Table of Contents

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Epilogue

  Other Books by Carrie Vaughn

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Hunting and gardening had something in common: waiting. Research the landscape, understand the objective, do the prep—and then wait. No way to get around the waiting part. In hunting, he waited for the quarry to come into his sights.

  In gardening, Cormac stared at a stretch of tilled and planted earth, wondering if a bunch of tiny seedlings were going to survive, and he couldn’t do anything about hurrying them along. He waited to see what bugs were going to attack, watched for stems and tendrils to expand, for buds to form and flowers to open, praying the whole time that hail and wind didn’t get to them first. On the Colorado plains, with the wall of mountains on the western horizon, you prayed a heavy spring snow didn’t destroy it all just as it was getting started. Don’t plant anything before Mother’s Day, the folk wisdom around here said.

  In both hunting and gardening, you didn’t know if you were going to get what you wanted at the end of it. Anything could happen. Over the last few years he’d found he didn’t miss hunting all that much. He was learning that he wasn’t too fond of gardening. But Amelia was, and since she didn’t have a body, Cormac did the work.

  They had a house now, and that meant gardening. Amelia insisted. All in all, Cormac liked having the house, on an actual chunk of acreage where they didn’t have to listen to the neighbors fighting or the traffic humming nearby. If having a house meant working Amelia’s garden for her? Yeah, that was all right. If not for her, he wouldn’t have this. If not for her, he’d have gotten himself killed a long time ago. They’d lived for years now in a strange symbiosis. By now, he couldn’t imagine living otherwise.

  First thing they did when they moved in, after unloading boxes and bags from the Jeep, before even going to bed that night, was start the garden. Just digging a few holes and planting a few sage and rosemary starters. Amelia had never been happier. That warm feeling in the corner of his mind she occupied—that was nice.

  Getting the place had seemed a cosmic stroke of luck. It was a word-of-mouth situation. A friend of a friend—or rather a friend of a client, since Cormac didn’t have too many friends—owned it and needed a renter quickly. A relative died, leaving a surprise inheritance; the place wasn’t fashionable even in a crazy housing market—old, outdated, too small, too far away from amenities. But it had space. It had a small creek bed with cottonwoods alongside. It had privacy and a good roof. The owner was willing to rent it out cheap for the right tenant, which apparently meant “not planning on cooking meth.” Too good to be true, Cormac couldn’t help but think. He’d deal with that fallout when it happened. Here, miles from anywhere, it was quiet. He could almost hear the grass growing.

  Leaves and blooms came out the same time the late spring thunderstorms hit, and this being Colorado those storms often brought snow. Back when he was a kid on his uncle’s ranch, they’d roam the pastures looking for new calves, to make sure they didn’t freeze. On the western slope, fruit farmers lit bonfires in their orchards to save the new blossoms. While walking the property’s couple of overgrown acres, he discovered an apple tree and cherry tree starting to bloom, which was nice, and also meant another thing to worry about.

  Having growing things under your care brought so much awareness of impending danger like the weather. Cormac could track deer, elk, and pronghorn. That had an element of chance, but you relied on your skill. Waiting to see what storms did to your fragile garden was more stressful than waiting to see if a bull elk was going to stay in your sights long enough to get a shot off.

  He sat in the small living room—Amelia called it a parlor—listening to thunder rumbling closer and tried not to worry. Thunder felt primal and thrilling. A reminder that human beings weren’t the biggest thing in the world.

  The parlor was also a study, a library, and arcane laboratory. It had a desk, shelves for books—so many books—and a cupboard for tools, lockboxes, and a dozen artifacts and oddities. A computer that they were still learning their way around. A filing cabinet that Kitty insisted would make his life easier. Too bad he usually forgot to put anything into it. The spot they used most was a big armchair next to a reading lamp and table just big enough to hold a cup of tea and a notebook. So goddamn Victorian. This wasn’t a life Cormac had ever pictured for himself.

  He was enjoying it, nonetheless. A quiet night reading a book, listening to the storm roll overhead… He was settling into a boring middle age. Thank God.

  Tonight, their book was about Neolithic archeology, with endless descriptions of stone artifacts and layouts of excavated tombs. This one also had chapters speculating that the symbols carved into the stone walls of the tomb might have been copies of hallucinogenic visions, which seemed weird. Amelia was right on the edge of suggesting they track down some hallucinogens, and that was where he might have to draw the line.

  He didn’t like being out of control.

  I know, but in a controlled environment—

  A crack of thunder rattled the windows, and the power went out. Not as startling as it could have been; Amelia had wanted to light a couple of candles—she said the soft warmth was comforting, and Cormac wondered how much of that was nostalgia—so instead of being thrown into pitch darkness, they had circles of buttery light, that didn’t reach the corners of the room. They sat amidst shadows, the memory of pre-industrial nights. The words on the page turned sepia, muted.

  Well, that’s exciting.

  Cormac glanced out the curtained window. Not that that would have told him anything—their nearest neighbors were half a mile off. But the glow on the horizon that was downtown Denver was absent. The power outage affected the whole area.

  He—or rather she—tried to keep reading, but another crack of thunder made him look up. The sound was almost constant now. Rain was beating the roof.

  Then came a pounding on the front door.

  Wind howled, tangling through the cottonwoods, another layer of sound to the continual rumbling in the thunderheads above them, the hammer of raindrops growing fiercer, suggesting hail. A massive storm, right overhead. Nobody should be out in this. Maybe he’d imagined it.

  The pounding came again.

  The door didn’t have a peephole, so he went to the window next to it and pulled back the curtain. A figure hunched on the front walkway. It seemed to be shrouded in a coat, dripping wet, nothing more than a dark shape. A streak of lightning broke the sky overhead; the moment of illumination revealed no other details. Reaching, the figure pounded a fist on the door again.

  That person needs help.

  Amelia’s magical protections meant that someone who wished them ill shouldn’t be able to approach the house. That this person had come close enough to knock suggested they were safe. Or at least, not an immediate threat.

  When he opened the door, wind threatened to yank it from his grip, slamming it inside, and a sheet of rain pummeled him. The figure ducked from the weather, as if he thought he could escape. A man, soaking wet, gasping for breath. The last of his strength seemed to go out of him, and he collapsed across the threshold. He managed to look up, a despairing expression clouding his pale eyes.

  Cormac knew him. Odysseus Grant, the magician.

  Cormac grabbed the collar of the man’s coat and dragged him inside.

  He paused to look down the front walk to the dirt drive—no car was parked there. There was no indication how Grant had arrived—his black dress shoes weren’t covered in mud. He was wet, disheveled, unfocused, but he hadn’t walked here. Beyond the drive, the cottonwoods were blustering in the wind, their crowns swaying, black against the lightning-touched clouds overhead.

  By the time he shoved the door shut against the wind—and double checked the locks—they were both soaking wet, chilled from the wind.

  Shivering, Grant was having trouble standing, like he couldn’t get his legs under him, so Cormac guided him over to the wood-burning stove in the parlor. He sank, right to the floor. Cormac stripped off his coat, tossing it to the tiled front entrance to drip a puddle on the floor there. Next, he shoved some kindling and a match into the stove’s belly to get a fire going. Pulled a blanket off the sofa and threw it over his shoulders. Grant came to enough awareness to take hold of it and pull it tightly around him.

  Cormac settled on the floor nearby.

  Odysseus Grant had a stage show in Las Vegas. The show was a front, cover for a man who might have been an actual wizard with deep knowledge and considerable arcane skill. Amelia admired him. Cormac was suspicious of him, but he was suspicious of just about everyone so that didn’t say much. They’d worked with him before. He was a friend of Kitty’s, and that normally spoke well of someone.

  Right now, he seemed ill, still shivering despite the growing heat nearby. He hadn’t yet lifted his gaze or spoken.

  Cormac’s first thought was to call Kitty to come take care of Grant. Whatever this was about he was pretty sure he didn’t want to get involved. His second thought was that Odysseus knew where Kitty lived, and if he’d wanted to bother her he’d have gone there.

  Put the kettle on for tea? Amelia offered. That was usually her first suggestion for any problem that didn’t
have them facing immediate danger.

  “Hey,” Cormac said. “You want something hot to drink? Or a shot of whiskey?”

  Finally, Odysseus Grant glanced up. His eyes glittered. “How are your protection spells? Your defenses? Are they strong?”

  “They’re fine,” he answered flatly, put out on Amelia’s behalf. “What’s the problem?”

  “Tea. Yes. All right.”

  He’d come here, he was asking about protections, because he needed someplace safe—because he wasn’t. “What’s coming after you?”

  Grant’s expression turned haunted, and he didn’t say a word.

  “Right. Tea.”

  Some chamomile, I think.

  Got anything that’ll make him tell the truth? Cormac asked, only half joking.

  Gentle goodwill. Also only half joking.

  He’d forgotten—the stove was electric, out with the rest of the power. He could find another way to boil water, but that seemed like a chore. So he poured the shot of whiskey after all. Grant clutched it with the air of a drowning man and drank the whole thing. Cormac had never seen him so anxious. The man was usually the epitome of control. Cormac was losing patience and had to remind himself: hunting, gardening. Just wait.

  The storm seemed to subside, moving farther east. Thunder was less frequent, and the time between the light and the sound longer. The rain had turned gentle. The power was still out.

  Finally, Grant seemed to settle. His shoulders unclenched a notch. He stared at the glass a moment, skeptical. “Whiskey, you said? Nothing else?”

  “Look, if you don’t trust me you shouldn’t have come here.”

  Grant curled his lip in a silent chuckle and set the shot glass aside.

  “Amelia says she’ll have a better idea of how good her protections are if you tell us what’s wrong.”

  Narrowing his gaze, Grant studied them. “How do you do it? How do you live with an entire other consciousness in your mind?”

  That didn’t really describe their relationship. In all their years together he’d never found an easy way to explain it. He said, “I’m never lonely.”

  He’s stalling, Amelia said testily.

  Cormac passed the observation along. “You’re stalling.”

  Grant nodded, acknowledging. “How much do you know about doorways? Portals. Gates.”

  “Not the kind you can close with a slab of wood, I’m assuming.” Grant didn’t smile. Barely acknowledged the joke. Cormac added, “I’ve seen them work. I’ve seen what uses them to travel.”

  Kitty had vanished through a portal once, traveling from Denver to Yellowstone in a flash. They’d had to go after her by car to get her back—and save the world, it turned out. More than a century ago, Amelia had essentially placed herself in a pocket dimension, to keep her soul from dying with her body. He wasn’t sure theoretical physics discussions of multiple dimensions could explain what was going on, since that seemed mostly to do with mathematics and modeling the way the universe worked. Not that he’d retained much about it from the reading he and Amelia had done on the subject.

  “So, why do you want to know about doorways?” Cormac prompted.

  Grant closed his eyes a moment. “For most of my life, I’ve been guarding a portal. I inherited it from…God, I don’t even know what to call him. He was a vaudeville magician. He’s got footnotes about him in histories of stage magic from the time. I learned magic from him. And I learned Magic. Deep lore that he’d learned from mentors going back to John Dee, to Paracelsus—”

  Amelia gasped at the names. The lineage. She shoved her way forward, to use Cormac’s voice: “This portal was also passed down? Was it an artifact, a spell—”

  “It was a box. The size of a coffin,” Grant said. “He used it in his act—he made people vanish. And I used it in mine.”

  Cormac had a sinking feeling. He asked, “You really made people disappear?”

  “Everyone thought it was just the usual trick. It was essentially harmless.”

  That essentially held volumes of excuses. “And now it isn’t essentially harmless, I’m assuming.”

  “Decades ago, when my mentor was a young man—you know how it is, a cult summoned a monster.” Cormac did not, in fact, know how it was. Most of the cults he’d dealt with had to do with vampires, but this sounded like something else.

  Amelia shushed him.

  “He couldn’t destroy the monster, so he trapped it. He tied the portal that they used to the box, sealing it into a sort of pocket dimension. He was cocky, sure of himself. Sure that the prison would hold. But there’s always entropy, isn’t there?”

  Entropy, the breakdown of order, the universe’s trend toward chaos and disorder. Everything died—

  Unless they didn’t.

  Grant was staring at the orange glow through the window of the stove. “Times are different than they were then. The events at Yellowstone—the world’s changed. The chaos is…more than what it was. Something from the other side of the portal forced it open. I couldn’t close it, couldn’t stop it. Now this thing…it’s hunting me, I think.”

  Let me talk to him, Amelia said urgently. He stepped to the back of his own mind, while she stepped into the sinews of his body. The trade used to take so much effort, consciously releasing control. Now, it was second nature. Her refined English accent spoke with his voice. He paced; or rather, she did. Helped her think.

  “What exactly came through to our world?”

  “A bleed-off remnant of another dimension? An elder god?” Grant sat back and rubbed his face. “Angels and demons, or whatever it was that made us think they were angels and demons when they first came to our world.”

  “I’m not a theologian.”

  “The theologians don’t know anything about this,” Grant replied.

  She didn’t want to judge, she hadn’t been there—but it was difficult, destroying a thing when you didn’t know what it was. She needed to know more. “What did this cult hope to accomplish? What rituals were they using? A witchcraft tradition, or—”

  Cormac interrupted, focused on what he thought was the more immediate problem. “Where is the box now?”

  “I destroyed it, hoping to destroy the portal along with it.”

  So this monster couldn’t be shoved back in, re-imprisoned. This meant they’d have to build a whole new anchor, a whole new doorway.

  “Wait a minute…” Grant hoped to destroy the portal? “How’d you get here, anyway? You didn’t drive, you didn’t walk—”

  Grant set his jaw, his expression growing even more closed off.

  Oh dear God, Amelia muttered under her breath. Out loud she said, “You were trying to separate the portal from its anchor, the box. So you could use it. Not just for your show, but anywhere.”

  Grant wiped a hand over his face. “Well when you put it like that, it does sound bad, doesn’t it?”

  “And you came here because, why? Why do you think we can help?”

  “Amelia is the one of the most powerful magicians I know,” he said bluntly.

  It was almost flattering. She said, muttering with Cormac’s voice, “Well, that’s what a hundred years of practice will get you.”

  “So what, you want us to catch this monster, shut down this portal—is that all?” Cormac asked.

  “Essentially.”

  Cormac grabbed his phone off the desk and punched up a number.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Calling for help. See, I know when I’m in over my head.”

  The call rang, rang, and turned over to voice mail. “Hello, you’ve reached the Manitou Wishing Well. Our hours are…”

  The number went to Judi and Frida’s shop, not a mobile phone. They’d always answered when he called before; he just assumed they would this time. Never mind how late it was. How late was it? Close to midnight. He didn’t bother leaving a message.

  “Who are you calling?” Grant asked.

  “Friends.”

  “Magicians?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Can you trust them?”

  “I can’t trust you, buster,” Cormac muttered. “When we meet them, you’d better not lie to them. They’ll know. Now, let’s see…”

  Amelia got out books, stacks of books, faded photocopies of old books of shadows uploaded online, shared among a strange community of magicians she’d found her way to. To them she’d added her own journals, notes, lists of symbols, incantations, alignments.