Clea instinctively pushed Holly down, covering the girl’s form with her own. The sound of gunfire was something she did not miss from her time in New York; it was unpredictable, jarring, and always accompanied by a brief thrill of fear. She hated it.
Holly’s body was stiff and unyielding beneath Clea’s, not because she was resisting, but because the temperature had plummeted, and she was that cold. Like a corpse, Clea thought, before shoving that image violently away. She didn’t know much about how Earth temperature was measured, but she did know below zero was generally not good. She had a feeling they were long past that.
She could feel her brain starting to shut down, her own body no longer responding to its commands, her thoughts becoming sluggish and confused. She had one chance to save them. If she didn’t get this spell out and get it right, she wouldn’t get another, and they really might all die.
Then, with every ounce of strength that hadn’t yet frozen solid, she forced her icy lips open and called out the only spell she could think of, trying to tweak it to apply to these dire circumstances. She’d seldom attempted twisting the intent of a spell to cover a situation it was not truly meant for. She didn’t know if it would work.
But she knew what would happen if it didn’t.
“For us under assail, with cold become harm,
Rise Shield of the Seraphim, to protect and to warm!”
Instantly, a glowing dome of yellow appeared over the women, arcane glyphs pulsating across its surface. The wind still blew, and the snow still fell, but the deadly seeping cold began to abate and Clea could hear whatever ammunition was being fired at them pinging off the shield’s mystic surface.
Shaking with relief and adrenaline, she pushed herself up into a kneeling position, and Holly rolled out from under her, flopping onto her back.
“You’re going to have to teach me that one,” she said weakly, and Clea laughed painfully.
“I only just learned it myself.”
But Margali seemed to be in better shape than either of them, or else the spell had allowed her to recover her wits faster, for she responded almost immediately by climbing to her feet, planting her staff, and doing the most Margali thing possible.
She attacked.
White hot bolts of bedevilment shot from the stone of her staff, arcing out through Clea’s shield like mystic missiles and alighting upon any weapon that had discharged in their general direction.
“Margali, no! Those are soldiers! Peop–!” Clea shouted, but to no avail. Though she was sure Margali heard her, her words had no effect. Instead, a series of explosions, small and large, lit up the falling snow in an undulating line, like an earthbound display of the aurora borealis. But seldom had the famed northern lights been so deadly.
Much to Clea’s relief, however, Agatha had landed them in a portion of the artillery range where the soldiers were, in fact, not people. The weapons that had fired at them were unmanned, probably automatically triggered by their mere presence once Holly’s shield dropped. Though how they could tell the three women from the piles of drifting snow, Clea wasn’t sure. If the weapons system relied on pressure plates, wouldn’t the weight of the snow have activated them long before now? Stephen had once called this place the Frozen North. It had to snow like this on a fairly regular basis for the land to have gained such a moniker. And Agatha’s exaggerations notwithstanding, Clea very much doubted this was the “storm of the century”. No, it didn’t make sense for weight to be the trigger, or the weapons would be firing constantly.
But if weight didn’t set off the weapons, what would?
Probably anything that wasn’t frozen. Heat signatures. Which meant…
Too late. Heat was rolling off Margali’s staff in shimmering waves as she fired bolt after angry bolt, intent on destroying whomever or whatever had had the temerity to attack her. That heat was far greater than the meager warmth generated by three women. Any artillery batteries that had not yet been triggered would perceive it as an incoming army.
Holly, who was sitting up now herself, had figured it out too. The color of her face was indistinguishable from the snow swirling around it.
“Oh, gods, she’s going to get us all killed, isn’t she?”
Gunfire erupted around them from all sides, so much coming so quickly that the dome created by Clea’s shield seemed to be ringed with fire. Even if she had been at full strength and not half-frozen when she had cast it, her spell might have weakened under such a barrage. And Clea had been nowhere near full strength.
Where bullets had been pinging off its surface before, now they were lodging in the shield. To Clea’s dismay, some of the larger ones were slowly forcing their way through, technology versus magic.
It wasn’t long before the battle turned in favor of technology.
Clea and Holly yelled at Margali to stop, but the green-skinned sorceress was lost in her fury. It was only when a smaller caliber bullet grazed her arm, leaving a thin red trail, that she seemed to comprehend what was happening. Her staff went dark so abruptly that it was as if all the lights in the world had shut off simultaneously, and Clea was momentarily blind. When she blinked the scene back into focus, her shield had disintegrated. She and Holly threw themselves back to the ground as bullets whizzed over them.
The barrage continued for several more eternally long moments before the firing guns registered that the large heat source had been extinguished. Their mission accomplished, the dutiful artillery returned to standby mode.
When she deemed it safe again, Clea raised her head, then climbed to her feet, helping Holly in turn climb to hers. Margali stood where she had before, several holes torn through the skirts of her dress and the tip of one of her golden ram’s horns missing, but otherwise unharmed.
“We need to find someplace safer where we can regroup and figure out what to do next,” Clea said. Holly nodded in vigorous agreement.
“I concur,” Margali replied grimly. “But I already know what we need to do next. We need to track down and kill a certain ghost.”
It was then that Clea realized that the spirit of Agatha Harkness was nowhere to be seen.
Had the old witch brought them all this way, only to abandon them in a fight where she could not be harmed? Was she truly such a rank coward? Clea had a hard time believing it, but Agatha, like Margali, kept her own counsel, and her idea of the greater good did not always match everyone else’s.
“We’re currently more likely to be killed than kill someone else,” Holly piped up suddenly, “so I’d suggest we focus on the ‘regroup’ part of Clea’s plan.” She pointed into the storm. “When Margali’s own personal war was lighting this place up like the Fourth of July, and Clea and I were playing duck and cover, I saw a building illuminated over that way. I can’t imagine they’d have an inhabitable structure out here that didn’t have at least a space heater – one that won’t trigger a firing squad. Maybe other supplies, as well. I say we head for it.”
“That sounds like an eminently practical idea,” Clea said, and Margali didn’t argue, so they began walking in the direction Holly had indicated. The going was slow, their progress hampered by seeping exhaustion, the triumphant return of grave-numbing cold that bit even through conjured attire, and a stiff headwind. Still, the dark shape of the building Holly had spotted finally came into view.
The young witch had taken the lead once they got that far, eager to show them to her prize, when she took a step forward, then suddenly shifted oddly. Almost as though the ground she had expected to be solid beneath her foot… wasn’t.
“Don’t move!” an unfamiliar woman’s voice shouted from the direction of the building. “Not unless you want to learn the definition of ‘unexploded ordnance’ up close and personal.”
Holly obeyed instantly, which Clea decided could either be a testament to her intelligence or her gullibility. Clea and Margali also froze, not knowing if their next steps might trigger other “unexploded ordnance” in the area, or even what that meant.
A shape appeared out of the calming storm, resolving itself into the form of a scowling woman with deeply tanned skin and long black braids that swung loose from beneath her fur-trimmed parka hood. Black gloves, jeans, and high, laced boots sporting the same fur trim completed the picture.
“It’s a good thing Agatha came to fetch me from camp when she did. Though I’d have come soon enough, regardless. You didn’t really think you could stage the equivalent of a magical OK Corral on my peoples’ land and not get my attention, did you?”
“Agatha’s with you?” Holly asked. There was no disguising the relief in her voice.
“I am, child,” Agatha replied, floating into view behind the Tsuut’ina woman. Clea couldn’t be sure, but she seemed more translucent than usual, almost as if she were starting to fade. That didn’t bode well. “Now, be still and do exactly as Elizabeth says.”
Holly became a veritable statue, with only regular white breaths pluming out from her nose and mouth and then quickly dissipating in the cold night air to show she was even still alive.
Clea was impressed by the girl’s discipline until she noticed how wide and frightened her eyes were. She exchanged a glance with Margali, who seemed to have come to the same realization as Clea: Holly wasn’t doing this of her own accord.
Turning her attention back to Agatha and the Tsuut’ina woman – Elizabeth – she saw that the latter wore a circlet on her brow that shone almost as brightly as her now-glowing eyes. She had her arms out in front of her, one gloved palm pointing skyward and the other facing the ground. With a look of concentration on her face, she slowly raised the upward-facing hand higher while keeping the other hand firmly in place. Holly rose in the air, like some priceless artifact being moved from its museum pedestal by invisible ropes and the world’s slowest, most careful crane.
Finally, though, Holly was deposited in the snow next to Clea and Margali. Clea caught her as Elizabeth released whatever immobilization spell she had used, and Holly stumbled forward, her original momentum still governing her movement, even though she was no longer walking, and hadn’t been for many minutes.
Then Elizabeth began raising her other hand, just as deliberately as she had raised the first. The other four women, three living and one dead, watched as a metal object was teased slowly from the ground, clumps of frozen dirt and snow falling off it as it rose to a spot about six feet in the air. There it rotated slowly, the only thing moving now that the snow and wind had finally stopped. Clea realized that Elizabeth wanted them to get a good look at it.
The object appeared to be an oversized bullet, with a set of fins circling the primer end. And that’s when Clea understood exactly what the Tsuut’ina woman had meant by “ordnance”.
What Holly had stepped on was a bomb. One that had sat dormant until the young witch’s foot had landed in just the right place, with just the right weight, to activate it. Clea chose not to dwell on just how close a call that had been.
“The rest of you can relax,” Elizabeth said. “That was the only one. Here, anyway.”
Clea didn’t find her words particularly comforting, though she was glad to be able to move again without being worried about being reduced to flesh fragments, or burned to death, or whatever it was this particular weapon of mankind’s wars did. It was probably better not to speculate.
“This is the legacy that the Canadian government has left my people. First they took our land from us, then they desecrated it, and now they ‘give’ it back – as if you can give away something that you do not and have never possessed. As if anyone can own the land, or the water, or the air.
“This land was supposed to be returned to us ‘clean’. Cleared of all the remnants of their occupation, even in this small part we still allow them to use. And this is what they give us. Ground littered with unexploded ordnance just waiting for some innocent soul to stumble across…”
As Elizabeth had spoken, the bomb had been rising in the air, still slowly spinning as if on display. When it was little more than a black dot against the steel-colored sky, it stopped. But Elizabeth didn’t.
“…and be blown to Creator.”
At those words, she released her hold on the bomb and it exploded, a flash of bright gold and copper-colored light, then a corona of white smoke, and seconds later a loud “crack” sound followed almost immediately by a concussive wave that rocked the women where they stood.
The blast was large enough that it would have killed Holly instantly and left a maimed Clea and Margali to bleed out in the snow. Elizabeth had saved all their lives.
As if reading Clea’s mind, Elizabeth spoke. Clea noted that her coronet was no longer glowing, and neither were her eyes.
“So, now that I’ve saved your sorry behinds, does someone who is not Agatha want to tell me why you’re here trespassing on a military training facility dressed like you want to die of hypothermia? The CliffsNotes version, please.”
“I… don’t know what that means, but we need your help,” Clea said.
Elizabeth snorted.
“Tell me something I don’t know, Captain Obvious.”
Surprisingly, it was Holly who spoke up.
“OK. I’m Holly, this is Clea and the demonic-looking one over there is Margali.”
“CliffsNotes,” Elizabeth repeated.
“Fine,” Holly replied. “Umar – Big Bad of the Dark Dimension, megalomaniac, etc. – got a hold of the Power Cosmic in female form and plans to use it to help her conquer all the Splinter Realms. We’re trying to stop her, but she’s barred entry to those dimensions. So, we need to use the back door, and you’re apparently the only one who has a key.”
The scowl that had never left Elizabeth’s face deepened.
“Let’s get inside the guard shack, and you can start from the beginning. I’m still going to say ‘no’, but at least then it will be an informed decision.” She turned and began walking toward the building they’d been trying to reach before Holly’s close encounter with death.
“Oh,” Holly piped up as they followed Elizabeth to the shack. “I left out the juiciest part.”
“And what’s that?” Elizabeth asked without looking over her shoulder.
“Clea is Umar’s daughter.”