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Halloween. You'd think it'd be my favorite holiday, being a Magos. And it is - but not for the connection with the spooky side: that's plenty of fun but I get more spooky than anyone should ever handle way more often than I'd like anyway. No, it's not the Magos in me that loves Halloween, it's the mother. Of course, my daughters are mostly too old for all the trick-or-treat antics these days - or they want to say they are, leastwise - so like I have the last few years, I volunteered to go with a big group of the local kids and keep them out of trouble. I get my fix of vicarious enjoyment, the kids' parents don't have to worry about it, Angie and Gwen get to do their thing and don't have to hang out with a bunch of "little dweebs", everybody wins. What's not to like?
I was not wearing my witch hat tonight. Literally or figuratively. Seriously, dressing as a witch for Halloween would be just a little too on the nose, ne? So here I was, as Snow White of all things. It works! I mean, I don't particularly look like Snow White: way too tall, for one thing, and "coquettish" has never been my look, but what's the point of dressing up if you're not pretending at least a little? I had the black hair and light skin at any rate. But yeah. Snow White. Not a witch. Not tonight. Tonight we pretend things are spooky.
I waved to the twins, and Sean - dressed as a particularly foppish Prince Charming - opened the door for me and made an exaggerated, sweeping bow.
"Thank you kind sir," I said as I swept through the door and out to the waiting throng of children. Their costumes really took all kinds: Iron Man, vampires, Aquaman, Elsa, Luke Skywalker, Revolutionary War patriots, you name it. Sean went over to let the various parents know where we were going, when we'd be back, all that good stuff, while I went over to the assembled kids. I high-fived a little girl who was dressed as Snow White herself and exclaimed "we're twins!"
Of course she didn't agree, confidently telling me that she had the right hairstyle and the right shoes. She was right, of course - these shoes were what I had and my hair was long, not Snow White's trademark bob. But that just comes with the territory and I was more than happy to let her "win" - that's half the fun - and so I nodded agreement with her and some of the other girls joined in voicing their agreement. The boys, of course, just groaned. Their superheroes and warriors were so much cooler than lame Disney princesses, and they knew it!
With the pleasantries out of the way, we gathered up and ambled off down the street toward the first house, me up front and Sean bringing up the rear. The first street was pretty boring - lots of busy, stressed-out 40-somethings with way too many obligations and not enough time or money lived here, and there wasn't much beyond a few pumpkins and a few sheet-metal cats, and maybe one or two real ones, and harried people handing out the usual Wal-Mart bulk candy. Fine, but nothing special. The next street was the one they were really excited for. So on we went, around the corner and past a field.
Over in the field there were a few people standing in a circle - teens, it seemed to a first glance. They were chanting something, and one of them, a tall, gangly boy, was gesticulating animatedly. I grinned amusedly at them as I led the congregation past - ah, to be that innocent still, with all those rumored ghost-summoning rituals that all the urban legends and school rumors talked about. Something just this side of none of those have anything to them, though this crowd seemed unusually earnest. Still, I wasn't on duty tonight. I was just Kate, mother of two and lover of playing pretend, not a Consilium witch, not tonight. I turned back and chivvied some of the distracted kids along, and rounded the corner onto Peach Street.
Peach Street, for a great many reasons, really got into the spirit around here. Might have been the most decorated street in the whole city. Nearly every yard had something: webs, jack-o-lanterns in various configurations, spiders, skeletons, ghosts, witch-lights (mostly flickering LEDs these days instead of real flames, but still), gravestones, it was really something to see. The candy was better too: Reese's pieces, Skittles, even the odd hand-made treats in various spooky shapes. The kids were loving it!
More than usual, actually. The excited chatter was getting louder and more animated, and I turned to see what they'd happened onto. Maybe someone got something particularly cool, I thought. But no, they were looking across the street at a gaggle of plastic skeletons in one of the yards. Quite the dense gaggle, and they were dancing! Now that was a cool thing to see!
Except, how were they dancing? I couldn't see a source for the motion, and they were dancing pretty unevenly, not what I'd expect from a simple set of wires and a motor or something like that. An itchy feeling washed over me, and on a hunch, I reached out with my Prime senses.
Sure enough, there was a faint, barely perceptible glow around the skeletons. Magic was animating them. I briefly marveled at how staggeringly audacious it was to do that, and then wondered more. The mystic resonance smelled very strange to me, with a faint hint of something hot, like scorched rocks. As I watched, the skeletons danced their way out of the yard and into the street, toward us. The children's excited chatter turned fearful. I raised a hand and looked toward Sean, shooting him a a worried glance. He moved in closer, corralling some of the kids who were starting to shimmy away from the group, back toward the field and the intersection with Sycamore Drive.
I kept watching the skeletons, though. They were edging closer, and starting to line up into something like ranks. Yeah, no. If this was some local sorcerer's idea of a joke, it was going just a little too far. The fearful murmuring was escalating from fun-spooked into properly scared. Not OK. I stepped out into the street, placing myself between the throng of kids and the shimmying skeletons, discreetly swept a hand from left to right in a slicing motion and muttered "evanesco!", pushing a whisper of will behind it, being careful not to use so much that it manifested any kind of witch-light.
The skeletons - dancing plastic skeletons, of all things - dropped in a heap, their arcane strings cut. For a moment, I thought that was it - a stupid arcane prank. I turned to the kids and laughed. "That was a good trick!" I said, trying to downplay it. But then the screams started. High shrieks of genuine mortal terror, coming from back up the street. From the field.
From the circle of teens in the field.
"Ei perkele," I cursed, half under my breath. What in the hell of being eaten alive by steel centipedes was happening here?
"Sean!" I called to him. "Take the kids down to Ash and back up to the house. I'm going to go make sure everyone's alright and make sure it's nothing serious. Call me if there's trouble!"
I turned and made off for the field, as fast as I could walk in these accursed heels. Snow White. Why'd I have to pick frelling Snow White anyway? Why couldn't I have picked someone who wore nice sensible boots? Of course. What was even going on?
I mulled possibilities as I strode. Did they call up a ghost with just enough power to put on a bit of a lightshow? No, had to be more than that, at least if their circle was anything like correct. A minor spirit? Maybe something darker, a manes or lemure maybe? Oh, that'd be messy - a lot more than a couple of dilettante hedge wizards could put down easily. I lengthened my stride, cursing the high heels all the while, and crossed the intersection into the field.
There was a circle of candles - candles in high dry grass, talk about stupid - surrounding something, a dark indistinct shape. Vaguely humanoid but fuzzy, almost like you were looking at it through smeared glasses. I gathered up my will as I went and worked my fingers in a series of banishing mudras, continuing to take stock of the situation as I went. The kids had backed away from the circle and were cowering behind the lanky boy, who seemed to be holding his nerve remarkably well. The boy scribed a quick circle around himself and the others with a stick and then made a motion with his left hand. There was the sound of something hard snapping, and with barely perceptible whiff of ozone, a warding circle sprang up around the teens.
That raised my eyebrows. Sure, that was a pretty simple piece of hedge magic - I'd taught both Angie and Gwen how to do it a few years ago, just in case - but I didn't know this boy. I'd never taught him, but he knew that spell well enough. It was a good that he did, too - the thing in the middle of the circle of candles stepped out of the ring of flames as if there'd been nothing there holding it. Uh-oh. Either they'd never had a good enough summoning circle in the first place, or else this thing was strong enough to just ignore it. Neither was good.
"Yeah, no," I thought. A thing from the Shadow, strong enough to step through a summoning circle, however inept, heading toward a bunch of kids who thought they were out for harmless fun? Nope. I brought a hand up, finished the mudra and called out "diabolo exime!".
The thing stopped dead in its tracks as the weave of the banishing charm enfolded it, and began to collapse on itself. And then, just as suddenly, it wriggled free and continued toward the kids. It closed in, stopped briefly by the ward, and then began to chew at it. I could feel the magic eroding, and I was still fifteen feet away.
I kicked aside those accursed pumps and broke into a run. As I went I drew up a bit more power, then stepped inside their warding circle, between the thing and the gangly boy, pulled the remaining threads of his flagging ward into me, then pushed out my will and cried out "ESPIRITUM EXPULSO! AEGIS! as I released the energy of my own ward, using the tattered remnants of the boy's ward as a foundation.
The group of teens huddled behind the boy looked up at me, screams replaced with stunned silence now. The boy looked away from the thing to regard me, then glanced up to meet my eyes. He was a bit shorter than me, a fact that seemed to catch him somewhat off-guard. He blinked, and then his look of bemusement was replaced with relief. "Who?" he started to ask, but then a weird, quavering voice cut us off.
"Witchling!" the thing howled. "You couldn't send me away, why do you persist? These mortals called me forth, and I shall have my price!"
It drew in a breath and began chewing at my ward. Through my senses I could see it was having much more difficulty finding enough purchase for its fangs than it did with the boy's ward. I turned my gaze back to the boy, drew myself up as much as I could and glared down at him. "Price?" I asked him, icily, thinking for a moment that he might have meant to feed his "friends" to the thing.
"I... I don't know! I didn't expect it to work at all!" he stammered.
"The ward, then?" I continued, still glaring daggers at him.
"First th... thing I learned! Just a precaution! Oh God I thought this one was... was..." he blubbered, almost crying.
"Thought it was what?" I pressed, a little more gently now.
"Well I knew it wasn't a hoax, but I thought it'd... it'd... call up a little ghost or something," he said. "You know, something that'd... that'd... oh no I just wanted to show off, I didn't mean anything! What is that thing? Is it Satan?"
I glanced back at the thing, still chewing at my ward. It still hadn't made any real progress, I noted. And it had only barely slipped out of my quick-and-dirty banishment charm. What was it anyway? This wasn't any mere manes or lemure, that's for sure - lemures were uniquely sensitive to summoning circles, and there was almost no way a manes could have wormed out of that banishment, but it definitely did have the whiff of the more sinister parts of the Shadow about it. The smell of Downbelow, of the Inferno. I returned my gaze to the quaking boy.
"Satan?" I shot back. "If that were Satan, or even one of his bigger minions, neither of us would be standing here right now. That's some kind of minor devil. Still more than a novice like you has any business messing with."
I could feel the palpable waves of anger radiating off the thing as I spoke. It didn't like that it hadn't managed to intimidate me with its 'witchling' quip. I knew what price it wanted, too, if it was an infernal. Infernals sometimes trade in powerful souls, but least infernals like this one don't - they want to tear little bits of a person's soul out while they still live and consume them to slake their appetites.
You might never have seen your soul, but you'd feel it if some nasty from Downbelow started tearing pieces off of it. It's like emotional trauma, except without the kind of concrete anchors in events that make it possible to confront and help to heal. Most people don't do well. A bleeding soul can leave you depressed, shocked, too stricken to function, flagging until the pain becomes too much. Even for those who can endure, it's arduous and scarring, and there are precious few who genuinely know how to help with those kinds of wounds. It was the kind of pain I wouldn't wish on a hated enemy. The kind of pain and trauma that could drive a man to suicide. And this damned thing wanted to do that to children?
No
Goddamned
Way
Not in my town. Not on my watch. Not tonight. Not on Halloween. Halloween isn't about being ravaged by horrors - it's about letting in enough of that fear to learn to deal with it, and about healing your spirit in the process. Not about letting it be eaten by devils.
The waves of fury emanating from it were growing stronger. The candles of the summoning circle began to fall like dominoes, igniting the grass all around as they did. Flames began to spread outward, and I could feel diabolic energy reaching out to gather up the flames. The devil turned to face down Peach Street. Toward Sean. Toward the throng of children who had been left in my care.
I grinned wickedly and looked down at the boy. "You feel that? Rage? Anger? How it wants to hurt and it doesn't care who? Yeah. Remember it. That's the feeling of Downbelow." Then I turned to regard the devil, my smirk turning to a glare of freezing contempt. "You dare?"
It didn't get the clue. Typical damned infernal. Hungry, angry, never anything but primality with them. I gathered up will and let it extend up to the clouds, reaching my hand up toward them as if to pull the clouds down from the sky, then I brought my hand savagely down in a stroke and called out "Ikazuchi!".
A stroke of lightning smote down from the clouds, directly into the infernal. I closed my eyes against the blinding light as the bolt crashed down and the deafening rumble of thunder rolled over us like a physical object. The actual energy didn't conduct through the earth as usual - it just poured into the infernal, overloading its corpus and blowing it apart into a welter of ectoplasm. As the wave of overwhelming sound passed, the weird smell of the infernal faded with it. I dismissed the ward with a whisper of will and quenched the flames with a further effort and a quick series of gestures.
"Holy shit," I heard one of the kids mutter, followed by a susurrus of intermingled voices.
"What you just saw," I said. "Was magic. Yes, the real thing. You've just gotten a look behind the curtain. Now stand up and let me take a look at you all."
I opened my Spirit senses. I hated doing that, especially on nights like this, when the Shroud is so thin - ghosts are a sorry lot for the most part, but some of them carry emotional resonance that's just heart-rending. It literally hurts to look at them, like you just lost a friend. But I did it anyway - I needed to know if that infernal had managed to tear out any soul pieces. But fortunately, none of those crushingly sad ghosts were in view. Even more fortunately, the boy had gotten the ward up before the infernal had gotten to anyone. "Thank the heavens", I thought as I closed down my Spirit senses. Next I looked them over mundanely. Nobody seemed hurt. A few scrapes from diving into the grass, a few bruises as they piled into each other, probably some peed pants, but nothing serious.
"What's your name, kid?" I asked the tall boy.
"Joe," he replied. "Joe Whitcomb. I was just fuckin' around, I swear, I had no..."
"Good enough, Joe," I interrupted. "Your friends here? Get yourselves home before anything else goes sideways. Tell your parents to call Kate O'Reilly if they have any questions. But Joe? You stay. We've gotta talk."
Joe's friends scattered like so many spooked mice. Joe looked up at me and gulped. "I fucked up, didn't I?" he asked.
"Yes you did," I replied. "But I believe you that it wasn't malicious. Where'd you find that rite, anyway?"
"A book at the school library," he said. "I know, sounds stupid, but seriously. The middle school library didn't have anything like that, but now that I'm in high school? I guess they keep things around."
"Keep summoning rites for infernals around?" I retorted, incredulous. "Yeah, I don't think so. Someone left that to be found. Tell you what, Joe. You've got potential. That was a pretty good ward."
"It was dogwater," he shot back. "Didn't help worth crap."
"Better than you think," I said. "If you hadn't been thinking on your feet like that, you'd all be crying in a heap while the field burned around you right now, and maybe if you were very lucky they'd find you half-dead in the morning. You just saved yourself a lot of pain, and maybe your life. Maybe your friends' lives. Like I said, not half bad for a novice."
He practically beamed, but I cut him off.
"But you've still got a lot to learn, and if someone left that book of rites where you can find it, you haven't seen the last of trouble," I said.
"So what? You're gonna put me in... Wizard jail? Azkaban? So I don't stir up more trouble? Or you're gonna kill me, is that it?" he said, half defiant, half terrified.
I broke into a grin. "Nah, nothing like that. I mean training. You need to learn how magic works."
His face fell. "More school?" he asked exasperatedly.
"Not exactly. Private lessons, more like. I can teach you, keep you out of trouble," I said.
"Private, eh?" he said, backing off enough to look me over. "With Snow White? I've... I've heard worse ideas."
"Don't go getting any silly ideas, I'm more'n twice your age and married besides, and that's even if you weren't a kid," I shot back, throwing metaphorical cold water on his budding silly idea. "But I will teach you, and if your folks don't like it, I'll iron it out. Here, lemme text you my contact, ping me on Saturday."
I pulled out my phone, turning aside as I did so he wouldn't get any more bloody silly ideas from where I was keeping it, and waited for him to get his so I could send over my info.
"Weird way to meet," he stammered afterward.
"A bit like," I said. "But it could have been a lot worse. Look, I've got some kids to take care of, you've got a home to get back to. Don't forget!"
I dusted myself off. Dammit, gunk and dirt all over my custom-made Snow White costume. And my shoes had been caught in the fire. For the hells! I made my way back to the house, hoping Sean had gotten the kids back there safely.
He had, fortunately, and nothing else spooky had happened along the way. Good, we didn't need any more spook tonight. Sean and I made a bunch of calls and got the kids hurried off back to their parents with a hell of a story to tell, even if they hadn't seen the real action. I wondered how many would believe it. The world had gotten very strange lately after all - everyone had a weird story, or knew someone who did. I'd let the Consilium know in the morning, but for now it was just one more weird story among many.