Chapter 12 – Wizzy

“Do a jaguar next!”

“No, a dragon!”

Huitzilin smiled at the children as he handed the butterfly he had just finished whittling to the small girl hovering on his porch steps. She took it carefully and managed to squeak out thanks before dashing off to show it to her friends.

“A jaguar, ai?” He asked, taking the next block of wood. The little boy nodded eagerly, brushing the hair out of his eyes. Huitzilin started carving, but after the first two curls of wood peeled off, the phone in his pocket chimed. The ringtone identified it as coming from House Taisen, so he sighed and put the wood block down. “Seems like work is calling. One will make a jaguar next time.”

“Okay gramps,” said the little boy, and Huitzilin narrowed his eyes at the kid. The children dispersed as he pulled out the phone and answered it.

“Yes?”

“This is Taisen,” the voice on the other end said. “I have a report from Princess Felicia.”

“Ah?” That was a departure from the usual way of things. Huitzilin stepped inside the little house he had on the edge of the village, to have some privacy. “Is there an issue?”

“There is,” a new voice sounded in his ear, and he could feel the power in it despite being unaffected himself, his blood denying it any hold. “A group of hostile fae have just emerged somewhere in Central or South America. Not too far south though, and I know they came out somewhere in a deep cenote with lots of bones at the bottom. But I couldn’t tell you their exact geographic area.”

“One suspects that that will not be necessary,” Huitzilin said, recalling old, old memories. It made sense that the fae would be attracted to such important and venerated places, old and bloody as they were.

“Archmage Taisen is extremely busy dealing with the aftermath of an attack on Alpha Chester; would you be confident in addressing the fae issue? They have someone fairly powerful with them, though not of archmage level.”

“Yes,” Huitzilin said. “One will ensure that these fae commit no mischief.”

“I will block their escape route,” Felicia said. “If they retreated there is no telling where they would end up. Not in Faerie, that is certain.”

“Very good,” Huitzilin said, and hung up the phone. He had never entirely agreed with modern notions like mercy anyway, for that required that the enemy be in some sense very similar, with only circumstance putting them at odds. For strange creatures like the fae, any that set themselves against him could not be granted clemency.

“Then we hunt again?” His shadow asked him, bright eyes opening where it was cast upon the wall. The language it used had been lost to the ages, dying out with his people in time lost to time.

“We do,” Huitzilin confirmed to his old friend. He stepped out of the back of his house, activating his foci. While he preferred walking most of the time, sometimes flight was a better option.

The glamour kept him disguised as he flew out of the small village he lived in for the moment, carrying him past the hidden temple where the portal to Mictlān resided, and on toward other, half-remembered ritual sites. Most of them were after his time, but not all. People had been drawn to the same places again and again, as if there were something magical about them.

Huitzilin knew there was. It wasn’t the magic of mages, not the magic of vis, but something deeper and more primal. It was the kind of magic that raised and razed cities, the sheer will and determination of thousands crystallizing into a single point of action. Mictlān had done none of that, only bleeding off talented youth for the false promise of easy power. At least until he had sealed it.

There was nothing amiss at the first sacrificial pool he checked, nor the next, or even the next. It wasn’t until he’d worked his way all the way to Campeche that he caught the first hint of fae presence. The blood of the earth twisted and turned, spiraling in toward the ancient cenote in ways that it should not.

Huitzilin dropped down into the changed space, feeling the beating hearts of two, perhaps three banner worth of fae and humans. Or things that had once been human. The blood that flowed through them was too thick, moved too slowly, its nature twisted and changed by too much time in Faerie.

He reached up to touch the thorns piercing his earlobes, tugging lightly to generate a few drops of blood, which he sent circling around him as he walked forward through the jungle. A few moments later he broke through into the clearing where the fae were assembled, all of them in some mockery of human or animal form.

Of course, his arrival hadn’t gone unnoticed. Several of the more human-looking fae turned toward him, while the one in the big hat stretched out his cane theatrically. Though with the fae, theatrics were inseparable from effectiveness.

“Halt, mage!” He boomed, shadows rising around him. “You tread upon the Court of the Loa! Pay your respects or face the consequences.”

“You are invaders,” Huitzilin said softly. “And will receive only what you have earned.”

The altered humans were weak, and he simply seized control of their blood directly, puppeting them to turn around and immediately attack their masters. Weak though they were, it was a surprise to their fae masters to be set upon by five or six withered bodies clawing and grasping with savage ferocity. Not that Huitzilin expected the thralls to do all the work for him.

He flung his blood forward, drops spattering against two of the fae – a bull-headed man and an owl-headed woman – and forced it into their veins. His vis tangled with theirs, his blood flowed in their veins. After a single moment, he ripped it all out of them, reducing them to dried chunks of meat and bone. The blood went splashing out, threatening the rest of the fae.

The rest of them blurred into motion, several of them coming directly at him with weapons that may have looked unimpressive but were clearly heavily magical, meant to cleave and sever. All of which he ignored, for when they met his skin they stopped, the blood inside it stronger than steel and as immoveable as a mountain. All that did was bring them closer to death, for the few drops of blood they freed whipped out to flense flesh from bone.

At the same time, the man in the oversized hat conjured up a great cresting wave of shadow, sending it Huitzilin’s way with a flick of the cane. It withered anything it touched, plant, fae, and human alike, but Huitzilin had ways of dealing with that kind of thing. Perhaps he could have withstood it on sheer strength of power alone, but there was no need to take the risk.

His shadow shot out to meet the one that the fae had conjured. For a moment the yawning abyss of Mictlān cracked open on Earth, the darkness there swallowing the pale imitation the fae had conjured and leaving only ash behind. That seemed to be enough for some of the fae, and a number of them jumped back down the cenote. Whatever they were expecting, it didn’t happen, the bone-choked water merely rippling and splashing. Felicia had kept her word.

From there the fight took on a note of desperation. The fae came at him in a horde, ignoring the ones who were being beaten to death by the hijacked thralls, and he welcomed them. All they did was speed up their own deaths, though his shirt and pants were torn to tatters. While his control over his own blood meant there was little in the way of injury they could inflict on him, it still sliced through the mundane material he was wearing as if it were air.

The only one who was at all a challenge was the hat man, who didn’t bother with anything physical and instead threw magical attacks. Not powerful ones, but insidious stuff, trying to infect the air he breathed and the light he saw. His old, dead friend was proof against that, a shadow that overmatched the darkness the fae could cast.

Huitzilin strode forward, drops of blood hanging around him as the exsanguinated corpses of his foes crumbled onto the grass. The hat man’s cane whistled through the air, the simple stick sharper than an obsidian blade. Even Huitzilin was wary of letting such a foul artifact touch him, especially since he could feel the hunger it had, so his blood pulled him to one side faster than mere muscle could move.

Like any real fight, it was over in seconds. Huitzilin was not taking any chances, and he ripped into the fae with all the blood he had gathered. He forced it into the fae’s mouth and nose, down its throat, into its ears and eyes. The hat man’s shadows tried to tear at his vis, but instead his old friend devoured them, diamond eyes glowing.

Then Huitzilin tore him apart from the inside, shredding his body and stealing his vis, funneling it into his shadow to repair what had been spent in the fight. Not that his friend would ever go away, but his shadow could only do so much without a ready supply of energy.

It didn’t take much longer to remove the rest of the enemies, with their lord and general gone. That left only the remaining altered humans, and Wizzy peered at them closely to see if any were still intact. But no, they had been that way so long that if they had minds, death would be a release. He stilled their blood in their veins, an instant mercy.

In the bloody silence, he reached down for the water of the cenote and used it to wash things clean, scouring open a patch of earth to bury the remains and using one of his foci to seal stone around them. No need to burden the jungle with the problems that fae bodies could invite if they were left out for the birds and the worms.

Huitzilin stretched and yawned, feeling a little bit drained from the encounter. He was of course unbothered by the carnage, since he had seen much worse and bloodier sights, and with less deserving victims. But he was out of practice, having not needed to use his offensive skills for a very long time.

“Thank you, old friend,” he said.

“It was fun,” the shadow replied.

He took out his phone and frowned as he saw he had no service where he was, then energized his focus to take to the air again. He needed to return home anyway and get new clothes, for the current ones were in tatters and people would balk at seeing the innumerable bloodless papercuts put into his skin. Huitzilin flew over the jungle as the sky darkened, content with what he had managed.

Even if he had not been a blood priest for a very long time, it was good to know that he still remembered how to deal with his enemies.

***

With Alpha Chester’s compound destroyed, House Hargrave ended up hosting what could credibly be described as a summit. Callum wasn’t entirely happy with it, but there weren’t too many choices. It needed to be held on Earth if the shifter and fae members were to be at all comfortable, unless Callum wanted to volunteer to hold portals open for the duration of their discussions. Which he didn’t, especially since he was completely tapped out from his work with the dragons’ own portal.

He was still keeping an eye on it, though it seemed to be stable enough, even if the mana flow wasn’t yet at the level of the original. Perhaps it never would be, considering how rough and haphazard the process had been, but it was probably good enough. It weighed on his mind enough that he was still worrying over it by the time he had to leave, and only reluctantly teleported his family over.

House Hargrave was astonishingly opulent to his sensibilities, the rooms enormous and spacious and filled with antiques. Hand-carved furniture, paintings that looked to be from the Dutch masters, and a lot of subtle enchanting for the lights, the windows, even the carpets. Though what surprised him the most was that there was an entire pack of shifters serving as guards and butlers.

“Welcome to House Hargrave, Master and Madam Wells, and of course the Young Master too,” one of the butlers said, bowing to them after they appeared in the vestibule of the House. Alex bounced happily at being called Young Master, staring around at the expensive carpets and hand-blown glass chandeliers. Callum had to admit he was impressed, though not entirely comfortable with that level of extreme wealth. While it was incredibly opulent, he suspected it was less showing off as just the way very powerful people lived when they accumulated wealth and connections over hundreds of years.

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“Thank you,” Callum said, and followed the butler through the house to where he had already sensed a number of mage bubbles along with Wizzy and Shahey. Even though House Hargrave were allies, he was still twitchy being so deep in another mage’s territory. It wasn’t as nerve-wracking as his first contacts, at least, so he was able to focus on something other than escape plans.

The sitting room had a half-dozen Hargraves, the family resemblance obvious when they were all gathered together, and the ones he hadn’t met stared politely when the butler introduced them. It gave Callum a moment of befuddled confusion to see actual fear in their expressions, but of course he had a reputation. The fae cloak he was wearing probably contributed, since the material was clearly not of Earth and he was sure it looked intimidating to mage-sight.

“Alpha Chester should be arriving soon,” Archmage Hargrave said. “And Princess Felicity is en route with Archmage Taisen.”

“That’s fine,” Callum said. “I’m pretty sure we’re all on the same page after the past couple days.”

“Their willingness to move to open hostilities is worrisome,” Archmage Hargrave acknowledged. “Even I know that the incident at Chester’s compound is getting far too much scrutiny. Especially after the vampire massacres. I’m not sure that GAR is even bothering to try and cover it up.”

“The DAI inherited BSE’s job, basically,” Lucy said, digging a book out of the bag for Alex, since he was sure to be fairly bored by the proceedings. “And they don’t have the expertise for it. Or the interest, probably. Isn’t the new policy that they don’t actually care about secrecy anymore?”

“It’s not clear what the new policy is,” Glenda said, watching as Lucy settled Alex on her lap. “We still have some people over in Faerie who talk to us, but the inner circle of Archmages are keeping their mouths shut.”

“Announcing Archmage Taisen, Princess Felicity Blackblood, and Princess-Consort Magus Raymond Danforth,” the butler said, which didn’t surprise Callum since he’d sensed them arrive. What did surprise him was the amount of power swirling around Felicia, significantly more than the last time he’d seen her. She was also dressed in what could only be described as a tactical ballgown, an armored black dress that integrated both pistol and sword.