Wolf Hunted, стр. 34
Gerard, Axlam, and Jax would enter through the “hotel” entrance where the elves had set up the equivalent of magical locker rooms. The Great Hall removed all glamours, and forced the pack into wolf form. The changing area kept clothing safe and clean.
I waved my arm and parted the magic veil between the real world and the elven glory on the other side.
Evening might have spread her violet shadows throughout the mundane world, but in here, she’d spread gold. Every dark space had a golden edge; every bright, an edge of silver. The sky above shifted from near-black violet dotted with stars to a firmament of borealis shoals and swirling heavenly fires.
The red oaks rustled. An owl hooted nearby. The air, though holding the chill we left outside, smelled crisp and fresh.
In the distance, the gold of the evening cumulated as the sunshine roof of The Hall, and lit the tops of the trees like a beacon.
Laughter rolled down the path. Chatter followed, plus a howl or two. The feast brought the elves and the wolves together. They were upbeat, but there was still a strained tone to the gathering’s sounds.
The last time I’d stepped through that gate, I’d had an oily, low-demon-like rage stuck to my soul. One that, like so much of the other magicks sticking their icy fingers into Alfheim these days, had been concealed.
If anything, it had proved that yes, I saw magic, but not all magic. Natural magic drifted around everything in the world. Elven magic created structured lines and coiling sigils. Spirit magic danced. The kitsune version of kami magic wagged its many fox tails. Vampires gleamed like the predators they were. The werewolves were all wolf, all the time. And the fae… well, the fae were the fae.
But every form of magic could be twisted and hidden. It could be pushed so large I lost it on the horizon, or so small and thin I missed it in my peripheral vision. It could be worked smooth, or turned into a shadow. Or it could simply be rendered invisible.
I’d lived with the elves for so long I’d forgotten how they sheltered Alfheim from the corrupted magicks of the world. Except now it was getting in. Carried in on the back of the unsuspecting, or with my brother, tucked neatly into the crevasses made by the scars our father laid upon us both.
What did it mean? I wasn’t sure. The world was changing, and magic with it. Was this new escalation a reflection of the mundane escalation of technology? Of humanity’s unending horrors?
Something was coming, though. Something big. Because if escalation was anything, it was a harbinger.
Maura touched my arm. “You okay?”
I looked down at my fully out-of-glamour elven sister. She and her daughter were all things beautiful about the world. All of life’s wonders, and all its power. And I was better by far for having been adopted into their family.
“When I came through the veil,” I pointed over my shoulder, “I was hit by a feeling of foreboding…” I didn’t know how else to describe it, especially with Akeyla, my axe on her shoulder and in small-warrior-goddess mode, standing right next to me.
Turned out I didn’t need to.
Akeyla swung Sal down to her hands. Maura’s safety spells coiled around Sal’s blade like a rubber bumper, and this close to The Great Hall, they had taken on a solidity they didn’t have in the mundane world.
Sal weighed a good thirty-five pounds, or she did when I wielded her, but in Akeyla’s hands, she looked fast and light.
“I want to go to fifth grade next year,” she said. She flipped Sal back up to her shoulder. “Then I’m going to skip sixth grade, too.”
What veils had just dropped for Akeyla? Because she stared down the path with a look much older than her almost nine years.
Sal agreed with Akeyla’s decree.
Akeyla looked up at her mother. “I want to learn real spells, Mommy.”
Maura didn’t seem all that fazed by Akeyla’s comments. “Sure, honey.”
Akeyla nodded her head as if she, too, had felt the foreboding I had. “Sal says when Samhain comes, and the veils are at their thinnest, sometimes the past and the future talk. Sometimes they tell each other stories.”
“I didn’t hear Sal,” I said. Next to me, Maura shrugged as if she hadn’t, either.
“She’s practicing speaking to one of us at a time. She says that she needs all her skills and learning, too.”
Maura obviously shared my surprise. Akeyla had moved way beyond my simple foreboding.
“Oh,” I said, as Sal confirmed Akeyla’s words.
So the past and the future were having their own feast, and we just happened to be in the middle of their conversation. “Can you and Sal understand any of the stories?” I asked.
Akeyla looked up at me, and a new set of flames danced up Sal’s handle. “I don’t think they’re talking to me, and if I listen in, they might get mad.” She looked to her mother. “No one should gossip, right, Mommy?”
“Unless you hear something important and you think you should tell an adult,” Maura said.
Akeyla nodded in agreement. “That’s what I did in the park. They were talking about that man so I told Uncle Frank and Mr. Bjorn.”
“Thank you, honey,” I said.
“They’re comparing notes,” she said. “Like we do in school when we talk about what a book means.” The flames on Sal’s handle vanished. “Let’s go eat. I’m hungry.”
With that, my also-escalating niece walked toward The Great Hall with my axe on her shoulder and her perplexed mother following close behind.
And me, her equally perplexed uncle, wondering if—with all my sense of foreboding, and the increase in hidden dark magic, or just the all-around intensification of harm done by the wicked somethings that had come our way—I’d just witnessed a real harbinger.
Something big was definitely coming our way.
Perhaps it was Akeyla’s new Sal-awakening.