There was… ice on her fingertips.
Raw prana washed over her and made the Magus’s hair stand on end.
A man’s hands caressed her in ways Dolores had only ever imagined.
Swallowing, she firmed up her grip on the horn. It wasn’t too large, perhaps an ox’s horn or an auroch’s, with a few flecks of gold around the base. Enough it was clear this was an ornament attached to a helmet at some point, perhaps ceremonial, perhaps simply because it looked cool. What mattered was that there was enough weight to this hunk of bone to crush a man.
Thankfully, she was a Shaman.
It still made her feel weird and she didn’t appreciate the handsy ghost one bit.
Suibhne even hissed at whomever or whatever it was, slashing at the air.
“Thanks.”
Letting out a small yowl of displeasure, the sidhe made her thoughts clear through a dismissive wave of her tail.
“Damn. I wasn’t even sure if what they were telling me was real. To be honest, I’m not sure if this is even a good idea.” Marcus sighed, locking a particularly… fleshy looking box. “The truth is, what the Department is doing now, well, I have to admit that this is probably us taking advantage of an opportunity to pull off something that would get us all slapped with a sealing designation any other day of the week.”
Narrowing her eyes, the Lady of the Clocktower felt her eyebrow twitch.
“Are we in the process of doing something suicidally stupid?”
Her foot began tapping before the young woman could stop it, the annoyance she felt only heightened by the earlier molestation. The simple truth was, her body just wasn’t ready for something like that and it made her skin crawl.
Suffice to say, it hadn’t made her day any better.
“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s suicidally stupid….”
Bringing her finger up, the young Magus couldn’t help but feel a spike of pure frustration.
“So what you’re saying is that this is a stupid idea! And in a crisis like this, why aren’t we taking action? What’s the point in some cocamamy plan that gets us sent to the back lines while our comrades bleed and die! Why, if we weren’t in such a dangerous situation I would-”
Biting her tongue, the young woman realized what she was about to say.
Grinding her teeth down until she felt blood, the Magus reasserted herself.
Because there was no shock.
No pain.
And no pain from her arm.
There was no pain from her arm, no exhaustion burning inside her very soul, and neither fear nor hesitation in even the darkest, most cowardly corner of her heart.
“The horn is affecting me.”
It would be a lie to say that saying the words out loud made it any easier to process the truth. After all, right now she wanted nothing more than to tear a strip out of Marcus’s hide for being a coward and then slaughter a hundred of those fire demons… zombie… child… things.
She looked down at the box.
This was a relic.
Something that shouldn’t have any presence unless it was drawn out by a ritual of spell. And just being near it was… leaking through her.
What the hell was that horn?
“Badly. Marcus, am I in danger?”
“Truthfully?” Her glare returned full force at his question. “Fair enough. Uh, well, Valentine, you know, the American I sometimes drink with?”
“The one you sometimes get drunk with and then proceed to bully the interns from the other departments for being nerds and end up getting into a blood feud with a few hundred nobodies, none of whom have the morals and self control needed to become a Shaman, but all of whom think themselves the next coming of the Buddha?”
Visibly flinching, the older, taller male suddenly seemed to shrink slightly.
“Well, you see, he mentioned that it would be a fun surprise. For me. And, well, I didn’t think-”
“Marcus.” She sighed. “I got felt up by a ghost.”
Okay, so felt up was a bit of a misnomer for what happened. A spectral entity had just attempted to reach into the pulsing heart of her life force… through her chest. Which in ghost terms was probably being felt up.
That didn’t make her feel one bit happy.
And, of course, that was when the spirit decided to make itself known again, a barely visible shape of vapor leaking out of the box and whatever it was inside it… by copping a translucent feel of her chest.
Again.
Dolores shivered feeling her very self recoil in horror at the unwanted intrusion of… whatever this was. Whatever Marcus was planning to summon should not be trying to manifest without a freaking ritual.
She let out a gasping breath as a cold hand reached through her ribcage and gripped her heart in an icy vice.
Which in turn prompted the exhausted, previously mutilated Suibhne to violently launch herself at roughly where its face would have been, fur and claws flying, only to catch a hold of nothing.
This almost caused an incident, when the now clearly furious sidhe began to swell in size, body distorting under the force of violent rage she felt at some soon to be re dead spirit daring to force his attentions on her mistress. Now, considering they were currently in the middle of one of the Department of Shamanism’s Reliquaries, that was a bad thing.
Because all that emotion, all that power combined with the Mystery pouring off of the horny horn. And now every single container in the room began shaking.
Thankfully, their foes were completely without self preservation and so a large, six armed homunculus, roughly shaped like the goddess Kali, forced its way through a door at the far end of the room.
Poison dripped from wicked slashing talons, acid dripped from long spines, and electricity bounced along webs of dripping demonic slime. All as a mouth split open, revealing a string of heads, shrunken and where a human’s uvula would be, had been anchored to the back of a massive, frog like mouth.
Even worse was how the body’s vaguely feminine shape undulated, a dozen cracking, twisting tentacles began to lash out - drinking in the sheer quantity of Magic feeling in such a small space.
Any sane Magus would have run, screaming, from the area.
Any Shaman would have politely asked their familiars to aid them in preventing whatever was about to happen from spilling out of the Reliquary.
Any utterly batshit insane, incompotent, novice Magus would have known that attempting to employ undirected mystic violence in such a charged atmosphere would have had dire, dire consequences.
None of this mattered to the homunculus, no matter how much the two whiter-than-the-bone-horn Magi might have wished it did.
So when the twisting, spitting, screeching ball of fur and hate and fuck you launched itself at the only target it could find, the now mountain lion sized sidhe began to rapidly shred and mutilate the hostile before it with all the fury of a warden unable to protect their charge. One could even go so far as to mention that it’s utterly stupid to piss off an already angry spirit.
But that might be a bit redundant, seeing as spraying arcs of strange fluids, the wails of souls being torn to shreds, and messy chunks of faux spell flesh were all that was left underneath Suibhne.
Underneath her, splattered on the walls, and liberally applied to the ceiling too.
Dolores tried to reach out to her partner, only to gasp, that same icy coldness returning as the well of unadulterated power coming from Suibhne cut off. Falling to the ground, her weakness returned, the Magus even cried out when her wounded arm was jostled as Marcus caught her, stopping her from falling into a row of shelves and possibly getting them all worse than killed.
“Easy there cousin.” He adjusted his grip, holding the younger shaman’s body protectively against his own.
“Sui-Suibhne… she is?”
Marcus grimaced.
“Raging. She’s a guardian spirit after all.”
Dolores wracked her brain for answers, hazy as her mind felt. It was like someone had stuffed her head full of cotton. Every thought was slow and muddled. But she could clearly feel the thread tying her to the Cait Sidhe. Her family’s sworn protector and guardian. Something whose protective anger was rooted in hundreds of years of tradition.
Even if they had just bonded for a day, Suibhne had been connected to her family for generations.
“I… have to calm her down.”
Her cousin shook his head.
“Negative. You are lucky to be alive, a nascent bond shouldn’t be that strong. Unless something tried to supplant it.”
Dolores blinked owlishly, the memory of death’s cold hand around her chest flickering through her mind’s eye.
Had the relic tried to… connect to her?
No way.
Impossible.
It was the dead remains of something.
She was a Shaman, she was trained to be an existence resistant to unwilling possession.
Unless… this was….
“Marcus-” she breathed out in pain. “What is this?”
Even now, she felt box weight, its presence looming over them. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t a ghost, it wasn’t even a remnant of something resembling a spirit. It was a shade, a shadow, the memory of something preserved through hundreds… no… thousands of years. And it had just tried to possess her.
Something so weakened.
So pitifully small in comparison to the whole.
And it reached straight into her heart.
“I have no idea. They didn’t tell me. Only that it was a catalyst for something old.”
Swallowing, the young man shook his head.
“The implication was that it would be a divine spirit.”
Thud.
Dolores’ clenched fist, feeble and weakened as it was, smacked her cousin on top of the head with all the exasperation and frustration her frail body could muster. She probably had hurt herself more than she did his thick skull. But it was the sentiment that counted.
“You… you… idiot! That’s too much! Way too much! What are you thinking?!” She’d have jumped away from the fallen horn had her legs not felt like jello. Though every millimeter of her being was yelling at her to get as far away as she could from the relic.
“Listen, I didn’t think it would affect you.” He tried to desperately explain. “I’m sorry, I…”
Dolores wouldn’t have it.
“Marcus. That thing just, whatever it is, whoever it belonged to, just tried to possess me. It’s active, after hundreds or thousands of years. You can’t tell me you thought we could use that to summon something?”
This wasn’t a rowdy shade or the ghostly remains of an animal.
That old piece of dusty bone and metal still retained enough of whoever owned it to try and take over her body.
“Listen.” He tried again. “If we get this to the others, we’ll be able to summon, maybe bind, whatever that scary thing was. And whatever memory is left can’t be strong enough to throw off us four - never mind the fact the whole Department is going to be helping us too.”
Dolores did not like what she was hearing.
“You three, you mean? I can’t walk, Marcus. I can barely talk and Suibhne isn’t responding to me.”
At the moment, that great cat was prowling around between the shelves, hissing at any box that rattled too loudly. This was all made a bit worse from the bits of her kill still clinging to the spirit’s fur.
“Listen, its fine. Master Harfang is probably already back by now. We’ll get him to help and whatever this thing is will fold.”
A familiar summoned using an artifact that predated their families by a couple centuries? Folding to a bunch of teenager shamans and and older shaman?
Not bloody likely.
“And besides, this is what Bram’s poofter of a dad said to do. We need backup, this is the least likely to violently murder us kind of backup, and if someone like that thinks this is an emergency bad enough to need back up, maybe, just maybe, a broken clock is right twice a day.”
Marcus fidgeted.
“Ok.” Dolores sighed. “Let’s get moving. Just… don’t let the horn touch me. If nothing else, I think Suibhne will still shadow me. I am keeping her bound to this plane of existence after all.”
Giving her a bright smile, the giant idiot adjusted his package, picked up the other one with the leave of his jacket to avoid touching the bone, and started moving.
There were a few routes to getting back to the main room, but the best one was….
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