“Good. Let’s go clean up.”
“Okay, I get the minotaurs, but what about the pigs?” Ms. Jynx asked.
“Clean up, Jynx,” Mr. Keelan said. “You’ve met the Consort before. Focus on what’s important.”
IT TOOK an hour to get all the corpses and body parts into a pile. It took longer for them to burn in the bonfire. I even had to feed some of my magic into it to get it hot enough. Once it got going the smell and the smoke were awful.
When we were done, Mr. Keelan took my wereboar’s head and placed it on the ground in front of the fire. Right next to the head of the largest minotaur.
“Well, that’s the last of them.” Then he stood back and just looked at them for a while. “Great big bastards, weren’t they? I don’t know about the minotaurs, but the two hogs smelled like wereboars to me. Usually, shapeshifters turn back to human after death but not these pigs.”
“They were cursed,” I said.
Mr. Keelan raised his eyebrows at me.
Ms. Jynx ran over to us. “Good news! I figured out the pigs! They are—”
“Cursed,” Mr. Keelan said.
She blinked at him. “How did you know?”
He nodded at me.
“I tasted the magic when I bit off his ear,” I explained. “It was witch magic. Very strong.”
“Are you going to be okay?” Mr. Keelan asked. “Do we need to purify you somehow?”
My grandmother had been a witch and Mom was one too, when she needed it. I knew how to protect myself, but it didn’t matter, because the curse was very specific. “I’ll be fine.”
“Well, anyway,” Ms. Jynx said. “I had a chat with that fire mage. She took an arrow in the knee, and she doesn’t deal with pain well, so she was very cooperative. Apparently, the two werehogs are local boys, Buck and Grady. They are—were—first-grade assholes. They did home invasions, collected gambling debts, assaulted people, your low-level muscle shit. Somehow, they got the bright idea to break into a house of a powerful local witch. They went in human and came out as that. Apparently, she told them that since they lived their lives like pigs, she would make their outside match their inside. So yeah. They didn’t turn back because they couldn’t. They are permanently stuck like that.”
They were. It was over now.
“Good work,” Mr. Keelan told Ms. Jynx.
She grinned at him and walked away.
Mr. Keelan studied the heads some more. “Looks like you’ve got the best trophy of the night.”
“No, sir. The one my dad killed is bigger than mine.”
Mr. Keelan scoffed. “Nonsense, lad. You’re young yet, you lack a proper sense of proportion. That porcine shithead was twice your size. How did it feel?”
“At first I was scared,” I admitted.
“Anyone would be. Wereboars are as tough as they are stupid. Even the bears don’t like fighting them. After you were afraid, what then?”
“I was mad.”
“Why?”
“They broke into our home. They wanted to hurt Ms. Jynx. And this one called me ‘little man.’”
“His mistake. Look at him, he’s not bigger than you now, is he?”
“No, sir. He’s just dead.”
“How did it feel to tear that ugly head off his hairy shoulders?”
I’d been exhausted and beat up but honestly, it felt…
“It was amazing,” I told him.
“Aye, it was that. But your father’s got the right of it. It’s a shame your mother will never know how brave you were, but this is shapeshifter business.” Mr. Keelan sighed, “Best not to trouble your mother with the details.” He paused. “Still, even if you and your father never speak of it again, it doesn’t matter. Do you know why?”
“No.”
“Because I saw it. We all did. My people. The humans. All of us.”
“So?” Why did that matter? I was tired and hungry and wished he’d just get to the point.
He seemed very serious now, like it was important that I understood what he was trying to tell me. It was a little like speaking to Grandfather.
“So, that’s how legends begin, lad. People who were here will tell the story to them that wasn’t. And those people will spread the tale.”
“Of how you and Dad killed three minotaurs? Nobody will believe it. It’s too crazy.”
Mr. Keelan shook his head. “No, lad. The story of how the Beast Lord’s son, when he was just a small boy, beheaded a magical wereboar with his bare hands. That’s the important bit. That’s the part people will remember.”
We were alone, but his voice was barely above a whisper.
I frowned. “He’s not the Beast Lord. Not anymore.”
Mr. Keelan rubbed his hands together and smiled again. “Is he not? My mistake. No matter. What if we go inside and find something to eat. I don’t know about you, but I’m fucking starving.”
7
Kate
T he Emerald Wave was an enormous ship. The sheer size of it was insane. It had to be about 1,000 feet long, and from my spot on Siren Call Road, I could see nine decks still rising above water. The windows of the third and fourth deck glowed with pale feylantern light from within. The massive cruise ship had run aground about twelve hundred feet offshore. A long rickety-looking pier connected her to the beach, and the whole thing looked absurd, like a whale, caught on a tiny fishing line, being pulled out of the ocean against her will.
According to Thomas, the Emerald Wave had gone off course during a particularly nasty storm decades ago and become lodged in a sand bank. The Coast Guard had tried to pry it lose with tugboats and gotten nowhere. In addition, something had attacked the ship during the magic wave that had killed all its instruments, and two of its compartments had filled with water, flooding the engine room.
Refloating the ship was a complicated process involving draining the fuel tanks while simultaneously pumping in salt water to keep it upright, and the cost of getting the Emerald Wave up and running again would have been astronomical, so the cruise line had left it where it was. It had been looted, stripped, and finally abandoned, and now it supposedly housed a cult.
“Look at that evil lair, Cuddles. No ziggurats, no ritualistic poles with skulls on them, no giant faces carved anywhere or big metal fire braziers. These modern evil god followers just don’t care to put in the work.”
Cuddles remained unimpressed. But then again, a big derelict ship was scary enough. I certainly didn’t want to go in there.
I nudged Cuddles, and she reluctantly walked to the pier.
Aaron didn’t seem to be doing any of the usual things people connected to gods did. But Onyx was well trained and educated. He would’ve recognized divinity, so there was some sort of deity attached to all this. How and in what capacity remained to be seen.
Water gods and their followers were never fun. Gods in general weren’t fun. They were fed by faith and shaped by the beliefs of their followers. If a god was poorly known or too obscure, they couldn’t scrape together enough power to manifest. The leading theory said that they didn’t even exist until their followers’ belief achieved a certain critical mass. One of the articles I’d read recently had somehow brought quantum physics into it, which went right over my head.