.
How had she hidden what she was from him? He who knew so intimately what black magic felt like?
“You killed my mother,” Tami said—incomprehensibly.
He didn’t have time to try to figure out what she meant because she struck out at him with a second blast of black magic. This was weaker, though—that first hit had taken too much for her to do it a second time, he thought.
As he’d warned her more than once, Asil was old. After his mate’s death, he’d made hunting down black witches the focus of his life for several centuries. He knew some tricks for dealing with witchcraft.
He could have dodged the second attack as he had the first. He doubted she had power for a third without having more time with poor Helen, who had been summoned here for no better purpose than to play sacrifice to give Tami power.
But if he’d dodged her strike, he doubted he would be able to stop his wolf from killing her.
And he had questions.
To that end, he pulled on pack magic to shield himself.
When he’d been Alpha of his own pack, it would have been a barricade that rendered her magic as naught.
But he was no longer Alpha; he’d ceded that to his son when he’d decided it was time for his long life to end.
The pack he belonged to now was over a hundred miles away and he could only request, not demand.
For all the generosity and power of his Alpha, the power he could pull through his pack bonds meant he was fighting a forest fire with snow. But it was sufficient to alter her magic from a killing stroke into something that merely held him where he stood.
It was dangerous, what he did. Safer to have killed her quickly and not given her a chance at him, but Asil had done away with safety when he came to this country to ask the Marrok for death. Curiosity, though…curiosity was his besetting sin.
“I killed your mother?” he asked.
It was not impossible, but unlikely. It had been a hundred years or more since he had last killed a witch—and witches, unlike werewolves, were not immortal. Not commonly.
Not answering, Tami grasped the amulet at her neck—and he saw it clearly for the first time, as if it had heretofore hidden itself from him. He had seen her play with it, but had taken no notice of it. Now he could taste its magic, familiar magic. His lips formed her name.
Mariposa.
His foster daughter had a talent for hiding things in plain sight, making one thing seem like another: a complex magical item appeared to be a piece of costume jewelry, or black magic felt like white.
His recognition of what that amulet did robbed its spell of the rest of its power. The corrupt feel and smell of Tami’s magic filled the space around them, cloying and oily, blending unpleasantly with the residue of whatever his foster daughter had done to create the thing.
Asil ignored the magic battering at his shield, which was strengthening as the Marrock’s power figured out what Asil was shielding against. He was too consumed with…emotion of some sort. Anger. Sorrow. Rage.
Mariposa. Daughter. Butterfly.
Tami was not Mariposa’s daughter.
“Mariposa was not your mother,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse.