40. What's In a Word: Pete
1830 Words
We burned a whole day on scrying for this. Sure, Willow got us a location. Supposedly, it’s even kind of close to where she could sense Anna Jade is being kept.
Not that we’ve seen any benefit from that. She wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why she couldn’t get us any closer, and we all let her do it, trusting that as the witch of the bunch, we should heed her witchy wisdom about all this magic stuff. But as it turns out, we could have learned more from actually being here. As soon as she ported us in, she figured out the problem.
“It’s shielded,” she declares, poking at some invisible force in the air that only she and maybe even Phoebe can sense. “This is what I couldn’t figure out, and now I know why.”
I wait as long as my flaring temper will allow before saying anything, doing my best to keep it from being an unproductive explosion of words and feelings.
“Care to share with the class, then, teach?” I ask, or I guess you could say taunt demandingly. But I’m not feeling particularly apologetic about my tone presently.
“Something is off about this magic. It wouldn’t register while I was scrying, and now, it feels …”
“Dark,” Phoebe supplies the term that her mother can’t seem to produce on her own.
“Yes, but not dark as in dark magic,” Willow clarifies. “Dark as in … I don’t know, corrupted somehow, but not with dark magic.”
“Eramund thinks it’s vampiric,” Bria chimes in over our headsets. “And I haven’t said it out loud yet, but I worry that Grayson might have found something of Raja’s to make it that way.”
Knowing that there will be vamps about but not being able to work with the hunters directly, we’re back to using earpieces to coordinate with each other, just like in the good old days. And with Phoebe back on the team, we shifters don’t have to worry about where to ditch them if we have to shift. Phoebe has a magic trick for that. And I have a trick of my own for letting Bria listen in on moments like this that’s called leaving mine set to broadcast everything that it picks up.
“Why are we just now hearing about this?” I demand of her, just as Willow comments, “That would do it.”
“Step back, lover boy,” Bria chides me. “The better question is why am I just now hearing about the lady with the crystal ball? I don’t know what to tell you until you tell me what we’re even talking about.”
“I haven’t missed her,” Phoebe mutters under her breath.
“Love you too, foxy,” Bria shoots back.
“So what, we can’t even get past here?” Nolan wonders, looking about ready to toss down his pack and walk off his frustration, same as me. “A whole day gone, for that?”
“We can get past,” Willow answers coolly. “I just couldn’t port us in any closer than this, is all.”
“Then I don’t see what we’re still standing here for,” Nolan grumbles, moving as if to take the first step forward.
“You’re a big boy and I’m not in charge, but I would urge you to consider letting me go first,” Willow advises. “This magic is twisted, but it’s still magic. If there are traps about, I’ll sense them long before you do.”
“Me and Pete,” Phoebe suggests. “We have a system. If we run into anything, we’ll call for you, Mom.”
“I’m with them,” Angel declares, nodding to the walls. He has a system of his own, and none of us are small enough to join him. “And since we have two witches, I think we should split up and try to cover more ground at once. Keep in close contact, though.”
“Then I guess that leaves me with the jilted lovers,” Bruno realizes aloud, sighing as he adds, “Great. Sounds fun. Let’s do it.”
“I have two teams on site as well,” Bria adds. “You’re with me, Pete, and Nolan, you keep Shy updated. Every two minutes like clockwork, got it?”
“Got it,” he agrees.
I don’t even have to say anything. Bria knows, and I know she knows.
“Stay alive, folks,” she advises. “And ask yourselves, what would the vampire hunters do? Because if the answer is the same as what you’re about to do, then maybe call us instead, 'kay?”
Sage advice. And we do our best, both with the staying alive and the calling them over to deal with the vampires we come across. We’ve got our scents suppressed as well as we can, and we’re dressed in black to try to blend into the darkness, so it’s not all that tricky to stay out of the way and hold in place whenever we come across a cluster of them, but it is annoying.
It’s slow work, inching along like this. Eventually, despite assuming that Grayson has the area monitored somehow and suspecting that there may even be cameras hidden here and there, Bria decides to just combine her efforts with ours. Neither of our teams are making much headway with us constantly having to call them over to where we are anyway, so they switch course and work the routes we intend to take with about an hour head start, hoping that the way will still be clear for us when we get there.
But I suppose that the more frustrating thing than the slow pace is that despite there being more and more evidence of Grayson’s twisted magic the closer that we get to where Willow suspects Anna Jade might be, there’s still no sign of her. No scent, no evidence of anyone living down here besides hordes upon hordes of feral vampires, nothing. We’ve been checking out every discrepancy that we come across between the official blueprints and what we’re finding in person, and none of them have panned out as more than anything but vampire nests and places where Grayson has anchored his shielding in place.
“The really odd thing is that the spell itself is powerful, and the magic is robust even if corrupted, but the anchors are crude and archaic. No one uses sigils like this anymore,” Willow informs us, lighting up a spot on the floor for us all to see now that we’ve regrouped for a rest and a proper check-in.
It’s a design of some sort, and though I have a vague awareness of the things she’s talking about, I’d never pretend to fully understand any of it, and I don’t catch her implication.
“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” Bruno speaks aloud what we’re probably all thinking.
“It’s just odd is all,” she admits, still seeming troubled by it. “For someone as powerful as he obviously is, it just seems like he would make it more difficult for other casters to defeat his shielding. Sure, it kept me from teleporting here, but now that I’m here, all it takes to get rid of it is this.”
She waves her hand over the spot that is still glowing, speaking the weird caster language until the glow is gone.
“One word. That’s it, and that’s also why we don’t use these anymore,” she explains. “Modern sigils are more like ciphers. You not only have to defeat the power of the sigil and the spell that it holds, but you have to figure out the proper sequence of the words of power that it contains. The more powerful the caster, the more powerful the sigils they can create, and the more words and combinations they can build on to do it. But this guy, powerful though he may be, his sigils are elementary at best.”
“Maybe it’s a trap,” Angel suggests. “It’s meant to seem simple when it’s not. Maybe you’re supposed to deactivate them in a certain order or something.”
“Quite honestly, that’s what I’m worried about,” she admits. “Perhaps he is cleverer than I, and I’m only just now realizing that I should have thought more on it before beginning the process. My original thought was that he seems to have integrated his traps and alarms into his shielding, and so by deactivating it, I can save us a lot of trouble later on, but now I’m not so sure. The sigils have all used the same word of power. Twice was maybe a coincidence, but this is three times now. Nobody does that.”
“Couldn’t you just stop now, Mom?” Phoebe asks worriedly.
“I could, unless it’s the sort of sequence that is a bit like a ticking time bomb, giving you only so long to get to the next and deactivate it to reset the timer,” her mother answers.
“Great,” Nolan mutters.
“Or maybe this is the point,” Bruno offers. “To make it seem so impossibly easy that you overthink it and get paranoid, and then show yourself to the exit because you can’t take the heat.”
“That sounds more like the Grayson I know,” Bria offers her input in my ear. “He enjoys messing with people.”
“Hopefully so,” Willow offers hesitantly. “I suppose let’s try skipping the next one and see what happens, and whether we come across anything else in that area.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Nolan challenges her.
And interestingly, he seems to almost instinctively reach for Phoebe, which wins him one of her charming glares. I don’t even think he knows why.
“Not at all,” Willow admits, laughing nervously. “In fact, it could be a terrible idea.”
“Perfect,” Bria chimes in chipperly. “Let’s do it. Whatever will happen, we already know that he’s left himself out of it, and since Anna Jade is with him, she’ll be fine too. Skip it, witch-lady. You have my permission.”
Not that she’s in charge, but I see her point. If something’s going to explode, we might as well let it be now, and in the process, maybe even learn which of Willow’s theories actually pans out here. I’ll worry about how even a powerful witch like her is left scratching her head when it comes to Grayson later. It can’t be a good sign, but it is what it is. I’ve faced worse odds before and lived.
- Writer
