A Dangerous Legacy

©Nora Quick 2013

Chapter Fourteen

The last day of my lessons felt a little strange. I think for the first time it sank in that I was back in school so to speak. So much had happened in my life that I had been spinning with dizziness, and by lunch it all caught up to me. I had to sit down as it all sank in.

I had gone from a frozen statue to maelstrom of emotions. I laughed aloud at that, making Val glance at me with concern. Damn it, I was a writer, I should have been able to think up a better metaphor than that. Another thought slammed into me.

"Val?"

"Yes?"

"Do I have to disappear from the human world?"

He'd finished his lunch and had been doing sit-ups, but suddenly stopped. "Disappear?"

"How am I to do all this queen business around humans? Will I have to lose my friends? I have a book due to my publisher, long, long over-due. I don't think I'll have time to write."

"That's simple, really. Use your magic. Cast a spell to write the book for you, taking it from your thoughts."

"That's not the point. Writing wasn't just my work, I mean, it's not just my work, but it's my hobby, it's my life. If I don't write I go slowly mad. The whole process...it's life. I write a sentence but if it's not right, I delete it and start over. While I type it's a piece of me flowing from my soul, my heart, my head, onto the paper. The work is a piece of slowly taking shape. Nothing else is like that, nothing."

He stood up and cocked his head almost like a wolf. "Bringing a child into the world is a bit like that."

That shut me up. I wanted no more talk of a kid. I sighed and set down my half-eaten sandwich. "You never answered me. Does Anna Finnegan, never successful author, disappear?"

"No. You can keep your friends. The best explanation is that a relative died and left you a grand estate, and also some large cause you must now head. So time will be limited. But yes, after fifteen or so years when the humans begin t notice you don't age, then you must move on with a new name. So in a way you will disappear, but you need never fully hide from human life."

That thought disturbed me greatly so I turned to see what Jerry and Liv were up to. Still playing cards, whispering to each other like lovers should.

"What next?" I asked finally, turning back to my teacher.

So far that day it had been more studies on the laws of time and physics. It seemed we could travel back in time but the first wards of magic would not let us change anything. The first wards were the rules of magic, the boundaries none of us could cross. The first of our kind laid them down, and Malachi's magic and now mine powered it, thought apparently Alessandra was a causeway for me, still in training. Val had promised I'd learn more in my three months with the Council.

So, yes, we could go back in time and touch things, speak to people, but the magic would stop us from doing anything that would change the world. We could go into the future but if we did we not be in any bodies, just floating around, and yes we could change the future by altering the present. However, as Queen, it would be my reasonability to make sure the power was not overly abused.

"Let's travel into the past. Where do you want to go?" Val asked.

Jerry and Liv stopped talking and turned to me. I nodded. "I want to go back to the night Sigrid was killed."

Val's handsome face fell, that was the only way to describe it. "You can't. The wards will stop you. They stopped us, all of us who tried."

"Then let us go back to when she met her lover, the one she met that night."

"Anna, we tried that too. My dear, no one has had any success with any of our queens, nor the few kings that came before Malachi. The wards do what they do."

"Suck?" I snarked.

An idea finally hit me. "Let's go back to one week before she died. To the home she was living in. I want to go to her bedroom at a time when no one is in there."

"That we can do. I was with her that week, I know just the day. Jericho? Olivia?" My newest wolves walked over, joining us at Val's bidding. "Anna, we'll need the proper clothes."

I summoned my magic and Diego yipped happily nearby as I changed our modern clothes to something more fitting. Goddess, women's clothes before the nineteen fifties seemed to weight a metric ton.

"Good. Now, just as I told you. I will point the point in your mind. Close your eyes and open your mind as I taught you."

I did and saw a tunnel, and endless long tunnel. To one side it was straight, to the other there were a thousand branches. It was time I saw in my head, feeling my mind connect to it. I felt Val's magic touch mine, and as he'd shown me, I relaxed mine and let his mind touch my own.

The tunnel of time was every shade of black, and there were thousands, but the coordinates Val gave me were like a pink thread.

"Grab it, Anna. Lock onto us all and follow it."

I felt them all, another witch, two wolves, and my familiar, and as soon as my mind touched his my magic flared. I saw the tunnel and I was in it, clutching to the pink thread with no hands. I was screaming and silent, spinning, traveling faster than light, but yet my body felt still.

We hit the end of the tread and it went through the wall of the tunnel. Inside it the tunnel was huge, bigger than my mind could handle, but as we left I looked back and it was as tiny as a human vein. Looking forward again I saw we were in a stone room.

Everyone was intact, and Jerry and Liv looked as spooked as I felt. Val slowly clapped. "Anna, perfect!"

There was a giant fireplace, the biggest I had ever seen, and a bed of the same kind of dimensions piled high with rough furs.

"Is that...is that bear?" I asked.

Jerry nodded.

Other than that the large room was empty. I walked through a doorway where Diego had gone and found a large wardrobe and a small desk with a stool. The desk was what I wanted and on it I found papers, a rare luxury in that time I knew. Magic let me read the writing and I saw it was missives being prepared to go to the Council to distribute to the witches. Boring stuff I'd already read about.

"Val, is there a spell to find something you don't know exists?"

He strolled in with my errant body guards. Liv was staring in wonder, and I knew she had never gone back in time. Jerry was looking around and I could tell the lost, hopeful expression was him remembering his life at this time.

"Did you read the second spell book I gave you?"

"I had time when?"

"The beauty of knowing time travel means you can never use that excuse again. All right, first we cast a spell to see if what you seek does exist."

"A diary. Most women keep them, a journal, an appointment book, something like that."

"So envision a calendar, now envision Sigrid-"

"I don't know what she looked like."

He sighed. "Fine, I'll do it." He closed his eyes and reached out as if to pet a dog. Diego looked at him and that me questioning. I shook my head and he sat, and Val drew his hand back. It told me his own familiar was a canine, which made me smile. I liked dog people.

"We must go," Val said suddenly. This time it was him.

Riding along all I knew was one moment I watched him close his eyes, and the next I was screaming back along the tread, but this time I didn't hold anything. When the rushing darkness cleared we stood back in the meeting room I trained in.

"What the hell, Val?"

"We had to leave. I must go to the Council, now."

"What? What's wrong?"

"Anna, there was a journal. But it's been taken, taken through time."

"But that's not possible, the wards-"

"The wards have been broken."

I shook my head. "I thought you said none of us could break them."

"No one can. No one but the first witch and first sorcerer. Anna, stay here on this island where you're safe. Stay until I get back." And with that he disappeared.

I waved my hand and gave me back my sun dress, the shorts and tees Jerry and Liv had come in, sandals back on our feet.

"Your majesty?"

"Liv, for the thousandth time, Anna, just call me Anna."

"What's happening?"

"Nothing right now." I smiled to calm my nerves. Nothing made sense. I wondered how Val knew the wards had been tampered with. How the hell did even know a journal existed? "Go back to cards, I'm going to do some reading."

I summoned the Kindle reader and sat down, Diego curled at my feet. I found the passages I wanted and reached down to scratch behind hiss ears and he licked my fingers and nuzzled my ankle.

What followed were two boring hours of reading. I was used to reading old texts as a student of history, but the gods help me, they were always written as if they intended to bore the reader. I didn't know who exactly wrote the family books, but I planned to re-write them.

Twenty minutes into it Jerry had asked for music, so I summoned up an iPod and speakers. After two hours Liv came over after winning a hand of whist, wearing a bored expression on her graceful features. "What are you reading you maj- Anna?"

"I figured out the spell Val was trying to do. It's actually three. Took me about a whole damn hour to figure out how to combine two into one. The first is to see if something exists, and then you join it to a summoning spell, but the actual trick is you need a location spell in there. So now I'm trying to figure out if I can jam a fourth on it."

"A fourth?" Liv asked. She leaned up against a column and behind her Jerry stood with an impressive stretch and wandered over. "Jerry, she's going to try four spells at once."

He pulled her back against him and wrapped his arms around her middle, nuzzling her neck. I glanced away, pleased at their easy affection but feeling like an intruder.

"It's okay, my love. You don't remember the great wars. I do. I've seen single witches and sorcerers combine as many as ten spells, and when they form a true coven...magic fills the sky, and the heavens themselves rain down upon us."

"Okay, so do too much and the galaxy gets pissed."

Jerry laughed at that.

"What is it you're trying to do?" Jerry asked, craning his neck to peer at the Kindle.

"Every ruler has personal, private thoughts written down. Sometimes in correspondence, sometimes in journals or a diary. Now it's going to be a pain in the ass to travel back to each and every time period, sneak in to the palace du jour, and then cast a three-way spell to see if such things exist, find them, and summon them. So if I add the time-travel spell but to the item, not to us, it should save time."

Liv shook her head slowly. "That's insane."

"Forgive my sweet, Anna, she hasn't spent much time around royalty or the aristocracy in general. Well, not outside of..." Jerry trailed off and I knew he was thinking of all the times they been forced to serve the perversions of some guest. "Well, anyway, I just ask you be careful."

"That's why I have you both with me. Jerry, you're older than God so you know the long list of everything that can go wrong. Liv, you're the youngest wolf I've met so far, which says a lot, but I figure you're going to bee able to understand me a bit better than others."

She pulled from Jerry and took a chair next to mine, slouching back from the conference table. "I don't know about that. When I was born women still wore corsets, none would dare work a paying job, and everything was sooty and dirty, and human young died so often nobody seemed to care. I've been on this island since I was twenty-five and all I have known is magic. I've never met anyone like you."

I half-smiled at the strange, rambling speech, the most I'd heard from her."Um, thank you?"

I turned back to the Kindle, bound and determined to find a spell that would simplify everything and assemble private journals and correspondence. If luck was with me all of them would have a single entry that went something along the lines of "Today I met and seduced some witch named Billy Joe Bob, gee I hope he doesn't kill me."

This was exactly why I never tried to write fiction. I loved history; the whodunit had already been revealed. I never like mysteries, in fact, I thought people obsessed with Jack the Ripper were kind of idiotic. The name was made up by a newspaper man, and most, not all, most of the murders were unconnected, read: different killers. And people who believed in Atlantis pissed me off to no end. If anybody actually bothered to read Plato, they'd see he clearly states it's a allegory, fiction, it's made up.

So being confronted with my own mystery was grating. Everyone had their own drives in life, and mine was never to be detective. I just wanted to find the answer to who was killing all the witch queens, find them, skew their liver, and then get back to learning my new role.

The distraction had cleared some of my mind, and something struck me. While my new wolves stared at me I summoned the timeline book Sebastian's friend had given me.

"Jerry, you said Kenneth was born..."

"Approximately around...I guess that would be the seventh century."

I grinned and perked up. "So he can't be our killer. The deaths go back far before that."

"But none of us know when Alessandra was born," Jerry countered.

I sat back and huffed. "God damn it all. I'm supposed to be queen. Can't I just force some damn witches to do this for me?"

Jerry smiled patiently. "Witch society doesn't work exactly like human ones."

"Oh? Do tell. Are you guys hungry?" It had been two hours since lunch, and in my experience that meant the wolves were starved. At their nods I summoned some bread, a plate of cheese, veggies, and cold cuts, and jars of mustard, mayonnaise, and salad dressing, plus a large tub of potato cakes with bacon, and some ham and pasta salad all from the kitchen. I got myself coffee, not hungry enough to join them.

Liv offered to make assemble plates for them while jerry spoke. He sat down across the table from me though his eyes remained on his love. I had to wonder just how long they had loved one another, and how long it had been only stolen minutes between them.

"As magic has grown so have the witches. Every now and again your numbers must increase, and so the queen will allow two or three children of a witch to inherit power. Once there were eleven, ten and your line, and now there are thousands.

"I assume you're most familiar with the British aristocracy, yes?"

I nodded but I actually understood them all.

"If you will, those who are the direct first generation descendents, or as close as we can come, are Dukes. Those who are seconds and have distinguished themselves s in service to the crown in war time retain the rank of Marquis. Second sons and daughters without distinction are Counts, and thirds are Barons. Those are the only title. Now there are second sons of second daughters, or third daughters of fourths, and so on. They make up witch rabble, the hoi polloi, the plebians, whatever you want to say.

"All are your subjects and must obey, but if I were you I'd only trust my secrets to the council and to the plebians. The aristocracy are as lazy and pampered as any."

"Oh, goody," was all I could say. "So we should just wait for Valerius to return and continue to trade horror stories and jump to conclusions like we've been doing?"

"You seem itchy your maj- Anna," Liv said evenly after eating a potato pancake in a single bite.

"The first thing any new ruler has to do is secure their throne. I don't like that thought that there is someone out there gunning for me. According to history there is someone who kills the queen, but only after she has a child. So, simple, I don't get knocked up. Easy. But then if I don't have a child, crazy Kenneth of Ainslie wants to kill me in a fun experiment to show magic won't die, so long as he lives on."

"I would say you need a vacation," Liv replied, "but, you know..." she waggled her hand around, indicating the island.

"Maybe I am over thinking all this." I realized. "Maybe I'm just being paranoid."

I felt the tingle of magic but it was strange, cool where mine was warm, dark where mine was light. "And maybe you're not," a deep, unfamiliar voice called out.

I turned and saw a man, drop-dead gorgeous like any witch or wolf, tall, broad shouldered, slim, with long dark hair queued back, and he wore a suit that looked like it cost the GDP of a small nation.

"Who are you?"

Jerry began to growl.

"I come in peace, wolf. I did not bring any dragons with me, I am all alone. I have come to speak to the queen on a matter of great import."

"Who the hell are you?" I asked again, standing. When Liv began to growl as well I felt the magic of their beings beating at me, seeking help to change. The hair on the back of my neck stood at attention.

"I can see your guards are quite protective. I need to give you some information, cousin. Here."

He threw out his empty hand and magic summoned a small tablet computer that sailed through the air. Before I could grab it Liv's hand snatched it. She began to sniff at it and the light was so strange I turned my back to the stranger to watch her. She raised her head, light eyes bleeding to almost yellow. "It's clean." She sounded disappointed.

I turned back to find the stranger was gone. "Who was that?"

Jerry had still been growling and shook it off. He looked at me now and his expression was unreadable. "That was the king of sorcerers, your enemy. That was Malachi."

***

"I really needed this," I murmured as Julian's hands skimmed down my back.

He was massaging hot oil into my back, and it was heavenly. We had the large spa room to ourselves, queen's prerogative. I had skipped the formal dinner and my pack and I had dined in our rooms, watching the video, the only thing loaded onto the tablet.

What it had shown would have been a total mystery to me if I had not gone back in time with Valerius. It had shown Malachi traveling back in time, seeking answers to some deaths on the sorcerer side, and each time there was something missing. It was a magical video, so I hadn't realized what the strange black mist was. Part of the video showed Malachi and a few others, including two beautiful women with odd color sheens to their skin, dragons, I presumed. Sometimes it showed things from Malachi's vision.

The only thing it didn't tell us was who were the victims. There were just periods of time they went to, seeking some artifact, and BAM! The wards had been tampered with.

So now it seemed that whoever was killing the witch Queens was also killing sorcerers. Alessandra and Kenneth might not have anything to gain with that, but perhaps. I supposed king of the sorcerers or witches would suit Kenneth, but he clearly was more invested in the witch side.

But that theory was weakened by the fact Malachi was still living, and had been for a few millennia, longer than any queen. Valerius hadn't returned yet and with nothing to do, Julian had offered to help me relax.

I had spent the last two nights getting to know his brothers better, so I supposed I should with Julian as well.

"Would you tell me your story?"

Julian chuckled as he tackled a bundle of tight muscles at the small of my back. "I was wondering if you would ask. I didn't want to press my turn, I know you have a lot on your mind."

"It seems to me, we're forgetting parsimony."

"Oh?"

"Why don't I tell you what I'm thinking after you tell me your story."

"Fair enough." He bent down and nipped at my shoulder and I shivered, aroused despite the madness.

"I'm sure you know about my childhood. I am the youngest so it was slightly different. Our sister left before I was old enough to remember her. My father had been very cruel to Andre, but by the time I came along he had mellowed. I think he just needed time to get over the fact that as a human he was a duke, and as a witch he was nothing.