Asil’s Third Date Asil and the Not-Date #7
Even if he were wrong about the effect of the black magic Mariposa had worked upon herself to stop the effects of time, Tami shared no scent with Mariposa. That he would have noticed, amulet or not.
“She was my mother in all that matters,” Tami asserted through her bared teeth. “And you killed her.”
That wasn’t true, but he didn’t argue. Mariposa had died hunting him, though it had not been Asil who had broken her neck. He did not care if this witch blamed him for her death or not.
He had wanted answers. Mariposa was one he had not expected, and it knocked him off his game. But he needed to know the depth of the plot that had brought him here.
“How did you set this up?” he asked. “Our not-date?”
“I didn’t,” she said with a wild little laugh.
“You could have knocked me over with a feather when you walked into the restaurant this evening and told me your name. How many werewolves are there who call themselves Asil? I am fated to be your death, old wolf. A circle of fate—you killed her, and I will kill you.”
Coincidence. Asil had believed in a lot of things in his long life; coincidence was not one of them. But she was not lying.
“You set all of this up after you saw me tonight?” he asked skeptically—though he knew she was telling the truth. She was not powerful enough to conceal lies from a werewolf. But his disbelief—unfeigned, though not directed at her—would keep her talking.
“Joshua always visits his sisters on Friday nights,” she told him. “I knew if something happened, he would call me. I ensured something happened.”
She must have used magic to contact the wyrm, Asil thought, wondering how he’d missed her using magic in the restaurant. But she’d gone to the restroom, hadn’t she? Communication over a few miles wouldn’t have taken a lot of magic.
She drew out a knife. “I have a special death planned for you. How convenient that Helen is here to give me the power I need to make your dying so terrible that it will feed me for decades.”
“Black witches like you gain power from pain and death,” said Asil, stating clearly what they both knew.
But Tami, crouched beside Helen and petting the unmoving woman with a tender hand, wasn’t paying attention to Asil. Instead, she crooned, “Don’t worry, this won’t hurt for long.”
He didn’t care that she didn’t acknowledge his words, because it hadn’t been Tami that Asil had been talking to.
As the witch raised her hand to position the knife against Helen’s flesh, a shot rang out.
It was a head shot, beautifully placed. The witch was dead before she would have heard the sound, her head the sort of messy ruin that buckshot fired at close range tended to make.
Shotgun in hand, Joshua jumped down into the basement with a grace that none of the other humans had managed.
Asil shook himself free of the shadows of Tami’s dark magic, already fading with her death.
He listened, but didn’t hear anyone approaching.
A shotgun was not silent, but it also was not a common sound for the center of a city.
He was of the opinion that, if they were a little lucky, and if the shotgun was not fired again, the neighbors would probably not call the police.
Carefully not looking at the dead body, Joshua knelt beside his mother.
“Unconscious, but her breathing and her heart rate are fine,” Asil told him. She must have passed out when Tami’s magic freed her. “You were supposed to wait in the car.”
“I saw Mama come running out the front door with her shotgun,” Joshua told Asil. “I left the kids in the car—they won’t come out until I tell them—and came to see if I could talk sense to her before she confronted a witch and a werewolf.
“She set the shotgun down so she could jump into the basement, I think. She wouldn’t have jumped with a loaded weapon. By the time I got to the basement door, she was down and Tami was—Tami was…I thought Tami was one of the good guys, you know?” His voice cracked.
Asil nodded. “As did I.”
“I picked up the shotgun,” Joshua said. “And I listened to you. You were talking to me, right? Telling me what Tami was going to do to my mom?”
“Werewolves have very good hearing,” Asil told him. “I heard you.”
Joshua’s mouth twisted, and he glanced at the dead woman who lay no more than two feet from him. He swallowed. Then touched his mother’s cheek. “I know how to shoot. Mama taught me.”
“You saved your mother and me,” Asil told him.
He was pretty sure he would have killed the witch before she could get to him.
The Marrok’s pack magic was particularly good at dealing with witchcraft, possibly because the Marrok had been born a witch.
But he might not have freed himself before Tami hurt Helen again—or killed her.
The shotgun had been the most certain way to ensure Helen’s survival.
The boy looked at the dead witch again. “God. God. I’m going to jail. What will happen to the girls?”
A soft sound told Asil that Joshua’s situation would have to wait. He scooped up the unconscious woman and urged her son into the corner of the room farthest from the two doorways that led deeper into the basement. “Urged” was probably the wrong word. Shoved. Thrust.
Set out of harm’s way.
He got them out of the wyrm’s path while the creature busied itself with the witch’s body. It took no more than a minute for it to consume the body whole.
It was young.
An old wyrm’s scales faded to a sort of blue-tinged putty color.
Their heads puffed up to an amorphous blob, while their eyes acquired a whitish coating that made them look blind.
He had no idea if they were truly blind.
Asil had killed an old wyrm who had enthralled a whole village.
That wyrm had been forty feet long and six feet in diameter, and if it couldn’t see, it had not needed sight to be deadly.
Afterward, piecing together stories, Asil thought it had been nearly six hundred years old.
Old wyrms were ugly, dreadful things. This one was beautiful.
Deadly and beautiful. Ruffled red-edged yellow scales covered it from head to tail, a distance of about fourteen feet. Its eyes, wolf gold and slit pupiled, sat in a face that reminded Asil forcefully of its distant cousin the dragon.
It was fabulous and rare—and Asil was going to kill it because there was nothing else to be done.
A wyrm was not a dragon, intelligent enough to conceal itself from modern civilization.
Asil didn’t know what one was doing in North America—wyrms were eastern European mostly. Sometimes they popped up in Eurasia.
He’d never heard of one in North America.
It raised its head and chittered at him, flattening its neck in a threat display like a huge cobra. The fluttering scales caught the dim light of the lantern in a motion that, for a moment, reminded Asil of butterfly wings.
The old beast inside his heart rose, called by old memories and the lingering stench of black magic. Asil fought it down for a moment—then considered the situation.
The boy and his unconscious mother were innocents, even by the beast’s standards. Asil raised his sword, and gave himself to the wolf.
He didn’t shift; the wolf could use their human form as well as Asil could pilot the canid one. They were both very skilled with a sword. There was a moment when Asil felt the wolf’s fierce joy at being let out of the cage of Asil’s will, then he was lost in the maelstrom that was his wolf.
He came back to himself in the darkness of the wyrm’s hoard, kneeling on the body of the creature. Both his ears and his eyes told him it was very, very dead. The wolf could be a messy killer.
With a satisfied grunt, Asil pulled his sword free, cleaned it on a piece of relatively clean cloth from the hoard, then checked on Joshua and Helen.
The boy was standing over his unconscious mother, shotgun at the ready. He looked a little pale, and when Asil approached, he flinched back. “Jeez, you’re fast,” he said.
Awe, thought Asil, with a touch of fear. Appropriate reactions to the sight of Asil in action.
“Yes,” he agreed mildly.
Joshua swallowed, squared his shoulders, and said, “I’m glad you were on my side.” He glanced at his weapon. “I couldn’t get a clear shot.”
“Just as well,” said Asil. “No one seems to have reacted to your first shot. If you’d kept going, someone would have called the police.”
“Tami is dead,” said Joshua. “Don’t we have to call the police?”
“I was just driving by,” Asil told the fireman. “I saw smoke. That boy—Joshua—he had his sisters out already. I just helped him find his mother.”
He wore a spare suit he kept in his SUV and had washed up in the only still-functional bathroom in the house. The smoke in the air would keep anyone who wasn’t a werewolf from smelling the scent of the wyrm’s blood, which still lingered on Asil’s skin and would for the next few days.
The blaze had been going well by the time the first responders showed up. They would find that the fire had started in the basement, the old electrical system having sparked something flammable—and every fireman understood that a hoarder’s home was a fire waiting to happen.
With all the occupants accounted for, no one would be looking for another person to be in the house anyway.
Even if they looked, they would not find a trace of Tami or the wyrm because wyrm flesh, enriched with magic, burned more than hot enough to turn itself and any evidence of its presence to ash.
At most they would find a place where the fire had burned hotter than usual.
A hoarder’s home was a good place to find things that burn hotter than usual.
As for Tami’s sudden disappearance—Asil would call upon the Marrok and they would smooth it over one way or the other—a new boyfriend, a new job, an unexpected opportunity. Asil was not worried about that part of it.
A black witch and a wyrm, both evil creatures, had been eliminated. A family—Asil looked over where Joshua and his sisters, all wrapped in blankets, were talking to the EMTs who were securing Helen to a stretcher—reunited.
That night, in his hotel room, Asil opened his laptop and sent an email.
Dear Concerned Friends,
There were no dead bodies left to find this time. I killed only the wyrm. Also, I do not feel that we have the same understanding about the meaning of the words “background check.”
Sincerely,
Asil